By Richard Wallace
Christmas, the way it used to be
was not like it is today.
The air was filled with magic.
There was lots of time to play.
There was time to come home from school with nothing more to think about than Christmas. There was time to go sledding on a nearby hill or to go skating on a pond or frozen swamp. It was fun to go skating among the frozen cat tails and bull rushes.
School was an exciting place to be at Christmas. I don’t remember a lot of school work being done but I guess there must have been some. It seems to me that most of our school day was spent getting ready for the Christmas concert. That was special.
There were Christmas songs to sing, poems to learn, plays and funny things to act out. One of the children would recite a long poem called a monologue. Wow! A monologue took forever.
Parents and friends would gather at the school or the community hall to watch the children perform, there would be sandwiches, and everybody would have a good time.
Once school closed for the Christmas holidays we knew the wait was almost over.
There wasn’t any television in those days so we spent a lot of our time playing games and especially playing outside. Our boots were not as warm as boots are today and our feet would get so cold. I can remember sitting in the kitchen with my so cold feet soaking in a pan of warm water and tears running down my face. I guess it wasn’t so bad because a short time later I would go out and do it again.
Do you remember how our parents and grandparents would put saw dust banking around the outside of the houses to keep out the cold? I guess it must have worked but it sure wasn’t enough to keep Jack Frost from working his magic on the inside of the window panes. He made such beautiful designs from the frost that would be collected from the moisture of the house, moisture that froze and clung to the windows in the cold night air.
I remember watching horses as they went down the road. Sometimes it would be so cold that we would see great streams of breath blowing from their nostrils, streams of breath that reached almost to the ground. They would be pulling a sleigh filled with logs or firewood; sometimes hay, hay being taken from one farm to another. Children who lived in town didn’t get to see such sights and that’s too bad.
We listened to the radio a lot. Our parents would listen to songs sung by Bing Crosby, songs like Silent Night and I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas. I liked songs by Roy Rogers and Gene Autry, I loved Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer..
Christmas was such an exciting time of year. The wind would blow the snow into huge drifts that blocked the roads, drifts that were so high they would almost come up to the tops of the telephone poles and we would try to touch the wires. They never did get quite high enough.
We loved it when the snow plow came through throwing the snow in all directions. Sometimes we would throw snow balls at the man in the plow and he must have been a very nice man because he would always laugh and wave. He knew we didn’t mean any harm.
When the plow came through in the middle of the night we could hear the soft drone of the engine from miles away and before long its lights would shine on the bedroom walls. It was really spooky, like in a movie. The lights would make a faint glow that got brighter and brighter and the roar from the plow would get louder and louder and then it would all fade away. It was nice and strangely comforting. It was as though somebody was looking after us in the middle of the night.
I remember once that somebody had to go to the hospital and a whole bunch of men were out in the road shoveling snow so the car could get through the snow drifts. Then they would follow the car and shovel away the next drift. It must have been serious.
When I think about all of this I think that people realized that they needed each other and it didn’t necessarily have a lot to do with actual friendship. People just needed each other.
At other times we would watch men cut huge blocks of ice from frozen ponds to be taken to store houses where they would be covered with sawdust to keep them from melting. They would be used during the summer months to keep the kitchen ‘ice chests’ cold. Not everybody had refrigerators in those days.
Getting the tree was a huge event and that was the sign that Christmas was almost here. Sometimes the whole family would go together and celebrate with hot chocolate and a bonfire. That was such a special time. Of course the tree would be perfect, well, not always. We would drag it home and let it dry out in the wood shed.
When it was dry we would bring it into the house and decorate it with bulbs and tinsel. We would put our few presents under the tree and just sit and look at it. We were struck by the wonder of it all. It was such a nice feeling.
When Christmas Eve finally arrived stockings were hung by the fire places, in those houses that had them, and for others they were left where Santa would be sure to find them. Going to sleep always took a little longer than usual, our heads filled with dreams and anticipation. We must have gone to sleep sooner or later because before we knew it we would wake up and it would be Christmas morning. Out to the tree we would go. Sometimes our parents would tell us it was too early and to go back to bed but sooner or later everybody would be up.
It was with great excitement we would unwrap our gifts, mittens, socks, colouring books and the like. Stockings had been miraculously filled with an apple, an orange, or hard candy and never the dreaded potato or lump of coal.
The day was spent with family, perhaps go to church, a turkey dinner and desert.
When we were children we didn’t think about how much time and effort our parents and grandparents put in to make each Christmas special. We didn’t think about money that had to be saved all year to buy a gift for each person, money saved twenty-five cents and fifty cents at a time. We were children.
We didn’t think about chores that had to be done, cows to be milked and animals to be looked after; all of this on Christmas morning and again at supper. We didn’t think about children who didn’t hang stockings and perhaps didn’t have a turkey dinner at the end of the day. We didn’t realize how much work it was for our mothers and grandmothers to get a huge meal ready in the middle of such activity. Now that we are older, we do.
When we were small, when we were children, it seems to me that folks didn’t have to make time for Christmas. Christmas was indeed a ‘Christmas time’.
Christmas, the way it used to be
was not like it is today.
The air was filled with magic.
There was lots of time to play.
