From Christmas Past

Charles Dickens wrote a “Christmas Carol” a century or two ago; a story that is told, and retold, on television every year around this time. Watching Scrooge and the Ghost of Christmas Past traipse through the portals of time got me to thinking about Christmas back in the early fifties, when I was still a kid. Yes, it was a long time ago; I’ve celebrated Christmas in each of the last seven decades.

Maybe it’s just that, as someone once said: "There's nothing sadder in this world than to awake Christmas morning and not be a child." Or, maybe I’m just turning into a sentimental old fool but I think Christmas has changed a lot since then.

Except for my youth, and the good health which accompanied it, I’m not really nostalgic for anything about the fifties. I don’t miss the outhouse, for example, especially in the middle of winter where shaking it more than once caused the formation of icicles making it difficult to stuff “the wee thing” back into your britches. And, I don’t miss crowding around the coal stove in the living room with “the old man” yelling from his big chair by the door to “Sit back and let the heat get out.”

And, I certainly don’t miss dragging the coal scuttles up the ladder from the cellar to keep both stoves glowing red (the other stove was the cooking stove in the kitchen).

No. It’s not nostalgia. But, nowadays I sometimes look at the wealth of gifts under a Christmas tree and wonder if kids today wouldn’t feel a little short-changed if they had to celebrate Christmas the way we did over half a century ago?

Back then, you weren’t likely to find a whole lot in the way of “store bought” goods under the tree. Each of the kids would get a gift from Santa (via Eaton’s or Simpson’s catalogue), but, mostly, it was knitted or other hand made goods; sweaters, scarves, mitts, etc. The kids of today would likely have a few nasty words for Santa if they were treated to the same kind of gift giving. There were no X-boxes, MP3 players, video games, etc, etc. Hell, they hadn’t even invented the transistor radio back then.

But, there were always Christmas treasures to which people looked forward. For me, it was the annual Christmas box from “Granny” Gordon, or, as my mother called it, “th’ parcel frae hame”. It wasn’t that the parcel contained anything of great significance, but rather the thought behind it. It had traveled thousands of miles across a very big ocean just to say, “We love you.”

There was usually an array of knitted goods, a bottle or two of ginger wine for Ma and a carton or two of Wild Woodbine cigarettes for Da. There was an assortment of candy for the kids and six months of comics from the Sunday Post (the other six months of comics came in the summer parcel), as well as copies of “Topper” and later on, “Beezer”. My favourite strips were “The Broons” and “Oor Wullie”.

I suspect the kids of today might find such gifts a trifle tame. I hope they still grow up with some appreciation for both the reason we celebrate Christmas and the thought behind the gifts.

Maybe I really am turning into a sentimental old fool

Note: My father didn’t always get his full complement of Wild Woodbine. Granny Gordon passed on sometime around 1952, if I recall correctly, but my mother’s sisters continued the tradition of sending parcels for many years after her death. It was from one of those summer parcels which my brother Tom and I confiscated a pack of smokes for our first taste of cigarette tobacco.

It was a year or two after we moved to Bog Row in 1954. We took the cigarettes and a fistful of wooden matches and sat on the side of the “red hill” until they were gone. I didn’t have another cigarette until I was about to board the plane for my first job in Montreal in 1962.