Do you recall Christmases as a child? I do.
I grew up on a farm and when I was really young, my parents were poor.
They struggled to make ends meet on a 50-acre farm of hills filled with sand and gravel.
They had nothing to give their two boys for Christmas.
So I remember one Christmas our gifts were wooden blocks from Dad’s workshop.
We provided the imaginations. And those blocks were fun.
My parents were regular church attenders, so Christmas was about the birth of baby Jesus, the angels, shepherds and wise men.
But the excitement was about Santa Claus who would come down the chimney and leave presents.
Christmas morning there would be a plate by my bedside with nuts and cookies and one orange. The only orange we would ever see that winter.
After waking up, it was morning chores.
The milk cows got extra bedding in their stalls and the best second-cut hay we could find in the mow.
Likewise the pigs got clean stalls and extra bedding.
And then we would rush to the house, eager to open presents.
But wait. First the Christmas story was read from the Bible.
Then breakfast. I can’t remember any special food, only the interminable waiting.
And then we would gather in the living room, Dad and Mom on the couch, we boys on the floor.
And we would then hand out the wrapped packages to the person whose name was on the tag.
I remember my gifts, other than the wooden blocks, being home-made pajamas and new underwear.
As we grew older, the clothing became pants and shirts, then skates and hockey sticks and one year a giant long toboggan.
We cleared patches of ice in the hollows between those sand and gravel hills and would play shinney. Later we went to the sawmill pond and with the help of a few friends, would clear a bigger patch of ice for shinney.
The annoying part was digging the puck out of the snow banks around the rink.
Our feet would be so cold that they were numb and our fingers so frozen that we would stick them in beside the cows’ udders and legs to get warm.
The toboggan was dragged across the road to the neighbour’s hill that was so big and steep it wasn’t farmed. We could glide a long way, a bit further each descent if we could keep inside the previous track.
As simple and sparse our Christmases were - but only in hindsight - we never considered ourselves poor, nor were we jealous of friends whose parents were only slightly better off.
There are lots of other memories, most of them when we were six to 10 years old.
We would have parts in the Christmas concert at the one-room school, the stage planks set on trestles, the blackboard decorated in coloured chalk, a tree with home-made decorations. And Santa would come at the end wearing rubber boots exactly like my father’s.
We also participated in church pageants that my father wrote and directed, so popular that they were put on every night for a week and lots of people came about 10 miles from Kitchener.
Mom, who was a school teacher, did the editing to correct grammar and spelling. The pageants were written to suit the talents of actors drawn from the congregation.
Dad had studied drama in Germany and had equipment to make beards, built floodlights and sets that were stored between Christmases in the driving shed loft.
It was always wonderful fun.
Christmas was always special. Still is.
