Christmas has a way of gently sneaking up on people, more so as they get older. It seems like only yesterday that Christmas came and went. And yet, too, I can remember when Christmas took forever and ever and ever to come.
It was back in the days of a single-digit age, the late 1930s, the waning days of the Great Depression. It was a time when store-bought items were just not to be had.
It was a time when the large two-cent penny was still in vogue and the little copper penny at the corner general store bought enough jawbreakers to make classmates jealous and keep you jawing for most of the week. It was a time when mothers and dads shopped with just nickels and dimes squeezed tightly in purses, palms and pockets.
I remember, too, the early pre-teen years of the Little Lady’s and my children. Talks of the coming Christmas started early. There were school concerts with skits to be practiced and Sunday school choir songs to be sung, and re-sung till perfected. There were costumes to make and pies and cookies to bake. Christmas trees, having been cut by hand, were hauled through drifts of waist-deep snow from the nearby forested land, and their decorations were, without doubt, made intricately by hand.
I remember, too, their early teen years, when bicycles, unicycles, skates, skis and snowshoes were bought. When brand-new squeaky accordions, ill-picked shiny guitars, wrongly strummed banjos and offbeat thundering drums eventually muted to recognizable music in our family room.
When gallons and gallons of home-grown popcorn were shelled, popped, buttered and munched while curled up on black and white short-shorn sheepskin rugs before the flickering orange and blue-coloured flames of apple wood quietly burning in the fireplace.
When the swimming pool, with checkered deep-diving bell, flanked the greenhouse that spanned the rear of the double carport. Where a welder was installed and dune buggies were revved and revved, time and again, loudly backfiring more often than not. Having been designed, assembled, reassembled and finely tuned from old, ill-repaired “Bug” Volkswagens, picked up at the local scrap yard for $35. When a box of 100 high-quality welding rods could be purchased for $32, life-savers to their mother’s collection of wire coat hangers robbed from her closets.
When calls for help came from those stuck in the mud where water from night-before rains pooled in deep puddles on the dune buggy trail – a trail that randomly wound through the towering trees of the reforested woodlands that was owned, replanted and carefully cared for by their far-sighted grandfather, many years previous.
But this year, though she has walked hand in hand as a guardian angel on the down slope of five long years, the Little Lady and I, together, wish you and yours a very Merry Christmas, celebrating traditionally the birth of Jesus, and a Healthy and Happy 2012 New Year. May your home be filled with hugs, giggles and laughter. May cooking smells in your kitchen frustrate your patience. May large flaked fluffy snow blanket your lawn Christmas morn’.
This year, too, I want to wish a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to two very special friends who have been faithful readers of my columns dating back to Day One. They are Gladys, from Cambridge, who is approaching her 98th birthday, and her sister, Isabel, from Acton, who has, lifelong, followed closely her older sibling’s footsteps. May God, health, and happiness be yours till day’s end, and with it my silent prayer: “May each of you live as long as you want to and want to as long as you live.” I send, too, my love.
Take care, ’cause’ we care.
Barrie@barriehopkins.ca
519-986-4105