An English Immigrants Christmas - installment #1

There are a million memes out there asking what you like/remember about Christmases past and present. I considered responding but thought it might be more enjoyable to write about my Christmas memories.

Like Mary P said about Christmas memories in her Blog

“They all sort of blend together [and] . . . I don't have a favourite.”

The first Christmases I have any memory of as a child were in Mum’s semidetached bungalow in our small southern Ontario town. We lived next to our English grandparents and in reality we lived with them. We thought little of just wandering from one unit to the next as we shared a common entrance. As kids we would show our friends around the house and, as I am told, tour them through our grandparents place as well. This became a common joke, “here is the living room this is the hall and that’s my Grandad siting over there.”

My Granddad loved Christmas, but the traditional one, not the Santa stuff. He was very critical of organized religion but Christmas was Christmas and you celebrated it even if you thought that a lot of the story was bunk. So we sung Carols and watched Dickens a Christmas carol on our old B&W television, except when we watched it on Grandad’s TV which was colour, not that it really mattered because we usually watched the Alistair Sims one which was black and white anyhow. Grandad, my aunt and later my sister would play Christmas carols on the piano. Sometimes our two dogs would howl as we sang. Mainly though it was the younger dog Rolly that would howl first, he never wanted to be left out of anything.

Out came all the decorations and Grandad would dig out a copy of Handel’s Messiah , other collections of other classical Christmas music, Perry Como’s Christmas music for my granny and an ancient Burl Ives, Christmas album (I guess it wasn’t ancient then) which he would play on an old cabinet stereo. Actually then the stereo wasn’t quite so old either, when I inherited it, it was old and I did it no justice, by playing my scratched and abused albums on it.
I remember eggnog but I don’t think Grandad liked it, that was more a Mum & Granny thing. We had Frys Cocoa more often than we had hot chocolate. Grandad would drink tea I don’t think he really liked much else in the way of hot drinks. He never really ate much as I recall. I think much of his blood was orange pekoe tea (Red Rose to be specific) and he substituted cigarette and pipe smoke for oxygen. I don’t smoke but I like the smell of pipe smoke, because it reminds me of home. Christmas was one of the rare times we had alcohol in the house, not because anyone was against it, it was just not a thing we did. Grandad, so I am told, couldn’t drink much, probably because he was a very small man and it effected his asthma, and about the only alcohol that Granny drank was sherry. Mum drank some but not much but she would drink wine and port and such. For some reason we always had a collection of cheap wine, like Baby duck and other Barnes products. I think the Baby duck was mainly for my aunt, who generally didn’t drink so the sweet taste of Baby duck appealed to her over the dry stuff that I prefer. Also the local small town liquor store didn’t carry much else. It wasn’t until much latter when the occasional case of beer would enter the festivities (I think that was mainly for guests, maybe my uncle, and me when I was old enough to drink.) Decorating the tree was fun, both units had a tree so we would decorate with Gran and Grandad and then with Mum and sometimes the other way around. Some years we had a real tree but most of the early years both Mum and our Grandparents had these funny silver tinsel trees. My next oldest sister ALWAYS wanted a real tree. I hope she still feels this way I prefer real trees too. The tinsel trees were basically a wooden pole with straight twisted wire branches, covered in fuzzy silver tinsel. You could hang one maybe two ornaments on each branch we had balls and bells and other odd things and every year we would have to buy new ones as the dogs and us kids would have broken a few. That said some survived for years. This past weekend I helped Mum put up her tree and we found two plastic bells that Granny had bought in 1951 or 52 when the first came to Canada. The bells survived because they are plastic covered with chrome. When all the decorations were on the tree for some weird reason we would put more tinsel onto the tinsel tree. Then we would put these old glass Christmas lights on the tree. There was always the big fight with the lights to untangle them and then the procedure of finding which darn bulb was blown. The tree was thus a mass of sparkles and when the lights were on the tree and the room lights off the colours of the bulbs would leave cool patterns on the walls. I used to sneak out of my room on nights before Christmas plug in the tree and just stare at it. It was beautiful. In reality the poor old things were losing tinsel and were really not that big but Mum did not really have much left over cash at Christmas for a new tree. Before the presents went under the tree there was this big gap and the rather ugly metal base could be seen but before long a mountain (from my three foot high vantage point) of presents under the tree.

That was the beginning of the season and it usually happened around December 1st.