Memories of Christmas

Dec 18, 2014

by Marion Sly Hart

Christmas at home didn't need 2 AA batteries or

tables laden with food from who knows where, just something for everyone. The dolls were mine and Doris's and the teddy bear was David's. Hard candy; Christmas cake with thin white icing. A tree with the same ornaments from year to year; between Doris and I we must have worn the paint off them from taking turns re-decorating the tree (they likely contained lead). How many muskrats did dad have to skin to even buy the hard candy at Long Lake store?

Christmases come and go; games of snakes and ladders; cut out dolls; Christmas concerts at the one-room schools; stringing popcorn; colouring books; links of construction paper in endless steams and colours for our Charlie Brown tree. The old barrel at the top of the stairs where Mrs Claus hid the gifts for the Sly children. No fire in the stove at night as we lay under mountains of homemade quilts.

I have some of them and if my memory could take me to a certain Christmas I would find mom in the dress that's now a piece in the quilt - maybe a piece of the shirt Dad wore when he got the kitchen warm for us when we came downstairs; the light from the coal-oil lamp shining as bright as the light in our faces with braids in our hair, some with hair in bobby pin curls or curlers or rags.

Some time through the day Doris and I could be found under the old stair steps in our play house with the new dolls or maybe on the hill at Victor's pond on a piece of cardboard, laughing and having the time of our life, waiting for Christmas dinner.

Some winters we were skating up the icy pond with only one pair of skates - we each wore one, then back to the house to hot chocolate and mom in her apron.

From there to now we have all that and more, so I'm not sharing what we didn't have; it's what we did, and that is what carries me through. Back then we didn't consider what was under anyone else's tree or sitting in their driveway, so this year I am to where I will give you the gift of giving that comes from the heart.