Classic Christmas Stories Read online

  Memories of Christmas Concerts in a Newfoundland Outport

  by James R. Thoms

  AUNT SIS WAS AN extraordinary character.

  I remember that she made the best buttermilk buns you ever tasted. She lived right on the edge of the barasway, and on Saturday afternoons, after jumpin’ clumpets for a couple of hours if it was wintertime or chuckin’ hoops in the summer, we would go home with her son Will Sam and fill up on skim milk and buttermilk buns. Or Aunt Sis might pull a blueberry grunt out of the oven.

  She was a kind old soul who never harmed anyone in her life, yet she had a life filled with tragedy. Her husband, Uncle Sam, was lost on the Grand Banks fishing grounds after his trawler iced up and turned over; or at least that’s what they think happened to her. Then shortly afterwards her son, Will Sam, drowned in the harbour when his dory loaded to the gunnels with capelin capsized as she rounded the breakwater at the mouth of the Gut to turn up the harbour.

  However, despite the tragedies in her life Aunt Sis carried bravely on and continued to do her part as a community leader.

  Aunt Sis was the community’s drama director, if there was such a thing as a drama director in those days. I’m thinking of the Christmas concerts we used to have.

  What fond memories are wrapped up in them! Now, as I look back, the whole cast of characters passes in parade before memory’s eye and I can hear again the voices of my youth, and wonder where they are now.

  Most of all I can recall the rehearsals, or practices as we would say, in Aunt Sis’s house where she used to serve stocks of gingerbread cookies and jam bread. We liked the practices even more than the concerts because they meant nights out of the house away from school homework.

  The old Royal Readers were a prime source of materials, but a lot of it we made up ourselves. One year, I kept the scripts of the original material we used, and I think the quality was pretty good.

  The concerts were held in the school, of course, on a stage built especially for the occasion. We had a two-room school with a moveable partition, so that for concerts we could make the two rooms into one.

  My father who was the teacher, was master of ceremonies, a task that inevitably fell on the school principal, and during the intermission he helped to sell little five-cent brown paper bags of homemade candy.

  Every child in school had some part in the concert, even if only an appearance in opening and closing choruses, so you could be sure that the whole community turned out for it. Aunt Sis would be off in the wings, fussing over us all like a broody hen, and her promptings could be heard right to the back of the hall.

  As I look over the handwritten programme for one concert, dear faces of youth flash before me, and I seem to hear their voices as in the long ago. I hear again the shy recitations, the halting dialogue and the bashful singing.

  A smash hit, I remember, was a rollicking sea ballad— “The Death of Billy Crow”—that my brother Phil composed in a moment of fearful inspiration, his one and only attempt at verse, and he recited it himself with feeling and gusto. The next day he was a hero among the seagoing fraternity who besieged him with requests for impromptu recitals by dockside and in the stagehead.

  His rather bold ballad was followed by a sad recitation by Winnie Grandy.

  Winnie was such a frail little creature ( “She’s fey, ” Aunt Sis would declare, with a knowing look), and so good that you just knew she wasn’t long for this world. She was always quiet in church and sat in the choir, her hands folded demurely in her lap while she listened to the parson pray and preach.

  It was diphtheria that took her before she was fourteen years old; and as she lay dying the word went around that she told her mother not to cry. “I’m going to like it in heaven, with the dear angels all around me and little Jesus to care for.”

  Winnie used to compose tragic little verses and she recited one at the concert only a month or so before her death. It was No. 7 on the programme.

  DEATH

  by Winnie age 13

  No tears for me. I ask

  Shed not a single tear

  When I am gone. There is

  A Better Land then near.

  If you believe, my love,

  What sages do foretell,

  Where is the pain of death?

  The sadness of farewell?

  I have no fear to tread

  The path my father’s trod;

  The grave I hold no more

  Then a pathway to God.

  And know in life I quaffed

  The overflowing cup;

  Tears are for the fallen,

  And I am lifted up.

  My father may have been the only one in the hall that night who had the faintest idea of what Winnie’s poem meant, but we all realized from the way she recited it that it was something special. We didn’t have to understand it to appreciate it.

  There was one item on the programme that always puzzled me. It was written and recited by Heber Bennett who had reached the ancient age of twenty. Heber was still in school but not because he was slow or dumb or anything like that. In fact, Heber was one of the brightest students ever to come out of our bay, and he rose to become the president of a great university in the States somewhere.

  He took a long time to get through school because when he was fourteen he had to go to the sanatorium in St. John’s with consumption, or tuberculosis as it came to be known. He barely got there in time and was saved only by a serious operation in which part of his rib cage was removed allowing his infected lung to collapse. That way the lung rested and slowly healed.

  Heber always had one shoulder a little higher than the other after that. His recitation “The Thoro” at the concert apparently referred to the operation and life in the sanatorium and was something he did originally for a home grown concert while he was a patient there.

  Not even my father could get the gist of Heber’s recitation, but it sounded good, and everyone enjoyed and admired the scholarly way in which Heber presented it.

  The concert usually closed with a few words from the parson. Rev. Clench was a sort of timid and kindly old soul who always reminded me of the village preacher in Goldsmith’s “The Deserted Village” who “allured to brighter worlds and led the way.”

  He would use the occasion to pass along a moral message along Royal Reader lines, and even if some of his thoughts were looked on even then as old fashioned, it could be said that “truth from his lips prevail’d with double sway, ” and few there were who dared to argue with him or question what he had to say.

  I regret that only one of his many messages has come down to us word for word. It was written in long hand on the back page of the program for a Christmas concert in 1937.

  Good Breeding

  A Message from the Clergyman

  The Rev. M. Harvey, in his history “Newfoundland in 1900,” declared that “race counts for a good deal . . . blood can never cease to be important.”

  There are some who will argue that these words embody all that we are trying to get away from in this modern day and age. They smack too much of serfdom and inequality. But is this really so?

  A voice in the crowd cries: “I’m just as good as anyone else!” and a brawny man waves a hamlike fist to emphasize his point. But take another look at that man. Ten chances to one he is at the low end of the scale in one way or another—poverty or social or cultural starvation. His cry emanates from inferiority complex.

  It was my good luck one time to meet briefly one of the pioneers in our forest industry. Mr. Harry Crowe, in days when he was trying to interest British people in putting the mill at Grand Falls. He told me he preferred to deal with the British because “their word counts for more.” I believe that an Englishman’s word is still as good as his bond. They are a whole nation counted as people who can be trusted, because they have a reputation to maintain in the eyes of the world. Race does count for a good deal. Most of us feel, at some time or other, that we are inferior in some way or other to someone else. Unfo
rtunately, our first reaction is to try to drag him down to our level. We rarely try to gain his level, an effort which after all represents the only way in which we can better ourselves.

  Instead of trying to tear down, let us build up. We may not reach the top, but at least we will have tried, and we cannot fail to be better for it. Only when we have tried our best can we say, with justification, that we are as good as anyone else.

  Now may I add a word for some young people in our school who recently had occasion to regret hasty words spoken in anger. May I quote from a lesson taught in the Royal Readers that I and most of the older parents have had in school:

  The ill-timed truth we might have kept—

  Who knows how sharp it pierced and stung!

  The word we had not sense to say—

  Who knows how grandly it had rung!

  You will remember, too, my sermon in church this past Sunday, as I brought to your memory the sound advice to be found in the last two verses of the fourth chapter of the Epistle of the Apostle Paul to the Ephesians.

  I have made modest effort to put these verses to rhyme, so that you can more easily commit their message to memory and take them with you on your uneasy journey through life.

  Put away your wrath and anger,

  Put away your bitter word;

  For they pierce and sting and sever

  Like a sharp and two-edged sword.

  Put away all evil speaking,

  Let not malice cloud your thought;

  And grieve not the Holy Spirit

  Who through Christ our God hath wrought.

  Be ye kind to one another,

  Loving, tender hearted, too,

  And above all be forgiving,

  E’en as God forgiveth you.

  Happy Christmas!

  A Child’s Christmas in the Long Ago

  by Mike McCarthy

  IT’S CHRISTMAS EVE, AND you’re a child again, in the happy, care-free days of long ago.

  Outside, the snow is gently falling, and the thermometer hovers below the freezing mark. Inside your house it’s warm and cozy with a great fire blazing in the front parlour, while from the kitchen, where your mother is busy with the finishing touches of preparing for Christmas, the most delicious and tantalizing whiffs of gingerbread and fruit cakes are waft to your nose. You busy yourself with helping or getting in the way, but the minutes tick by slowly and your mind is in turmoil caught between the disbelief of the bigger boys in Santa Claus and the stories of lumps of coal or stones in the stockings of those who have lost their faith in the jolly old gentleman.

  The Christmas Tree, a stately fir has finally passed your mother’s critical inspection, and now stands in a far corner of the parlour awaiting the fall of night to be decked in all its beauty, a symbol of the true beauty of this the most wonderful of all the great feast days.

  The hours drag by slowly but at last it’s supper time, and you sit down to a meal of salt fish or watered herring—Christmas Eve is a day of strict fast and abstinence—remembering the old proverb, “a fast before a feast.” Of course you’re too excited to eat very much and can’t wait until the table is cleared, so you can begin decorating the tree.

  Your community has no electricity so you must do the best you can with glittering tinsel, artificial snow and coloured tree ornaments of every size and colour, to change your fir tree to a magical symbol of the splendour of the Christmas Season.

  And of course you can’t possiby forget to tune in to radio station V. O. N. F. for the final instalment of “Jonathan Thomas and His Christmas on the Moon” just to find out if Jonathan Thomas, The Man in the Moon and his talking horse have really rescued Santa Claus and Jonathan Thomas’s teddy bear, Gus, from the clutches of the Wicked Old Witch of Rumplestitch, and the evil Squeebubbles. But everything turns out fine and you can go back to putting the finishing touches on the tree.

  Finally the job is finished and with the glittering golden star placed on the very top of the tree, everyone stands back to admire their creation. Then, in the golden glow of the parlour hanging-lamp, the glittering tinsel and shimmering ornaments creates an atmosphere of almost mystical beauty, and there is general agreement it’s the best tree ever.

  But tonight is a special Christmas Eve for you, for tonight you are allowed to attend your first Midnight Mass, and though the hours pass slowly, at last the church bells ring out and you eagerly don your “outdoor clothes, ” and go with the other members of your family, to the church on the hill, wondering secretly in your heart if you will find your Christmas Stocking filled on your return from Midnight Mass.

  It’s a strange sensation for you entering the church with its flickering altar candles, and the kerosene lamps dimly lighting the long aisles of the church.

  The Christmas Crib with Mary and the Christ Child is set up before the side altar, and the scent of fresh evergreen boughs mixing with that of burning candles and incense recalls the story of the three Wise Men and their gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh, and suddenly you have an “epiphany, ” or swift and sudden insight into the true meaning of Christmas, and the great mystery of a God, made Man.

  Then from the choir loft the organ swells and the choir’s rendition of “Adeste Fideles” welcomes again the birth of the Christ Child, and when the priest reads the short and simple Gospel account of the First Christmas, you know, small as you are, that the glittering tree standing in solitary splendour in the front parlour, and the gifts and the good food are but the externals to the true meaning of this special day that shows God’s love for his people, and at Holy Communion when you receive the Blessed Sacrament, you feel a new and special relationship with the Babe in the manger, who has come to redeem all of mankind.

  Then Mass is finished and after a short visit to the crib you go outside where the priest and people are exchanging Christmas greetings. Then, its home again, accompanied by a few friends and relations to the first feast of the festive season. Ham, home-made blood puddings, a roast of pork or beef or mutton, a special pot of soup, and of course thick slices of home-made sweet bread covered with “cow butter, ” and the first generous helping of your mother’s special Christmas cake, with a glass of hot grog for the adults, to ward off any chills.

  Now, with the needs of body and soul satisfied your eye-lids begin to droop, and you go up the creaking stairs to your bedroom, more asleep than awake, but determined that this year you’ll stay awake and solve once and for all the nagging question of Santa’s true existence.

  But somehow you rest your eyes for a moment and the next thing you know it’s morning, and in the first dim, grey light of December dawn you race down the stairs with the terrible unexpressed fear that maybe— just maybe—he forgot your house this year, but no, your heart gives a mighty leap of joy, for there is your stocking bulging with “goodies” and underneath it, that beautiful store bought slide that you’ve been wanting for so long. It’s a perfect Christmas morning, just one of the many of the happy Christmas days of the long ago.

  Memories of Christmas Past

  by Jessie B. Mifflen

  “WAKE UP; WAKE UP; Father Christmas was here.” It was my sister—my senior by little more than a year—who called me as she jumped out of bed to go downstairs and see what surprises he had brought.

  I didn’t need a second call; indeed I had been too excited to sleep for most of the night and had at midnight heard the nearby chapel bell peal out the joyful tidings that it was Christmas. Only the fear that Santa, or Father Christmas as we were taught to call him, had not yet arrived at our house had prevented me from getting up and going down then.

  We gave a hurried call to our very small brother and waited impatiently for him to join us. We had no fears now that Father Christmas had not come, for the little one had heard the reindeer on the roof. Actually there was never any doubt that he would come, for every Christmas Eve right after tea one of his helpers would come to the front door and call out loudly, inquiring how many children were in this house a
nd whether they were good. We invariably were, of course, at this particular time, so we knew that we should find a just reward on Christmas morning.

  Our parents would also get up at the same early hour, for they had to light the kerosene oil lamp in the sitting room, as it would be a long while before daylight. Nor was ours the only house in the neighbourhood with lights burning at this hour, for the scene was repeated and wherever there were children it was one of the most exciting times of the Christmas season.

  How delightfully bulging the stockings looked as they hung from the mantle! They would not, of course, contain anything like the elaborate presents that children receive today, because money was scarce in Newfoundland outports in those days and anyway it would have seemed like wicked extravagance to spend so much on pleasure. There would always be a shining coin in the toe of the stocking. There would also be an orange, for oranges were not then included in the daily diet of children in remote outports and were regarded as treats for special occasions. There would be nuts and candy—not the common or garden variety candy like all-day suckers or molasses kisses, but delicious mouth-watering confections such as vivid yellow and shocking pink heart-shaped coloured transparent candy figures of varying designs and sizes. There would probably be a pencil case, a game and a small toy or two. Under the tree would be the larger presents—perhaps skates or a doll or useful presents like a new dress or gay cap and scarf, and always a book.

  Sometimes of course there would be disappointments, for we did not always get what we asked for in our laboriously spelled out letters to Santa, especially if we had requested a baby brother or sister. We got many of the ideas for our requests from mail-order catalogues and on autumn nights after lessons were done we would pore over them, picking out all the things we would like to have, though we knew better than to ask for the extravagantly priced luxury items displayed therein.