Classic Christmas Stories (3 page)

by P. K. Devine

T
HE PRESENT GENERATION OF young people have no idea of
the enthusiastic and whole-souled manner in which Christmas was celebrated
seventy years ago in the Outports. They only read now and then a short sketch in
the Christmas publications of today of some few of the salient features of times
or occasionally listen with doubt to the recital of isolated events by the
inhabitants. Although our forefathers had few of the necessaries and inventions
of modern civilized life that nowadays make existence so luxurious, nevertheless
they enjoyed their existence with more zest and freedom from care than their
restless and discontented descendants. What a number of inventions our fathers
and grandfathers lacked that we possess today. They had no stoves, no painted
canvas on the floor, no kerosene oil light, no sewing machine, no telegraphs, no
railways, no street cars, no daily mails, no automobile, no electric light, no
motor boats. We could go on and enumerate a score of other useful inventions,
the product of man’s brains, during the last half century.

In spite of all these accessories of modern life, the people
who kept Christmas in those old days, we are inclined to think, enjoyed life
with a keener zest and derived more pleasure from their surroundings than their
descendants do today. In the first place, the friendship and good will were
genuine and thoroughly sincere, and doing a gratuitous or kind turn for a fellow
man or woman came as natural to them as swimming is to a duck when thrown into
the water. This was the normal attitude all the year around, but when Christmas
arrived the feeling was intensified, and warmest feelings that were in
everyone’s heart came to the surface.

Christmas, as a season of good will and fraternal affection was a reality and
not merely an empty expression as it is now too often in conventional society.
Every door was open to the visitor and the neighbour, and the gatherings that
took place at Christmas were suggestive of the golden age that the poets now so
often sing of and sigh for.

People visited from home to home in the Christmas holidays and hospitalities
were displayed with a lavish hand. At night the young men and young women
assembled in the largest kitchen in the village and dancing and other games were
kept up with unremitting merriment “till the sun peeped over the hills.” The use
of the term kitchen here does not convey the correct idea to the younger
generation who know it as a small room where cooking is done. A kitchen in the
old dwelling in the Outports was parlor, sitting-room and dancing hall. It was
in fact the largest room in the house, and in some instances had a floor space
of 24x30 feet, including the open blue-flagged fire place, where the Christmas
fire, built up six feet high with cross junks, triggers and back junks, went
roaring in a sheet of flame up the open chimney. The floor was covered sometimes
with sand and at others with sawdust in order to keep it clean as long as
possible. On the rack overhead, near the fireplace, lay the big sealing gun, one
of the treasures of every prosperous fisherman. The pots, kettles and such
culinary utensils hung on a crane over the fire, which could be swung in and out
at will, and on each side of the fireplace were homemade cosy chairs and a long
pine or fir bench known as the “settle.” The building of a Christmas Eve fire
was an important work, and generally only one in a family could aspire to it.
The big Yule log, generally called the “back junk, ” four feet in length and
round as a flour-barrel, was rolled
in close to the back of
the chimney and was supposed to last during the twelve days at Christmas.

Powder guns were fired off out of doors near each one’s house as soon as the
sun set on Christmas Eve. The cod-oil lamp trimmed with zealous care and
brightened to reflect the fire light like a mirror, were then lighted, one
swinging from a hook in each corner. “Hooking” the lamp and keeping it bright
all the time was a work of art which generally fell to the tidiest girl in the
house.

After the supper table was cleared away the neighbours began to flock in, and
soon the red decanter and old-fashioned cut glasses were produced. This was
called “breaking” the ice, and when it was broken it grew fast and furious. The
younger folks soon asserted themselves and claimed fifteen square feet of the
floor for dancing, compelling the older people to move back the “settles” and
chairs close to the walls. Merely a dance that broke the ice was all that was
indulged in on Christmas Eve. The religious aspect of the feast must not be
forgotten, and it seldom was, in spite of all the carnal temptations in the way
of eating and drinking. The real thing in the dancing line was not witnessed
till St. Stephen’s night, and it was kept up every night at one kitchen or
another till the twelve holidays were over. The lion’s share of this business
was done by the “mummers, ” fools or “jannies, ” whichever name you wish to give
them, as they were alluded to by all three.

Probably in no outport in Newfoundland were the old Christmas customs kept up
and were wholeheartedly celebrated than in Trinity. The back-bone of Trinity’s
prosperity in the days under review was the seal fishery. The three big
mercantile firms were Brooking’s, Slade’s and
Stoneman’s. A
score or more of smaller stores and shops did active trades by reason of the
existence of these wholesalers. The principal sealing skippers whose names are
handed down to us in sealing history and deep sea voyages are Andrews, Facey,
Ash, Coleman, Field, Dorothy, Morris, Eagan, Fowlow, Christian, Answorth and
Verge. Harry Andrews, known by his friends under the familiar name of “Billy
Lindy, ” was for many years the high liner in the sealfishery before the coming
of the steamers. His first ship was the
Selah Hutton
and then the
Peerless
. His name was known all over the country.

It has been said of Brigus that it lived on the fat of the sealfishery for half
a century after the industry was prosecuted in wind-jammers. This could be said
with equal if not greater truth in Trinity. Not only was it a town of shops but
also a town of mechanical tradesmen. There were shoe makes, tinsmiths,
carpenters, blacksmiths, sail makers, masons, coopers and tailors who kept the
town trade going on the money circulated amongst all the residents of the town—a
self-supporting country. The decline came on gradually after Bremner closed the
Brooking premises and Walter Grieve withdrew, but the traces of quondam
prosperity are there today in the neat well-kept homes and gardens and streets,
churches and schools. Even a stranger visiting the place for the first time and
meeting the residents cannot feel to be impressed by the fact that he is in the
midst of a cultural and hospitable people imprinted with the heritage of a
prosperous past.

by James R. Thoms

A
UNT 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. Unfortunately, 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!