Memories, tradition and hope make my Christmas
As a 75-year-old woman with a pretty severe disability, my Christmas is about hope, tradition and memories. A lot of memories.
To go way back, a trip to the National Bakery on St. Paul Street with Dad for our annual Christmas goodies was a must. The heavenly aroma of warm bread still conjures up white-tiled walls and rolling chrome racks full of loaves, pies, cakes and cookies. You went away hugging still-warm loaves in brown paper bags and white paper boxes tied with red string dangling from any spare fingers. I seem to recall that they left the screen door on all winter likely to vent heat from the ovens.
And then we’d walk just a little bit further to Laura Secord’s for sev- eral pounds of the chocolate-covered peanut clusters that Dad loved and chocolate covered cherries for everyone else.
Mom and I would go to Warren Woollens down on St. Paul Street to pick up something special for Dad as he always liked their Viyella shirts. My mother’s present came from Wallace’s as it was, I thought, the nicest general dry goods store in town.
Later in 1953, when we lived across the road at 221 Ontario St. and Mom was buying and selling antiques, she convinced Dad to push a lovely old sleigh she’d found up onto to the roof of the front porch. To add to it she painted a huge Santa on Masonite, cut him out, and Dad placed him in the sleigh with a Christmas tree and a string of lights. It made the papers. The next year she added two reindeer and, finally, ran out of room.
And so many Christmas dinners at my sister Kathie’s home on Queen Street. The house was always warm and inviting and our table was always interesting because it was never just a family Christmas but included friends and acquaintances of her artist husband, Paul, who has a heart big enough to fill the house to overflowing.
As loved ones died, our Christmas table numbered more friends than relatives and we began to realize that Christmases with close family like that aren’t always forever.
There was one Christmas back in 1980 when I was only days away from marrying the man who was to become my husband of 37 years and then another one in 2006 that we spent waiting on lab tests to see if he had cancer. He did, had surgery, and is now cancer free.
And the many Christmases when we received hundreds of greetings from people all over the world who have my neurological disease and appreciated the information we sent them through the charity we ran from 1984 to 2002.
And I’ll never forget the Christmas my mother showed up at our door carrying a bag of gifts and wearing a long string of sleigh bells. She jingled.
Twenty-seven years ago, when we celebrated our first Christmas in our new home behind Ridley College, we decided not to have a Christmas tree. It took a couple of years and watching a soppy movie about Christmas to make me relent and buy a good artificial one. Now, our beautifully decorated little tree comes out every December, we enjoy it for a month and then it’s bagged, ornaments and all, because there’s no way with my paralyzed hands that I can decorate a tree every year. We have instant Christmas and I just love it. Several years ago, we started listening to a recording of A Child’s Christmas in Wales read by Dylan Thomas that has become a tradition and we always make it a habit of watching It’s a Wonderful Life, A Christmas Story and Bad Santa.
This Christmas, I’m celebrating the culmination of two-and-a-half years of work writing my autobiography, CMT and Me, but more about that some other time.
My husband and I have both lost our immediate families but we have each other and grown nieces and nephews in our lives with their spouses and children.
Feeling slightly nauseous at the present state of our world, I’m hoping for a better tomorrow and that we’ll all be together to see it.
Merry Christmas! linda@lindacrabtree.com