Emo seniors recall Christmas memories

Memories of past Christmases are as varied as the people who remember them.
Maurice MacMillan, 101, a resident of the Golden Age Manor in Emo, remembered Christmases on the farm when he was only two or three years old.
Oranges often were found in their stockings.
“We got one every year. An orange and a roll of popcorn wrapped in paper and a few candies,” MacMillan recalled last week. “Only one year we had a turkey, [we had a] goose for the other years.
“When I was about three, my mother would make me a pair of mitts. They had a cord around them so if I lost one mit, I lost them both,” he joked.
Fellow resident Elder Jack recalled a time when they didn’t have money to travel. “Times were hard,” he said.
“I can remember once when I was big enough drive the car, they sent my sister and I to Fort Frances with a $5 bill to buy presents for dad and mother and five kids.
“That was a lot of money back then, it was about 1932.”
The best Christmas Jack remembered was when he received his grandfather’s watch after he passed away in 1922.
“He left it to me [but] dad and mother wouldn’t let me carry it until I was 13 or 14,” Jack noted. “Every time I wore it, a jewel would go [fall out]. They were $10 apiece.”
Jack also recalled that his mother-in-law used to give home-made socks at Christmas. “I had a knitting machine and she bought the wool for the socks,” he said.
Jack added one time he was finished, he had about 90 feet of sock tubing ready to make socks from.
Cecilia McComb, another resident at the Golden Age Manor, recalled one Christmas as an eight-year-old when a big box from the Red Cross arrived.
“There were something for all the seven children. We had two gifts each,” she said.
But later that day when her father came home from delivering milk in Emo, he informed his children that they had to give up one gift each for a family who Santa forgot about.
“No one else seemed to object but me. I wasn’t going to give up anything, I never had more than one doll,” noted McComb.
“My dad assured me that I didn’t have to give up a gift,” she continued, then adding he said, “But if you don’t, I will.”
Fellow manor resident Iris Reid recalled a trip to her grandpa and grandma’s house one Christmas Day.
“I remember my dad used to get up on Christmas morning,” she said. “He would harness up the team [of horses] and hook them up to the sleigh, and [we’d] all go to grandpa’s house.
“At grandma’s and grandpa’s, there were always a beautiful hill and the kids went sliding all afternoon after we filled ourselves with turkey or goose or whatever it happened to be.
“We had another feast [after the sliding] and then went home. It was a cold ride,” she remarked, noting they travelled about five miles each way that day.
Reine Kivell had a Swedish Christmas memory when she was about six or seven.
“It was a very traumatic time,” she recalled. “We were living in a very small village. It was cold and snowy. This man came to the door.
“Since my mother and the kids were alone, she let him go up in the attic to sleep. It was warm up there due to heating from the kitchen.”
Since there was no refrigeration, Kivell’s mother had a ham sitting out in the closet. But when her mother looked in the closet the next day, the ham and the man were gone.
“So we didn’t have any Christmas dinner,” she said.
Kivell also recalled their Christmas tree. “We had real flaring candles on our Christmas trees, which was kind of scary,” she admitted.
Louanne Fisk remembered her grandmother used to make home-made gifts.
“My grandmother used to make a Raggedy Ann doll out of socks and decorate them,” she said. “My great-grandmother made dresses for all the girls.
“There were oranges with candy, and every Dec. 20 we went out to the pasture and cut a tree down and [brought] it home.”
Bernice Campbell recalled her first Christmas with her husband, Don.
“One our first Christmases, we lived in Clareshome, Alta. Don and some men went out to the foothills and cut down a Christmas tree,” she noted.
“We put it up [but] it wasn’t very good, kind of small. We went away for a couple of days and when we got home, there wasn’t a needle on it.”
For his part, Lyle Elliott grew up in a time when fancy toys were not as plentiful as they are today. He said he never got any “fancy presents.”
“Just socks and mitts that grandma knitted us and a toque, maybe,” he noted.