Christmas on the Farm, 1950

     This is a great story which recently appeared in Allan MacRae's column "From our Past" in the West Prince Graphic - Wed December 19, 2012 issue.  It could very well have been written in our rural community.

     "My earliest memories were of Christmases at the farm of my grandparents.  It meant a house filled with people, mostly relatives and the neighbours.  There were distant cousins, the children of friends or the farm help and their families." Louis Bromfield (1896-1956), "Summerside Journal," 22 December 1950.
     "At my grandparents' house there were always 20 or 30 persons with an immense appetite with a ritual of eating...a late breakfast, dinner about 3 in the afternoon, and a pot luck supper from the delicious leftovers about 8 o'clock in the evening before the families who lived a long way off started for home."
     "The decorations came off the farm itself...golden ears of corn, blue-black branches of native hemlock, clusters of red dogwood and sumac berries and bittersweet plucked in bright October from the old twisting rail fences.  The Christmas tree, brought inside in a day or two earlier with some ceremony, came from grandfather's farm.  In a sense, it was as much a festival of plenty as of Christmas."
     "I grew up and went away, my grandparents died, and at length the home place, from which a family the size of a small village had come in the course of five generations, was swallowed up by the suburbs of the town.  But through all those years the memories remained of the plenty, the good feelings, the sumach, the meals, the bittersweet.  They followed me where ever I went.  Never did I find a Christmas as satisfying and as authentic as those holidays back on the farm."

     "When I got older I grew tired of wandering and returned to the country where I was born, and bought myself a farm a few miles from my grandparents' place.  When the holidays come round it is filled to bursting with family and friends, just as it was years ago.  On Christmas morning the family and guests of all ages come creeping down the stairs about 9 o'clock through the wreckage of the party that took place the night before.  Most of them are in wraps and pajamas and have breakfast in the dining room, with its Christmas tree decorated the night before with the aid and advice of all."

     "The tree is surrounded by a three-foot bank of gifts brightly wrapped and tied.  Even the dogs know it is Christmas and share in the bacon and toast with the rest of us.  The distribution of gifts takes an hour or more and then everybody goes upstairs to make ready for the rest of the day.  That means long walks, and card games in front of the fire, and, if there is now, skiing, sledding and skating."

     'The old abundance I remember is still there.  Instead of my grandfather's deep cellar and pantry there is a freezer stuffed with beef, lamb, pork, poultry, fruit and vegetables of all sorts.  The root cellar is filled with cabbages, turnips, and potatoes.  On the starlit Christmas eve when you step to the door you hear the noises of the animals in the barn a hundred feet away and when you go to the barn and switch on the lights the Holsteins stand up and stretch and blink, and look softly at you, and the new calves waken and stand on wobbly legs eagerly waiting to suckle their mother."

     "It is a nice Christmas, very much like the Christmas of my childhood.  It couldn't happen anywhere but on a farm, and the best of it is it happens naturally.  As in the remote past it is as much a festival of plenty as of Christmas."  Merry Christmas Everyone!