A not-so-traditional Christmas

On Saturday my family enjoyed the traditional ritual of trimming the Christmas tree — a strange expression because we add to the tree instead of removing bits. The tree vendors do that so that every product in their inventory looks as if it has been removed from a Christmas card.

Anyway, my four-year-old granddaughter did most of the work, showing delight at the different ornaments and often showing them around to the other guests before mounting them. And of course, the lower branches got much more attention than the upper ones.

That's the way traditions are supposed to work. They get handed down from the older to the younger generations, and change a bit each time, so that today very few remember that a "Christmas tree" has its roots in a pagan ritual that the church elders were wise enough to continue.

A unique Christmas past

One Christmas reversed the normal flow of tradition for my family. In 1960 my bachelor uncle was doing graduate studies at Purdue University. Of course he was coming home for Christmas, and my parents invited him to stay with us.

This was not as easy as it might seem. My mother had five children and might have been aware that she was carrying a sixth. We lived in a three-bedroom bungalow of less than 1,000 square feet. Fortunately we had a finished basement (we called it a rec room back then) with a Toronto couch in the corner. (Toronto couches used to be called Winnipeg couches in Toronto, and they're like a metal-and-wire version of a futon.) That was where uncle Barkley was going to sleep. No problem, until he called to ask if he could bring a friend.

Room at the bungalow

My uncle explained that his friend was from New Zealand, so he couldn't go home and his other option was spending Christmas alone in West Lafayette, Indiana. My parents remembered the Christmas tradition of showing hospitality to strangers. The friend would sleep on the couch in the rec room.

As luck would have it, my uncle and Don Russell arrived just as we finished trimming the tree. Trees and ornaments were different back then. The trees were almost always Manitoba spruce, unless you were very well off and could afford scotch pine, or were decadent beneath contempt and owned one of those new-fangled fake trees.

Electric tree lights were a new enough thing that older people would reminisce about when they used candles to light the tree, sometimes literally. The newest things were candle-shaped lights that were hollow and filled with glycerin. The heat from the lights would boil the glycerin, making bubbles rise in the candles. These lights probably inspired the lava lamps of the psychedelic era.

When Don entered, my parents saw that they had a problem. Uncle Barkley was six-foot-four, but Don towered over him. Uncle Barkley would barely fit on the Toronto couch, but neither had any possibility of using the couch. Somehow they worked that out.

I was 10 years old then, so most of Christmas was old hat to me, probably even the Santa bit. Imagine my surprise to see a giant of a man transfixed at the sight of a Christmas tree. They didn't have Christmas trees in New Zealand. Don sat in the nearest chair to the tree and stared at it like he had a front-row seat to the arrival of the Magi. I remember my mom asking him if he would like a coffee or a beer or something, and he said, "No, thanks. I just want to look at the tree."

Hockey Night in New Zealand

The big gift that year was a table hockey game for my brother Derek and me. The old games were different: the players were stationary and just spun when you twisted the knobs. And of course every game was between the Habs and the Leafs, which was fine because Derek had not seen the light yet and was happy with the Leafs. Soon my uncle and his friend offered to join in, and since Don knew nothing of hockey, we handicapped the game by having him team up with me, the older brother. He nearly killed me. Childish enthusiasm doesn't begin to describe the zest with which he played.

The Great White North

A few days after Christmas, uncle Barkley decided to visit his brother in Brandon. I don't remember why, but Derek and I joined them on the road trip. We piled into the back of our uncle's Volkswagen Bug, and headed west. Then a blizzard started. Don had never seen one of those, either. Eventually he got so excited at the sight that he rolled down the window and leaned out with his Leica camera so that he could send pictures back home. I've always wondered how his photos turned out.

When you get to my age, Christmases sort of blend together, but I will never forget the Christmas when as a child I got to watch an adult experience Christmas with a child's eyes.

Kevin Longfield is a Winnipeg playwright and theatre historian.