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Christmas Morning
in the Village
The day began with the rattle of stove lids in the kitchen. There my
grandfather, the first to rise in our household, was lighting the fire with the
spruce kindlings I had split the previous afternoon and stowed behind the
stove to dry. As the flames spread from them to the crumpled newspaper
with its splash of kerosene, grandfather added the short split lengths of beech |
and birch. Then he kindled an additional fire in the heater which with its
nickel trim gave such bright cheer to the living-room. Soon a third fire in the
slender stove with its mica windows standing near the foot of the front stair-
way would send the heat streaking upward through pipes which ran above
the upper hallway and served to warm the bedrooms off it. Across the road
and along it other homes were similarly being made habitable for the winter
day and columns of wood smoke rose above each chimney in the village.
Long before any room but the kitchen was warm, I had hurried downstairs
to recover my stocking which, along with the stockings of other members of
the family, had been hung over a chair on Christmas Eve for Santa Claus to
fill. Although grandfather grumbled mildly at being made to conform by
hanging his sock, he, together with most grown-ups in the village, consented
to take part in this agreeable deception of children.
It had seemed but a moment since I was restive in bed, impatient for the
sound of sleighbells of Santa’s reindeer, but never did I hear them. Yet when
I came downstairs there in my stocking was evidence of Santa’s visit.
This was a special stocking made never to be worn, a stocking of red
flannel with white toe and cuff and bells at each point of the cuff. Now it
was varicose with alluring bulges which proved, on extraction, to be oranges
and apples and the rare—in those days of more than a generation ago—grape-
fruit. Beneath the enormous candy cane protruding from the stocking’s top
were nuts and trinkets and ‘‘barley toys”: elephants and lions and roosters
of red or yellow, translucent candy. All these were from Santa Claus. Gifts
from the family were not to be opened until after breakfast.
Already the circle of heat had spread to include the parlour, or "front
room”, as it is called in so many Canadian rural homes where the best, and
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