POSTING # 5---CHRISTMAS STORIES

POSTING # 5:
Niagara-on-the-Lake at Christmas: Henderson Christmas’s; Hunter Christmas’s; Henderson-Hunter Christmas’s; The Magic of Mince Tarts; Short Stuff (Mini-Stories about Kids and Pets)


Niagara-on-the-Lake at Christmas

One of the prettiest Christmas sights is Niagara-on-the-Lake at night.

Pat and I drove through the town the other night and marveled at how beautiful it is. The masses of tourists have gone, replaced by a few Christmas shoppers bustling from shop to shop. The stores give off a warm and cozy glow---not garish or trashy---and the trees and shrubs along the main street are decorated discreetly with strings of white lights.

A horse beside the Prince of Wales Hotel stomps its feet waiting for a young couple on a get-away weekend who would like to snuggle under a buffalo robe and tour the town.

The local Chamber of Commerce claims that Niagara-on-the-Lake is the prettiest town in Ontario, or perhaps Canada. From their advertising, it seems they are referring to the town in the summer, with flowers in hanging baskets and well-tended parks. And it is lovely then.

But Niagara-on-the-Lake at Christmas time is wonderful, soothing, reassuring, and magical.

Henderson Christmas’s

On Christmas day, the tradition in Pat’s family was to open the presents from Santa Claus and from each other in their home in Aurora, have breakfast and then set off for the farm in Oro, near Barrie where Pat’s mother grew up.

For the first 6 or 7 years of Pat’s life, until road plowing improved, Pat’s father drove them to Murdoch’s Service Station on Highway 11, north of Barrie. There, they waited for Pat’s grandfather to come in a sleigh to get them. The family would load the gifts for the grandparents, Aunt Margaret, Uncle Bob and the cousins onto the sleigh. Pat’s grandfather gave them warm robes and shouted, “Gett yup” to the horse.

When they arrived, Pat and her family would rush out of the cold into the solid brick farmhouse built by Pat’s great grandfather and revel in the smells of a real Christmas tree and cooking food.

Later on when the road snow plowing improved, they would drive right to the farm.

But some years there were problems. Barrie is in the middle of the Ontario Snow Belt and cars then were not as reliable as they are today. Sometimes Highway 11 was blocked by huge snow drifts and they had to turn around and go home to a Christmas dinner of bacon and eggs or ‘chicken a la king’ (toast with cream of chicken soup mixed up with some dead chicken leftovers.

On one occasion, they spent the Christmas day in an unheated garage in Barrie waiting for the mechanic, who had kindly agreed to forego his own Christmas dinner, to fix their car.

Pat says, “A feeling of fun and adventure prevailed on these occasions----the very idea of having bacon and eggs for Christmas dinner had us howling with laughter”.


Hunter Christmas’s

My family always celebrated Christmas at our home in Arthur.

During the year, Dad was normally serious and stern at dinner, but Christmas dinners were different and I remember them fondly. The ‘dinner’ was at noon after we had opened the gifts, passed around bowls of nuts, chocolates and oranges. We would start dinner by pulling Christmas crackers, reciting the silly jokes and putting on the ridiculous paper hats (dad included).

Dad would have a glass of sherry, the only meal in the year that Mom permitted any alcohol at the table---she didn’t want to set a bad example for the kids.

Mom would bring in the roasted goose and slice it. (It was always a goose, never a turkey. This was part of Dad’s heritage---his father had a bakery in Wales and he would roast the geese for all his customers, deliver them around the town and only then did the Hunters sit down to their own goose dinner.)

For dessert, we would have rich, dark plum pudding, made by Aunt Millie who lived in Perth, and mince tarts.

I remember one or two Christmas’s when the monthly cheque from the Ontario Provincial Police didn’t arrive on time. We were not poor but despite pretty careful money-management there was usually little money left by cheque time. If the cheque that normally arrived around the third week of the month was held up in the mail or by a snow storm, there was a problem, and the problem was magnified if this happened in December.

I can remember Mom explaining to us on one occasion that Santa would not be able to bring us the hockey sweater, skates, toboggan or whatever we had asked for. It was hard to understand why Santa with his unlimited resources would not be able to call at our house.

One Christmas, Mom decided it was time to introduce a little culture to the four men in her house (Dad, my two brothers and me).

On a visit to Guelph, our nearest city, she bought a 12 inch, 78 RPM record of John Charles Thomas, a famous American baritone, singing the hymn, Jerusalem.

Mom played the record and we were all impressed. He had an amazing voice.

Then one of us, I forget who, looked at the B side, something Mom had forgotten to do. It was Thomas singing Kansas City from the musical Oklahoma.

One of the verses goes:

Everything's up to date in Kansas City
They've gone about as fer as they can go
They got a big theatre they call a burleque
For fifty cents you could see a dandy show!
One of the gals is fat and pink and pretty
As round above as she was round below
I could swear that she was padded from her shoulder to her heel
But later in the second act when she began to peel,
She proved that everything she had was absolutely real!
She went about as fer as she could go
Yes, Sir! She went about as fer as she could go!

Dad smiled broadly, we boys giggled and Mom looked down at her fingernails, as much as to say, “That’s the last time I try to bring any culture into this family”.




Henderson-Hunter Christmas’s

We have generally had our Christmas’s at home but the dates have bounced around a bit, to fit in with people’s work schedules and relatives’ commitments. This year, we are in the midst of our Christmas as this posting is being finalized.

Our tradition has been to have pancakes and maple syrup first thing and then open the gifts under what was always a real tree until recent years. (Our trees were usually bought at the last moment and often looked a bit like something Charlie Brown might have selected. A neighbour up the street looked at our tree one year, shook her head, and said, “It’s people like you who give real trees a bad name.”)

The trees were decorated with a mish-mash of treasured items. Arab headdresses I had brought from a trip to Lebanon when the children were young, kindergarten creations made from toilet rolls and pipe cleaners, and assorted balls, glass angels and other bangles acquired around the world---all items rich in memories.

Early on, our daughter, Jen, appointed herself the distributer of gifts, even before she could read the names on the gift cards. What a wonderful job she did, making sure that everyone got a gift, including our dog Cassidy, before starting another round.

This early demonstration of family organization has carried on and developed, and everyone looks to Jen (and Pat, her husband) for the planning of family events.


The Magic of Mince Tarts

As I mentioned earlier, we always had mince tarts at Christmas time and I grew up believing that to have 12 months of good luck in the upcoming year you had to eat 12 mince tarts between Christmas and New Years. If you ate only 11, you would be OK until the end of November, but watch out for December!

Now, part of me likes to think that I am a rational, no-nonsense, non-superstitious person, but there is another part that doesn’t walk under ladders, that ‘knocks’ wood, and dodges black cats (except when I am in Britain, where a black cat crossing your path is considered good luck---go figure).

If there were a support group for superstitious behavior, I would have to say, “My name is John, I believe in mince tarts”.

It is hard to know where this belief in mince tarts came from---perhaps from my Welsh, Scottish or Yorkshire roots.

Or perhaps there is another explanation. As far back as I can trace our family tree, the Hunters were all master bakers. Did the guild of bakers dream up this idea a few centuries ago just to boost year-end sales?

(By the way, the Wikipedia Encyclopedia claims that in the 17th century, Oliver Cromwell, that Puritan spoilsport, outlawed the eating of mince tarts on Christmas Day, because, I assume, he was worried that the succulence of a warm tart would distract people from the religious significance of the day.)

Anyway, I brought this idea of the magic of mince tarts to our marriage and although Pat grumbled a good bit about getting out the rolling pin each December, she did it. I got my 12 mince tarts and although our fortunes went up and down, overall we have done pretty well.

Truth be told, Pat has bought into the idea so much that most years she forces me to eat 13 or 14 tarts just to be sure I haven’t miscounted. It should be noted that she has never joined me in the dozen of tarts tradition---she really doesn’t enjoy mince tarts.


All of which brings us to Christmas 2002. Pat and I were in Baku, Azerbaijan, where I was heading a project to reduce corruption in the public service (I can guarantee that future postings will have some stories about that experience).

We had gone out for dinner on Christmas day (to an Azeri restaurant---no turkey with cranberry sauce). As soon as I woke on Boxing Day, I thought, “We have forgotten mince tarts!”

Off we went to find some mince tarts or at least some mincemeat. Grocery stores in Baku had never heard of mince tarts or mincemeat. We kept getting shunted to ground meat in their butchery section.

Getting desperate, we went to the restaurant in the Radisson Hotel---a favourite of western expatriates. The chef said they had made mince tarts for a special Christmas dinner the day before but the tarts were all gone.

Could they bake some more? No, they were too busy preparing for New Years. Could they sell us some mincemeat. No!

We decided that we had made a good faith effort, that the fates would hopefully take that into account, and wouldn’t punish us. We had tried.

And anyway, it was just a superstition, wasn’t it.

The first indication that the mince tart fates were annoyed with me came on the evening of January 10th. Hans (not his real name), a German lawyer arrived in Baku. He was to help me by re-writing public service legislation to prevent (or at least reduce) corruption in the hiring, promotion and firing of Azerbaijan public servants. He arrived with all kinds of legal texts---plus a very high temperature.

It turned out that he had had an intermittent temperature in Germany after returning from a Christmas holiday in Kenya. His temperature would be normal during the day but high at night. His doctor told him it was just a virus.

I suspected malaria especially after he told me that he had not taken anti-malarial drugs while in Kenya---because, he said, he wanted to be able to drink and one can’t drink alcohol while taking those pills.

We took him the next day to one of the two clinics that western oil company employees used (there is a lot of drilling for oil in the Caspian Sea off Baku). His temperature was normal and his blood test showed no malarial infection. The Azeri doctor (trained in Moscow) thought it was probably a virus---take Aspirin, drink plenty of fluids and get lots of sleep.

Hans wasn’t sleeping, wasn’t eating much and was getting weaker and weaker, and I was getting more and more alarmed. Finally one night when his temperature was high, we took him to the other clinic. The doctor was a South African who had worked in the Canadian north and, more importantly, in Indonesia where malaria was common.

He immediately suspected malaria and the blood tests confirmed that Hans did indeed have malaria and not just that but a particularly nasty type that if not treated promptly could destroy organs. The doctor explained that blood tests can only detect malaria when the temperature is high---when the temperature falls it means that the ‘bad guys’ have temporarily left the blood stream and hidden in body tissue.

The doctor gave him a drug that he said would help but the best drug wasn’t available in Azerbaijan. He said we should use medical evacuation to get Hans back to Germany right away (a medevac jet with a doctor and a nurse could fly in from Moscow and take him to Germany).

At that point Hans told us that his travel insurance didn’t cover medical evacuation. His contract with the project included funds for insurance, but he had opted not to buy that insurance, and, instead, had pocketed the money.

He told us he couldn’t afford the $100,000 cost of an evacuation. He couldn’t even afford the $15,000 for a nurse to accompany him on a commercial flight to Germany.

Right!

His doctor took me aside, “This is really serious. He has to get back to Germany right away. He’s not infectious---Malaria is spread by mosquitoes. Get him on a commercial flight, tonight if you can.”

I called the agency in Germany that Hans worked with and the official said that if I could get Hans on a plane for the four hour flight, he would have a doctor and ambulance waiting when the plane arrived in Frankfurt.

Pat and I took Hans back to his hotel, packed his belongings and set off to the airport. Hans was wearing a brown, wool duffle coat with the hood up. He kept dozing off but I would wake him and coach him on how to behave at the airport.

“You will have to put the hood down.”

“But I’m cold.”

“It doesn’t matter. You’ve got to convince the airline people you are OK to travel. Put the hood down, stand up straight, and don’t shuffle.” (Pat says that I added, “Right now you look like an idiot!” She remembers thinking that that was out of character for me, but it was a pretty stressful time.)

At the airport we helped him through the outgoing customs screening and then just watched and held our breath as he approached the airline counter. He held himself together until he had checked his bags, and got his boarding pass. Then the stiffening seemed to go out of him, he slouched, put his hood up and shuffled off, out of sight, toward the departure lounge.

We waited until the plane had left, just to make sure.

The next day the agency phoned to say he had arrived safely and was now in hospital.

A week of so later the agency sent us an email saying that Hans was now at home and recovering well. The agency thanked Pat and me for our help, saying, “If you had not done what you did, the result would not have been good.”

Looking back on it, we were enormously lucky that the SARS epidemic did not become headline news until several months after Hans was safely home.

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The mince tart fates had one more nasty surprise for us at Baku.

Six weeks after Hans left, I developed some aches, pains and a temperature. I thought it was just a virus (shades of Hans!!), perhaps a cold or maybe at worst the ‘flu.

A friend working on another project called to ask how I was. Pat chatted with him and then I got out of bed to tell him it was nothing and I would soon be back to work.

Then, I started feeling dizzy and collapsed on the floor. When I came to, Pat was shouting at the friend telling him to come over right away.

It must have been a terrible time for Pat, not knowing what had happened to me---a stroke, heart attack, or worse (at one point she thought I had stopped breathing).

The friend arrived with an Azeri colleague with a big SUV. I was bundled into it and Pat told the driver to take us to the clinic with the South African doctor. The Azeri fellow didn’t know the way to the clinic---while Pat knew exactly how to get their because of our trips with Hans---but he was reluctant to take directions from a foreigner. After all, it was his city. In the midst of caring for me, Pat had to shout and argue with him.

We got to the clinic in record time and the driver was clearly impressed with Pat’s knowledge of the tricky streets in that part of Baku. He was one of many fine Azeris we met during our stay in Azerbaijan.

After tests, the doctor said that I had just fainted, that I had prostatitis, a bacterial infection of the prostate, and prescribed a heavy dose of CIPRO. He said I would feel lousy for a week or so but would recover fully in a few weeks.

As he was putting away his equipment, the doctor said he was quitting and returning the next day to South Africa. He wasn’t sure who would replace him at the clinic. One of his reasons for quitting was that he wasn’t sure how he would be looked after if he became ill in Baku. Not reassuring.

The prostatitis was the last straw. I had been having fights with the project contractor on how to manage the project and now with the illness and the uncertainty of medical care, I decided that the time had come to part company. The contractor agreed (I think they were getting fed up with my insistence on dotting ‘I’s” and crossing ‘T’s’ on contracts with local employees), found a replacement and Pat and I returned home.

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So, the events of Baku convinced us that the mince tart fates are not to be toyed with.

We are leaving for South Carolina on Boxing Day and. I will only have time for a couple of tarts before leaving for the South. We are not sure that tarts or mincemeat will be available in the land of the pecan pie so we are going to lug along some President’s Choice mincemeat and will buy prefab tart shells!



Short Stuff (Mini-Stories about Kids and Pets)

Brother Jim tells a story about a long-ago Christmas. He had written a letter to Santa asking for a sleigh, the kind of sleigh he had seen at the local hardware store. Unfortunately, when Mom went to the store to get the sleigh she was told that they had just sold the last one.

Mom must have been heartbroken, must have wondered what to do. In the end, she prepared a letter to Jim from Santa that started off “Dear Jim”. Santa said that he had got Jim’s letter and thought he would be able to provide a sleigh but things had come up, and he was so sorry.

Jim says that if he received the sleigh, he would probably have forgotten all about that Christmas.

But he has never forgotten the letter he got from Santa.

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We always got Cassidy a hermetically sealed tin of yellow tennis balls for Christmas, to replace the tired, grey slobber-stained balls from the previous Christmas. When the presents had been put out under the tree, Cassidy would circle around until he sniffed the tennis ball container. He would lie for hours on the floor, shivering, his nose pointing at his present.

When Jen put his present in front of him, he would tear away the wrapping paper and then look for someone to open the can.

Once he had one of the new balls, he would take off across the floor playing his version of hockey, batting the ball back and forth between his front paws. Sometimes he would forget and grab the ball in his mouth, a move that wasn’t permitted by the rules he had developed for his game.

Over time, he had discovered that if he kept an ear in his mouth he wouldn’t be tempted to grab the ball. So, he would swing his head back and forth until he could grab one of the floppy ears in his mouth and then resume stick-handling (paw-handling?) holding the ear firmly in his mouth.


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We once got Cassidy a soft rubber toy that squeaked. As he was sniffing under the tree for his tennis balls, he stepped on the wrapped toy. It squeaked and he yelped and jumped back.

He got his revenge after the presents were opened. He chewed the toy until the metal squeaker fell out and then pranced around with the vanquished toy in his mouth.


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THANK YOU----SEE YOU AGAIN ON SUNDAY, FEBRUARY, 8

I am grateful for the kind comments about Letter from Virgil and for the memory-jogging suggestions.

It is great fun rummaging through my attic of memories.

Pat and I are taking off for the next few weeks---the next posting will be uploaded on Feb. 8.

We wish everyone a wonderful holiday season and a super 2009.