Daily Life

A Child’s Christmas In Huron County

By Jim ⋅ December 22, 2007 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

A Child’s Christmas

I think I was four years old.

I remember that Christmas, because a few months earlier, my uncle Robert had left for his last tour of duty in World War Two, never to return.

I remember it too, because we didn’t have a Christmas tree and it was getting close to the big day.

On Sunday we had gone to church…the little Presbyterian Church in Dungannon…now a senior citizens’ centre. The sound of the carol “Good King Wenceslaus’, was still ringing in my ears.

I remember my Mother and Father talking; she said to my Dad that we really should have a tree. He nodded in his quiet laconic way and looked at me with his crooked sort of grin and said something like, “You want to come”?

I nodded eagerly and my Mother helped me into my winter clothes, which had been drying by the wood-burning cook stove.

Then my father and I struck out for the bush across “The Feast of Stephen”, with my Dad carrying his axe over his shoulder and my small hand in his. It was already starting to get dark when we arrived at the woods…and we looked around for just the right tree. It turned out to be a small cedar and my Dad used his axe to fell the little green symbol. He had a rope with him and tied it around the trunk.

Together we dragged the tree across the snowy fields and back to our house.(He carried me the last part of the trek). By the time we got there, the moon and stars were out and I could smell our dinner cooking on the old wood stove.

After we ate supper, we decorated the tree with some lights and icicles and a silver star right up on top. Then my Dad took me to my room as he always did and read me a bible story and then I said my usual prayer.

“Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord, my soul to take”.

I rolled over on my side, thinking that the whole thing was a big mystery. I never really knew just what that prayer meant. But what I did know was this – I loved my Mom and Dad and they loved me. I knew too that Christmas was a special time.

Most important though, I knew that when I woke, there’d be a nice present under that tree…just for me.