Jen's Genealogy Pages

Prompt: What songs did your family listen to during Christmas? Did you ever go carolling? Did you have a favorite song?

We used to listen Christmas music through much of the month of December. There were the more ‘religious’ songs – Silent Night, Hark the Herald Angels Sing, Away in a Manger – and the more ‘secular’ ones – Jingle Bells, Santa Claus is Coming, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. We listened to albums, mostly, although I am sure there was a fair bit of singing, too. Today, I try to sing Christmas carols but the preschooler tends to tell me to keep quiet. It’s ok if the preschooler is singing, but it’s not ok for me to sing along!

I went carolling exactly once. I was in my late teens/early twenties and was involved with a youth group. We went out on a snowy winter evening and sang at several houses in the neighbourhood. I don’t remember much more than the fact it was pretty cold!

My favourites when I was younger are similar to my favourites now. I have always liked We Three Kings, O Holy Night and Do You Hear What I Hear? I tend towards the more traditional, apparently.

Excerpt from Where the Saints Have Trod, Judith St. John, 1974 (Oxford University Press). The book is based on the author’s childhood memories (ca 1914-1924). She was my great-aunt.

“ “What will be the first Christmas hymn we sing this year?” my father asked. We always sang a hymn after supper. We didn’t sing church Christmas carols like “Hark! The herald angels sing” or “Joy to the world”, nor Sunday School carols like “We three kings” and “Once in royal David’s city”; we sang very private Christmas hymns my mother taught us that no one else in Lukefield knew.

“ “Let’s sing “Once a little Baby lay, Cradled in the fragrant hay”.” It was always my mother’s favourite. It was good to hear it once again. It had lain quietly in my mind for eleven long months.

“ “What Santa Claus piece shall we sing?” said mother. It was difficult to choose. We were all quiet for a moment, remembering old favourites.

“ “I’ll choose, “Santa Claus will come tonight, if you’re good”,” I said. I liked the motions we used while we lustily sang that song. When it was over we played: “What would you like for Christmas”. We each had a turn to give a heart’s desire. “A toy typewriter,” I said. “A fur muff,” said Elizabeth. “Roget’s Thesaurus,” said my father. “A feather boa,” said mother. We were all ready and waiting with longed-for treasures.”

Prompt: Did your family attend religious services during the Christmas season? What were the customs and traditions involved?

As a young child we attended church fairly regularly and went to church during the Christmas season. I don’t actually remember any sort of pageants or much at all about the services from way back then. We did have our school Christmas concerts in the local United Church and I remember those much better.

When I was older, we went to church much less regularly but at some point we did start going to the Christmas Eve evening service. These were usually held around 10 or 11pm on Christmas Eve. My favourite services were always the candlelit ones. A dimly lit church and beautiful music makes for a wonderful Christmas tradition. Having very young children, however, has taken the Christmas Eve service out of my usual Christmas traditions for the time being.

This year, however, we did get a bit of “church” at Christmas. The baby was baptized on Sunday. In addition to the baptism – there were three babies being baptized this time – the service included a rather unique Christmas pageant with plenty of audience participation. I don’t think I really got the full impact of the service as I was holding a squirmy baby and trying to keep a preschooler under control. The baby behaved beautifully, the preschooler spent part of the service running around the church with a cousin. Not exactly the service of my dreams but the music was pretty good!!

Excerpt from Where the Saints Have Trod, Judith St. John, 1974 (Oxford University Press). The book is based on the author’s childhood memories (ca 1914-1924). She was my great-aunt.

 ”Christmas Sunday was a joyous, holy day. In the afternoon, my mother told the Christmas Story to the whole Sunday School. She drew on the big blackboard the quiet town of Nazareth, and Joseph’s house with the flat roof, where the angel visited Mary. She drew the long, weary road to Bethlehem. With a few strokes of the chalk, she pictured the shepherds and the angelic, heavenly host. Away down in the corner, she drew the camels and Wise Men who were journeying to worship the Christ Child in the manger. It seemed to me that we were really in the Holy Land, that those crude figures were alive and breathing, and that we went with them to the stable. My mother could make stories seem more real than real living.”

Prompt: How did your family handle Christmas Shopping? Did anyone finish early or did anyone start on Christmas Eve?

When I was a child, my mother did the bulk of the Christmas shopping to ensure us kids and my father had presents and filled stockings. Early on, my father would be the only one buying for my mother, but as I got older I started to buy things both for my parents and my sibling. We usually made lists for each other to provide guidance, but it wasn’t mandatory to actually follow the list if you came across something ‘better’. Some years, if we hadn’t had a list some of us might not have had any presents. We still do lists but they seem much harder to create than they used to – fewer toys, I guess, though more expensive ones! The logistics of ensuring there isn’t duplication off the list also makes things challenging – there’s a lot of email and secretive phone calls leading up to Christmas.

No one finished particularly early most years – although every year I continue to hope I’ll be done well ahead of schedule. And every year I’m usually in the mall buying something or another a day or two before Christmas. This year will be no exception. Thanks to the Internet, however, I haven’t been in the mall quite as much as usual prior to the last couple of days!

Excerpt from Where the Saints Have Trod, Judith St. John, 1974 (Oxford University Press). The book is based on the author’s childhood memories (ca 1914-1924). She was my great-aunt.

“In secret places, we began to make presents. Elizabeth embarked on the ambitious task of knitting a dish-cloth for Mother, out of string. I decided to knit her a table-napkin ring. I found a little ball of rose wool for the purpose. I made a book-mark for Aunt Rhoda, and a calendar for my father to hang in the barn. He had never had one there. I went shopping for Elizabeth’s present – a fat scribbler that she could use for a scrap-book. In the same store, I bought a tiny silver container full of coloured leads for my brother’s eversharp pencil.”

Prompt: Did you have one? Where did you hang it? What did you get in it? Do you have any Christmas stockings used by your ancestors?

My mother had handmade all of our stockings. They were red with a white band at the top with our names written on in green. She had not made one for herself. Hers was store-bought with a picture of Santa Claus on it. As we added partners and grandchildren to the mix, my mother made them their own stockings and has since replaced our old ones. She herself still uses her old stocking.

I grew up in a house without a fireplace so we couldn’t really hang our stockings in the more traditional manner. So, for as long as I can remember, we laid the stockings over various chairs in the living room. When we moved, our new house had a fireplace but we tended to have the Christmas tree in a different room so the placing of the stockings continued. Even today, in my own home, we will probably not actually hang the stockings because our fireplace is again in a different room from the tree. When we come down in the morning, Santa has filled the stockings and left them on ‘our’ chairs.

We always had an orange in the toe of the stocking and a candy cane hanging over the edge of the top of the stocking. What was in between varied from year to year, but there were usually socks and a toothbrush and other assorted ‘necessities’. Then there was the ‘fun stuff’ – candy, chocolate, little toys, a stuffed animal. And that’s pretty much how Santa handles stockings today – there are always some practical items as well as some fun stuff.

Excerpt from Where the Saints Have Trod, Judith St. John, 1974 (Oxford University Press). The book is based on the author’s childhood memories (ca 1914-1924). She was my great-aunt.

“We hung up no ordinary stockings on Christmas Eve, but special bright blue knitted stockings that had belonged to an ancestor who died before my mother was born. He must have been a giant, for those stockings were so long that they almost touched the floor when we hung them on the mantel. They were always kept in the Christmas truck with the decorations.”

“It was still dark when the alarm sounded. It was morning. “Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas.” Everyone shouted the greeting as loudly as possible. In a twinkling, my brother, Elizabeth and I were racing downstairs to our stockings. I let the others go first in case Santa Claus had not found us in the new parish. But he had come all right! Our stockings were bulging. The tree looked like a fairyland tree in the faint light.

“ “He found us. He found us.” We all climbed on to the big bed in my mother and father’s room. Aunt Rhoda came, too, wrapped in a blanket. The things in our stockings were a great surprise to everyone. A red candy apple, a little candy donkey, a toy watch, a puzzle, nuts, raisins, candy, figs, dates, a shining apple, and in the toe, a fat, bouncing orange. When all our treasures had been unpacked, we sang our jolliest Christmas songs, beginning with “Merry, merry, merry, merry Christmas bells”. I thought Santa Claus had never been so generous.”

Prompt: Did you like fruitcake? Did your family receive fruitcakes? Have you ever re-gifted fruitcake? Have you ever devised creative uses for fruitcake?

I don’t think I would consider myself a huge fan of fruitcake, but I have always liked my mother’s. When I mentioned the topic of today’s prompt, she told me that the fruitcake she makes was the fruitcake my grandmother made – and that recipe came from the Toronto Kresge’s years ago. I don’t have the recipe myself but I looked online and lo and behold, people have actually posted the recipe. You can find everything on the Internet! Apparently, Kresge’s Fruitcake used to be sold by Kresge’s every Christmas and at one point they handed out the recipes to lucky shoppers. I guess my grandmother must have been one of them!

Prompt: Did you or your ancestors travel anywhere for Christmas? How did you travel and who traveled with you? Do you remember any special trips?

We didn’t travel a great distance for Christmas. When I was young, all the family was in the same city. We’d usually do Christmas Eve with my father’s side of the family either at our house or at one of theirs. After all our presents were opened on Christmas morning, we would take a couple of ‘favourite’ toys and get in the car. We’d spend the rest of the day driving around the city visiting my mother’s side of the family. I remember there were often two stops with Christmas dinner being at the second one. (I may, however, be remembering wrong! It was years ago and I was quite young at the time.)

Once we’d made the ‘big move’ we didn’t travel at all at Christmas. It was too expensive for us all to fly ‘home’ so we had very quiet Christmases with just us. One year one of my grandmothers came out for the holiday but I think it was only the once. Someday I would like to take our children to visit my husband’s family overseas, but we think we’ll wait until they’re old enough to understand what’s going on!

Excerpt from Where the Saints Have Trod, Judith St. John, 1974 (Oxford University Press). The book is based on the author’s childhood memories (ca 1914-1924). She was my great-aunt.

“We finished The Prince and Pauper and started the book about old Scrooge. First thing we knew, we had stroked off eighteen days. There were only six more until Christmas, and we had come to the date bearing the picture of the train that was bringing Aunt Rhoda all the way from Montreal for Christmas. We were all standing on the station platform when the locomotive rushed into town with boisterous excitement. There was Aunt Rhoda with a huge, black suitcase. It was good to hug her. She was fat and rather squashy, like the comfortable cushion, Edward, I used to play with when I was little.”

Prompt: Did your family ever volunteer with a charity such as a soup kitchen, homeless or battered women’s shelter during the holidays? Or perhaps were your ancestors involved with church groups that assisted others during the holiday?

My children are still too young to really understand volunteering with a charity but it’s something I would like to have them involved in some day. Until then, we help support our local food bank by getting out to Canadian Pacific’s Holiday Train. The train came to town for the 12^th year last night and we all bundled up and headed out to watch it. The train itself is quite spectacular.

There is a stage car in the middle of the train – it’s a converted boxcar rigged for sound and light. Santa comes out and greets the crowd and does a little song and dance. Then there are cheque presentations for the local food bank. Finally, there is an outdoor concert with both original music and Christmas carols.

The trains – there are actually two - run across the Northeast and Midwest US and across Canada from Montreal to Vancouver. They make over a hundred stops at towns and cities along the way and it is well worth getting out to see if you happen to be in the area. The food bank or pantry in each location are set up to accept cash and food donations and everything donated in a town stays there.

As for my ancestors, one of my great-grandfathers was a Methodist (later United Church of Canada) minister. All three of his children were quite involved with the church as a consequence. Unfortunately, however, I am not aware of any specific activities they might have been involved in at Christmas time.

Excerpt from Where the Saints Have Trod, Judith St. John, 1974 (Oxford University Press). The book is based on the author’s childhood memories (ca 1914-1924). She was my great-aunt.

“The carpenter was home when we arrived. My brother bumped the carriage up the step and into the shack. The mother began to sob again when she saw the baby carriage, the shawl, the wood and the food. We didn’t say anything but ‘Merry Christmas’, but I knelt by the baby in the soap-box.

“ “Come, Janie,” Elizabeth said.

“ “Thank you, God bless you,” the carpenter said. As I went out the door, I heard him say, “Stop crying, Mary.”