The Joy of my Mother

I never feel closer to my mother than at Christmas. The '50s were an enchanted time to be a kid in Canada. Christmas pageants abounded, tree lots were bursting...there was an excited anticipation that permeated everything and everyone.

I remember the card table my parents put up in their bedroom for two weeks while they operated a virtual assembly line of goodwill -- a living, breathing card business. My Dad wrote some, my mother others. Hundreds left our home to end up all over the world. I used to look at the lists and wonder who these strangers were in England, Detroit and Florida?? But all the connections were made every year in December.

I can still see my parents, knee-deep in our snowy front yard, my Dad on a ladder, my Mum calling instructions while they strung blue lights on the huge blue spruces that ringed our corner property. I can also see my Dad, prone on the floor behind the Christmas tree, a ball of string in one hand and a flashlight in the other, while my mother told him where to secure a loose branch to the trunk, to fill in an unacceptable hole in nature's imperfect handiwork.

I can still smell the red nail polish my mother applied just before we all went to Aunt Betty and Uncle Elgin's for Christmas dinner. What a fabulous gathering that was! Aunt Pat, Uncle Rollie, Aunt Ruby, Uncle Charlie, Grandma Stapledon, Great Aunt May, Great Uncle Charlie, Aunt Alma, all my cousins...it was huge.

I can still smell the almonds my mother blanched, skinned, roasted and salted to take to Betty's. I "helped" by eating most of them before they left the kitchen. I can still see her in her nightgown, stuffing the turkey at dawn.

The comforting aroma of a huge bird roasting, the orderly tang of fresh furniture polish, the sophistication of my aunts' exotic perfumes, the festal tinkling of crystal high-balls, the flickering glow of silver candle sticks, the fresh smell of my uncles' aftershaves....these all evoke happy memories and warm feelings of belonging, love and merriment.

She has been gone for 10 years. I weep when I think of my mother at this time. But happily this is also the time I take out her flanellette nightgowns and start to wear them. So glad Calgary is frigid.