Classic Christmas Stories

by Frank Galgay

  We had made a good landing and scaled the opposite hill, and were galloping over the high barrens, when the dogs began to give tongue, loudly announcing that a team was coming from the opposite direction. As we drew near, a muffled figure jumped off, and hauling his dogs to one side, shouted the customary “What cheer?”

  Then a surprised, “The Doctor, as I live! You’re the very man I’m after. Why, there’s komatiks gone all over the country after you. A lad has shot hisself down at St. Ronald’s and he’s bleeding shocking.”

  “All right, Jake old friend. The turn for the path is off the big pond, is it not?”

  “That’s it, Doctor, but I’m coming along anyhow, ’feared I might be wanted.”

  My little leader must have overheard this conversation, for she simply flew over the hills. Yet it was already dusk when at length we shot down the semi-precipice on the side of which the little house clings like a barnacle. The anxious crowd, gathered to await our arrival, disappeared before the avalanche like a morning mist when the sun rises. Following directions, I found myself in a tiny naked room already filled with well-meaning visitors able to do nothing but look on and defile what little air made its way in through the fixed windows. Fortunately, for want of putty, air leaked in around the glasses.

  Stretched on the floor behind the stove lay a pale-faced boy of about ten years. His clothes had been taken off, and an old patchwork quilt covered his body. His right thigh was covered with a heterogeneous mass of bloody rags. Sitting by him was his mother, her forehead resting in her hands as if she were wrestling with some inscrutable problem. She rose as I entered, and without waiting for questions, broke out with: “’T is Clem, Doctor. He got Dick here to give him the gun to try and shoot a gull, and there were a high ballicater of ice in the way, and he were trying to climb up over it, and he pushed the gun before him with the bar’l turned t’wards hisself, and she went off an shot him, and us doesn’t know what to do next.”

  While she ran on with her story I cleared the room of visitors, and kneeling down by the boy removed the dirty mass of rags that had been used to staunch the blood. The charge had entered the thigh at close quarters about the knee, and passed downwards blowing the kneecap to pieces. Most of it had passed out again. The loose fragments of bone still adhering to the ragged flesh, the fragments of clothing blown into it, and the foul smell and discoloration added by the gun-powder made the outlook a very ugly one.

  The mother had by this time quieted down, and was simply repeating “What shall us do?”

  “There’s only one thing to be done. We must pack Clem up and carry him to the hospital right away.”

  “Iss, Doctor, that’s the only way, I’m thinking, ” she replied. “An’ I suppose you’ll cut off his leg, and he’ll never walk no more, and O dear! what—”

  “Come, tear up this calico into strips, and bring me some boiling water, —mind it must be well boiled; and get me that board over there, —’t will serve to make a splint; and then go tell Dick to get the dogs ready at once; for we’ve a Christmas-tree at St. Anthony tonight, and I must be back at all costs.”

  In this way we kept her too busy to worry or hesitate about letting the child go; for we well knew it was his only chance, and she had never seen a hospital, and the idea of one was as terrifying as a morgue.

  “Home, home, home!” to the dogs—and once again our steel runners are humming over the crisp snow. Now in the darkness we are clinging tightly to our hand ropes as we shoot over the hills. Now the hospital lights in the windows of the “Room.” As we get near, they look so numerous and cheerful that we seem to be approaching a town. Now we can hear the merry ring of the children’s voices, and can make out a crowd of figures gathered around the doorway. They are waiting for the tardy arrival of “Sandy Claws.” Of course, we are at once recognized, and there is a general hush of disappointment as if they had thought at last “Sandy” himself was come.

  Only a little while later, and the barking of dogs announces the approach of another komatik. But we alone are in the secret of its mission. Someone is calling from the darkness and a long sleigh with a double-banked team of dogs has drawn up opposite the doorway. Two fur-clad figures standing by it steady a huge box which is lashed upon it. The light shining on the near one reveals of his muffled face only two sparkling eyes and large icicles bristling over the muffler from heavy moustache and whiskers, like the ivory tusks of some old bull walrus. Both figures are panting with exertion, and blowing out great clouds of steam like galloping horses on a frosty morning. There could be no doubt about it, this time. Here was the real Sandy Claws at last, come mysteriously over the snows with his dogs and komatik and big box and all!

  The excitement of the crowd already intense from anxiety over our own delay, now knew no bounds. Where had they come from? What could be in that big box? How large it looked in the darkness! Could it have been dragged all the way from the North Pole? Luckily, no one had the courage left to go near enough to discover the truth. The hospital door was swung open, and a loud voice cried out; “Welcome welcome, Sandy Claws! We’re all so glad you’ve come; we thought you’d forgotten us. Come right in, come right in! O, no! Don’t think of undoing the box outside; why, you’ll freeze all those toys out there! Just unlash it and bring it right in as it is. Come in; there’s a cup of tea waiting for you, before you go over to start your tree growing fruit.”

  There had been rumours all the week that Sandy Claws would bring his wife this year. There had been whispers even of a baby. So we could explain the second man; for the Eskimo men and women all dress alike in Labrador, which would account for Mrs. Claws’s strange taste in clothes. A discreet silence was observed about her frozen whiskers.

  A few minutes later another large box was carried over to the “Room.” It was full of emptiness, for the toys were on the tree long ago. But two strange masked and bewigged figures stumbled over the snow with it, to carry the little drama to its close. So complete was the faith in the unearthly origin of these our guests, that when the curtain went up, more than one voice was heard to be calling out for “Ma” and “Dad.” While a lad of several summers was found hidden under the seat, when it came his turn to go up and get his “prize.”

  And so Santa Claus came to St. Anthony, and brought a gift for us as well as presents for the children. Indeed, the best was the one he had kept for us who had so unworthily thought that the outlook for a happy Christmas was but a poor one. Sleeping overhead, in a clean white cot, free of pain, and with a good fighting chance for his life, lay our bright-faced lad—Clem. The gift to us this Christmas day was the chance to save his life, and we would not have changed our gift for anyone else’s. At the old home, where doctors are plentiful, such a gift were impossible.

  Christmas has gone long ago. Already we have heard ominous groaning of the heavy ice along the land-wash, warning us that the open sea is getting nearer, and that soon our icy fetters will be broken. The toys and trinkets from the poor spruce tree have already lost most of their pleasure-giving power. Must it not always be so, at last, with the things we are apt to call “valuables.”

  Clem has gone to his home again. He is able to run and walk like the merry lad he is. For not only his life, but his limb also, has been saved to him. And we have learnt once more that the real joy of Christmas comes of those small opportunities for giving to others—faint efforts to re-echo, however faintly, the love this feast commemorates. There is no cant in saying, “It is more blessed to give than to receive.”

  The First Christmas

  by Hans Rollmann

  NAIN 1771

  THE TEMPERATURE HAS FALLEN to thirty-six below and the wind howls along the palisades, yet inside the sturdy wooden building fourteen Moravians thank their Lord for the warmth of Christmas. The little band—six Germans, four Danes, and four Britons, including three women—is celebrating its first Christmas Eve at Nain, having arrived in the bay in August of 1771. In haste they built their mission house. One Inuit, Manuin
a, settled near the Europeans with his two wives and three children, but the family is presently in Aupaluktuk with his brother-in-law in search of whales.

  Alternating between German and English, the Moravians sing familiar Christmas hymns, but also remember Christ’s crucifixion, the two focal points of their piety. Jens Haven, the Danish carpenter, sings with fervour. Once a missionary in Greenland, he has kept alive the idea of a Labrador mission after a first effort in 1752 by Johann Christian Erhardt failed. Now he has become the driving force behind the settlement in Nain after three previous explorations. Next to him stands his wife, Mary Butterworth, a good-natured Yorkshire woman who joined the Moravians at Fulneck. She married “little Jens, ” as he is affectionately known among the Inuit, in May, only a month before their departure for Labrador. Tonight, the Christmas story with the child in the manger resonates with a special meaning for this Mary in Labrador. While she sings, she feels the movement of her first child within her. John Benjamin will be born in February, 1772, and will later follow in his parents’ footsteps as a missionary.

  Superintendent Christoph Brasen, a Danish barber surgeon married to an Alsatian wife, records this first Christmas Eve service in the Nain diary. “We offered Him our poor and sinful hearts including life and soul, ” he writes, “to serve him willingly and stand at his command, whatever he wants to use us for in this rough and cold land.” He only regrets that Manuina and his family cannot be with them. He knows that song and celebration are much more effective in communicating the Moravian religious message than their theology or doctrine. He also knows that Manuina loves to sing about the Christ child.

  While they now sing in unison with their brothers and sisters, in three years’ time the superintendent and Gottfried Lehmann, a weaver from Saxony, will no longer be with their brethren. The two will perish when their sloop founders north of Nain on an exploration journey to establish a northern missionary outpost, the future Okak. Okak in turn will be devastated by the Spanish influenza epidemic in 1918 and disappear as a community. Only the rhubarb is still a silent witness to the Moravian presence.

  On Christmas Day, Larsen Drachardt preaches a sermon about the little child in the manger who was also God. In the sermon, the sixty-year-old theologian revisits his childhood days in Denmark and reflects perhaps about his later life as a journey in grace, especially the Lutheran missionary service in Greenland that changed his life forever. In Greenland, Drachardt learned the language of the Inuit during his twelve-year stay and eventually became a Moravian. After a mystical experience of Christ’s presence in Greenland, he later joined Jens Haven on two of his exploratory journeys to Labrador. In 1765, he interpreted for Governor Palliser at Chateau Bay, becoming a bridge between the Europeans and Inuit.

  The third day of Christmas is celebrated with joy and solemnity. The temperature has now fallen to forty degrees below zero. At dusk when the Europeans sit together, reminiscing and reading, they are suddenly startled by a loud scream from outside. The dogs start barking furiously. When they run to see what has disrupted the quiet of their holiday evening, they discover Manuina, their Inuit neighbour. Fearing the dogs that run in front of the palisades, he wields a large knife. He is alone, but his wives are not far behind. He has merely run ahead of them to arrive before it is too dark to be recognized outside. An hour later, the two women follow. Since it is so cold and the family has not lived in their dwelling near the station for some time, the Moravians prepare them sleeping quarters in the little hall of the mission building. The Inuit also take part in the missionaries’ evening service as well as in their morning blessing of 28 December. A deep bond unites European and Inuit during this first Christmas season. “We all feel a special love for the man and his family, ” Brasen writes in the communal diary, “and they definitely also trust us.”

  OKAK 1776

  The Okak Moravians celebrate their first Christmas Eve in 1776 with a so-called love feast, a simple shared meal amidst singing and prayers, restoring an early Christian practice adopted also by the Methodists, who celebrate love feasts in the 1770s in Conception Bay. Jens Haven, who is part of the first Christmas at Okak, writes in the diary that they keep a night watch and “pray to the child in the manger in front of his creche.” Similar religious celebrations continue the next day, Christmas.

  The Okak diary records the mixed feelings of solidarity and isolation of those labouring in such a remote location. The nearby Inuit visitors are also told the good news of Christmas, a message to be repeated the following days at nearby Uvibak and Kivertlok by Haven and Johann Ludwig Beck, a missionary with Greenland experience who joined the Moravians in Labrador in 1773.

  HOPEDALE 1782

  Hopedale celebrates its first Christmas in 1782. At this station south of Nain, the children are the centre of the Christmas Eve festivities. Thirty-three of them meet and are read the story of Jesus’ birth. Each child is given some bread as a gift. Afterwards they are also shown a nativity scene and a representation of the crucifixion. The children and mothers are particularly drawn to these artistic images. Later, the Europeans celebrate a love feast and pray in front of the nativity scene and—according to Haven, their chronicler—welcome the dear child and ask him to come into their midst and remain with them. Christmas Day is spent in praise of the incarnation and with thanks that Jesus has come as their brother.

  On 26 December, the good news story of Christmas is recounted to the Inuit, but here the diary reveals the difficulties of the entire missionary enterprise. The drama in the encounter of the two cultures—European and Aboriginal—can still be sensed in the casual remark of Jens Haven, who feels that communicating the message of the saviour’s birth “is not as easy to make clear as one would wish.”

  Today Moravians retain their distinctive Christmas celebrations and remain a mission-oriented church, although Labrador Moravians are now administratively on their own. Today Moravians also think of missions somewhat differently, emphasizing the need to change society not from without but from within. In the words of a Moravian from Africa during a recent conference on missions: “The example of the Apostle Paul who became ‘to the Jews a Jew and to the Greeks a Greek, ’ deserves repeating more now than ever before.”

  Christmas at Zoar, Labrador

  by Hans Rollmann

  ON CHRISTMAS DAY OF 1866 Thomas Merrifield was fighting for his life.

  Already up to his knees in what the settlers called “slob” and the Inuit “sikuak, ” he continued to sink. The events of his forty-four years ran in rapid succession before his eyes: his youth and upbringing in Devon and, thereafter, his hard life on the north coast of Labrador. Elizabeth, his wife, had come to share with him the privations and simple joys of a settler in the bay.

  She and their daughter, Harriet Elizabeth, had gone ahead of him by sled to Zoar, the new spiritual and social centre for Inuit and settlers living between Nain and Hopedale. Not even these loved ones could hear his anguish. Thomas Merrifield was all by himself. The man after whom a bay and a mountain would be named was only a solitary speck on snowshoes, sinking in a partially frozen Tasiuyak Bay.

  Or was there somebody, after all, who had listened to Merrifield’s anguished prayer? For just as he was about to resign himself to his fate— perhaps thinking for a moment that he should have accepted the invitation of his former drinking companions to join them for a party instead of spending Christmas with the Moravians at Zoar—just then he felt something firm under his feet. His snowshoes caught and were able to sustain him, and with one more effort he reached the safety of more compact snow.

  Later that day, he saw the lights of the mission house. Exhausted, frozen, yet glad of his salvation on a partially frozen bay, Merrifield stumbled into the house, where an anxious wife and daughter were waiting for him.

  This true story happened in 1866 to the man after whom Merrifield Bay near Davis Inlet is named. The Moravians, a mission-minded Protestant Church, after establishing themselves on Labrador’s north coast in Nain (1
771), Okak (1776), Hopedale (1782), and Hebron (1830), had answered a call to accommodate Inuit and settlers living between Nain and Hopedale. Named after the biblical village of Zoar ( “Little”), into which Lot and his family fled for refuge when Sodom and Gomorrah were being destroyed (Genesis 19), the mission station was planned for spiritual and economic reasons: spiritual, to share and sustain the faith of Inuit and settlers living between Nain and Hopedale; and economic, to encourage Inuit and settlers to trade their fish and pelts with the Moravians instead of with Hunt & Henley or the Hudson’s Bay Company, fierce competitors of the Moravian trade, or even with the Newfoundland schooners now showing up annually on the coast.

  Eventually, economic reasons closed the store when the indebtedness of those trading with the missionaries at Zoar had reached unmanageable amounts and their numbers decreased. The original building of this extension of Nain and Hopedale, nestled in a picturesque bay, was constructed in 1865. In the following year, Friedrich Elsner and family as well as a single Danish brother, Peder Dam, moved into the new premises. Inuit eventually settled nearby, but the congregation remained small. They erected a log house and a somewhat larger building complex that served as store and church, and—as in all other Moravian settlements except Killinek—planted an elaborate garden.

  In the winter of their first year at Zoar, the Moravians also started a school for children, as they had done in other places, since education and schools ranked closely after worship and missions in their value system. A trained Inuit schoolteacher, Thomas, who had accompanied the missionaries from Nain, served as instructor.