Table of Contents
Title Page
How My Heart Finds Christmas
Copyright
Dedication
Foreword
A Cornucopia
Quarantined for Christmas
Christmas Mysteries
A Christmas Call
The Cedar Chest’s Secret
A Scholar and a Gentleman
My Second Kingdom
Do This in Remembrance of Me
Those Christmas Cranberries
The Christmas of the China Dog
A Pink Dress and a Promise
Without Words
Granddad and His Dog
Angel in a Kerchief
Twelve-Month Santa
The Night of the Northern Lights
The Fifty-Cent Angel
An Owl Named Santa Claws
Christmas Confessions
Christmas Labrador
Jet’s Gift
The Chair
The Missing Windowsills
The Case of the Telltale Sunbeam
Santa’s Revised Schedule
Gifts Awry
It’s the Christmas Beagle, Charlie Brown!
The Pug Who Came to Dinner
Hands Remembered
Of Mice and Memories
A Place of Peace
The Enduring Christmas Wish
Lassie Never Did Come Home
Invisible Gifts
Thank you for purchasing this publication of The Wild Rose Press, Inc.
Praise for Gail MacMillan
“A true treasure of a read...Be prepared to be hooked on the first word of the first page and to go from one story to the next with increasing anticipation.”
~Rebecca Melvin, Publisher, Double Edge Press
~*~
“This book is a collection of old time tales that conjure Christmases of long ago. It’s a treasured addition to family traditions...to be read by the fire preferably during a blizzard with plenty of hot chocolate bubbling on the stove.”
~Sally Armstrong, award-winning journalist and author
~*~
“...a charming collection of stories by Canadian author Gail MacMillan that will delight the senses and brighten the dark days of winter like a candle glowing on a windowsill.”
~Sue Owens Wright, author, newspaper columnist, and two-time Maxwell Medal recipient
~*~
“I had to take a break while reading this book to regain control of my emotions as Gail led me on the gamut from the delightful humor of her father’s quarantined courting to the sorrow of her mother’s death during her teen years.”
~Douglas Wayne Coldwell, musician,
educator, and author
~*~
“MacMillan’s writing illustrates the extraordinary in the ordinary world in vivid, sometimes bittersweet clarity.”
~Heather White, Editor, Saltscapes Magazine
How My Heart
Finds Christmas
by
Gail MacMillan
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.
How My Heart Finds Christmas
COPYRIGHT © 2014 by Gail MacMillan
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or The Wild Rose Press, Inc. except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
Contact Information: [email protected]
Cover Art by Tina Lynn Stout
The Wild Rose Press, Inc.
PO Box 708
Adams Basin, NY 14410-0708
Visit us at www.thewildrosepress.com
Publishing History
First Mainstream General Edition, 2014
Digital ISBN 978-1-62830-559-3
Published in the United States of America
Dedication
To my family, whose love and generosity
have inspired so many of these stories,
and to my wonderful dogs, who have faithfully
companioned me over the years
Foreword
Each year it seems the true spirit of Christmas becomes harder and harder to find. Materialism overshadows so much of the wonder that is the genuine Yuletide reason. I’m not simply referring to the religious aspect although that is an invaluable component. What I mean is the family and friends aspect. This warm feeling of togetherness reassures us we’re not alone in the universe, that there are hands and hearts willing to share our bad as well as our good times, ready to help us through the upcoming New Year with all its joys and sorrows. A hug, a smile, a few kind words can do more for us than the most expensive gift.
For the past fifteen years, I’ve been writing Christmas stories for various magazines. Each year as I sit down to compose yet another, I feel a pleasant warmth flood into my heart. Each year I draw on memories to inspire my tales and carry me into the true spirit of Christmas, but it was only last year I realized it was through my stories that my heart rediscovers the wonder that is Christmas, December after December.
Some ancient cultures regarded the heart as the centre of the soul. Maybe that’s why it’s so important each December that this life-affirming organ rediscovers Christmas for me. I hope it will continue to do so for many Yuletides to come.
A Cornucopia
of Childhood Christmas Chronicles
My earliest recollections of happy Christmases are of my father, a gifted story teller in the oral tradition, and the tales he’d weave around the Yuletide season.
For most children, classic Christmas stories include A Christmas Carol, The Night before Christmas, and The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. Mine were different. Among my favorite titles were The Tale of the Crackling Christmas Tree, The Contrary Christmas Pony, and The Skater and the Wolves.
If you have access to a New Brunswick school reader from around the beginning of the twentieth century, you might be able to locate the latter but you won’t find the first two titles there or in any bookstore or library or even on the Internet. They’re my father’s original, until now, unpublished creations.
My father would weave tales of his boyhood Christmas Eve sleigh rides to church that crackled with all the crystalline clarity of a December frost. I could almost feel the sharp, cold air brushing my cheeks and hear the jingle of sleigh bells, the horse snorting and blowing as it lumbered along the roughly broken road.
As my father recounted the events of those evenings, I was drawn back to those times, into the frosty air and moonlight, huddled beneath dusty buffalo robes pulled into winter utilization from their summer hibernation on pegs in the stable. Excitement rushed through me in expectation of the days to come as the chestnut Percheron pulled the sleigh through the bright and drifted snow.
My father’s anticipation would have been much more real and immediate. In those days, before electricity had reached their small, rural community, the church Christmas tree was illuminated by real candles. Regularly assigned the task of bucket brigade in the event, which was usually the case, the tree caught fire, my father and his four brothers would eagerly await the need for their services. When the tree finally burst into flames, the Fowlie boys had the responsibility of extinguishing the conflagration. It was the highlight of their Christmas Eve celebrations
My father and his brothers, in spite of being entrusted with this seemingly adult responsibility, weren’t so different from kids today. They, too, had Christmas wish lists. Granted, the items weren’t as
numerous, expensive, or hi-tech as they’ve become in this new millennium but still costly and not always possible given their farm family income and the economics of the day. They asked for skate screws to fasten blades to their boots so they could go gliding across the millpond below their home. The luxury of oranges and store bought candy were hopefully added to the list. And like many kids today, they longed for a means of transportation.
Oh, nothing as grand as a bicycle. Too young to be given access to one of the farm horses, they asked for a pony.
The first Christmas after they made their request, their wish came…at least partially…true. They received a small sled, a set of mini-harness…and a bull calf.
“We did manage to wrestle him into the harness and get him attached to the sled,” my father recalled. “But then he took off bucking and kicking. It took all five of us to catch him.”
The brothers decided to try a new strategy. They’d take him down onto the ice of the millpond. There he wouldn’t be able to gain traction on the glassy surface, rendering him manageable.
The idea, like so many others, while sounding good in theory, didn’t prove out in fact. Once on the pond ice the little bull slipped, fell, then lay sprawled and inert, terrified on this foreign footing.
Struggling to get the animal back on his hooves and keep him there, the five children shoved him ashore where his objection to the harness immediately resurfaced. Dodging thrashing hooves and a swinging head, they battled him up the hill to the barn. After the panting creature had bucked his way back into his stall, the boys unanimously agreed to retire him from a career in transportation.
Undaunted, the brothers renewed their request for a pony the following Christmas. This time their wish came true. Christmas week a sturdy brown pony appeared in the stable. Excited, they harnessed it, attached it to the sled the bull calf had failed to manage, and headed out for a drive.
And drive and even ride they did…until spring arrived. The first day after warming weather melted the snow cover from the wooden bridge that led across the brook between the farm and the main community road, an unanticipated problem reared its head. It happened one sunny April morning.
My father had decided to visit a school friend on the other side of the brook. Innocently he mounted Christmas Pony and trotted out of the farmyard.
As they headed down the dirt road away from the farm, my father, a typical eleven-year-old, longed for the excitement of speed. Clucking to Christmas Pony and using his heels, he urged the little animal to an all-out run.
Wild with the joy of the pace, my father paid little heed to the bridge ahead. It was to prove a major mistake.
The moment the pony’s hooves hit the bare boards of the bridge, it shrieked, reared, and bucked in such a sudden sequence, my father was tossed clear over its head.
Farm boy tough, he scrambled to his feet. Looking back to the spot from which he’d been propelled, he saw Christmas Pony standing at the edge of the boards. Ears pricked, it gazed round-eyed at its former rider as if as much surprised by the chain of events as he was. Apparently, my father deduced, Christmas Pony had been terrified by the echoing of his hooves on bare planks. Not easily deterred, he began to try to fathom a solution to the problem.
Fording the stream swollen with a spring freshet beneath the bridge definitely wasn’t an option, so home my father went to enlist the assistance of his brothers. En masse the five youngsters returned to the bridge determined to make the little animal overcome its phobia.
They pushed, prodded, and pulled but it soon became apparent that nothing short of carrying Christmas Pony bodily over the boards would induce it to the far side of the brook. The boys were forced to accept the fact that whenever the bridge was bare and the stream beneath it too deep to ford, they’d once again be travelling á pied.
Then there was the story of the Christmas when my father, as a teenager, went a-wooing and got himself the 1919 rural New Brunswick version of grounded. In an attempt to impress the object of his affection and make a dashing exit from their evening of courting at her home, he urged the horse with family sleigh attached to a full gallop. As he attempted to round the gatepost at the end of her drive, the sleigh hit a bump and overturned. The horse escaped unscathed but the family sleigh was a shambles. My father suffered a broken nose, two black eyes and a large measure of indignity.
These days a teenager would have the car keys confiscated. My father received a similar punishment for the times. He was denied access to the horse, the new sleigh and, when spring finally rolled around, the buggy. As a result, he spent the next several months traveling to visit his lady fair on horseback, the Percheron’s only trappings an old plaid blanket and a working-class bridle complete with draft horse blinders. Years later, after he’d had an opportunity to read Cervantes, he commented that he would have made Don Quixote look good.
Much as I loved these stories, it was the yarn he always recited on frosty Christmas afternoons that thrilled me most because it was participatory. Weather permitting, my father and I would don our skates at the millpond below my grandfather’s house and head up the frozen brook into the forest. Only the swish-click of our skates, my snow-white ones keeping time with my father’s long-bladed ones called reachers, broke the winter silence as we glided through the snowy landscape, dodging bits of bark and fallen branches lodged in the ice. The keen cold set my cheeks tingling as I stretched to keep pace.
When an early winter’s twilight began to descend, we’d turn back toward home and my father would begin to recite The Skater and the Wolves, the tale of a lone skater pursued by a pack of wolves. As we glided along in the encroaching darkness, the poem took on life, and I slipped into the skates of the story’s fleeing hero. My heartbeat quickened and my mittened hand clutched my father’s gloved one just a little tighter as I glanced furtively into the shadows creeping out from among the trees.
Of course, the fictional character always made it to safety just as we arrived back at the millpond where a bon fire surrounded by family and friends kept the winter night’s darkness at bay. As we skated into the dancing circle of light, a sense of satisfaction and security tinged with a sprinkling of sadness would engulf me. Another wonderful Christmas enriched by my father’s stories was coming to an end.
I never tired of hearing his Yuletide yarns. They brightened the dark hours of a winter’s solstice and were as much a tradition of the holiday seasons as fruit cake, turkey, and presents. As I pass them along to my children, I hope they’ll appreciate and preserve these intangible gifts that were a precious part of my childhood Christmases.
Quarantined for Christmas
Sadly, some animosities don’t vanish into the good will and fellowship that are supposed to characterize Christmas. My father found this out when he was a young lad and went a-courting one fine winter’s day.
Family feuds have been around as long as there have been kinfolk. They’ve been fictional such as the bitterness between Shakespeare’s Montagues and Capulets and deadly real such as the battle between the Hatfields and McCoys. Their causes have been as serious as murder and as ridiculous as a misunderstanding over a pig. Some have even been lost in the mists of time making the lingering alienation and bitterness meaningless as well as pointless.
Such was the case with the feud between my father’s family and their three-farms-distant neighbors the MacDonalds. This source of yet another of my father’s stories brings a Christmas chuckle to my heart.
Although there were suggestions the cause of animosity was ancient, having been carried from Scotland like a disease when the ancestors of both present-time families had immigrated to Canada, nothing was ever definitely proven. Suffice it to say, my father’s family and the MacDonalds were sworn enemies based on tradition.
Therefore, when fifteen-year-old Iona Macdonald caught my sixteen-year-old father’s eye, it did not bode well. And when my father boldly used the family sleigh to drive Iona home from a quilting bee, one frosty evening early in December, lo
ng simmering, ill will escalated to a rolling boil.
In ringing tones, my grandfather forbade his son ever to see “that MacDonald girl” again. Furthermore, my father was denied the use of any of the farm horses for the rest of the winter. Granddad may have chosen this time period, believing (or at least hoping) their passion wouldn’t outlast the season.
Unfortunately there were two other aspects of the teenage psyche that he didn’t take into consideration. These, of course, were determination and defiance.
For three weeks my father obeyed the edict. Then hormones took over. On Christmas Eve afternoon he hitched a ride with a neighbor on the pretense of going to the church to help decorate for the evening service. As the sleigh drew abreast of the MacDonald farm, he jumped.
Five minutes later he intercepted the fair Iona as she emerged from the henhouse with a basket of eggs. Ten minutes later the resourceful lass had smuggled him into the house via the outdoor cellar hatch.
Over the next half hour, through a daring series of sock-footed sprints and stops, he made his way undetected up two flights of stairs, as Iona had directed, to the attic. There, with bated breath and pounding heart, he awaited the arrival of his true love.
The plan was that after a few blissful minutes of hand holding and chaste kisses, Iona would go back downstairs to dress for the Christmas Eve service. After the family had left for church, he’d steal out of the house and catch a ride with one of the families headed in the same direction as the MacDonalds.
Unfortunately the best laid plans…
Earlier that day Iona’s younger sister Isobel had been feeling ill. While my father and Iona had been enjoying their stolen moments, the doctor had arrived, diagnosed Isobel as having contracted Scarlet Fever, and quarantined the house and its inhabitants for two weeks.
Informed of this appalling development when she returned downstairs, Iona took the first opportunity to scamper back to the attic and inform her beloved.
His first thought was to escape and head back to his father’s farm but after Iona left him once more alone he realized that couldn’t happen. He couldn’t go home, possibly carrying an infectious disease to his family. He had to stay, make his presence known to Mr. and Mrs. MacDonald, and send a message to his parents that he was alive and, as of yet, well. He couldn’t allow his mother to face Christmas worrying over the mysterious disappearance of her middle son.
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