Christmas has long been considered a very important time of the year for many people in our part of the world.

For the young, it is a time of exuberant joy as they receive gifts and enjoy party time with friends and family, while for parents it may mean a time of financial stress and an extra work load.

For the merchant, it is harvest time, days to "make hay while the sun shines." For the lonely and bereaved it is a dreaded time to be survived and suffered through, while surrounded by reminders and memories of happier days.

Christians, of course, have long celebrated the birth of the Saviour, the long awaited Messiah, Jesus Christ who was born as a human baby to a young virgin named Mary, about two thousand years ago.

This story is a little trip down memory lane, to the days of travel by sleighs and cutters, to wood burning stoves and churches that were full of all the people of the local community, singing the beloved old Christmas carols, unafraid of offending some minority by wishing a Merry Christmas. The story is given to me by clear-minded old timers who can vividly recall the way they were then. These are their words...

"Well, of course the sideroads were always full to the rail fences with snow drifts and no cars could get through. Sometimes it was piled up so high that you could almost touch the telephone wires. I remember how they used to hum in the wind on cold winter mornings. The wind sure did blow cold in those days.

We didn't get a lot of presents like the kids today. We were happy to get an orange in the toe of our sock and maybe some clothes that we needed anyway. Sometimes mother would make some candy. Nobody expected a lot of toys and things.

To get out to church, dad used to harness the horse and hitch it to the cutter (a small sporty sleigh) and put an old quilt on the cutter floor and put a hot brick from the oven there to keep our feet warm and our parents would be all covered up in a buffalo robe from their toes to their noses and us wee children would be snug and warm down by their feet under the robe.

Sometimes, one cutter runner would sink down in soft snow and the other one was up on a hard drift so that we were all dumped out. The patient old horse would just stop and wait until we were ready to move on. The horse was a little sweaty by the time he was stabled at the church shed so he had to be covered by a horse blanket until after the church service.

- From Elmer Braden who lived in Essa Township.

"One Christmas morning, dad went up to grandma Speer's house to bring her down for the day. Sometimes I took the cutter and drove old Jinny to pick her up after the barn chores were finished. If the roads were too full of snow, folk just drove across the open fields where some of the snow had blown off. The mornin' was pretty bright and I loved to drive in the wee cutter. We had some wonderful sleigh bells made in Switzerland and when old Jinny turned toward home and a warm stable she sure made those bells chime.

Mother and my sisters Ethel and Muriel were scurrying around in their pretty pinnies (aprons) preparing a feast. We had a wonderful dinner of roast goose, potatoes and turnips and gravy, biscuits and fresh bread and butter with homemade jam. Later came apple pie and Christmas pudding until we were "as full as toads." They sure knew how to cook and bake on that old woodstove.

Then, as usual, Dad went behind the old cook stove to enjoy a pipe full of his special Christmas tobacco while the rest of us went into the parlor around the old pump organ.

My sister Muriel knew how to bring the sweetest music you ever heard out of that old pump organ as we sang, Away in a manger no crib for a bed, the little Lord Jesus lay down His sweet head.

The stars in the bright sky looked down where He lay:

The little Lord Jesus asleep on the hay.

Along about the time of the evening barn chores the sky turned an ominous, leaden grey and a mean cold breeze came out of the southeast, a sure sign of a storm. Then, about 9 p.m. the windows of the old brick farm house began to rattle and the wind howled around the chimney, sometimes causing a puff of acrid smelling wood smoke from a down draft and it was then that Grandma Speers made her announcement:

"Robert, I want you to hitch up the horse and take me home. The fire will be out and the house will get cold."

"I wouldn't think of going out on a wild night like this," her son-in law replied."

"Elmer will take me home," she retorted.

"She was right, and soon I had her bundled up in the cutter and I had to walk, leading Jinny through the drifts and trying to find the road in the starless night, but we made it and several hours later, I had the old mare back in her stall. Dad was not very pleased, as I recall. It was my most memorable Christmas and I'll never forget it."

 From another local oldtimer:

 "'Twas the night before Christmas and all through the countryside lots of creatures were stirring. You could hear them before the light of the stars illuminated them and it was the sound of the sweetest chiming sleigh bells that jingled on the horse harness throughout that sparkling, frosty night.

It was the most beautiful, cold, Norman Rockwell scene that you ever saw and when your eyes were accustomed to the dim light, the shadows became trotting horses pulling every kind of conveyance filled with happy folk, to the candlelight service in the wee church in the valley."

"After the horses were blanketed in the church shed, the men in their coon skin coats joined their womenfolk inside just as the old lady at the pump organ was just working up a sweat in the packed little building which had even the aisles filled with extra chairs as the folk sang out the notes of 'Oh Little Town of Bethlehem,' 'Silent Night' and countless others and the clergyman in his long black robe, told once again, the old, old story of the miraculous birth of the baby Jesus as a humble human in a manger in a stable."

The story hasn't changed over the centuries since the days of our pioneers but today's citizens seemed determined to change. It is no longer considered politically correct to mention Jesus or Christmas and we now strive to change the season into a commercial one.

It certainly is colourful but the oldtimers tell us that we are taking away the joy and the real meaning of the season. Certainly, those who built this country would be surprised at the people we have become, but in the old days, that's the way they were then.

For more stories about our past, see the Tues., Jan 5 edition of The Alliston Herald. The 2008 collection of these stories is now being published in a book entitled The Way We Were Then, Book 1. Copies will be available soon.