rose~
i remember being so happy to see
that santa had left crayons and a
colouring book - not just any crayons
either. but crayola - 48 colours!!
and a THICK colouring book.
my youngest brother and i were discussing something to the same effect last night. this was going to be a story about a christmas past, but it's probably about my old dog as much as anything.
~ ~ ~
In the early 60s, my family moved to a small town which lies not too far from where I live today. We had moved a few times in 4 years as my dad followed work from city to city and had only been at the latest location since the summer. When you move a lot, it often takes time to make friends, so my brothers and I tended to just play together a lot, especially when we moved to a new town. The house we were living in was a big 3 story Edwardian brownstone near the edge of the town. I was a bit of a loner as a kid - sort of a female Tom Sawyer type who was always off exploring with my big dog which was a mixture of some kind of hound and a Lab and weighed in at close to 100 pounds.
Awhile after arriving in the town, I discovered, much to my glee, that my favourite teacher from Grade 3 in the town where I had just lived previously, lived in a house on my street, only out on the fringes of the town. She had retired over the summer, so when she found out that I was living in the same town, she gave my brother and I a sort of standing invitation to come by any time we liked to visit and partake of the latest baked goods from her kitchen. We frequently took advantage of her kind offer, and would walk down the street with our big dog which we would tie to the back porch railing while we went indoors for a short visit. After a time, we discovered that we could shorten the journey by tying our dog's leash to the handlebars of my brother's tricycle and then let the dog pull us down to her house -- my brother sitting on the seat of the tricycle, and me standing on the back running board crosspiece. It worked great, but you had to keep your feet clear of the peddles which would be spinning like crazy if the dog speeded up for any reason. The teacher's husband, an elderly minister in our town, "clocked us" one day by driving slightly ahead and said we made a top speed of something like 6 miles an hour, so we were moving along pretty well. Worked fine until one day when our dog saw a squirrel, and like the half-hound that he was, went tearing off across the street and through a neighbour's yard, dragging the tricycle (and us) along behind until, through some mechanical miracle, the handlebars popped out of their moorings and went bouncing off across the yard in pursuit of the dog that was still attached to them by its leash. We careened out of control and crashed in the wet autumn leaves. The dog soon returned, quite proud of himself for having treed the squirrel.
Over that autumn, our big dog earned quite a reputation for himself, breaking his line and wandering off across town on a regular basis. Of course, it didn't help things much that the neighbourhood butcher used to present him with huge cow bones every time he dropped by. Or that the town police, who was my mom's second cousin, would drive by and drop our dog off (along with his cow bones) if he happened to see him wandering around town in the evening. I expect our dog thought he was a VIP around the place.
Well, Christmas came round, and as luck would have it, shortly beforehand, all three of us kids came down with chickenpox -- a truly delightful experience. Things were pretty boring around the house in the run-up to Christmas -- no visitors, no going out anywhere, nada. However, as we lived on one of the main streets of our town, we were treated to the annual Santa Claus parade -- the typical kind that you get in small towns here in Ontario. A couple of haywagons pulled by tractors, decorated with a few cedar branches and a spruce tree or two and with people from a couple of local businesses waving as they floated by. Somewhere between a couple of convertible cars with banners and people sitting up in the back waving, the town's one and only marching band strode by playing Christmas tunes. Then finally, the grand finale ~ Santa Claus -- one of our more colourful local farm lads, came whizzing down the street in a quaint little sleigh pulled by his Hackney horse. Apparently, the sight of the horsedrawn sleigh was just too much for our dog who was on his line out in the backyard. Moments later, as we waved at Santa Claus through the front window, we gazed in horror as our dog raced out onto the roadway and straight after Santa's sleigh. As it turned out, Santa Claus revealed himself to be quick-thinking and rather a grumpy old bugger, as he reacted by shouting (we couldn't hear what he was saying through the window glass, but I expect it wasn't anything too nice), and by slapping at our dog a few times with his buggy whip. Nonetheless, our dog turned and came home wagging his tail, having put the run on the evil man in the red coat who had invaded our section of the street.
Fast forward to Christmas morning. We didn't know it then, but finances were fairly tough around our place that winter. However, we never had a clue about the situation. Seemed that we got all kinds of neat stuff that year. My brother got this amazing castle which my parents made out of a box and some cardboard mailing tubes, all painted grey with stone patterns on it, and the tubes cut into crenellated towers, and with little battlements glued to the inside of the box, and a drawbridge that actually worked, along with a big bag of plastic knights and horses which probably cost all of about $1.99 from the Woolworth's store. I got a similar present of a barn made from a cardboard box, along with a bag of plastic farm animals (I have always been animal crazy, so this was a terrific gift). My youngest brother got a "town" made out of one of those boxes that work boots come in -- the kind that flips open into 2 halves -- and it had 2 cut-outs so that you could drive your toy cars from one side of the "town" to the other on the roads painted onto the inside of the box. He got a plastic bag of little cars to go with his town. But that wasn't all -- perhaps the best thing of all was that my parents had gotten the town shoemaker to make a harness for our big dog so that we could hitch him up to our small glider sleigh. The shoemaker used a bunch of scraps of leather to make the harness and it was pretty darned nice and worked great (I think my Mom said that the shoemaker made the thing for something like $6.00!) Anyhow, we had quite a time ripping up and down the snowy streets on our dog-powered sleigh over that winter.
All in all, it was a pretty good Christmas. My brothers and I often talk about how it is that, even 40 years later, about the only toys we can remember from Christmases past were the castle, barn, and town, and the dog harness.
(o:
~croc |
