The (Friendly) Ghost of Christmases Past

As I sit here in Lipah, Bali on a muggy, overcast Christmas Day, 2024, I find myself casting my mind back to the distressingly large number of Christmases Past that I have experienced over my two score and sixteen years, thinking of some of the patterns and commonalities of the celebrations, and the meaning that Christmas gatherings and traditions have for us.

Leysin tree, 2010

As is the case for many people, at times imbued with ritual significance I find my memory drawn back to childhood. I remember Christmases in Thunder Bay, Ontario, with a real Balsam fir tree cut down in a forest outside town and lovingly decorated, at first by my parents but soon enough largely by myself and my siblings. We strung tinsel and had a large collection of birds that my mother had inherited from her mother in New Brunswick which we twisted onto the slender branches with the small wires protruding from their feet; it gave our tree a subtly different feel than those of my friends, especially since, in violation of all fire regulations and common sense, we illuminated the tree with real candles. We kept a fire extinguisher at hand, and when we had the candles burning there was a rule that we had to sit quietly, but still with small children in the house and a mischievous cat it probably caused my mother more anxiety than she let on. (The candles were at the insistence of my father, memories of his childhood Christmases in the Netherlands.)

Christmas 1975 

Presents would accumulate under the tree in the week leading up to Christmas Eve, at first from far-off aunts and uncles, and then later from us. Presents were carefully hefted and gently shaken and examined for clues as to their contents before being put back under the boughs of the tree. We would make a gingerbread house as well; early on my mother would bake and assemble the house and we children would decorate it with icing and prodigious quantities of candies. On Christmas Eve we would eat cheese fondue in the living room, looking at the tinsel sparkling in the candlelight, and then we were permitted to open one (and only one) present. My father would sometimes sit at the piano to play Christmas carols while we sang with greater gusto than tunefulness, and in other years we would listen to recordings of Handel’s Messiah. Then we kids hung our stockings by the fireplace with care and trooped off to bed while my parents aided Santa and his elves to fill them.

The 1975 gingerbread house

Christmas morning was always an agony of anticipation, as we children were forbidden from going downstairs before the adults in order to avoid a repetition of the year early on in my childhood when we ran downstairs and opened all of our presents without remembering what was from whom, making writing thank you letters to those aunts and uncles rather challenging. When finally one of my parents consented to arise, we trooped down the stairs and found our stockings bulging with various goodies (which always included a chocolate letter for our initial, a Dutch tradition, and a mandarin orange in the toe of the stocking.)We would open presents one by one, carefully remembering who sent us what, and make our way through the gifts which often featured sweaters knitted by our great aunt Ethel as well as intriguing board games from Oom Piet and Tante Corrie. We would gather around the living room table and eat croissants (made by hand by my mother in the early years, since they were as rare as hen’s teeth in 1970s Thunder Bay), and then troop down to Trinity United Church to sing carols. In the afternoon, we would often go out for a cross-country ski before sitting down to a meal of turkey, cranberry sauce, fiddlehead greens, roast pumpkin, potatoes and luscious gravy. Sometimes we would be joined for dinner by some of the overseas Master’s students that my father knew from the Forestry Faculty at Lakehead University and who were stuck in town for the holidays with no way to get home to Burkina Faso or China or Tanzania.

Christmas 1990

As we got older, things changed a bit as we three older children moved away to university, but we still got home for Christmas almost every year. The first Christmas missing members of the nuclear family was 1989, when Audie and Saakje were away in the Antipodes on year-long exchange programs. I first missed a family Christmas in 1991, when I spent 8 months in Australia. By and large, though, we managed to get home more often than not. A bigger change happened when in 1991 my mother, who had separated from my father in 1989, moved to Ottawa, and we older kids got used to splitting Christmas vacations between Ottawa (usually for Christmas) and Thunder Bay (usually for New Year). The menu for Christmas dinner changed when Audie and Saakje became vegetarians, and for the carnivores, my mother switched from turkey to Cornish game hens, one per person. We continued to make gingerbread houses, but now it was the younger generation in charge, and we changed the theme every year, including castles, Greek temples, pyramids and the Houses of Parliament, among others.

The Gingerbread Parthenon, Leysin, 2001

As we three older children launched further into the wide world, my mother spread her wings as well and moved overseas to teach chemistry in international schools in Cairo, Mexico and Switzerland. We had family Christmas gatherings in Egypt and Switzerland, and also met up with my mother in Peru (joined that time by my father) and in Thailand for completely non-traditional celebrations; in 1999 we marked Christmas at a campsite along the Inca Trail leading to Machu Picchu. When Audie started to be based in Leysin, Switzerland, and especially after the arrival of my nieces Malaika and Ellie, Leysin became a de facto default spot for holiday gatherings. Now that my parents have both passed away, we are the old folks that we imagined our aunts and uncles to be, and we have tried to keep alive some traditions for another generation. Last Christmas Terri and I were in Leysin at the end of our epic drive up from southern Africa, and Saakje came in from Guillestre, France (her European base) for a few days. It was fun, but also haunted by pangs of nostalgia as it was the first Christmas without my mother.

On the Inca Trail, Christmas 1999

This year we siblings are all scattered in different places for Christmas: me here in Bali with Terri, Audie and her family in Leysin, Saakje and Henkka in Guillestre and Evan in Ottawa. We are all gathering with various different friends and family which, really, is what I most value about Christmas. I’m not at all religious, but the fellowship and fun and joy and childlike wonder that Christmas has meant to me over the years has been incredibly important and formative.

Gingerbread townhouses, 2010

One of my favourite Christmas memories is from 2015. Terri and I were riding our bicycles along the spectacular Carretera Austral in southern Chile, and we calculated that we would be in the small city of Coiyhaique on Christmas Day. We had met and befriended a number of fellow cyclists and hikers along the route, and many of them were moving along the road at about the same rate as us. Terri threw her bicycle into a bus on December 23 and sped ahead of me by a day and found a lovely guesthouse for us to stay at. She passed the word around to our travelling companions, and on December 25^th we had a gathering of about 10 of us, from Germany, France, Belgium, Chile and Canada, each of us contributing a dish. We were all far away from family and friends, but the atmosphere that we created, under the careful planning of Terri, was just as warm and welcoming as if we had been in the bosom of our families. It made that Christmas one to treasure.

Coyhaique, Christmas 2015

So wherever you are this Christmas, whether you celebrate the holiday or not, I hope that you find yourself able to gather with people who are special to you and celebrate the joy of gathering, of tradition and of making the most joyful use possible of the limited time we have on this Earth. Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

Gingerbread model of our camper Stanley, 2016

Swaziland, 2016