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Christmas In The Snows
by
The cities and smaller towns especially as a rule are cleaner, better governed, more progressive, better provided with improvements and comforts than corresponding places in the East. Scarcely a community exists without its water works, electric light plant, telephone system, trolleys, paved streets, etc. Of course, this does not apply to the extreme frontier in which my field of work largely lay so many years ago. The conditions were different there–the people too in that now far-distant time.
But to return to Christmas. One Christmas day I left my family at one o’clock in the morning. Christmas salutations were exchanged at that very sleepy hour and I took the fast express to a certain station whence I could drive up country to a little church in a farming country in which there had never been a Christmas service. It was a bitter cold morning, deep snow on the ground, and a furious north wind raging.
The climate is variable indeed out West. I have spent Christmas days on which it rained all day and of all days in the year on which to have it rain, Christmas is the worst. Still, the farmers would be thankful. It was usually safe to be thankful out there whenever it rained. I knew a man once who said you could make a fortune by always betting two to one that it would not rain, no matter what the present promise of the weather was. You were bound to win nine times out of ten.
I hired a good sleigh and two horses, and drove to my destination. The church was a little old brick building right out in the prairie. There was a smouldering fire in a miserable, worn-out stove which hardly raised the temperature of the room a degree although it filled the place with smoke. The wind had free entrance through the ill-fitting window and door frames and a little pile of snow formed on the altar during the service. I think there were twelve people who had braved the fury of the storm. There was not an evergreen within a hundred miles of the place and the only decoration was sage-brush. To wear vestments was impossible, and I conducted the service in a buffalo overcoat and a fur cap and gloves as I have often done. It was short and the sermon was shorter. Mem.: If you want short sermons give your Rector a cold church or a hot one!
After service I went to dinner at the nearest farm-house. Such a Christmas dinner it was! There was no turkey, and they did not even have a chicken. The menu was corn-bread, ham, and potatoes, and mighty few potatoes at that. There were two children in the family, a girl of six and a boy of five. They were glad enough to get the ham. Their usual bill of fare was composed of potatoes and corn-bread, and sometimes corn-bread alone. My wife had put up a lunch for me, fearing that I might not be able to get anything to eat, in which there was a small mince-pie turnover; and the children had slipped a small box of candy in my bag as a Christmas gift. I produced the turnover which by common consent was divided between the astonished children. Such a glistening of eyes and smacking of small lips you never saw!
“This pie makes it seem like Christmas, after all,” said the little girl, with her mouth full.
“Yes,” said the boy, ditto, “that and the ham.”
“We didn’t have any Christmas this year,” continued the small maiden. “Last year mother made us some potato men” (i.e., little animal and semi-human figures made out of potatoes and matches with buttons for eyes; they went into many stockings among the very poor out West then).
“But this year,” interrupted the boy, “potatoes are so scarce that we couldn’t have ’em. Mother says that next year perhaps we will have some real Christmas.”