Each Christmas season brings with it memories of Christmases past, of gifts given and received and travel connections missed or made. The most vivid memories are often of childhood and are of such things as Christmas concerts in small schools and community halls in such places as Barney’s River, Sunny Brae and out along the Northumberland Strait.
As Fergie MacKay remembers it, the Christmas concert kicked off the festive season when he was growing up in Pictou Landing.
“Christmas did not start as early as today but we’d begin preparing for the concert a few weeks in advance and when it ended you knew Christmas was just around the corner.”
The concert was held in a small community building known as Bethesda Hall, which later closed and later still was destroyed by fire.
“We attended a two-room school but the hall was one room and heated by a wood and coal stove in the middle of the room. The stage had three sections, the first section being a preparation area. Amazingly, I only remember one door to the building, one way in and the same way out.”
Not only was there a large Christmas tree, decorated primarily by handmade ornaments, but the tall, narrow windows were also decked in freshly cut boughs, their fragrance mixing with the smell of the blazing wood fire and damp winter clothing.
“I remember being very young, standing in the schoolyard and watching the older boys tramping into the woods in search of a tree and hemlock boughs. I watched them, imagining that in a few years it would be my turn to go. When my turn came I went off with another group of boys and we had to agree on a half-decent tree before cutting it down and dragging it back to school.”
The seating inside the hall was a mixture of old church pews and straight back chairs set out around the beehive stove, its top gradually shifting from black to crimson and back as the fire built and burned down and the night wore on.
MacKay can still picture several lengths of stove pipe extending from the top of the stove to the high ceiling where it met the rooftop chimney. The memory of the red and green crepe paper streamers that painstakingly crisscrossed the room still brings a smile.
Songs, recitations and plays, all practiced from sheets of paper handwritten by a teacher for each student, made up the concert program.
“I’m sure some of the concerts may have been quite good but what I remember most today is how the whole community gathered for them. We’d be dressed in new clothes if we could afford them and if not we’d be in the best we owned. Our parents and grandparents were there and all the neighbours came.”
At intermission students would carry round trays of homemade fudge to sell to the audience.
“There was a woman who made divinity fudge which you don’t see often today and it was in much demand.”
During the second half of the program the excitement continued to build among students.
“A week or two earlier I’d have drawn a name of someone and someone would have drawn my name. We placed our little gifts under the tree in anticipation of Santa’s arrival. The excitement of Santa Claus and those small gifts was almost more than we could bear in the early grades.”
The distant sound of sleigh bells would prompt the singing of Jingle Bells and Here Comes Santa Claus as he entered the hall with greetings for all. With the help of a teacher or two he handed out the gifts and made a quick departure. Soon after, the door of the hall was thrown open and children and adults spilled out into the night.
“Oh yes, it seems always to have been a beautiful, clear evening with snow on the ground and perhaps a little falling through the air as we walked home.”
MacKay was one of three boys in his family and his father ran a store in Trenton.
“We had a barn and we had a few animals, a cow, a pig, some chickens, as most people did in those days. For a short time we had 700 hens and my brothers and I were the hen keepers. My father would send a message that somebody wanted a two-pound hen and we’d go out and get it ready for the store.”
Another source of excitement during the Christmas season was the much-awaited arrival of the box from Boston.
“We had relatives in Boston, better off than we were it seemed, and they would send a gift to each of us so the arrival of the box was always something we watched for. Years later I was competing in the Boston Marathon and another generation of those same relatives opened their homes to me and got me everywhere I needed to go.”
While MacKay was growing up, the minister of the Pictou Landing United Church struggled with failing eyesight.
“He would get me and other young fellows to do some of his work for him, a reading perhaps. I didn’t know it but he was preparing me to be a lay minister which I am today.”
After high school MacKay attended teachers’ college in Truro, hitchhiking home and back on weekends. He spent most of a long career teaching history at East Pictou Rural High School but his days helping the minister stayed with him and in retirement he studied theology, becoming a lay supply minister.
“I’ve been around a long time so I know a lot of people. If I can help them, particularly during a period of grief, I’m happy to.”
A few years ago Mackay and his wife Miriam, who have been married 55 years, visited their son in Ottawa just before Christmas, returning to Nova Scotia by train.
“The parliament buildings were decked out beautifully and all Ottawa seemed ready for Christmas. We changed trains in Montreal and again there were Christmas lights everywhere but what struck me most was the lights we saw in small towns and along rural stretches through Quebec and New Brunswick and into Nova Scotia. They seemed so beautiful lighting up the darkness.”
MacKay acknowledged many take a dim view of the commercialization of Christmas but he is still touched by its magic and deeper meaning.
“When you think of it, isn’t it really something that a baby born in a stable 2,000 years ago in a place called Bethlehem, thousands of miles from Pictou County, causes traffic jams and parking problems on East River Road, Provost Street and Westville Road?”
Rosalie MacEachern is a Stellarton resident and freelance writer. She seeks out people who work behind the scenes on hobbies or jobs that they love the most.
