This month’s Sunday Short is an extract from Spirit Gifting: The Concept of Spiritual Exchange, by Elmer Ghostkeeper (Eschia Books). In it Elder Ghostkeeper shares his memories of childhood Christmases and the teachings that accompanied that time of year.

Pawastun Pesim or Snow-drifting Moon

Pawastun pesim, “Snow-drifting Moon” and the month of December is when the cold weather arrives from the north. The temperature can get down to –40°F by the middle of the month. At this time of the year, I remember settling into a daily routine of attending school and doing my chores. I would rise every weekday morning at 7:00 am, get dressed, go downstairs, light the coal-oil lamp and put more wood into the heater to stoke up the fire that my father had kept fuelled throughout the night. I could tell if the fire had burned out, because a thin sheet of ice would have formed on the water pail sitting on the wash table. I would make a fire in the cookstove with kindling that my younger brother had prepared and put the water kettle on it to boil. My younger brother would soon rise and begin to make porridge, while I went out to the barn with my dog, Rex. I carried a coal-oil lantern for light as I fed the livestock in the morning darkness.

I would first feed the milk cow and other young cattle tied in stalls in the barn. I would then fork hay from the haystacks into a feeding area for the cattle and horses that wintered outside. Then I would milk the cow. I would untie her calf from its stall, and let it suckle on one side of her udder while I milked the other side into a galvanized milk pail. She gave us about two quarts of milk every morning and every evening, which was used for our cream, butter and milk. When I returned to the house my mother would also be up, having made breakfast of pancakes, bacon, eggs and birch tree sap syrup or saskatoons. This food would be waiting for me on the table.

I would carefully wash my hands and face before sitting down to eat. After breakfast I would leave for school with my two younger brothers. Against my mother’s advice, we usually ran the three-quarters of a mile to school, which gave us a short while to play before classes started. At the lunch break, we would run back to our house for a hot meal before running back to school. We returned home again at about 3:30 pm, to have a light meal and begin our evening chores. My evening chores were to split the firewood, clean out the barn of manure, add a new bedding of straw, put the barn animals back in their stalls, feed the livestock and milk the cow again. My father fed and took care of the hogs and chickens, released the barn animals for the day, watered the livestock and did a variety of other activities when we were in school. After our chores were completed for the day, we began our school homework sitting at a round oak dining table in the living room. We would have supper, finish our homework and say our family prayers before going to bed at 8:00 pm. As Christmas Day and our Christmas school holidays approached, I would begin to feel the excitement and spirit of the ceremony and ritual that they brought.

Two Saturdays before Christmas Day, my younger brother and I performed the ritual of selecting a spruce tree, from among the thousand that grew a mile from our house, that would become our Christmas tree. We left the house after daylight. We walked in a single line through snow up to our knees across a farm field and entered the forest. I broke the trail and carried the axe.

In 1960 the weather was bitterly cold. I remember a sharp wind blowing from the northwest into our faces, which made it seem colder than the –30°F on our thermometer. We walked down the centre of an old, abandoned road trying to find the perfect Christmas tree. The trees were all covered with snow, which made them look as though their branches were all evenly spaced and symmetrical, but when we shook the snow off, the branches revealed themselves to be different and uneven. We spread out and walked amongst the trees. When we thought that we had found a good tree, we hollered to the others to come and see, only to decide that it was not the one to be selected.

If our winter boots were not properly laced and secured around our ankles, then snow would enter from their tops, melt from our body heat and wet our wool socks. I remember that my youngest brother’s feet began to get cold, and we had to start back to the house before they became frozen. It always seemed to turn out that the first spruce tree we looked at would be the one to be selected, and this year was no different.

On the way home I half carried and half dragged the frozen six-foot tree, trying to not break off too many branches in the process. My mother, anticipating that we would be cold and hungry, fired up the heater and gave us a cup of hot chocolate milk and some cookies. She brought out the cardboard box containing Christmas decorations, and we began to decorate the house and tree. My father started to practice singing the Christmas carols which were sung at midnight mass on Christmas Eve, as he led the community’s Roman Catholic church choir.

My father and mother were spiritual people who practiced a syncretic form of religion. They combined the local traditional spiritual beliefs with Christian spiritual beliefs on holy days and at mass. The birth of Christ was a religious celebration in our house. Prayers and hymns were said and sung in both Cree and English. My parent’s spiritual influence led me to act as an altar boy for five years. I considered it an honour to be chosen by the priest to carry baby Jesus to the altar and serve at Christmas midnight mass. The team of horses pulled our bobsleigh to church. We usually arrived an hour early to assist the priest with the final preparations. The church was packed with Métis from the community. There was standing room only for latecomers.

After midnight mass was over, my mother’s custom was to invite the priest over to our house for a full-course turkey dinner with all the trimmings. My mother made her turkey stuffing from scratch and no other food compares to the taste of her cooking. At this meal she would allow us to open one Christmas gift: an item of clothing. In the morning, the only other gift we opened was a toy. Our Christmas stockings would be stuffed with an apple, an orange, various hard nuts and peanuts, and striped white, red, and green curled Christmas candy. People from the community would drop in throughout Christmas Day to express their wishes to my parents. We children were allowed to visit some friends and compare gifts.

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