The best Christmas presents are memories.
Happy memories of times spent with special people, some now gone. Memories
that never break or wear out, and are as wonderful and inspiring this Christmas
as they were last year, or five years ago.
My absolute favourite Christmas memory I have written about many times.
The number of times is irrelevant because every time I write about it, tears fall
on my keyboard. This is that memory:
Fresh-fallen snow protested beneath the crush of my gumboots breaking
trail down the unploughed lane. Dry, sharp squeaks, not unlike the cries of
cheap chalk cruelly scrapped against too clean a blackboard.
Skuur-eek, skuur-eek.
The boots ignored the sounds. They moved on, ribbed rubber bottoms and
laced high leather tops creating a meandering wake in the ankle deep snow.
From
each side of the lane, drifted snow leaned tiredly against the backsides of the
bungalows, dropped there to rest by an impatient blizzard just passed through.
Their crests were indistinguishable against the white stucco walls but nearly
reached tufted piles of fluffy snow clinging nervously to windowsills and
eavestrough lips.
The squeaks flew through the still night air, dodging fat flakes that
fell heavy and straight onto my cap bill, occasionally splashing into my face
flushed warm from the walk. I could have rode back home from Christmas Eve Mass
with the family, but the teenage mind prefers independence, and it was a chance
to visit friends along the way.
Faint strains of music joined the squeaking as I approached our back
fence. I stopped to hear the music more clearly, now identifiable as singing
voices escaping through an open window. I shuffled forward and listened to the
notes float out crisply and clearly, then mingle with smoke rising from the
chimneys. Notes and smoke rose together into an icy sky illuminated by frost
crystals set shimmering by thousands of stars and the frosty moon the Ojibwe
called Minidoo Geezis, the little spirit moon that appears small and
cold early in winter.
I held my breath to hear better and determined that the music was the
Christmas carol “O Holy Night,” and the notes came from the window in my
grandmother’s room. It was open to the cold because most people smoked cigarettes
back then and at gatherings cracked a window to thin the smoke. They sang the
first verse, and, when they reached the sixth line, the other voices ceased and
one voice carried on alone:
“Fall on your knees! Oh, hear the angel voices! O Niiii ... iiight
Diii...vine! ...” That’s the part where the notes rise higher and higher until
the singer reaches an awesome note.
The solo voice belonged to my grandmother, and I knew she was hitting
that high note while sitting on the edge of the bed that crippling rheumatoid
arthritis had made her prison for sixteen years. She was unable to walk without
assistance and had trouble holding a cigarette between her gnarled fingers.
The others had stopped singing to listen to her. The second time she hit
the high notes at the words “O Night Divine,” a shiver danced on my spine.
When she finished singing “O Holy Night,” the other voices started up
again, this time with “Silent Night” and other favourite carols. I went into
the house and found Christmas Eve celebrants — my mom, dad, and some neighbours
— crowded into the ten-by-ten bedroom that was my grandmother’s world. They
sang long into the night, mostly in French because the neighbours were the
Gauthiers who seldom spoke English to my grandmother and my mother.
After the singing ended my mother served tourtière, which I slathered
with mustard. Then we gathered at the tree and opened our gifts.
I have long forgotten what I got, and it doesn’t matter, because my real
gift came many years later: the realization that those high notes were not
solely the products of my grandmother’s lungs. They came from a strength far
beyond anything that a mere body can produce.
They were high notes driven by something far stronger than flesh — an
unbreakable spirit.
(This column was adapted from my book Waking Nanabijou: Uncovering a Secret Past – Dundurn Group 2007)
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