My most memorable Christmas was 1970. A record amount of snow fell that winter. It started early in December and the snow kept piling up and didn’t start to melt until mid-March. We had moved to our present day farm that October. Our farm in Eganville was sheltered behind a rocky ridge with tall trees so we didn’t get a blast of wind and certainly no drifting snow. Now on flat fields in Admaston Township we were in the open and we saw and felt all the winter elements.
The previous year two young single women from our neighbourhood in Holland decided to immigrate to Canada. My parents knew their parents from the time before we immigrated in 1953. The young women, a few years older than me, settled in Renfrew and both found work in a factory. One of the girls was an only daughter. Her mother had passed away a few years earlier so her dad was saddened that she moved to Canada of all places. So far away!
The father decided he would visit his daughter for Christmas. He had never travelled outside of Holland so his older brother, a bachelor, who also had never been far from home, accompanied him to Canada.
The daughter was happy her father and uncle would come all the way to see her. It would be quite an experience for the men as neither had been on an airplane before. There was just one problem. The girls lived in a very small apartment in Renfrew and there was no spare room of any kind where the two men could sleep.
A solution was needed. We had a big two-story house and so the father and the uncle came to live with us for 10 days. They came on December 18. The girls would come here when they had a chance. The men were not used to cold weather and snow every day and I recall them looking out the windows when I was blowing snow day after day. Sometimes they’d walk to the end of the laneway and be puzzled by the lack of traffic. Occasionally a vehicle went by. It was so different in Holland.
That Christmas I thought we’d put a real Christmas tree in the house. A real tree would look good in the living room. But I wasn’t going to just go and buy a tree. I wanted to do what we did when we were kids — go and find a tree in the bush, cut it down and bring it home.
I did find a decent tree despite all the snow. The girls helped decorate it. We had our first Christmas dinner at our new farm with a house full of people, including two Dutch men who said next time they’d come in the summer. I checked my daybook notes from December 1970 and it said it snowed heavily on Christmas Day but everyone came and we had a house full of people, including my two sisters who were home from university.
The brothers never forgot the hospitality of that first visit to Canada. I think the elderly uncle came only once more but the father made many, many trips to visit his daughter and her family in Gatineau, where she moved to. Over the years, until his death, the father, daughter and son-in-law and some of the kids (when they were young) would drop in for a visit, usually on a Sunday afternoon. The father often spoke of that first snowy Christmas in Canada.
