Christmas memories

When I was a child my mother owned a millinery shop. She had learned millinery as a trade in Ireland and continued to work at it after she emigrated to Canada in 1930 to marry my father who had arrived in 1928. After my parents moved from Toronto in 1942 she went into business for herself. In those days, women always wore hats; they didn't need a special occasion. While my mother had her own designs that sold well, her customers would often bring her photos from fashion magazines and ask her to create something similar. Some women came from Toronto to buy. She was good, very good.

We lived behind the shop on the main street just on the edge of downtown. By today's standards the entire place was small; probably no more than 20 feet wide by 40 deep including the shop. One storey, no basement, no front yard and a postage stamp of a grassless rear yard. My bedroom was an alcove off my parents'. But when you're five you don't notice these things.

I was always around the shop. At first I would sit in my high chair in the workroom where my mom could keep an eye on me. When I was older she would give me scraps of material and I would make "hats". I was later told I always said they were for Aunt Martha, my mother's aunt. No one had any idea why. I was lucky. Although my mother worked at a time when few married women did, she was always home.

The shop, although small, was a place of wonderment. Drawers filled with hats and their makings. Feathers, beads, boas, artificial fruit, buttons, sequins, fur. Wooden heads that served both to display the hats and to block them (set their shape) when being made stood on shelves and counters. And always people to fuss over me.

Christmas was special. Like Easter, the run up was my mother's busiest period. She often worked 14 hour days, either serving customers or making hats, to meet the demand, easing off the week before. But she always decorated. There were lights around the door and front window. The window display was stripped of hats to become a winter wonderland. Houses with lights inside, papier-mâché figures, Santa in a sleigh, reindeer dotted throughout, little artificial Christmas trees, a mirror laid flat as a skating pond. And all the empty space was filled with cotton batting snow, drifting from between the houses, softening the edges of the pond, fluffed and tufted, sparkling with sequin ice.

I suppose if I were to see it now I wouldn't be all that impressed, but my Ghost of Christmas Past always lets me use rose-coloured glasses.

Canada without hockey

Not really. It's Canada without the NHL. As the time approaches where cancellation of the current season becomes more likely you can hear gnashing of teeth and rending of garments among fans. But that's not hockey.

Don't get me wrong. Yes, it is the game and I know that. I'm old enough to remember when the NHL was the original 6. Lying in front of the new 18 inch black & white TV, with my bubble gum cards spread out in front of me. It's Saturday. Hockey Night in Canada. And the players. Mahovlich, Kelly, Keon, Armstrong, Duff, Horton. Toronto, of course, because that was my team. Montreal had the Richard frères, Béliveau, Plante, Geoffrion, Pronovost. And equally as legendary ones among the Bruins, Red Wings, Rangers and Black Hawks.

You are a Canadian kid. You watch hockey on the CBC. But that's not hockey.

Hockey is the kid across the road, Danny, and I in my backyard on the rink my Dad made. Not much of a rink. The ground is uneven and if you're not careful a stray clump of grass will send you flying flat on your face. Sticks, skates and a puck. That's it, no other equipment except maybe hockey socks pulled up over our pant legs. It's the faceoff and both of us go for the puck. It flies up and smacks Danny in the mouth. Blood everywhere, or so it seems. Tears, a quick check by Mom to make sure no stitches are needed and that's it for the night. We'll be back tomorrow.

Hockey is heading for "the cutoff" - a railway excavation down the street that was abandoned before any tracks were laid. In the summer you hunt for tadpoles in the creek that runs at the bottom of its 20 foot sloping sides. But in the winter the creek freezes and where it widens out in a few places there's room for a game. Nets are two stones set about 4 feet apart or someone's gloves. If you have even numbers, everyone plays. If the numbers are odd, someone sits out until it's his turn. The girls watch or skate further away. It is, after all, the 50's.

If all the professional and amateur teams, all the organized leagues, all the kids' leagues were to disappear and all the arenas suddenly close, we would still love hockey. We would still play hockey.

You would find it in the local open-air rinks. In the backyards. In the games of shinny on the farm pond. In the kids playing road hockey where there are no periods, just breaks when someone yells "Car" and the players scatter to the sides of the road to let the interloper pass, only to drift back in its wake and begin again.

That's hockey.