Finding Christmas

BY SARA KEDDY

Kings County Register

Cookie exchange: an invitation often accepted with dread at the prospect of baking dozens of treats and coming home with nothing but sugar cookies.

Forget the cookies: Gail Russell’s party goes beyond.

Fantastic.

Magical.

Inspiring.

An invite to Gail’s event is awaited throughout East Dalhousie and beyond neighbours’ mailboxes as early as November.

Gail is a relative newcomer to the community, but she married one of its original settler’s descendants in 2000. Peter Russell is the sixth generation to live in a home built in 1851. “It’s the original land grant - they walked through the woods and when they saw the number on the trees, they stopped,” Gail says of the setting she now lives in.

There are 1,000 acres, run through the years as a small farm and woodlot. Peter’s great-great-greatgrandfather alone had nine children and, with a few hired men, developed apple orchards and other mixed farm operations. Today, Peter is retired, and an only child - the last of a founding Nova Scotian rural family. Dozens of photos on the walls show relatives working in the woods, around the farm, on the trains that hauled trees out to the mills, ready for war service.... his mother had died, and he’d thought of closing the house and taking an apartment. “The house literally was as it was for decades,” Gail says of its condition when she arrived. However, the new Russell team had something in common: they’re collectors. “What he didn’t have, I did,” Gail says.

Peter had a property stuffed with handmade hooked mats, quilts, old farm and woods working implements, photos, household tools - things he was actually living with day-to-day.

Gail, a former craft store owner, has a wide, sentimental interest in collectibles - fancy dishes, bears.... “We just hit it off really well.”

They painted, hung new curtains and reorganized their possessions around the home over two-and-a-half years: Peter’s family pictures, quilts and mats are still as dominant and functional as in the past decades. Gail’s teddy bears nestle in the chamber pots under upstairs bedsteads, and tiny figurines crowd a dozen knick knack shelves throughout the home. “Need has nothing to do with it,” she laughs. “Everything has a story to it. “Peter said one day, ‘I’d like to have an anvil, I can’t say why’. I said, ‘You’re talking to the wrong person’. Now, we have an anvil.”

At Christmastime

Gail’s first Christmas with Peter, “he hadn’t had a tree in 30 years. I told him if he put one up, I’d cook him a turkey dinner, the whole thing. “Well, he didn’t know me that well.”

Gail arrived from her city subdivision home with a Santa hat on, bells ringing in her hand; she unloaded her car, cooked the turkey in the woodstove - “and then found out he doesn’t even care for turkey. “I brought Christmas.”

Now, she starts decorating every year after Halloween, “two or three hours a day, not on weekends. Don’t kill yourself.”

It took one visitor this year half-an-hour to find a two-foot painted Santa that sat last year at the foot of the stairs. “I’m always moving things around, depending on how I interpret them.”

For their first tree as a married couple, Gail made a bunch of letters, spelling “joy” and “comfort” to hang on the tree as ornaments. “Peter’s my joy, and he’s always saying I;m his comfort. I wanted to save the letters, so I sewed them on the tree skirt the next year.”

The cookie caper

Gail herself had been organizing cookie exchanges and holiday parties for friends for 25 years, and she brought the tradition to her new home. A tree-cutting party, an open house for a women’s group she belongs to and the cookie exchange are part of the holidays.

Cookie exchange guests are asked to bring three dozen holiday favourites, and she supplies the recipe card in the invitation - “I get to keep those - they’re the hostess gift!” When everyone arrives, the cookies go on the dining room table, there’s a chance to tour the decorated house and then it’s time for tea and cookies. Guests copy over recipes they like, and then everyone circles they table, container in hand, taking three cookies at a time until they’re gone.

The evening’s conversation covers decorations, family holiday traditions and food: the older ladies remember Christmases with raisin bread, doughnuts and mincemeat. “I still have the cookie cutters my mother used, and it’s not Christmas without those cookies, all decorated,” Gail says of her own memories.

With a British background, she also grew up with plum pudding and hard sauce. “I go to my own children’s homes now, and they have it. It’s funny, but you don’t really know the influence you have. “Cookies - I think everyone has something in their home and tradition.”

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