The 1908 Christmas season begins with dinner

I would have to say that it has been a pretty fair year. The wife came close to shooting off my ear one night, as she put away my shotgun, but of course it was an accident. I have always told her not to handle my guns without she checks to see if they are loaded, and I was greatly surprised, as I was sure I had seen her inspecting it.

The oldest girl is speaking to me again, though I am uncertain as to whether or not that is a good thing. She is starting to drop hints about Christmas presents, yet otherwise when she speaks she is critical of me. One night I explained to her that no one would want to marry a girl who has that kind of attitude. She had the absolute gall to say that if husbands were like me, she was not so sure she wanted to get married.

I was that close to turning her over my knee and giving her a whaling she would not soon forget when the wife reminded me that she was too old for that, and that if I laid a hand on her the shotgun wouldn't miss this time. I said for her to steady herself. We have come to a pretty pass in this modern age when we cannot even discipline our own children.

Both the youngest girl and the boy have done well in school this year. I asked the oldest girl to study her younger sister in the way in which she is so cheerful and industrious, but the oldest girl only made a rude noise. I assured her that her Christmas gift would remind her of the need to respect her father.

The youngest boy, meanwhile, does the chores when I tell him and spends a lot of time out in the woods, usually bringing home rabbits for the pot.

By and large, however, the year has been good, and to reward the family, I decided to take them out for a very special evening. Up past Maitland Bridge, on the Mersey River, a couple named Tim and Andrea have established a cluster of hunting and logging cabins, so that folks who find themselves out in the woods can come in of an evening for shelter. They have built a fancy cookhouse to go along with the cabins, with a fireplace right in the middle of the dining room.

Some of the ladies from town asked if they could use the cookhouse for an event they had in mind. They would serve a roast turkey dinner and have a show of some kind to entertain the diners, the idea being to raise money for attracting visitors to the area. Ronnie Frail's wife, Suzanne, who usually can be found down by the village street waving at the newcomers who pass through, was the one who had the idea about the gathering.

She rounded up ladies from the village and got some of them to roast turkeys in their cookstoves. Others gathered vegetables and still others baked breads and cakes, and the Saturday before this past one they loaded everything into their wagons and made the long trek up to the cookhouse. They put the turkeys in iceboxes and got to work chopping and cooking vegetables, so that those who attended the social would have a hard time seeing a difference between the meal in front of them and a real Christmas dinner.

We harnessed up the horse and wagon and headed out. There being no snow to speak of yet, we trundled off on four wheels, heading west beyond Caledonia, through Harmony Mills, Kempt and Maitland Bridge. We picked up old Mrs. Bollard at the Corner, as her husband is in the mines up in Timmins.

The place looked a fairyland when we arrived, with candles lit everywhere. I had the oldest girl stable the horse while we went inside, where Ronnie Frail's missus ushered us to our seats. When the meal arrived, it was most satisfying, and I told the wife that she could get some good ideas from the way it was presented. She whispered to me that if the cookhouse weren't packed she would present me with a plate of turkey, right over my head. I was flabbergasted. What gets into that woman?

The show was marvelous. A couple of young people from the village had made friends with two sports from the United States, Albert Bigelow Paine and Eddie Breck, after they went on a fishing trip deep into the back country last spring, and they told stories they'd heard about the trip. One of them sang songs and the other pretended he was Albert Bigelow Paine, and they had people almost wishing they could have gone on the trip, too.

When dinner was over, the oldest girl brought the horse around and we made the journey home.

Thomas W. L. Sheppard, Esq., can be contacted at the old Benjamin Annis place, Hibernia.