Classic Christmas Stories Read Online Free Page B

with her son Will Sam and fill up on skim milk and
     buttermilk buns. Or Aunt Sis might pull a blueberry grunt out of the oven.
    She was a kind old soul who never harmed anyone in her life, yet she had a life
     filled with tragedy. Her husband, Uncle Sam, was lost on the Grand Banks fishing
     grounds after his trawler iced up and turned over; or at least that’s what they
     think happened to her. Then shortly afterwards her son, Will Sam, drowned in the
     harbour when his dory loaded to the gunnels with capelin capsized as she rounded
     the breakwater at the mouth of the Gut to turn up the harbour.
    However, despite the tragedies in her life Aunt Sis carried bravely on and
     continued to do her part as a community leader.
    Aunt Sis was the community’s drama director, if there was such a thing as a
     drama director in those days. I’m thinking of the Christmas concerts we used to
     have.
    What fond memories are wrapped up in them! Now, as I look
     back, the whole cast of characters passes in parade before memory’s eye and I
     can hear again the voices of my youth, and wonder where they are now.
    Most of all I can recall the rehearsals, or practices as we would say, in Aunt
     Sis’s house where she used to serve stocks of gingerbread cookies and jam bread.
     We liked the practices even more than the concerts because they meant nights out
     of the house away from school homework.
    The old Royal Readers were a prime source of materials, but a lot of it we made
     up ourselves. One year, I kept the scripts of the original material we used, and
     I think the quality was pretty good.
    The concerts were held in the school, of course, on a stage built especially
     for the occasion. We had a two-room school with a moveable partition, so that
     for concerts we could make the two rooms into one.
    My father who was the teacher, was master of ceremonies, a task that inevitably
     fell on the school principal, and during the intermission he helped to sell
     little five-cent brown paper bags of homemade candy.
    Every child in school had some part in the concert, even if only an appearance
     in opening and closing choruses, so you could be sure that the whole community
     turned out for it. Aunt Sis would be off in the wings, fussing over us all like
     a broody hen, and her promptings could be heard right to the back of the
     hall.
    As I look over the handwritten programme for one concert, dear faces of youth
     flash before me, and I seem to hear their voices as in the long ago. I hear
     again the shy recitations, the halting dialogue and the bashful singing.
    A smash hit, I remember, was a rollicking sea ballad— “The Death of Billy
     Crow”—that my brother Phil composed in a moment of fearful inspiration, his one
     and only attempt at verse, and he recited it himself with feeling and gusto. The
     next day he was a hero among the seagoing fraternity who besieged him with
     requests for impromptu recitals by dockside and in the stagehead.
    His rather bold ballad was followed by a sad recitation by Winnie Grandy.
    Winnie was such a frail little creature ( “She’s fey, ” Aunt Sis would declare,
     with a knowing look), and so good that you just knew she wasn’t long for this
     world. She was always quiet in church and sat in the choir,her hands folded demurely in her lap while she listened to the parson pray
     and preach.
    It was diphtheria that took her before she was fourteen years old; and as she
     lay dying the word went around that she told her mother not to cry. “I’m going
     to like it in heaven, with the dear angels all around me and little Jesus to
     care for.”
    Winnie used to compose tragic little verses and she recited one at the concert
     only a month or so before her death. It was No. 7 on the programme.
DEATH
    by Winnie age 13

    No tears for me. I ask
    Shed not a single tear
    When I am gone. There is
    A Better Land then near.
    If you believe, my love,
    What sages do foretell,
    Where is the pain of death?
    The