I think I was 8, back in 1982(ish); it was a day when our trailer burned to the ground in the middle of the night. We had just come back from a long day of shopping in Nelson. My dad had actually stopped on our street to warn another neighbour he had fire shooting out of his chimney, and he was worried they’d have a chimney fire. Our pipes were frozen, so my dad went under the trailer to thaw them with a torch. Something he’d done before. The winters in the Kootenay’s were crazy! I remember my mom coming down the hall fast yelling at us to get out. She was literally pushing us from the back and when we looked back where we had just come from, it was in flames. My sister and I ran to my Grams, which was just a hop, skip and a jump away, and phoned our cousin Perry who lived not far from us, and he came over. We did not have emergency services and our home literally burned to the ground in 3 minutes. All of our Christmas presents were gone, and my dad’s eyebrows were singed, along ...

My favourite Christmas story was related to me by a family acquaintance who grew up in an urban setting. We discussed the hard times our families had to deal with during the depression of the 1930s. I was too young to know the experiences directly, but she was old enough to be an aunt. Her story was about the 1931 Christmas: We had little to enjoy that Christmas as my father had been laid off from work. We could not get a traditional turkey and would have to make do with a tube of bologna. We were not looking forward to Christmas day. On Christmas eve, my mother announced that we would all have a bath on Christmas morning and put on our best clothes for Christmas dinner. We all did as told. Just after noon on Christmas day, we were called to dinner. We passed bowls of vegetables, stuffing and gravy around. Mother had heated the bologna in the oven and put it on a platter in front of my father. He had brought out the carving knife and fork kept for our special dinners. Father tu...