Easy reading is damned hard
writing. Nathaniel Hawthorne(1804-1864)
Growing
up in Montreal, oh, what a blast on a cold, wintry day! Blustery squalls, spinning like berserk
Tasmanian Devils take your breath away. It
takes a half an hour just to get dressed in winter stuff and get out the door!
And it’s
really bad after a big storm, when we get a major dump of snow. It’s one of my chores, and my three sisters,
to shovel out a parking space on the street, for my dad. It needs to be cleared in time for him to
park, when he gets home from work, around dinner time. And, my baby sister really is useless because
she is pretty little. She doesn’t get an
allowance yet either, because she doesn’t really do any chores, but then again,
she doesn’t really know what an allowance is either. She just likes to be outside with her three
big sisters, which lasts maybe ten minutes and then she starts banging on the
door, (she’s not tall enough to reach the doorbell), to be let into the house.
Even
with three young girls and six strong arms, our shovels are kinda small and sometimes
it takes us a whole two or three hours to do after we get home from school. Believe me, winter in Montreal pays, because
even though my allowance is only a nickel a week, sometimes, if my mom’s
feeling rich, it might go up to a dime if we have to shovel a lot.
*********
The
approaching Christmas holiday is knocking on frosty windows and my school chums
are breathless with excitement in anticipation of THE BIG DAY! There is a Christmas tree in our
classroom. It’s a beautiful live tree,
the greenest of green and has a pine scent that sure beats the stuff my mom
puts in the mop water, when she washes the kitchen floor. What a treat it is, going into my classroom
for a week or two! The fresh piney aroma
smells so much better than wet socks and chalk.
My classmates and I work feverishly for days, making all the decorations for the Christmas tree from ‘scratch’. Construction paper, twisted and turned and folded and scissored into wonderfully creative shapes and sizes, casts a rainbow of colours from the top to the bottom of our beautiful green tree. Popcorn garlands and candy canes are especially fun to hang, with everyone sneaking a piece here and there, even the teacher. The best decoration is saved for last. The glowing white angel crowns the highest branch and looks upon us with peace and serenity. What a fitting place for the guardian angel of our beautiful green tree!
*********
A few
days before Christmas break, the beautiful green tree would get to go home with
someone. The teacher asks us to write
our names on small pieces of paper and one by one, we put them all in one of
the kid’s toques. Slowly rummaging
around in the hat, the teacher finally pulls out that one special name and it
was MINE!
My
excitement knows no bounds! Dragging the
beautiful green tree, now bare of all its glorious decorations, I enthusiastically trudge toward home along
slushy sidewalks, my head and tree barely visible above the snow banks,
standing like sentinels guarding a castle.
I burst through the door and can hardly contain my glee as I announce to
my mom, “I won the Christmas tree! Isn’t
it beautiful?”
The look
on my mother’s face is hard for a seven-year-old to understand but what came
next isn’t. “We’re Jewish. No Christmas tree is coming into this
house.”
Shoulders
sagging, eyes filling with tears, I struggle to understand what had gone so
horribly wrong. How could my beautiful
green tree make my mother so upset? I
ran to my room, which I share with my three sisters, sobbing as if the world
was ending.
My dad
got home from work a while later and I could hear my mother telling him about
the beautiful green tree and how it arrived at our house. Listening to their murmuring voices rising
and falling, I doze off, exhausted from crying.
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