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A Child’s Christmas In The Hat

“Car coming!” the shout came from the street below. My best friend since grade three, Lloyd was the lookout man at the bottom of the steep sled run that ended on the once-wagon trail named after the not-too-steep for loaded wagons route up from the river valley that eventually led to Fort Macleod in the southwest. Now it was a city street curving up the gully from the river valley to the flat land above where it joined 5^th street. Named Macleod Trail, it was not the famed trail in south Calgary, this was in Medicine Hat my hometown.

 The sledding slope could be more accurately designated as a sliding hill because we, the members of the sliding fraternity applied all manner of conveyance to our winter passion. The topography of the hill allowed only one really good run, a shallow groove without any bends, that many mittened hands had shaped and then polished by endless rides on toboggans, sleds or shipping crate cardboard.

The Macleod hill had been crowded for a while just after school let out on this day. Lloyd and I were the only ones left now and the light was fading fast. Early darkness in December, close to the winter solstice, descended like a gray wool blanket until street lights came on, which would be our signal to get home. However, the cautious driver of the car that passed slowly down the road had not yet turned on his headlights.

“All clear!” Lloyd hollered from street level where his view of traffic was unimpeded by bushes on the hill. “Hurry up!” he yelled again, his red wool mittens cupped around his mouth. 

I preferred the sitting position on the sled (borrowed from my older brother), but Lloyd liked the “death slide” on his belly, toes dragging behind, steering like rudders on a boat. It was fast and dangerous, but any slide on that steep hill always had an element of danger. The run ended on the street at an angle and if you had enough momentum, and if the city sanding crew had not added grit since the last snow, then you could make it to the other side of the street, and if you could make the turn on the uncleared snow of the sidewalk maintaining speed, the incline could carry a rider as far as Fourth Street, and under ideal conditions, all the way to the parking lot beside the dairy on Third.

I scooted forward, shifting my weight to break the tenuous friction between the packed snow and the metal runners. As soon as I slid over the edge the immediate gathering of momentum felt more like falling than a ride down. I never made it to the bottom. My steering was erratic and just ten feet from the street a runner glanced off an exposed root. I went one way, and the sled went the other into the bushes.

Blood on the snow makes it look much worse than it is. A mitt full of snow pressed on the nose helps speed up the clotting. But when Lloyd kept grinning and squishing my nose flat I squawked, “Stop! Enough!” I batted his cold soggy mitts away and used the back of my bare hand to see if the blood had stopped.

“Told yuh to lay down. Your centre of gravity was too high,” he grumbled. His father worked at the Medicine Hat airport recording and reporting metrological conditions and as a man of science, he imparted a lot of information to Lloyd which did prove to be useful in the most surprising situations.

I brushed snow from my now-torn winter jacket. “I’m good. Now your turn.”

Lloyd shook his head, “I’m cold and have to pee!” he said. It was a long struggle to get back up the hill with a sled. “I’ll show you how it’s done tomorrow. Gotta get home now,” he waved and left. I said the same and started pulling the sled home.

This was the week before the Christmas holidays and there were only four days left of school.

Our English class was given an assignment during those four days. Something we were supposed to think about while trying to forget school and have some fun. It was to be an essay titled “What I did over the holidays”. Note that it was worded in such a way, I guess, that Christmas was not mentioned as was not Hanukah or any other religious event. It left room for a story bereft of any God or deity. I intended to concentrate my writing on snow sledding, skating, and snowball fights, all in the style of Dylan Thomas’s “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”, a popular recording of the story which the local radio station always played on Christmas or Boxing Day in tandem with the recording of “A Christmas Carol” or multiple repeats of music like “Frosty the Snowman”, “Jingle Bells”, and a dozen others, including Roy Rogers’ version of “Rudolph, the Red Nose Reindeer”. My holiday adventures would recall all the snow activities we always enjoyed in the extended time off from school.

The wind began on the second last day of school, one day before Christmas Eve. On the walk home, we marvelled at the rise in temperature and the heavy gusty wind that pushed us eastward past the already soft sled hill over Macleod Trail. The next day, the wind intensified and the temperature increased. It was later to be remembered as “Slushy Christmas”. Puddles and piles of wet snow prevented even a pleasant walk against the Gail Force wind from the west, a Chinook, named by the early white European settlers in honour of the Chinook native band that dwelled on the other side of the Rocky Mountains.

Christmas Day was a warm and nearly snowless delight. Waking up before sunrise in a darkened bedroom, feeling for the knee-length stocking at the foot of the bed. Pulling out the rolled-up colouring book and crayons, feeling deep past the new pair of socks and the miniature toy car and a little box with the chocolate cherry, down to the paper-wrapped Japanese orange in the toe and pull it out to unwrap as quietly as possible to take an acid bite of the skin to start the pealing and the separation of its segments to lay back and let the juice flow over the tongue making saliva glands clench and then to swallow the first bite of this Chrismas.

Warm winds above freezing still made for an unpleasant windchill and it was a miserable week spent inside playing the games we had gotten for presents that Christmas or from Christmases past and pulled from storage in the dark recesses of the basement behind the octopus gas furnace which sputtering with flickering flames like a sleeping dragon. Snakes and Ladders, Monopoly, or jigsaw puzzles, all of us jostling for a spot on the well-worn living room rug now littered with the detritus of Christmas wrappings, toys and the occasional string of tinsel which the cat pulled down from the tree, our wool sock feet disrupting play as we lay on bellies kicking feet in excitement at a lucky roll of the dice or turn of a card. Then raiding the Christmas turkey in the fridge for a few more scraps to build a sandwich slathered with cranberry jelly and devoured with a glass of ginger ale sneaked from Mom’s supply for her nightly rye and ginger. But had to settle for a cheese and relish sandwich because mom had started making turkey soup when my older brother had stripped the carcass of all the best meat for his sandwich before that.

My friend Lloyd came by once to see what I got for Chrismas and marvelled at the mechanical toy helicopter I had flown once before it was blown into the poplar tree by the back alley where I waited for the right gust of wind to dislodge it to be retrieved and put away for a calmer day. He reported that the sled hill on Macleod Trail, as well as all the hills he had inspected, were totally ruined, probably for the whole winter, unless we got a massive amount of snow.

Forays into the great outdoors for short lengths of time to visit friends or catch a movie at the Monarch theatre jostling in a joyful crowd of munchkins in soggy boots and mittens smelling of peppermint Lifesavers, spilled Pepsi and buttered popcorn to see the latest Walt Disney cartoon and a tedious music and dance movie that played way, way too long to keep the attention of that mob. Parents should have known that Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron dancing to classical music would not be a happy combination, but at least it got the kids out of the house. But on Saturday we could look forward to the weekly kid’s program at the Astra theatre, a jam-packed popcorn-throwing two-hour medley of old cartoons and black and white serials like Jet Jackson, Sky King or sometimes a Tarzan movie. 

Mother was getting very tired of the Christmas holidays. She called it the “Hollar days” because after a week she was hollering every ten minutes for us to be quiet or go outside. When father came home from his work trip on the train, she let him know it was his turn to entertain the troops and the next day, the day before New Year’s Eve, he began by hollering at us after breakfast to get our skates out and get into the car while mother made a whole loaf of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and packed them in an apple box full with two thermoses of hot chocolate with a stack of paper cups and then making sure each of us answered the roll call inside the car before she said, “Have fun!” and quickly closed the car door.

My older brother pulled rank and took the front passenger seat where mother usually sat while the rest of us squirmed in the back seat with Duke our golden retriever who refused to lay on the floor with our never-still feet as we jabbered on and father ignored the constant questions from that chorus asking where we were going, especially when he drove past the arena, over the bridge and turned west out of town. The Chinook arch of clouds had moved away to the east and the sun blazed down like the hot thermal nuclear explosion that it was in the palest eggshell blue sky.

Dry dead faded yellow prairie grasses, flattened by the wind that whistled through the barbed wire fences on either side of the road, mixed with the sound of gravel bouncing inside the wheel wells until we made a turn into a field and stopped facing an open expanse of frozen water. Not a lake but a slough. On the flat land, father said, it was never more than a foot deep and with the chinook wind melting the surface so that when the nightly lessening of wind and the just below freezing temperature happened the slough became the flattest, smoothest and biggest hockey rink in the world, mirrorlike with a rippling sheen of water and tufts of tall grasses breaking the surface at random intervals.

With car doors open to sit on the sills and take off boots to wiggle our feet into cold skates rushing to be the first across the wind-whipped ground to the broken edges of the ice to push and glide away ahead of the wind into a swirling world of blue ice reflecting the sky like some magical reversal that had us skating upside down in the cloudless heavens. Scarves whipped by the wind like banners on sailing ships we opened our jackets and backs to the gale, we made sails to race each other downwind to the far edge of our blue ice sea.

While Duke barked and chased elusive mice through the crusty snow patches Father laced on his old long-bladed racing skates and bent at the waist with hands clasped behind his back making gliding strokes that carried him away astonishing us at the grace and speed as he diminished to a dot on the near horizon where he turned and circled jumping grass bunches and dodging white frothy patches of thin crusty ice he glided back to us, stopping suddenly and spraying us with shaved ice like a speeding hockey player avoiding a crash into the boards.

We struggled upwind to the car and exhausted we gulped hot chocolate from paper cups almost too hot to hold, dribbling peanut butter and jelly on our chins before racing back to the ice for another go at skating in the sky as the sun touched the clouds lurking along the western horizon until we unlaced skates from sore feet and with trembling legs slid back into the car for an eye closed car heater-on-full ride back home to a quiet supper table with smiling parents and droopy-eyed siblings too tired to squabble about anything except who might get the warm spot by the glowing gas fireplace in the living room as we listened to a now forgotten comedy show on the radio.

The New Year was ushered in with rug-rolled-back dancing and laughter with friends punctuated by midnight cheering, hugs, kisses, and singing along to the radio as the children in their beds woke to the ruckus for a moment and then slid back into a dreamworld filled with contentment. The next day visits from relatives, drinks poured and toasted to greet the new year with more laughter, hugs and handshakes while still quiet children played on the rug with visiting cousins avoiding adult feet or sitting on the stairs reading books or magazines brought by mother’s maiden aunt from England.

The warm wind lessened overnight and by the time we were ready to go back to school when I thought I might ride my bike, the temperature had dropped, and the wheels were frozen in the puddle where I had parked it. Mom said that the radio station had played Bing Crosby singing “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas” once too often and had jinxed the whole holiday season. The first day back at school it started to snow fat fluffy flakes drifting down without wind and I could never remember whether it snowed for eight days and eight nights when I was eleven or whether it snowed for eleven days and eleven nights when I was eight, but the snowfall after Slushy Christmas was the best snowfall of the winter and the one winter I remember as the very best ever.

Early on in my career – my film and television career – I learned that advertising was important to the survival of the industry. In fact the real reason for television was not to entertain viewers but to sell advertising. It was the advertisers that ruled the screen. It was they who judged the content, decided what was to be shown or not. Mostly this power was used to censor the programs they sponsored simply by withholding their sponsorship. I also learned eventually to craft commercials that would entice the viewer to buy a product and please the advertiser. I now use those skills to make my own commercials. I am an advertiser. I have a product to sell – my first book, “Sideslip”. So, here is the commercial I have made to entice the viewer to buy my book: https://youtu.be/vYvMUA03xok

Yes, maybe. Am I just a writer? Am I not many other things as well?

I have been many things over the years, but mostly I have tried to be me. In old age I am still struggling to find the real me. My first novel, “Sideslip”, came out of a desire to be a pilot – a goal started and never achieved. Instead I fell into a career in television at a regional station, starting from the bottom up as a studio hand. In truth the only studio hand for a live to air production of daily news with the occasional commercial and a chance to learn to operate the only black and white camera we had at the time. Yeah. The good old days.

Through a series of plot twists and life changes, involving a disastrous first marriage, I clung on to the idea that I might make my way in film and television. Writing was a part of that. However, it was at best a part time endeavour. Work as a film and television writer in western Canada was spotty and ill-paid. There was more promise than pay-off in just about every contract. Meantime a living had to be made and my main skill of film editor paid well enough to keep me out of debtor’s prison, mostly. Film editing was in demand and I learned the basic skill while working at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Edmonton outlet. I am old enough to state that I learned that skill cutting black and white 16mm film for the local newscasts. Splicing strips of celluloid together was not the big lesson – easily learned by anyone with the use of their hands – the big important lesson was how the story was told by the order of the shots and the selection of the images and their movement within the frame. Without fully realizing it I was constructing short stories that could have been words on a page. Story structure in it’s most basic form.

Eventually I graduated to editing longer films in documentary form. Freelance work was plentiful when I left the CBC to work with whomever would hire me. Production companies bid on or proposed films to the networks or government departments and assembled their crews from a pool of freelance workers comprised of camera operators, sound recordists, writers, and a number of assistants with experience on location shoots. Film editors like myself were at the bottom of the funnel, assembling that work product into a cohesive and logical finished film. At some point I began to realize that the difficulties I encountered in editing films could be avoided by starting the process higher up the chain in the writing of the script. But, no surprise here, that was not an easy job to attain.

A few small documentary scripts, a series of radio items, some voice over lines, and one feature film script for which my writing partner and I were paid to go on a research trip and produce a first draft of a drama based on a true story. Never produced, dropped when the producer wanted a total re-write which we were not willing to tackle. That’s the movie business.

Fast forward past a life-changing move to a horse farm near the mountains (I did it for love) that was punctuated with short sojourns (relatively) into the worlds of public exhibit with the Winter Olympics in Calgary, a mushroom factory closer to home, managing a local history museum, and some best forgotten forays into small businesses.

Put that all together and you have the story of most of my adult working life. I will keep the details and rest of the story for writing inspiration in more stories I will present here on this blog. Look for bits and pieces that may be interesting, or not. Please let me know if anything here is something I should pursue in length or more detail . . . or just drop as a bad idea. I can not promise to follow your advice but I will take it into account.

In television Program Operations TBA was the note we put on the schedule when we had no idea what film we were going to run in that slot, sometimes right up until minutes before the clock ran out.

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