Next
Monday is Canada’s great annual festival and how it will be duly honored in
every home in Hamilton depends on the condition of the family pocketbook. It is
no small item of expense to provide the materials for a Christmas dinner in
these prosperous days of the twentieth century, for we have become extravagant as
to the wants of our stomachs. The time was when a good, juicy roast of beef
such as the old-time butchers used to have in their Christmas displays here in
Hamilton, with a Yorkshire pudding baked in the pan under the drippings of the
pot roast, potatoes baked in the gravy, a head of cauliflower or some other
vegetable for a side dish. Why, that was a dish to set before a king, and
hardly a family was so poor that could not afford such a dinner at least once a
year; for a prime roast that would feed a dozen cost less than fifty cents, and
the price of the Yorkshire pudding and the potatoes and cauliflower were hardly
worth considering. A slice of such beef today would make the water drip from
one’s mouth like a dish of roast possum and sweet potatoes at a colored
brothers’ dinner. With what pride the portly butcher of half a century ago told
of the prominent farmer who raise the three-year-old steer that hung in front
of his stall, weighing from 1,000 to 2,000 pounds dressed. Why that steer was a
picture that would make one anxious for Christmas day to come, and a roast of
it to adorn the place of honor in front of the carver at the annual feast.
Think of the Christmas displays of it. J. Lowry, old Dick Passemore, Tom
Anderson, Jim Creed, the Dingles, old John Cook, Silas Bond, or any of those
old-time butchers, and it would make an anchorite or a vegetarian long for the
good old days when roast beef and plum pudding was served up by every Canadian
mother for the family dinner at Christmas. Ah! Those plum puddings were works
of art as made by the blessed old mother cooks. That was what she prided
herself upon, and there was much care taken in the compounding of the pudding
as though the eternal happiness of the family depended upon its preparation. How
carefully the flour was sifted; the rich suet shredded down till it was fine as
silk – none of the coarse, stringy fat that some butchers nowadays palm off on
their customers – the currants and the raisins picked over and washed and the
seed in every raisin cut out; and then the candied citron and the lemon and
orange peel and the spices, chopped as fine as the suet, and the great rich
mass sweetened to taste and thoroughly mixed together with eggs to make it light
and delicate; then all poured into a bag and put on to boil for hours and
hours. My old Hamiltonian doesn’t the remembrance of that Christmas plum
pudding carry you back in memory to the dreamy past when you used to stand
around the kitchen with mother and children watching that pudding boil and
smelling the savory incense? My! what a wonderful sight was what pudding when
turned out of the bag, and with what anticipations was the hour for Christmas
dinner. After father and mother and the children had feasted on the roast beef
and Yorkshire pudding, the potatoes baked in gravy, and the other vegetables,
you would think now that there was not the least little bit of room for a mouthful
of the piece de resistance, that great big cannon ball of a plum pudding, with
the raisins and currants, dotted all over it like cunning eyes peeping at you.
Father carved the beef and dished up the vegetable, but mother would not allow
King Edward were he present to plunge a knife into that pudding; that post of
honor was reserved for herself. How sharp the knife was! It had an edge on it
like a razor. There was to be no ragged edge on that pudding as mother was a sleight-of-hand
performer, so deftly did she lice that pudding, and at the risk of horrifying
the good women of the W.C.T.U.. we must tell the truth, that there was a dash
of brandy in that sauce to give it flavor. But, bless your soul, no one was
affected by that gill of brandy in a bowl of pudding sauce; the baby of the
family could have swallowed the whole of it, and you would never know that the
little dear had a gill of brandy locked away in his stomach. When the last
scrap of pudding was cleared up from each plate, that family was too full for
utterance. Not another meal that Christmas day, but in the evening there were
the raisins and nuts and apples to finish off on; only the nabobs could afford
oranges.
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The good old Irish mothers, God rest
their souls, must have a goose for Christmas if they never have a mouthful of
meat during the 364 days of the year. There must be something in common between
the Hebrew and the Irish races, for both love a goose, and no anniversary
dinner is complete unless there is a big, fat goose, stuffed with sage and
onions at one end of the festive table. While the English families in the old days
were loyal to roast beef and plum pudding for the Christmas dinner, the Irish
and their descendants always had a taste to their mouths that never could be
satisfied with anything less than roast goose. Like prime beef fifty years ago,
a goose could almost be bought for a song, and then the old mothers had the
feathers to renew their pillows. In the Hamilton market one could buy a great
fat beauty that almost staggered little Mickey to carry home for fifteen pence
in Halifax currency, and on ordinary occasions, you could knock three pence off
the price. When the goose was brought home by mother or Mickey, they had no
delivery wagons in those days, and
everybody had to carry home their own marketing, the whole family would gather
around it and enjoy, in anticipation, the part they would have in making a
skeleton of it at the Christmas dinner. If there was anything in this world
that the old mothers knew better than another, it was how to cook a goose. The
stuffing of it was a work of culinary art, for to make it tasty, there must be
just the exact quantity of sage and seasoning so that the flavor of the onions
would not be too prominent. Stick a knife into a goose cooked like that and the
aroma would be an appetizer. And don’t know forget it, those old mothers knew
how to make plum pudding. But the goose hangs high now in the Christmas market,
and no one less than a bank director can afford to look at one.
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Our American cousins adopted the
turkey as their national bird for thanksgiving dinners long before Christmas
had a place in their annual feasting: and since they have dropped into the good
old ancient custom of keeping Christmas, that bird holds sway at the head of
the table. Here in Canada, roast beef and goose are being lost sight of, and no
dinner is complete without turkey. Now, the turkey is a hard bird to raise, for
in his infancy, he is liable to cold feet and diseases not known to the hardy
goose, and the old mother turkey has the time of her life in raising the flock
for the Christmas market. Consequently, our dear friends, the farmers, take
advantage of all this, and when turkey comes to market, there is a price set on
his head almost equal to a King’s ransom. Some people will eat turkey next
Monday, but there will be more who will be glad of roast beef or goose, or even
a humble chicken. Turkeys are beyond the reach of the average Hamiltonian, even
though work has been plenty and wages good during the year. With turkey, one
needs patties and salads and all kinds of vegetables to make it palatable,
while with the beef or goose, topped off with plum pudding, nothing more is
desired.
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But we have only given an old Muser’s
side of the question. Others will tell a different story, and probably they
know what is best. There will be many a home in Hamilton next Monday, even with
all the prosperity the year has brought, who will sit down to a Christmas
dinner but little, if any, better than they have everyday. Your wife and
children, my prosperous friend, will have everything that heart can desire,
while the unfortunate class can only get their Christmas gifts in their eyes by
peering into the shop windows. To a penniless child, the richness of a
confectioner’s window is a mockery; bring the child and the candies together
and there will be joy in that little heart. A lady clerk in a show store said
one day this week to a customer : “It makes my heart sad at times to see
mothers bringing in their little children, almost barefooted, to provide new
shoes for, and the poor mother has not enough money to pay for more than two
pairs. Prices have gone up, but that poor woman’s purse is no fatter. She
cannot buy for two and leave one out, so with a sorrowful heart she says she
will see what can be done, and off she goes.” That same condition may apply to
many poor mothers in Hamilton just now. Try to help them, you who are blessed with
an abundance, and you will make a happy Christmas in two homes – yours for
giving; the other for receiving.
The Saturday Muser sends hearty
Christmas greetings to the Hamilton old boys and girls of half a century and
more ago. Time and the world has dealt gently with us that so many have lived
beyond the allotted years of threescore and ten, and are yet hale and hearty
and as full of love and loyalty to Hamilton as in the days of youth, when
everyone scarcely believed that in order to reach heaven at the end of life’s
journey, we would have to enter the pearly gates through this dear old city,
where the joys and fancied sorrows of youth began, and where we are now
gracefully entering upon the home stretch.
“God bless us everyone.”
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