Fish Crate Christmas

Fish Crate Christmas

This is the time of year I like to sit back and take a visit to my earlier years when times were really tough.

When I was a kid, we were so poor; the people on Welfare were considered better off. My father usually got laid off from his bricklaying job around this time so things got really got tight.

We had coal and wood burning stoves to cook and keep warm. My grandfather would go to the fish market and get old crates to chop up for firewood. My Grandfather always cut extra wood to sell so he could buy our turkey. Meanwhile, my brother and I would take our wagon and go to the coal yard to buy a bag of coal for 60 cents.

My family would never accept charity from anyone so we were left to our own resources.

My Mother and Grandmother would buy a crate of celery and go door to door selling it. My brother and I would run errands for the businesses uptown to make money for Christmas gifts.

On the day before Christmas, my Great Grandmother would start the cooking and baking. Everybody in the family had a part to do.

In my thoughts, I can clearly smell once again the delightful smell of the cookies and that wonderful turkey. I can feel the warmth of that old coal stove, and most of all, I can still feel the warmth of the love within the family.

Right up the alley from my house, was the Zion Lutheran Church, where the Boy Scouts sold Christmas trees every year. Somehow they always had one too many and they would ask us to take it off their hands.

My Father, brother, and I would sit for hours changing light bulbs trying to find the one that was bad in the string of lights from last year. After much frustration, we finally got them to work. Then we finally felt like it was really Christmas and we promised each other that somehow next year, we would get new lights.

Around 4:30 P.M., my brother and I would head up the street to the Woolworth five and dime store to buy our presents. There were the oversized ties that nobody would ever wear and the hair pins that would sit in a drawer for years to come.

But everybody was happy to receive the presents because a lot more went into buying them than just money.