BARBARA WELLS SARUDY writes of the oral history memoir of Edward O’Neill, who grew up in the 1850s-60s in Brookfield, Massachusetts. This memoir speaks of a world so different from what is experienced by most American children today, surfeited as they are with gadgetry and toys while denied the uplifting mystique of Christmas (the “Christ Mass”) and many other good things, such as siblings, free time and family stability. Edward O’Neill lived in a better time:

“The first Christmas I remember was when I was four years old. The reason I remember it was because my mother gave me a big lump of brown sugar with a few drops of peppermint on it. I nibbled at that sugar a little bit at a time all day long and I can taste that peppermint to this day. You see, we were sort of pioneer people and we didn’t have much – nor not much to get anything with. Every winter in my early days was hard times.

“The only other present my mother had to give that Christmas was a quarter of a dried orange peel and she give it to my sister to put in her bureau drawer to make her clothes smell sweet. My father didn’t know much about Christmas. He’d been brought up by the Indians. His parents had been killed by redskins and he lived with the Indians until he was nearly twenty. My mother’s parents were missionaries and of course she knew all about Christmas.

“I don’t remember much about the Christmas’s that came after that one when I got the lump of sugar with the peppermint on it, until I was twelve years old when my father gave me six boughten fish hooks. We made most of our fish hooks by forein’ ’em ourselves before the fire. About that time my father got to flat boatin’ down the river. Some time he’d be gone three or four months and when he came back he’d bring back things like store clothes and boots, and once he brought me a tie and then my mother’d hide ’em away and keep ’em and give ’em to us for Christmas. And from September ’till Christmas us kids’d have lots of fun huntin’ around over the house and wonderin’ what we was goin’ to get.

“When I was fifteen my mother gave me a rifle of my own for Christmas. My father’d got it in Boston and this, with the exception of the one when I got the peppermint sugar, was my best Christmas.

“I was a grown man almost twenty-one before I ever saw a Christmas tree. A German family moved near us and they had a tree every year. They dipped the little candles themselves, colored ’em red with poke berry ink and fastened ’em on the trees some-how with wild turkey ribs. I never’d seen anything so purty in my life as those Christmas trees. We had to work awful hard in them days but we had our fun same as we do now. Well, if I don’t run acrost you again, I wish you Merry Christmas.”

— Comments —

Mrs. T. writes:

What struck me most about the story is the self discipline of the four-year-old. Imagine giving a piece of candy to a child only to have him savor it for the entire day. It must have taken a lot of self control. The depth of gratitude and understanding from such a young boy astounds me.

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