Random Memories

To-day was to be the family Christmas Gathering. It had to be  re-scheduled . Obviously because of the weather.

We 've  heard from  all  except the Kitchener satellite. Power is out over there but Mary has a cell phone like a mini computer  that works on a battery.

Christmas always makes me think back. Right now,  I"m thinking of my father on his weekly visit to his parents. I was small enough to ride on his shoulders, my two sisters and brother walked alongside.

It must have been six miles there and back up th brae and across the moor. The last part was up the Course Hill  in Kilwinning. My mother never came.  Nothing  needs to be made of that. The tradition was and still is that each sibling had a  particular day to visit parents.

 New Year was everybody's night; except for children.

At my maternal grandmother's house . Saturday was Aunt Jean's  day and Monday was Aunr Mary's. The first part of Aunt Meg's married life was taken up by the war .She lived at  Grannie's  for the duration with  my infant cousin Anne.

My paternal  grandparent's house was full as well. Aunts  Maggie  and Kate  and  my father were married. The rest were still at home.

They were Mary, Michael, Bill, Pat, Tom. and David, also called Sonny because he was the youngest.

Michael was an apprentice baker. On one visit. he baked us a fruit cake.  It's not a Christmas cake . That's  a Black Bun. The fruit cake he baked had a mixture of   moist spicey dried and candied fruit between two layers of pastry sprinkled with sugar on op. It could be puff pastry or short. Short is easier to make.

Mary played piano and a harp. and entertained us.

Mary was expelled  by the nuns from St. Michael's College for playing piano  to silent movies in Green's picture house . Clearly the place was a den of iniquity.

Ten years later , Mary died in childbirth with her first child.   Her parents didn't even know she was in labour.

There  were  no telephones .  A relative came to tell  Mary had died and the baby too. I was seven then.

Homes were lit by gas mantle  and cooking done  on a coal range. The last time I hung a stocking, it was from the cord that stretched  across the smoke  board.  That was part of the range that slid up  or down ,depending  on the direction of the wind  outside  that made smoke blow down the chimney into the room.

The last doll I had  poked out from the sock top. It was a small sock .It must have been a small doll. It was a sixpenny  Woolworth doll. I washed her clothes and pot them back  on the doll wet. Her body , being made of paper composition , collapsed.

She wasn't the only doll I ever had . Just  the only one I remember.

My father got a bicycle when they came on the market. Sunday visits to his parents were no longer a day long expedition. They were in the evening. I remember the lamp  being primed with a material I think was asbestos. It was a miner's  lamp. There were no batteries then.

My last memory of  those times was begging him to take me along with him to Grannie's house.

I was seven when my mother took us to live at my  maternal grandparent's home.  It wasn't large  but they had big hearts.

My Finnigan grandparents became strangers after that .

Life changed in other ways as well