Christmas Eve
Labels: holidays
Allow me to wish you all a very Merry Christmas. It feels a bit like the holiday has crept up this year and is suddenly upon us. Being focused on work, with only a few strategic shopping trips for presents and with other positive things on our minds, the lead up found us preoccupied until finally we opened our presents tonight and are able to sit back and reflect on the holiday.
I know it's the usual topic at this time, but more than ever, "family" is on the top of our minds this year. We'll be visiting my parents this holiday season, which is something we weren't able to do last year. Also, we already looking forward to next year as our family will be enjoying an addition. Our first child is due this spring, so when we sit down to Christmas Dinner (on Boxing Day, actually) my wife will be eating turkey for two.
Food and family is also coming together with a nice treat that was dropped off by our cousins this morning -- sausages. However, they're not just any sausages. Our cousins inherited the recipe from my great grandfather and a butcher (in Milton, I believe) has made up a batch based on the three kinds that were once a mainstay with my paternal grandmother's parents when they ran a butcher shop in North York, back in the the Depression. They'd immigrated from Scotland in the early part of the last century and landed in Winnipeg. Not liking it there, my great grandmother had pushed to return to Scotland but a cousin of hers in Toronto suggested that they come there and give Canada a second chance. They did, and they liked it enough to stay and set up a butcher shop.
They ran it through the '20s and lasted through the Depression in the '30s, but then both passed away in the spring of 1940. My grandmother was recently married then, and took over the butcher shop. Her sister, who'd been born in Canada, also married within a month of their passing and moved to Brampton, which was a long way away in those days.
Our child's due date will therefore be almost exactly 70 years on and I think it's amazing that we can both look to the future and share in that connection with the past. No word yet on whether we are expecting a son or a daughter, but we'll be finding out by the time we both start back at work in the new year.
posted by Ian at 10:45 PM -
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