Christmas in Canada

My brother Craig moved to Canada in 1969, a Vietnam-war draft evader. He was the first in our family to leave the fold. For a number of years he couldn’t come home to visit without risk of capture at the border, and this was hard on everyone, especially on my mother (though she supported his decision and cashed in a Folgers coffee can full of loose change to help get him across the border) and especially at Christmas. So for several years in a row we took Christmas to him. My parents, their other six kids, in-laws, grandchildren, a stray aunt or uncle, a couple of dogs – four or five carloads – would make the trip caravan-style up I-5 from Portland OR to Vancouver BC. Nobody had any money, so we’d rent a string of cheap motel-six-style cabins, and my mom and sisters and in-laws would fix a feast with tiny chickens and frozen pies roasted in five or six tiny ovens. My dad would scrounge up a fallen branch from the neighboring woods, cut some ornaments with his tin snips, and the kids would decorate the tree with popcorn and cranberries. Any gifts we had were mostly ‘found objects’. I was just a kid; I thought these were the best holidays ever.

One year my dad brought a tape recorder and left it running for most of the three or four days we were there. You can imagine what these recordings sounded like: someone (usually my dad) telling a story, a TV going, kids squabbling, a baby crying, a dog barking. And laughter. Laughter, laughter, laughter.

Years later – after Carter’s amnesty allowed my brother to return home, and a few deaths, divorces, and other irreconcilable family differences – I came across my dad, sitting in the dark, smoking a cigarette, listening to those tapes. “How can you listen to that, Dad? It’s nothing but white noise.” “I love it”, he said. “It makes me feel like you’re all right here in the room with me.”

Picture above from one of the Christmas in Canada trips.  There’s my mom, two sisters, a niece, a nephew, our Cowboy Ex-Pat, and me.