Dear Grandma
Tuesday, October 30th, 2007Dear Grandma,
We made some Christmas cards to send to our relatives and friends in
Ontario. We peeled and dried some birch bark off some of the wood pieces from the river bank. We selected our best pressed and dried flowers that had retained their coloring pasting them with egg white in a pleasing arrangement or design, sometimes stitching them. The spring flowers and autumn made the best showing but we are anxious to display the variety that grow on the wild prairies, so each family got different flowers and colorings. It was a problem to get white paper to wrap the finished cards for mailing so we wrapped them in yellow-brown building paper for security, and note paper for addressing. We were complimented on the results, so we are making some for our walls.
For Christmas gifts we had not any (like Simple Simon) but we exchanged some of our treasures and put them on a bare poplar tree, decorated some Chautauqua books Uncle Alex or A.K. had sent us with his usual Christmas letter. “May the Lord bless you and keep you and make his face to shine upon you and do you good.”
For dinner we had a cherished wild goose stuffed with potato dressing seasoned with wild sage, vegetables, of course, suet pudding of grated carrots, flour and dried
Saskatoon berries boiled in a cloth.
Mother allowed us some hoarded sugar for taffy, flavored with wild mint. Some of our pop-corn popped but not much pop in it. We danced on the threshing floor and in the evening played hide-and-seek and did some story reading by lamp for a treat as coal-oil is five dollars a gallon at
Saskatoon.
At midnight Christmas Eve we girls went to the stable to see if the oxen would kneel as father said they would or did on Christmas Eve. We had never had the opportunity until now. When mother followed us out to the stable the oxen knelt for a second, as they got up they were disturbed. See?
We missed you and our old friends, Grandma. Everyone sends love.