CHRISTMAS BLESSINGS AND CHALLENGES

   A plethora of choices greet us from the pages of our newspapers and flyers offering bargains for the upcoming holiday season.  Search for work during this downturn and lack of jobs available presents challenges.  Most seniors in care homes have given up their cars needed for shopping or work.  For example, the Handy Dart (for less than two dollars) asks the potential rider to call to set a time for its arrival.  The driver graciously loads our walkers for us.  When appointments or our shopping duties are complete, we phone Handy Dart to tell where we are in town for pickup. 

   Scroll back to the 1920s, the decade I was born and note the comparison.  The father in the family would be hitching up the farm’s team to horse and wagon as our mother is handing him a short list for baking powder or cocoa, the items she cannot grow in her garden.  She also brings a scoop containing the bricks she keeps in the coal stove oven to place on the floor boards of the wagon for heat during the 20 mile return trip to and from town.  A Chinese restaurant and a general store carried the few items needed and then he and my older brother turn a corner in town and arrive at the post office for the once a week mail pickup.  Local news and weather promises a snowstorm and wagon wheels will be replaced with sleigh runners.  My brother has rigged up a barb wire telephone line attached to the fence posts and each family answers to their number of rings.  In about 1928 we’ve sold enough grain (29 cents a bushel) to buy a radio and an Edison cylinder player.  Post office gossip hints of an upcoming depression and soon would come true. 

 Scarlet fever vaccinations were not available and our parents lost a 3 year old son in the mid thirties.  They prayed one of their descendants would become a doctor and help prevent such sadness.  After World War 2, funds for university education were not available.  Office work as a secretary paid $l.25 an hour.  In later years I offered to pay the interest needed for tuition fees required for any relatives who had registered at the UBC to become medical doctors.  Two of them registered in pre-med studies at UBC but did not complete their doctor’s degrees.  Parkinson’s disease was claiming my husband’s life and I had trusted the parents of these two students with over $30,000 to pay the interest on their loans.  Their parents are now retired with government pensions and spend winters in tropical lands and say they use their extra funds for missionary work.  Here, exercise classes help me regain my walking balance.  Words of encouragement and cheer are often written on the class chalk board like - “The divine in me honours the divine in you.”