December 22, 2011

Column | Korky Koroluk

Slow down and enjoy the holidays

Every Christmas I take a break from writing about construction, and give readers a peek at some of the other work I do.

I was a Prairie kid, born and raised in eastern Alberta. I rode my horse through the range of hills near the tiny village where I grew up, disappearing for three or four days at a time, using my .22 calibre rifle to bag the occasional partridge or prairie chicken (out of season, of course) to cook over my campfire. Love of the Prairies struck me at an early age, and even though I’ve lived in Ontario for many years, there’s still something of the Prairie kid in me.

That feeling for the West has led me to write weekly essays dealing with the Prairie history. Those essays have been appearing for more than a decade in community papers dotted across the plains.

My sources are history books (some of them pretty obscure) as well as old diaries, collections of letters, and local history projects that are often available in special collections or archives that are relatively unknown but publicly available.

Some of the things I unearth in those sources deal with Christmas, of course, since it was perhaps the most important day of the year. Some of the stories are sad, because they often are about people long separated from families “back home,” people who often struggled simply to survive. Cash was scarce, so parents often had to use their ingenuity to make the day a special one for their children.

But there are also tales about people who did have money to spend, and some are funny. One such concerned the Harvey family of Winnipeg.

He was well-known locally, and fairly successful, so Christmas was a time of indulgence, which meant shopping at the Hudson’s Bay Company store, by far the biggest retail store in town.

Their daughter, Ruth, recalled one such shopping trip in a book Curtain Time, which is long out of print.

But the funny part of the story as she related it, was not the shopping itself, but an experiment her father tried in his desire to have a nice ripe cheese in the house for Christmas.

The object of his affection was a whole round of Stilton, a famous, strong-tasting and somewhat odiferous treat — if you like well-aged blue cheese.

Early in November “Papa” arrived home from the Bay store with his treasure, hoping to further ripen what was already a ripe cheese.

He bored holes in it and filled them with Port wine before putting it on a high shelf in the pantry, hoping that a few weeks there would finish the aging. Then the family went away for a month’s vacation.

On their return, Harvey recalled, her mother took one step inside the kitchen door and stopped.

“Something,” she exclaimed, “has died here!”

She searched high and low for a carcass but found nothing, so she sent for a carpenter, who traced the smell to the pantry.

“A rat,” he announced, “under the floor.”

He was just ripping up the first of the floor boards when her papa strolled in and took one deep, enraptured sniff.

“Ah,” he said. ‘”I believe my cheese is exactly ripe.”

I don’t know how many readers will have a ripe Stilton on the sideboard this Christmas. If you do, I hope you enjoy it.

We, my wife and I, will make do with a traditional turkey dinner. In our house that tradition doesn’t include cheese.

Enjoy your Christmas. Slow down for a few days; spend time with family and friends.

Have a bottle of nicer-than-usual wine with dinner, and perhaps a glass of Port afterwards.

But no Stilton.

Korky Koroluk is an Ottawa-based freelance writer. Send comments to editor@dailycommercialnews.com

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