A faded black and white picture. A young boy in a soldier’s uniform. He was saluting as he posed for the camera. The uniform was a trifle small as his white wrists and white socks were visible. The boy was me. The year was l943. It was the middle of WWII and I had a father serving in the Merchant Marine somewhere in the North Atlantic. It was Christmas and I was nine. I would share that Christmas with our extended family at my grandfather’s farm.

We didn’t own a car, but one of my uncles drove us the 14 miles to the farm. Once there, we children engaged in a happy reunion of play and mischief. I led the way to my grandfather’s milk house, where I knew gallon cartons of ice cream were stored in the milk cooler for the dessert table. I would carefully pry open a carton top and we used pieces of cardboard to scoop into the creamy top of the ice cream. We then tried to smooth it over to hide the evidence.

We children ate in one room and the adults in another. Almost everything we ate came from the farm as my uncle raised chickens and turkeys and my grandfather kept milk cows. Grandmother had her vegetable garden next to the house, and when we visited in the summer it was our job to keep it weeded. Canning was a necessity of life and ball jars filled with the fruits of her garden lined the pantry shelf. The smell of fresh pies coming from the large Glenwood cast iron stove in the kitchen set our mouths to watering, especially when we knew it would be topped with the ice cream we had been filching.

Dinner was always preceded with a blessing to our Lord and his Son. We were of mixed Protestant faiths at the time. Grandfather, my mom and some of my uncles were Quakers, while grandmother was a New England Congregationalist and my older aunt and uncle were Methodists. Somehow or other, it didn’t seem to matter as we celebrated the day.

In the living room, our presents were stacked under a big fir tree cut from grandfather’s woodlot. The presents were distributed by my grandmother by sex, as each was marked for a boy or girl. We quickly opened our presents, carefully folded the wrappings for future use and showed off our gifts. Sometimes, we would swap gifts if it suited us but most of the time we were delighted with them.

We then headed outdoors to the sleigh-riding hill. Those of us who had wooden sleds with metal runners shared. Often, we would ride double down the slope with an older boy in front steering with his booted feet while one of the younger girls gripped him around the waist and held on for dear life. As darkness set it, the kerosene lamps came on in the farmhouse and that was a signal for us to come in for the day.

On our way home, I turned and looked out the back window of the car as we climbed the last hill on the county road that overlooked the farm. I could still see the faint glow of the kerosene lamps in the living room windows as the Christmas of l943 slowly faded into the night.