Written by Ruth Harvey. Illustrated by Barbara Cook.

For the Yuletide Feast

Each year we can identify the subtle hints that the holiday season is upon us, whether it be the smell of cinnamon, the hustle-bustle of shoppers, or the continuous ringing of bells. In this article from the 1949 December issue of The Beaver magazine a young child can already recognize these symbols of the holiday season in the old Winnipeg store of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Click here to see this article in its orginal format.

Nostalgic memories of a child’s “world of wonders” in the old Winnipeg store of the Hudson’s Bay Company at Christmas.

A chapter from the book: Curtain Time, “a saga of the greatest playhouse in the Canadian West,” published in Canada by Thomas Allen Ltd., and in the United States by Houghton Mifflin Company.

The fortnight just before Christmas was a slack time in the show business and many companies planned a lay-off then. People were too busy shopping and preparing for the holidays to go to the theatre. We went shopping, too, and the very best part of it was our special trip to the Hudson’s Bay Company’s store.

On most of our other visits there we used one of the entrances that gave on gloves and ribbons and purses and led to the elevators. That was nice, but it was—even with a detour to the toy department—like any other big shop. On our annual, pre-holiday expedition we passed and ignored this part of the store and went to the farthest end of the building before we entered. The doors we pushed open here were like all the others, but they seemed wider and loftier and I always thought of them as “portals,” for they led into a world of wonders.

To step inside there on a December day, half blinded by the dazzle of sun on snow, was to be Ali Baba entering the vast gloom of the treasure cave. For a moment I could see only dimly the laden shelves and counters. But even before my eyes had adjusted to the light my nostrils were aware of many odours—coffee, apples, warm bread, spices, tea and oranges, mingled with others pleasant but unidentifiable, in a symphonic smell of good food.

The food department of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s store was large, but it was not bright, obvious, and slickly hygienic as the big markets are now. It did not suggest a quick feed by fluorescent glare at an enamel-topped table in a corner of the kitchen, but rather, long feasts by candlelight at the knightly board. The dark wood in the long counters, in the high shelves lining the walls, in the ranks of cupboards and deep, mysterious bins, gave it a mellow, grand, baronial air.

Directly inside the door was the tobacco counter. In its glass showcase were pipes with bowls of richly polished bruyere or carved meerschaum, humidors and pouches, and gilt-edged playing cards. Ready, on the counter above, were tins and packets of fine cigarettes, canisters of tobacco, and wooden boxes displaying cigars like brown potentates’ fingers, ringed in scarlet and gold or regally wrapped in entire robes of silver.

The counter was set just there, I suppose, for the convenience of the male customer, and it was symbolic. It dominated the place. A gentleman could step in from the street and buy his tobacco without having to make his way past the long aisles of kitchen supplies, yet in the short moment of his stay he could cast a lordly glance over the territory beyond.

“All this,” the tobacco counter seemed to suggest, “is your domain, sir. The clerks busy at the shelves and the women shopping are minions intent on your comfort and pleasure.”

If the gentleman glanced above the door, the coat-of-arms of the Company confirmed the suggestion. The four beavers sable on the shield and the two elks supporting it were explicit. “This extraordinary organization,” they told him, “is a monument to male initiative and power.”

“And all the agreeable perquisites thereof!” added the fox who formed the crest of the arms and was seated on a red cap trimmed with ermine, the heraldic symbol of sovereignty.

“This company,” the fox continued, “was born in the minds of gentlemen smoking their long pipes and warming their silver-buckled shoes before the fire in a coffee house in London. It was chartered by King Charles and headed by Prince Rupert. It knows what a gentleman likes and what is his due. And thus in your service, sir, are the long winter trap-lines of the North, the pelt-laden sledges of the Eskimos dragging across the snow, the Indian canoes heavy with skins flowing with the spring-freed streams to Hudson’s Bay. And the lonely trading posts there. And the ships that come to them, fighting the ice through the straits, to unload their cargoes of kettles and knives and blankets and bright cloth, and load again with furs and turn back to the straits. And all the other ships that join them on the sea, the ships going east with their bellies full of minerals and western wheat and coming back to provide you, sir, with comforts and sensual delights.

“In short, sir,” concluded the fox, from his elegant perch on the ermined cap of maintenance, “with your dinner.”

And the gentleman, like a prince pausing at the door to the kitchens on a royal tour of inspection, might take one more glance at the back of the store and one sniff of the perfumed promises wafted thence and so, stopping only to clip and light his cigar, go on his way.

Well, the gentleman might leave, content with one glimpse and one whiff, but wild horses could not have dragged me out. Or even hurried me on. Mamma and I moved with leisure from section to section. We did not rush along, seizing pack- ages and piling them into a perambulator. In due time our purchases would be sent to the house in a sleigh drawn by a horse with jingling bells on its harness. At each department we sat down on the chairs there and mamma took out her list. The clerk displayed, measured, weighed, and suggested. And while mamma considered and made her selections, I had time, leaning back comfortably with my heels hooked over the rungs of the chair, to survey the laden shelves.

One of the first sections was almost like the toy department, for the merchandise was in miniature. Here were little packets of those wonderful tastes that were spread in the sandwiches at grownups’ parties. And all the things an English cook used for savouries to serve at the end of a meal instead of a sweet dessert. Small jars of bloater paste, pink shrimp, lobster, anchovy, ham and turkey. Russian caviar that did not look nice and tasted just as bad, but was exotic to think about. Sardines, invisible in flat tins, but lying there, I knew, silvery in pools of amber oil. And pate de foie gras in shallow, yellow-glazed pots, each with a lid and a thin layer of creamy fat beneath it to protect the velvet pate.

By this time, although I had had a sound breakfast of oatmeal porridge, bacon and toast, I would begin to feel the faint symptoms of appetite, the little languor in the stomach followed by dreamy thoughts of food. “This state,” Brillat Savarin says, “is not without its charms.” Certainly I, with the visions actually before me, found it delightful and I turned to look at the neighbouring shelves.

Here were green olives, almost as big as plums, stuffed with pimentos and celery and nuts. Gherkins sweet and gherkins sour. Brown pickled walnuts. Chutneys, waiting in spiced splendour to be wedded to some prince of curries. Here were square jars of sulphur-coloured chow-chow, the kind that was very hot and very sour and that, when you spread it on bread, dripped through and made indelible stains on white middy blouses.

Here was horseradish in tall white bottles and capers in tall green bottles. Worcestershire sauce “from the recipe of a nobleman in the county.” And all those other sauces the English invented to take your mind off the slabs of cold meat and the mounds of sodden vegetables. Sauces with labels that made you think of crotchety old gentlemen in London clubs and the story of the man who was black-balled from one of them and drummed out of his regiment with his epaulettes torn off, and whatever other humiliating things they do to those who disgrace the uniform, because he had taken mustard with his mutton.

A memory of last summer’s sun seemed to haunt the shelves beyond, shining from the contents of the glass jars with jewel colours. Here were the jams, red raspberry and strawberry and cherry. Black-currant jam and tart gooseberry. Golden apricot and dark damson plum. Blackberry jam that was purple to see and purple to taste. Jams that made you think of English streams and hedges. And from France, precious little jars of Bar-le-Duc: currants in ruby nectar, so good to eat with Neufchatel cheese.

And marmalades. Marmalades made in Scotland from Spanish oranges. Marmalades, in small grey stone jars, brown and deliciously bitter and chewy with peel. Marmalades in big gilt tins. Marmalades made of lemons and tangerines, with the fragrance of the fruit perpetuated by sugar. Marmalades that would slide from a spoon, light and clear and flecked delicately with shreds of peel.

And jellies. Crab apple and quince glowing in their glasses, pellucid jellies “soother than the creamy curd.” Now there was a poem! The stupid person who made the illustration for it in The Young Folk’s Libraryhad painted Porphyro and Madeline stealing down the castle stairs, neglecting the stanza that described the best picture of all.

Oh, gladly would I sleep an azure-lidded sleep in blanched linen, smooth and lavender’d, if I could wake to see what Madeline saw: the candied fruits, the jellies, the lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon. Poor Madeline—she was bustled off by Porphyro and Keats without having had a single taste. It was outrageous.

But mamma was not so unkind. She would always buy a jar of preserved ginger, a squatty blue Chinese jar bound and looped with raffia. And some honey —the pale golden syrup that would taste of clover and prairie roses, or one of the exquisite combs that made you feel wickedly destructive when you first broke into them, thinking of the long, precise industry of the bees.

Behind the next counters were glass-fronted bins of rice and beans and dried peas. There were coffee beans and green and black teas in enormous storage canisters. And little tin and lead caddies of tea scented with lemon or jasmine that the clerk lifted down reverently from the shelves.

Beyond were the cheeses. Huge cartwheels of yellow Canadian cheese and smaller disks of white cheese made by the Trappist monks in a prairie monastery twenty miles away—the kind Schumann-Heink liked so much. Silver packages of snowy Neufchatel, and Maclaren’s, orange, soft and mealy, packed in blue- white china jars. Here were green-veined Roqueforts and Gorgonzolas, looking geological from their long sojourn in the caves, chubby red Dutch cheeses, and English Cheddars and Stiltons.

It was a Stilton that papa had used for his great experiment. He had bored holes in it, filled them with port wine, and set the cheese away on a high shelf to ripen. Just after that we had all left on a month’s holiday. When we came back mamma took one step inside the kitchen door and stopped. “Something,” she cried in a Mrs. Siddons voice, “has died here!” High and low we searched for a carcass. We found nothing, and mamma sent for a carpenter. He traced the smell to the long pantry. “A rat,” he said, “under the floor.” He was just ripping up the first of the floor boards when papa strolled in and took one deep, enraptured sniff. “Ah,” he said, “I believe my cheese is exactly ripe.”

At the back of the store were the poultry, fish and meats. Here we passed the red salmon, the finnan haddie, the mammoth rib roasts of beef and saddles of mutton, to contemplate the plump geese and capons. Sometimes we toyed with the idea of having one at Christmas, just for novelty, but we always ended by ordering a turkey. There was nothing like a big, high-bosomed turkey for Christmas dinner. Turkey and all the trimmings for the far-from-home theatre people who might be our guests. I let mamma decide which bird to choose—it could be admired later as it browned and glazed in the oven and filled the house with a gust of fragrance at every basting—and I went on to the bakery department.

The good things that went with English tea were here: scones, crumpets, muffins, Bath buns. There were round loaves of cottage bread, each with a baby loaf on its back, like duck-on-a-rock. There was the mealy brown bread papa liked. Sometimes he would take two slices of it with an apple to the office for his lunch. He would always exhibit this small package, making a great show of his austerity. And it did seem like a meager lunch—until you remembered that he had fruit and oatmeal and buckwheat cakes and maple syrup and sausages and coffee for his breakfast.

Next to the new-baked goods was one of the best departments of all: the biscuits. Here were the everyday biscuits and the special-treat biscuits. The bins behind the counter held the ordinary ones: social teas, fig newtons, oval arrow- roots for the nursery, raisin biscuits and ginger snaps. But on the shelves above were tins of plumcake and shortbread from Edinburgh, and boxes and boxes of the very finest biscuits from England. They were packed for the colonies; boxed in tin and soldered tight against heat and cold and damp. From England they went by ship over the globe, to all the big red splashes on the map and all the tiny red pinpricks dotting the blue expanses of the oceans. To Chesterfield Inlet, to Bulawayo, to Simla, to Singapore. Every moment, I knew, of my day and night, it was tea time some place or other in the Empire. People were warming the pot, measuring the tea leaves, pouring on the boiling water, and perhaps while the tea steeped, opening a box of biscuits like these.

It was fascinating to open one. Under the snug tin cover the box was sealed with another sheet of tin that could be cut with the tine of a fork or with a little opener that sometimes came with the box. When you tore off this tin wrapping and lifted the thick sheets of waxed paper beneath it, there were the biscuits. Little rounds and ovals, squares and diamonds. Some shaped like coronets or like beehives. Some filled with fondant. Each sort separated from the others by paper frills as crimped as the ruffles of a regency dandy.

To us in Canada they were delicious, the best of their kind. But to Britishers in the remote outposts they must have been more than a good product. At tea— the best and the most English of all English meals—it must have been pleasant to have them. For though the strawberries might be missing, the Devonshire cream and the crumpets, here, at least, were the English biscuits, as crisp and fresh as if it were home.

England had done handsomely by her brewers and her soapmakers: they had been wafted up to the peerage as if on clouds of lather and froth. But 1 felt keenly that these bakers had served the Empire even better, and I hoped there had been some biscuit barons in the honours list on the King’s birthday.

As we had almost circled the store now, we came to some of those things whose scents had greeted us when we entered. Here were barrels of apples, crates of oranges and tangerines, and brown Spanish casks full of grapes packed in crumbled cork: malagas as cool as jade, and great hothouse clusters that were deep purple beneath a frosty bloom.

Here, too, were the dried fruits, the raisins, currants, cherries, citron and angelica for the Christmas cakes and puddings. Mamma had bought her supply of these on an earlier expedition, and our Christmas cakes had been made. Every- one in the house had stirred a wish into them before they were put in the oven to bake for hours. Then, for two or three days they had stood on trays in the pantry while juice from preserved cherries and plums was poured over them and allowed to soak in. Finally they had been bathed in brandy and now, blanketed under an inch of almond paste, they were dozing boozily in the fruit cellar.

Today we would buy clusters of table raisins to nibble and almonds and walnuts to crack lazily at the end of dinner, when appetite had changed to a feeling of obesity, but the hand was still moving automatically to the mouth, allargando, like a metronome running down.

Here, too, we ordered our Christmas candies and it was hard to choose. There were bright marzipan fruits, langucs de chat in flat boxes, silver-wrapped sweet chocolate tied with bright ribbons, yellow twists of barley sugar, butterscotch wafers and rum toffee. Dangling from a wire hung above the counter were the red-and-white peppermint canes for the Christmas tree, and small plum puddings looking like fat friars in their brown or white cloth sacks. In Mother Goose there was a rhyme about a king “who stole three pecks of barley meal to make a bag pudding.” It must have been larger than these, for

The King and Queen did eat thereof,

And all the court beside;

And what they did not eat that night

The Queen next morning fried.

Like mush, I supposed. It made the family life of ancient English royalty seem so cozy, and I longed to taste one of these little puddings. But mamma scorned them because they were boiled instead of steamed. For our own pudding she bought here a set of good luck charms: a ring, a thimble, a threepenny bit, a donkey and a four-leafed shamrock.

And then we came to the most festive and exciting of all these special, holiday things: the crackers. Some of them were magnificent, with gilt or silver trimming on the coloured crepe paper. Some were decorated with artificial flowers or tinsel butterflies for the ladies to pin on their dresses or wear in their hair. But that was only the outside. A small label on the end of each box told what was inside the crackers: caps, charms, fake jewelry, conundrums, jokes or epigrams. Some- times there were several prizes in each.

Oh, what delight—before the turkey was brought on—to find your cracker! What excitement to pull it with your neighbour, getting your fingers firmly on the snapper and making a terrific bang! And then the unwrapping, the unfolding of the paper caps that might be crowns or baby bonnets. And after the caps were put on, everyone read the joke or the riddle he had found. The epigrams were cribbed from Voltaire and Lord Chesterfield, and sometimes the riddles were pedantic. I remember one that sounded as if it had been made up by some waggish don: “Why is a misogynist like an epithalamium?” But most were better suited to the varied ages of a Christmas family party. Merriment would dent two dimples high in my little cousin’s cheeks as she read hers: “Why does a sculptor die a horrible death?” “Why?” we would all ask, and shout with laughter at the answer: “Because he makes faces and busts!”

When we had chosen our box of crackers we came to the last stop, the department where the wines and liquors were sold. These shelves had a regimental look, with the bottles all in line, shoulder to shoulder, like soldiers on the parade ground. They were not, I thought, so beautiful as the shelves of jellies, for here dark glass often hid the colours of the wines. And my palate was too young to appreciate the contents. But as mamma ordered, the names took on an aura of festivity. First, claret for the holiday dinners. Even the children would have a few drops of claret in their glasses—enough to make the water a faint pink and to make us feel regal. Then brandy, to put around the pudding and set alight. And sherry, to serve to callers and to put in the grownups’ pudding sauce. Children had lemon sauce, but at about twelve years it was possible to graduate to a small helping of the grownups’ nectar, silky smooth with eggs, heavenly sweet with sugar, and divinely fiery with sherry.

And now mamma asked for rum. That was for past Christmas, for New Year’s Day. It would go into the punch bowl with brandy and lemons and sugar and spices and hot water. New Year’s Day was a grand day, the end of the holidays but the beginning of something new. The first page of an unread book, promising and mysterious. You began it with a fine feeling of virtue, exalted by resolutions to practice the piano more than one hour every day and sternly to conquer the Latin gerund and gerundive. Of course, you would not have to start this until the next day: New Year’s Day was too busy. The close family warmth of Christmas expanded now to include all old friends, in laughter, joviality and a confirmation of fellowship. From early afternoon until well into the evening all the men in town went on a round of calls. They paid their respects to the Crown at the Lieutenant-Governor’s official reception and then went from house to house of friends, where the women were ready with their dining tables spread with sandwiches and cakes and tea and coffee and punch. When I saw the bottle of rum on the counter I thought of the fine smell our punch bowl would have. And I thought of Mr. Barley.

For as long as I could remember I had seen Mr. Bar- ley on New Year’s afternoon. He never patronized me when I was little or was archly teasing when I was in my early teens. He talked to me just as he did to papa and mamma, and at six, at eleven, I looked forward to his New Year’s call.

He was a small, slender man and the years did not change him much, except that he grew more frail and his blond hair and moustache paled with the white hairs in them. As he grew older he came earlier and stayed later at our house. He had not the strength to make the usual great round of calls, and year by year death made its cancellations on his calling list. So, sometimes as early as two o’clock the bell would ring, and when I ran to the door and opened it, Mr. Barley would blow in like a stray brown cocoon on the gust of bclow-zero air. I would take his beaver coat, his fur cap and his gauntlets, and we would settle him in an armchair by the fire with his punch. He would wrap his fingers about the mug to warm them. His hands were slender and the veins showed green-blue on the pale, freckled skin. He would sniff the punch, and smile, and sip.

“Very warming, very fortifying!” he would say contentedly. Then, lighting the first of a chain of cigarettes, he would talk about the theatre and the shows he had liked. He would tell us about his reading, his latest phonograph records. He had a love for French writers and French music.

“That fellow Anatole France!” He would shake his head in admiration. “You’ll enjoy him when you are old enough. And that fellow Verlaine!”

He would tell us about a new song, singing it more with the left hand that sketched the melodic line than with the breath of a voice that chanted the words:

Le temps des lilas el le temps dcs roses est passe.
Le temps des oeillets aussi . . .

And then, while we were busy with other callers, he would take a cat nap, waking for a little more punch and more talk. . . .

So the clerk wrote the order, set aside the bottle. “Hudson’s Bay Company . . . Rum ... Overproof,” it said on the label—a bottle of New Year’s Day! Old friends and their greetings, pleas- ant talk, laughter, fruitcake, a fine feeling of virtue, and dear Mr. Barley, and that fellow Verlaine.

Mamma checked her list. Yes, with the rum, everything was ticked off. She folded the slip of paper and put it away in her purse. I buttoned my grey lamb coat, tightened the red wool sash around it, and pulled on my mittens. Now I was impatient to get away. I felt as if I had walked around the world, and the little languor in my stomach was a pang of starvation. As I hurried mamma to the door, I would look up at the coat- of-arms. The little fox had a smug look, I thought, as if he had just licked his chops.

 

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