Fish Crate Christmas :: English Literature Essays

fish Crate ChristmasThis is the time of year I like to sit bandaging and dramatise a visit to my earlier years when times were truly tough. When I was a kid, we were so poor the people on offbeat were considered better off. My father usually got laid off from his bricklaying job some this time so things got really got tight. We had coal and woodwind instrument burning stoves to forge and keep warm. My grandfather would go to the fish market and suck up grey-haired crates to chop up for firewood. My Grandfather always cut extra wood to sell so he could buy our turkey. Meanwhile, my brother and I would take our wagon and go to the coal yard to buy a dishful of coal for 60 cents. My family would never accept charity from anyone so we were left over(p) to our own resources. My Mother and Grandmother would buy a crate of cultivated celery and go door to door selling it. My brother and I would assort errands for the businesses uptown to make money for Christmas gifts. On the da y before Christmas, my great(p) Grandmother would start the cooking and baking. Everybody in the family had a part to do. In my thoughts, I can clearly smell once again the handsome smell of the cookies and that wonderful turkey. I can feel the oestrus of that emeritus coal stove, and most of all, I can still feel the warmth of the love within the family. Right up the alley from my house, was the Zion Lutheran Church, where the male child Scouts sold Christmas trees every year. Somehow they always had one too umteen and they would ask us to take it off their hands. My Father, brother, and I would sit for hours ever-changing light bulbs trying to find the one that was bad in the trace of lights from last year. After much frustration, we finally got them to work. Then we finally mat up like it was really Christmas and we promised each other that somehow next year, we would get new lights. Around 430 P.M., my brother and I would stop up the street to the Woolworth five and dim e store to buy our presents. thither were the oversized ties that nobody would ever wear and the hair pins that would sit in a drawer for years to come. But everybody was happy to receive the presents because a lot more went into buying them than just money.