Here Comes Santa

I think I believed in Santa a lot longer than most kids in North America. When I was little, Santa, or Joulu Pukki, came to the house and distributed the gifts. We kids, often, would dance with Santa in a ring around the Christmas tree, our red felt slippers flashing in the light. When I was four or five years old, I can remember the candles on the tree, no electric lights back then. A small candle sat in a holder which clipped to a branch on the tree. Needless to say, the candles were only lit when people were going to remain in the room.

Santa came in person less frequently when we moved to Canada and as I got older, he stopped coming in person altogether. He still came on Christmas Eve, after dinner. All of us kids couldn't sit still through a long dinner in anticipation of what was to come. The personal appearance, now that the world population was in the billions, was relegated to a huge thump on the porch where we would find wrapped presents in a sack amid bikes and sleighs and what-have-you.

My sister's kids in California were still treated to the thump on the porch and one of my enduring memories is little Steve jumping up and down saying, "My wagon, my wagon", when we opened the door. By the time my own kids came along, presents appeared under the Christmas tree. Presents from friends and family far away piled up under the tree right away but Santa still left presents and filled up stockings while everybody was asleep on Christmas morning.

In our house, Christmas was celebrated with the Finnish side of the family on Christmas Eve and some presents were opened after dinner. Then the stockings and the balance of what was under the tree was opened on Christmas day. This way, the excitement was spread out over two days. So was the food. We now enjoyed a feast on Christmas Eve as well as Christmas day. This bi-lingual Christmas was good.

Christmas dinners also changed when we came to Canada. In Finland, the Christmas specialty was lipee kala (lutefisk in Sweden) or a dried cod that had been preserved in wooden barrels of lye. The fish, of course, had to be soaked to remove the lye and the house just smelled dreadful. When the fish was cooked, it became quite transparent and was then covered with a white sauce with chopped hard boiled egg. The first course was usually boiled potatoes with pickled herring. Then the lipee kala with boiled potatoes and often a Christmas salad of finely cubed, cooked beets, potatoes, and carrots topped with whipped cream (coloured purple by beet juice) and yes, herring, and casseroles of cooked turnips or parsnips. The Christmas kitchen was often pungent with fish and turnips cooking. Dessert was often a prune dessert (boiled prunes in a thickened juice) topped again with whipped cream. The rest of the evening was full of open faced rye bread with cucumber or salt salmon or canned salmon salad. After Santa came, a meat pie would be brought out and served with consommé and often with mulled wine. Of course, coffee was served with a variety of breads, cookies and pastries. The Christmas alcohol in our house was a Finnish martini - vodka, red vermouth, and a splash of seven-up. Nowadays, we often substitute cranberry juice for the Vermouth.

The main change in Canada was that we wholeheartedly accepted turkey over the lipee kala. Mom tried once or twice to serve the fish, because it could still be bought from a Scandinavian delicatessen in New Westminster, but it met such stiff resistance that she gave up and the turkey was here to stay. Most of the other foods we kept and they still get served up in my home, even if my sister and I are the only ones to touch the herring.

Cars I Have Known

The first car that I was really aware of, other than the custom-made pedal car with the Austin hood ornament, was a 1938 Chevrolet sedan that dad ran as a cab in Finland. It had a floor shift and since it was in Europe it had those little arms that flipped out of the post between front and rear doors to indicate in which direction you were turning. The actuator switch was right in the middle of the dash, up toward the split windshield. Dad had an odd quirk of running his finger around that black bakelite switch to wipe the dust off every time that he used it. I'm surprised that he didn't wear it right out. Cab drivers in Finland in the postwar years wore uniforms. It started with a hat with a black brim. Grey jacket and grey pants that tucked into black knee-high boots. Yowser. In the winter dad had a leather suit with sheeps' fleece on the inside, the kind that bomber crews wore in the war. I still have the gauntlets from that suit.

Mom got her driver's license with that '38 Chevy which was fairly rare for women in those days. My sister and I would stand on the front seat, no seat belts then, ready to do a header to the floor if the brakes were hit. We had a summer place out in the country and for some reason dad was not along so mom drove with us three kids and my aunt from Kotka and her son. On the way home mom failed to disengage the parking brake fully so the drums heated enough to expand so that when we got to town, there were no brakes. It was quite exciting as we coasted through a busy intersection of five streets with street cars coming from two of them.

The next car was in Canada, a 1929 Chevy coupe with a rumble seat. We kids sat on a wooden seat behind the front seat so we were out of the weather. This Chevy had after-market turn signals. The actuator was clamped to the steering column and had a little rubber wheel that rode on the hub of the steering wheel to click it off when you straightened out. The lights on the front had those eye-brow covers over the top. Prior to these after-market lights, you had to stick your arm out of the window in all weathers to show in which direction you were turning. In those days dad was driving truck hauling peat moss from Burn's Bog. The truck was a 2 ton bull-nose GMC like this but with a big canvas covered bed. In those days a 2 ton truck often carried ten tons. I got to spend a

day with  him in this truck when grade one was out for some reason.

When we moved from the flats by the Patullo Bridge to Coquitlam around 1954, the '29 Chevy was traded for a 1938 Hudson Terraplane sedan. Now there was a roomy back seat with swinging grab loops on the rear door posts and padded line that went from one side of the front seat-back to the other, to help rear seat passengers to get up from the plush luxury, and out of the suicide rear doors. What I remember most about that wine coloured Hudson is pushing it up Blue Mountain Road in the winter when the worn tires didn't have a lot of grip in the snow. Often mom and the kids were in the back for ballast and on one snowy evening, the car went up the hill backwards.

I guess that dad thought the Hudson ok because he traded that one in for a 1941 Hudson Commodore around 1956 when we moved onto a couple of acres at the end of Austin Avenue. It was like its predecessor, plush in the back seat with hand loops and I think it even had a little flower vase on the door post. It must have died because it was still in the back yard two cars later and we kids would play in it. Finally a scrap dealer came to get it & dad got 10 bucks. Now you have to pay to have them hauled away.

The next car to come home was a 1947 Chevrolet Fleet Master sedan. Two tone, wine and tan. Yowser. We had a really long driveway and that's where I learned to drive, taking that '47 back and forth up the rocky, potholed drive. The Chevy was followed by a 1947 Studebaker Champion, blue, which later became mine in around 1959 when I was 14 years old. I was supposed to tear the Studebaker apart and learn how it worked, instead I drove it on the back roads until I had to start stealing gas so off it went to the wreckers too. Yep, 10 bucks.

The reason that the '47 Studebaker trickled down to me was that dad had bought a 1956 Chevy wagon, pale green. Wowie. A three year old car after all the relics that we had. The wagon was plain, with plastic seats, but it was great right from its tail light hidden fuel filler to its eagle beaked hood ornament. Power steering was just then becoming an option only so these Chevies had a very large, 18 or 20 inch, steering wheel. After 1959 or 1960, power steering became standard and wheel size started to get smaller. The Chevy became a workhorse around our place as we started putting up houses on that couple of acres. I remember times coming from the lumber yard down on Schoolhouse Road and the front wheels barely touching ground because we were so loaded at the rear. That '56 Chevy took us to New York and back in 1962 and when dad was ready to move to a '62 Chevy Belair in  1963, the old '56 hung around the yard until my sister Satu and her husband Howard were ready to use it.

In the early 1960's, loggers would still come to Vancouver, drink and party their pay cheques and head back into the bush broke. That is how dad got the 1962 Chevy in 1963. The logger was holed up at the then newest hotel in Vancouver, the Bayshore Inn, and needed money. He had bought the Belair brand new but because he used it up north and that model had very deep foot wells, the logger had punched holes in the floor to let the water out. I never did know how dad heard about the car being for sale (no Face Book in them thar days) but he paid $700 for a car that was worth $2400. In those days there was a Motor Vehicle Branch right across Georgia Street from the Bayshore and when dad went to register the vehicle, they thought he was trying to wiggle out of paying sales tax by stating such a low purchase price. Dad had to go back to the Bayshore and drag the logger over to verify the price. He kept the car for a few years and then traded it in on a 1965 Chevrolet Biscayne.

By the time the Biscayne arrived, I already had my own wheels but was still living at home. That winter we drove to California to spend christmas with my older sister and her family. To my shame I managed to smack up dad's new car. I was tooling along too fast on rain damp El Camino Real in Palo Alto and another car made a left hand turn from the other direction across my lane. I almost came to a stop without hitting but did crunch the puny bumper and a bit of the bodywork in front of the hood. We fixed it up ourselves back home, good as new. My own cars were small so it was great to borrow the Biscayne to cruise Vancouver or go on a date. It was almost six feet inside from door to door. Yowser.

Decades

It's interesting how one's life seems to be defined in decades. I was born in the middle of a decade so I get to decide whether to slide back five years or to leap ahead at some convenient point. What I remember of the 1940's can really be compressed into a handful of glimpses, some a little hazier than others. The 1950's are really a jumble of moving and school. Moving and changing continents, cities, languages, houses and progressing, more or less, through a variety of schools. The 1960's though is where life started to get interesting.

The 1960's defined a confidence and competence in many things. High school was zooming  to an end with a scholarship in football to SFU. Early in the decade, I learned to drive - fast. I was competent to build a house, build a boat, work with men in manly jobs. And the sixties was such a great time for emerging from the cocoon of parents and school - rock and roll. The Righteous Brothers came to town and Aretha Franklin. Elvis came and then the Beatles. In the US, black Americans marched for human rights. In the late '60s, folksingers came to coffee houses and started to set the stage for the folksingers of the '70s.

There was a decade within a decade, 1965-1975, that was defined by the Vietnam War. To Canadians it was a war whereas across the line it was a police action. In Canada we first saw American involvement in the pages of the National Geographic where advisors were helping the South Vietnamese. This soon escalated to fighting troops being sent over, and not just from the US, Canadians and Australians were to be found there as well but more as adventurers than representatives of their countries. It really wasn't until the end of the '60s, 1968 and 1969, that youth started to protest the war as immoral and young men began to evade the draft by coming to Canada. And flower power started in the late sixties. I saw Hair in 1969 in San Francisco and lots of hair in Haight-Ashbury. I met a young guy with a back pack on a tram in downtown San Francisco who later showed up at the Canadian border with my name as a reference.

The 1970's was the decade of my generation but it started in deadly ernest when in May four student protesters were killed by the National Guard at Kent State. Imagine, student protesters killed for practicing free speech. Universities closed across the country as students protested. Canadians travelled to Washington, DC to protest as well. Nevertheless, huge optimism reigned. Canada had a young, intelligent Prime Minister in Pierre Trudeau, who married a girl from my generation and from my university. The hippie movement, and it was a movement more than a fashion because deep philosophical and spiritual ideas from previous generations were found wanting and were tossed aside, spread rapidly around North America and the world. The baby boomer generation had arrived.

The decade of the baby boomers reaching adulthood was not without difficulties. An immoral (to this generation) war was still in full force. Over 58,000 young Americans and  millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Lao would ultimately perish. The previous generations had difficulty understanding hair, bell bottoms, patches, protests, anti-government, anti-big business, flower power, free love, sit-ins, be-ins, love-ins, pot, grass, weed, LSD, and media is the message. In spite of the inevitable clashes with parents, government, police and generally any authority, the 1970's was a time of unbounded optimism. This was a time of back to the land; Greenpeace; ban the bomb; when the revolution comes; M.A.S.H.; The Waltons; Joni Mitchell; Joan Biaz; Bob Dylan; Maria Muldaur; Carole King and James Taylor; Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young; Simon & Garfunkle. This was also the time of Jim Morrison, Hendrix, Jim Croce, and Janis Joplin. There were the Smothers Brothers; Laugh-in with Goldi Hawn; the Band and Pink Floyd. Anything was possible and we really could do anything.

The decade of the '70s, however, ended with nary a whimper. Long hair had become collar length to match the business suits. Free love had become taking care of the kids. The following decades, 1980's, 1990's, 2000's belonged to other generations. Oh yes, the boomers still affected the tide of affairs in North America but they were no longer a movement. They were all too busy making ends meet. Big business and big banks took over. Now, in 2011, when Occupy Wall Street could use the energy of that whole generation of boomers, where are they? If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem.