Merry Christmas & a Happy New Year 3 Marysburgh Memories by Tanya Huff Norman Ackerman of Royal Strest has already allowed the readers of the Mirror a glimpse into almost a century in South Marysburgh. This month he and his wife Edith (who was Edith McCornock) together share some of their Christmas memories. Mr. A: We generally had Christmas and sometimes New Years with my grandmother Ackerman's family, the Sloans. She had a sister that lived in Bethel and my Grandfather Sloan lived in Milford and sometimes they'd come to Milford and sometimes my grandmother and grandfather Sloan, my mother and father and |, we'd go out there. My mother was quite musical, she'd played the accordion and the back then hung up on the stem and they were picked off and sold that way. Even the steres in Milford had them on stems. And | think they kept better that way than they do the way they have them now. Anyway, my father would drive into the barn and when he got the horses unhitched he'd get this bag of bananas out of a box he'd built on the dashboard for parcels and give them to me. I'd startto the house with them and when | got there and handed the bag to my mother there was just nine bananas out of the dozen. I'd consumed three going from the barn to the house. Mrs. A: | always hung up my stocking. One year | wanted a ring awful bad; with a ruby in it, my birthstone. | mouth organ and the organ and so sometimes, when G0) 1, And of course there was always the orange all got together, they'd have sing songs. My grandfather would never have turkey ~~ for Christmas. He said he'd just as soon chew straw as eat turkey. We had goose, practically everybody did. You could get them most anywhere and alot of people raised their own geese. The turkeys that were grown in those days can't be compared with the turkeys that are grown today. What we've got today is what they call the full-breasted turkey and it's a lot different, I'll admit that. | Mrs. A: | had two sisters and a brother, and myself and we al- ways had my mother's parents -- my father's parents were dead -- and we never had a urkey either because, as you say, they didn't like them as well as ducks or a hen. Ea and the candy. Mostly, | got books. | liked to \._ readand | started when | could only read two \.. or three words in a line, words like and or the or of and it gradually grew until | could read them all. After that they always knew what to get me. I never liked dolls. | remember getting a doll, a beautiful doll, and | just set it on the dresser. | never played with it. | wanted a teddy bear. The first onel ever got, back when they first made teddy bears, was a little tiny thing about six inches long -- | don't know but | think she just paid a quarter for it --and | played with that untill wore the fur off it; made clothes for it and everything. I've had anumber of teddy bears since and the last one | got is still sitting upstairs on my dresser. They'd rather have a good fat capon. LY There were six of us and we boarded the school teacher and we had a hired man s0, you see, we always had quite a crowd anyway. Mr. A: | can remember my mother, she made a fruit cake. She started the first layer in a milk pan -- now a milk pan was about the same as a pail in diameter at the top and about six inches high -- then she'd get a second one for another layer and then another layer and another layer and the final one of about four inches. She'd mix it in the dish-pan and my father'd have to stir it up because it was too much for her. Mrs. A: She made one for us every year. Five tiers. | don't think anybody could make it any better. Mr. A: When | was a boy and | hung up stockings at Christmas, | hung up my big ones that went over the outside. You could get more in those. | always got the usual orange but my favorite fruit was bananas. | remem- ber when my father drew the cheese from the cheese factory every week and when he came home he'd stop and bring home a dozen bananas. They were sold in the stores fie Mr. A: My favorite Christmas present to get was a pair of skates. | could skate pretty near as soon as | could ~~ walk. There was aditch crossthe road in front here, it would freeze full of water and I'd got out and skate on it. That was before | ever went to school. | never skated on South Bay but when we moved to Milford in 1910, | spent a lot of time on the pond. | remember we went over to my great grandmother and grandfather Sloan's for Christmas and | took my skates, planning on going down and skating on the pond, and my grandfather Sloan didn't think | should skate on Christmas Day. They had a very religious view and it was the same thing that | shouldn't skate on Sunday -- and they lived right up by the millpond, the first house up. Infact, their lot practically went down to the pond. But! didn't skate that Christmas. My grandmother was quite a hand to knit. She knit me socks and mitts and toques. You generally had three or four pair every year of wool mittens. The men, they wore a wool mitten -- knit with what | think they calied botany yarn -- and then they bought a leather mitten that went over that. There was no lining in it, it was just a thin leather mitten but with the wool mitten in it and it was a lot warmer than a mitt you'd buy with the lining already in it.