Gifts were small, dinners were home-made, and oranges — imported Japanese Mandarin oranges — were a special treat, and time spent with family, neighbours and friends was the best part of Christmas, said seniors who spoke to the Langley Advance Times about the way it was celebrated, when they were young.
Sharon Fisher, 70, who grew up in Murrayville, remembers how her uncle Bill Poppy would have her family over to his farm.
She has fond memories of holiday dining at what is now the Poppy Estate Golf Course — which used to be the Poppy farm at 248th and Fraser Highway — “where the turkey would come from the turkey pen, all [the food was] homemade and cooked, and dinner was always at noon, because you had to milk cows in the evening.”
“Every community hall used to have a Christmas concert, a Christmas pageant where all the locals came and you got a little bag with a Japanese orange and a candy cane,” Fisher recalled. “Every Christmas there was an event where the whole community came together.”
Albert Anderson, 80, the “Al” in the Aldor Acres farm he founded in Langley with his wife Dorothy, remembers Mandarin oranges were a rare treat, a surefire sign of Christmas.
“The boxes had to be saved and the paper wrappers [around the individual oranges] had to be saved,” he laughed.
Presents “weren’t a big deal,” the youngest of five siblings recalled. “A pair of socks would be the new present and probably a new toque.”
Every year, his family would would cut cedar boughs two or three weeks before Christmas and sent them to relatives in the prairies.
“In exchange for the boughs, we’d get, probably, a sack of beat-up skates — ice skates — that got shipped the other way for us to skate on, on the odd pond,” Anderson smiled.
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Christmas was an opportunity to visit other families.
“We had a cattle truck with a box on the back and that was transportation [with passengers] in the back,” Anderson said.
Cards were a major source of entertainment, played with “two or three close families that mom and dad interacted with.”
“A lot of good memories,” Anderson summarized.
Lorraine Armstrong, 85, from Fort Langley, is a member of the Native Daughters of B.C., a group that works to collect and preserve information and relics related to the early history and subsequent development of British Columbia
Her own personal history includes fond memories of Christmas as young girl, walking with her older sister.
“We went two miles from our place down to Fort Langley hall, and we walked up those 23 steps, up to the Christmas tree and the Christmas concert,” Armstrong recounted.
“We all got a bag of candy and an orange.”
Not just any orange, but imported, easy-to-peel seedless Japanese Mandarin oranges that, back then, were only available around Christmas time.
“We only got them once a year, and you might get two out of a box,” she estimated. “We had a big family.”
One Christmas, a small amount of money went a long way for Armstrong and her six siblings (three brothers and three sisters).
“During the war years, nobody had much of anything, and one fellow who was a fish packer — my dad was a fisherman – he gave my dad $20 for us kids for Christmas, and [my parents] bought one little [kid-sized] rocking chair, and we had a turkey, we had Japanese oranges and we each got a pair of slippers, out of that $20.”
“We fought over the rocking chair, over whose turn it was,” Armstrong laughed.
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Have a story tip? Email: dan.ferguson@langleyadvancetimes.com
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