The following is an excerpt from a delightful little monologue written by Howard Engel for CBC Radio, now a lovely little book published by Key Porter Books and illustrated by Bill Slavin.

“Whenever I remember Christmas as a child in Scarborough, I can never remember whether the slush was new or old, or whether we lived on the sixth street north of the shopping plaza stoplights and I was seven years old, or whether it was the seventh street and I was six. But still my nose and fingertips tingle at the thought of Christmas in the row housing, whose names rang their challenging, forlorn ways down to the fast-backed, nerve-and gear-racking lanes of the freeway: Elegance Manors, Tweedingham Mews, Buckingham Back Courts.

“And I am again a boy among boys, riding our crash-barred, chrome-bedazzling bikes through the supermarket swing-doors, grabbing girls’ tuques and popsicles in the Mac’s Milk and diving with our arms spread to make angels in the snowbanks that the plows churned up, plunging our hands to the soggy, stitch-straining armpits…

“And clear as the chlorinated water in the taps, but not so clear as a secret rivulet in the snows that we boys found near the highway that was gone in the spring when the hill was cleared for a condominium, I see Uncle Harry turning away the Salvation Army girl at the door and his making us all laugh as she fell on the path, on the ice I should have chipped away.

“Christmas in Scarborough was nothing if it was not families and laughter. But before the compacts and the late-models and the single sports car owned by Aunt Hetty, the divorcee, who bought the Fugs record, before the hordes of uncles and aunts and cousins jousted for a parking spot and the superintendent appeared to ask us to remove a car that been parked in someone else’s spot, there were the presents that smothered Father’s absence due to overtime, and Mother’s voice raised in the kitchen downstairs while the supper held in the stove at low heat congealed…

“And then it was afternoon: all the cousins, friends of friends, who had been stuffed into spare rooms and cautioned to nap because they had stayed up all night in candy-caned anticipation of catching Santa and delayed for a day his return to the department store throne, were awakened and sent off into the streets…

“Then Father phoned from Number 41 Station to say that he had been in the egg nog again, and that he would be detained, and Mother drank the cooking sherry, and the turkey went unbasted.

Then Uncle Frank, who had been a stockbroker and then a convict, tried again to dance the Windfall of ’65 and fell through the picture window.

Then the neighbors knocked on our wall and we knocked on the neighbors’ wall and then the police came.”

(Howard Engel – A Child’s Christmas in Scarborough)

Beautiful – and real. Happy Christmas to all and to all a good night!