I met a man on a bus one snowy day. He told me a wonderful story. As we sat looking out the window, he told me how glittery snow always took him back to the Christmas he turned nine.
His name was André. He was born in 1946, the tenth of fourteen children on a Quebec farm. He was less than a year younger than his brother and best friend, Guy. He and Guy did everything together. They shared chores, clothes, and a bed.
They also shared a dream.
The family lived on a farm at the end of a country road that was never plowed. When the snow came each winter, the only mode of transportation, other than walking, was by horse and sleigh. Every Christmas there was a candlelight service at the local church. So if the family was going, they could only go by sleigh.
The sleigh didn’t have enough seats for all the family. For the candlelight service, the youngest children would ride on the floor of the sleigh, snuggled close to the warm bricks that were placed under everyone’s feet and covered with bearskin rugs. The oldest two boys took turns riding up front with their dad, helping with the team. Everyone else crowded onto the seats with their mother. Everyone except two boys. Every Christmas two boys were chosen to ride on the runners of the sleigh, holding on to the rope their father had tied back there.
Being chosen to ride on the runners was a rite of passage. There were rules. You had to be eight or older, and you had to be able to reach the rope comfortably.
André was a small child. So he continued to ride in the sleigh for two Christmases while Guy rode the runners. As the Christmas after his ninth birthday approached, he and Guy had anxious conversations about whether this would be the year they’d get to ride the runners together.
Christmas Eve dinner dragged that year as they awaited their father’s customary post-dinner seating plan announcement. When he finally made the announcement, they couldn’t believe it: their wish had come true. They would be riding the runners together!
It seemed to take forever for their father and brothers to get the team ready and even longer for the bricks and bearskin rugs to warm by the wood stove. Finally the grand moment arrived.
André told me the memory of that night still brings him joy. There was a full moon, he said, and the new snow on the trees and fields glistened like diamonds. The bells on the horses’ harnesses jingled with every step. Sitting beside me on that bus, André chuckled at the memory of his mother’s silhouette appearing over the back of the sleigh. “Ça va bien?” she asked them again and again.
Guy and André rode the runners for the next two Christmases, until Guy was promoted to the driver’s seat and André became big brother to the next boy in line.
Every year at this time, I think of my bus ride with André, and of the sleigh ride he took so many years ago: those two little boys, their eyes twinkling like diamonds under the full moon. Their giggles echoing in my heart all these years later.
It’s his story, but as the years pass, his memory of that sleigh ride has slowly become one of my favourite Christmas memories, although it doesn’t belong to me at all.
Bedford, Nova Scotia