“If you aren’t good you might find nothing but a lump of coal in your stocking on Christmas morning,” my mother used to say when we were growing up.

I discovered later that we were the only kids in the neighborhood threatened with lumps of coal if we weren’t good at Christmas. Apparently, this was how kids in the region of Great Britain where my mother grew up were cajoled into keeping out of mischief. My mother came to Nova Scotia from Kent as a war bride in 1918 and she brought with her a few Christmas customs unheard of in our neighborhood.

For many years we received modest gifts from our parents on Boxing Day, for example. I was in my teens before I discovered that no one else around us observed the British custom of gift giving on Boxing Day.

Christmas dinner was a bit different at our house as well. Like most people in the 1940s, we usually enjoyed the traditional goose for Christmas dinner. This remained the custom in our house long after the goose dinner was replaced by the now ubiquitous turkey dinner. Christmas dinner was always held at midday and the dessert always was home cooked mincemeat pie. The mincemeat for the pie was homemade as well, many of the ingredients coming from our own garden. I don’t believe anyone makes mincemeat the way my mother used to, and I don’t think anyone would want to in this fat-conscious era. My arteries shudder when I remember all the suet that used to go into its making.

This is an aside, having nothing to do with our celebration of Christmas, but I must tell you that when the goose was being cooked, a lot of fat was rendered from it. The fat wasn’t wasted. Stored in jars after it cooled, it was later mixed with wintergreen oil or Minard’s liniment and used as a chest rub for colds. A chest rub was also made by mixing the goose fat with a juice obtained by boiling onions in water. In other words, memories of our Christmas dinner often lingered on through the winter.

Fruitcake was another Christmas staple at our house, and it was always served during a light evening meal on Christmas day evening. The fruitcake was homemade and was concocted from scratch. I recall that it was a dark, really heavy fruitcake and it always had almond flavored icing. You can buy dark fruitcake with almond icing today but it doesn’t compare to the homemade cakes that came out of our old woodstove oven.

Because my father was a hunter, we always had some kind of wild game meal around Christmas time. Usually it was venison, a roast or chops. If my father was successful and managed to bag a deer, some of the meat was used in preparing the mincemeat for the pies. I’m not sure if it’s a tradition or simply a way of making sure all of the deer was used, but the mincemeat was always made from neck meat. The meat from the neck was carefully preserved and set aside especially for the mincemeat.

Later, as my brothers and I learned to hunt, black duck, grouse, and rabbits were added to our holiday wild game dinners. Having a wild game dinner around Christmas time and especially at New Years was a family tradition, one many of us with hunters in the family still observe today.

This was our Christmas in the 1940s and 1950s and for the most part it’s celebrated the same way today. What has changed perhaps is the way Christmas is actively, almost aggressively promoted as an occasion to exchange gifts and never mind the real reasons for celebrating.

Gordon Hansford of Kentville, a retired schoolteacher, served in the RCEME, the Royal Canadian Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, during World War 2. Just before Christmas in 1945 Hansford was hospitalized in England with complications from pleurisy. While he was there, a German prisoner of war arrived at the ward he was in. This is Hansford’s tale of what occurred when word spread that an enemy soldier was being treated in the hospital along with Canadians.

The ward in the 24^th General Hospital at Horley in the south of England was in a state of unrest. It was the day before Christmas and the 30 Canadian servicemen in the ward, many of whom had been wounded in action, weren’t happy when they heard that the patient they’d just brought in was a German soldier; one that perhaps not that long ago had been shooting at them.

“Everyone wanted to know who he was when he was carried in on a stretcher with a head wound,” said Gordon Hansford. “We were curious. We figured he might be from one of our own units and we could catch up on the news. We asked a nurse what Canadian outfit the new arrival was from and she said he was a German soldier. He had been in a prisoner of war camp but his wound gave him trouble, she said, so they brought him here.

“Nobody was pleased to hear that. Some of the Canadians in the ward were really angry. Let’s face it. There were men there from the North Nova Scotia Highlanders; some of their compatriots had been murdered by the 12th SS, and there were a lot of bad feelings towards the Germans.”

There was still tension in the ward on Christmas Eve, Hansford recalls, but the next day when he took out a flute he had been carrying around everything changed. “Since it was Christmas Day we had a nice dinner. After dinner, everybody sang and I played along with my flute.”

Without thinking about it, Hansford decided to play a traditional German Christmas song, O Tannenbaum. As the notes wafted through the hospital ward, the German soldier sat up in bed and started to sing in his native language. “He had a wonderful voice and it brought a hush to the ward. Then I played Silent Night and he sang the words to it in German. Everybody in the ward including the nurses joined in the singing. At the conclusion of this song we all clapped.

“Then this big Sergeant from the North Novies got up from his bed and limped over to the German soldier. The Sergeant was in bad shape but he made it to the soldier’s bed and placed a chocolate bar on his bunk. ‘Merry Christmas, Jerry,’ he said, ‘We’re glad that you’re here.’

“At that, everybody who could get out of bed went over to the soldier’s bunk and gave him something, gum, cigarettes, things like that. Everyone shook hands with him and wished him a Merry Christmas, some of them attempting to say it in German.”

Hansford can still see the German soldier sitting upright in his bed, his blanket covered with gifts, tears running down his face. In a poem he later wrote, Hansford said, “I knew then that a feeling of peace and good will to all men was there in that ward on Christmas Day in 1945.”

Find a longtime waterfowl hunter and sometimes you’ll find a person interested in local history, especially history of the dykes, and the old aboiteaux. This may seem unusual when you think about it. But waterfowlers generally spend a lot of time on the dykes and it isn’t unusual for some of them to collect dykeland lore and history.

One of the finest waterfowlers I ever met knew the history of much of the Canard dykes; why the various dyke sections were so named, for example, where the old Acadian aboiteaux and dykes were once located, and historical tidbits of this sort. The old waterfowler, now long deceased, used to say that “knowing some dyke history rounded out my hunting.” He was like a many of the older generation of waterfowlers that were around when I first started to hunt. They knew the dykes like the backs of their hands, to use an old but suitable cliché.

I often duck hunt down the Dewey Creek below the old Dewey Bridge. This is in Canard and the creek or brook is a tributary of the Canard River. The bridge can be found on an old section (now a farm road) of what was the main highway until roughly 70 years ago when the road was straightened. I was curious over how the bridge and brook connected with the Dewey surname – a surname not that common in Kings County – and I asked the old waterfowler who this Dewey was.

A couple of the Deweys came here with the Planters, maybe a bit later that the original grantees,” the old waterfowler said. “They’re a mystery. It seems they didn’t stay around that long and I don’t know what happened to them. I think their homestead was near the head of Dewey Creek.”

The “head of Dewey Creek” could be a mile or two away from where the creek crosses under the highway just below a poultry plant. The creek makes up in wetlands east of the Canning to Port Williams highway, a distance of several miles from the Dewy Creek bridge. Pinpointing the Dewey homestead, if there ever was one, would be difficult since it could be anywhere along the creek.

Anyway, the location of the homestead wasn’t of interest to me. How Dewey Creek came to be named was and the old waterfowler had provided the answer. “Look in your history books if you want to know more about Dewey Creek,” he added.

Dewey Creek in the history books? The old man was right. In his history of Kings County, A. W. H. Eaton devotes nearly a page to the Dewey family. Eaton says that one Moses Dewey received a grant in Cornwallis in 1764 and settled there for a time.

There’s no Dewey mystery, however. Moses Dewey simply must have given up his grant and moved out of Kings County, or out of the province. “For many years the Dewey name has hardly been known in Nova Scotia,” says A. W. H. Eaton. He quotes a historian he names as Dr. Brechin: “All that remains (in Cornwallis) of this family is the name of a small stream called Dewey Creek, on the place where Mr. Simpkins Walton lived.”

Now if my old waterfowler friend were still around I’d ask him where the Walton homestead was located. I’m sure he knew.

In earlier times, the crossroads where Canard Street (Route 341) is crossed by the Port Williams to Canning highway (Route 358) was known as Hamilton’s Corner. Arthur Wentworth Hamilton Eaton in his Kings County history writes that this was the local name for the crossroads.

However, Malcolm (Mac) Eaton, a farmer whose family has owned the house on the northwest corner of the crossroads since 1919, tells me he and others in the area often refer to the crossroads as Canard Corner. Relatively few people – and most of them are history buffs – know that the crossroads was once called Hamilton’s Corner. Canard Corner seems more appropriate but it never caught on. Instead, the crossroads is known locally by another name, and a colorful one at that, for a set of whale jawbones that once rested in what is now Mac Eaton’s driveway.

Most local people know how Jawbone Corner got its name, but few know the details. Even fewer people know that the corner was once the commercial center of the area. Like most crossroads in the county, the corner attracted local industry, holding a postal station, a blacksmith and carpenter shop, and a factory that made sleds and wagons. Also, a carding mill once operated nearby on the Canard River. A medical practice was situated there as well, conducted by the gentleman after whom the corner was named, Dr. Charles Cottnam Hamilton.

I got this information from Mac Eaton who told me about the blacksmith shop and factory when we were talking recently about the history of Jawbone Corner. Mac said the equipment in the factory was operated by horsepower. Not the kind of horsepower generated by engines but actual horses that were harnessed to a turntable. Mac remembers seeing the grooves ground into the floor of the factory by the constant circular motion of the horses as they moved the turntable.

Mac told me as well that the whale of jawbone fame was stranded on the Canard River just above the highway that runs between Port Williams and Canning. The jawbones were placed on either side of what is now the Eaton driveway and rested there for decades before ending up at a residence on Church Street. This incident occurred when the Minas Basin tides were unrestricted and ran well up the Canard River; this would be before the Wellington Dyke was completed in 1825.

When I was talking with Mac Eaton about Jawbone Corner he gave me a tour of his house. Built in the early 1800s, the house was purchased in 1835 by Dr. Charles Cottnam Hamilton. Mac showed me the area in his house where Dr. Hamilton had his practice from 1825 until 1880. Mac’s grandfather, Charles Cottnam Hamilton Eaton (who was named after Dr. Hamilton) purchased the property in 1919.

The area around Jawbone Corner apparently was once part of a major Acadian settlement. Jawbone Corner was the junction of two main travels ways between Acadian villages north and south of Canard. The Corner is historically significant but this has never been recognized.