Where Christmas Is Christmas

R. Gordon Moyles is professor emeritus of English at the University of
Alberta. He is co-author of Imperial Dreams and Colonial Realities:
British Views of Canada, 1880–1914, author of The Salvation Army and
the Public, and editor of “Improved by Cult

What a strange title. Christmas is Christmas wherever it’s celebrated,
though the traditions may vary and the pleasures differ. What I expect
these editors mean is that, somehow, Christmas in Newfoundland has a
distinctiveness, a richness, a uniqueness that corresponds to the
uniqueness of the island’s society. And this they try to exemplify by
collecting and reprinting, about 35 poems, stories, reminiscences, and
descriptions of Newfoundland Christmas experiences and traditions. These
range from such 19th-century commentaries as Judge Prowse’s “Faction
Fights and Christmastide” and Sir Robert Thorburn’s “Christmas
Bells” to the more modern, and certainly more entertaining, memories
of Christmas recounted by Ron Pollett, Alice Lannon, Maurice Burke, and,
best of all, by Don Jamieson.

The collection is edifying and entertaining. Nevertheless, it would
have benefited from a explicative introduction and could certainly have
been better organized and edited. The main question that bothers me,
however, is this: why, if these editors wanted to show the distinctive
features of Christmas in Newfoundland, would they illustrate that
distinctiveness with old woodcuts from the Illustrated London News? So,
added to a very strange title is an inappropriate choice of
illustrations.