A Cowboy Christmas: Celebrating the Season on Ranch and Range

David E. Kemp, a former professor of drama at Queen’s University, is
the author of The Pleasures and Treasures of the United Kingdom.

Whether riding the range under a fierce Texan sun, surviving a British
Columbia blizzard, stranded in isolated tented camps or in remote
snowed-in log cabins, the cowboys we get to know in this attractively
produced compilation of stories, poems, and recipes join (sometimes
reluctantly) in a celebration of Christmas.

There are stories and remembrances by such well-known figures such as
Roy Rogers, Andy Russell, and Paul St. Pierre, as well as tales from
little-known and anonymous sources. If there is an overriding theme, it
is the idea of rugged and often lonely men overcoming boredom,
privation, and even the forces of law and order to spend Christmas with
friends in a spirit of kinship and humanity. Especially memorable is the
image of a young boy whittling little objects from wood for his
impoverished family and joining with them to make simple tree ornaments
of paper; the boy, it turns out, is Roy Rogers, the future King of
Cowboys and a legend of our time.