Edmonds writer Bill Morton sent along this story to help readers remember the holiday spirit.

Christmas 1935, by Bill Morton

At age nine, in the summer of 1935, my step father (Steve) and my mother, took on the job of running a ranch, some 10 miles out of the city of Salmon, Idaho. It was owned by a British corporation and managed by Charlie Marshall. We were located on Bohanan Creek, one of the many that tumbled down from the row of ten thousand foot peaks of the Beaverhead Mountains. These formed the division between Idaho and Montana. This group of mountains also formed part of the continental divide running north and south where water ran either toward the west to the Pacific ocean, or east toward the Mississippi River and south to the Caribbean. Each of these many creeks had formed huge alluvial fans of sediment into what was then a huge lake in the valleys of the Salmon and Lemhi Rivers. Bohanan Creek had half a dozen ranches reaching up to the foothills and the timberline. Our house was covered on the outside with black tar paper, not very effective in keeping the cold wind outside. There were no inside walls, the 2 x 4 studs showing. Cracks seemed to invite the cold air into the house. A kitchen-living room held the cook stove and table. Two bedrooms were on either wide of the main room. A play place for me was a large, unused room where I could hang a rope from the rafters and skate round and round with my clamp-on roller skates. In the summer my bed occupied one corner, a good place for me to be isolated when I got a bad case of summer flu. My play yard was part of a wheat field with plenty of room to dig an underground “fort” or cool hide-away. The small branch of the main creek, down in a gully, provided a great place to practice dam building. Further down the same gully, Steve had found a small spring where he dug a hole big enough for me to frequently fill and carry buckets of water for drinking, cooking and bathing. Fortunately, bathing was accomplished in a round, galvanized metal tub with only about an inch of water.

Summer was great when others my age from neighboring ranches would gather at one of the large irrigation ditches for a swim. We found a cave that had been formed in a hill side of one wheat field from water runoff. We carved benches and shelves and pretended this was our gang’s hide out. It was a cool place in the summer.

Many years before this time, gold was discovered along Bohanan Creek and had been dredged in an operation called placer mining. Water was pumped with great force through hoses and nozzles to wash the soil and gravel through flumes and shakers to let the heavier flakes of gold drop to the bottom to be scooped out. What was left were ugly scars and piles of gravel but a fascinating place for me to explore, looking for gold. I never found any, but I did find some large deposits of clay to be formed into grotesque figures from my imagination.

Then summer was over and time for school to begin. This was a one room school containing grades one through eight. I was in the fourth grade with three others at the same level. My sister, Peggy, was in the eighth grade. Freddy Marshall, who lived with us during the winter, was in the second grade. His most fascinating feature were his long eyelashes. We had to walk 2 ½ miles to school each day, and during the coldest months temperatures hovered around 0 degrees. Frost would form on Freddy’s eyelashes by the time he got to school so we knew Jack Frost had followed us. I only had one pair of shoes, well worn tennis shoes. My mother wrapped gunny sack material around my feet and tied it all together. It protected my feet from the snow.

Christmas vacation came at last and we didn’t have to walk the long miles in the snow for a couple of weeks. That was something to celebrate. The best part of all was that Charlie Marshall and his wife invited us to his large log home and ranch for Christmas dinner. I had never seen so much food in English style. Turkey, ham, a variety of great vegetables, and to top it off, his wife had crafted the most delicious plum pudding cake. An old English tradition was to pour 151 proof brandy over the cake and ignite it. The flavor seemed to sink deeply into the heavenly concoction and I had more than one helping. At nine, my appetite was huge, but being super active, I could run off all that energy easily. Back home for Christmas morning, I received two wonderful gifts, a pair of heavy duty leather shoes and a book of David Copperfield. I slept with my shoes under the covers and re-read David Copperfield many times. Jack Frost visited us each night and I could hardly wait to see his art work on the windows each morning. They were beautiful, intricate and different each day.

Steve, having experience as a bachelor it some cold places, each night would whittle curly slivers of kindling, getting it ready for the wood fire the next morning. His chosen task was to get up before anyone else and build a hot, roaring fire in the wood cook stove. This is where we all huddled until the heat had found its way to the two bedrooms and we could get dressed for the day.

Our animals, pigs and a cow required attention that I did not always remember. It was my job to feed the pigs, but one night I forgot. I had already fallen into a deep sleep when Steve came to wake me up. “You forgot to feed the pigs, they are calling you!” Here in the middle of the cold, dark night, I had to get bundled up, go down 50 yards to the pig pen to feed them. They were delighted and grateful with their food. That was the last time I forgot them and they later paid me off with great pork chops, bacon and ham.

Christmas, 1935, cold as it was, is a delightful memory for me as a nine-year-old.