Growing up in Riske Creek, Williams Lake senior Loren Buckle remembers Christmas being his mom’s favourite time of the year.
“We weren’t poor, but we didn’t have extra cash to throw around, yet Christmas was special for mom.”
The Buckles’ home in Riske Creek was about eight kilometres west of the Chilcotin Lodge.
His mom June Durrell of the Wineglass Ranch had married his father Bert Buckle in 1946.
They had four children - Donna, Gordon, Loren and Diane.
Leading up to the season, June would save her money and then go on a baking frenzy making cookies, tarts, Christmas cakes and puddings.
With only a wood stove to bake in, keeping the temperature even was always a problem.
“We’d help her line the cake tins and get to lick the spoon and all of that stuff,” Loren recalled.
One of the biggest highlights for the Buckle children was in November when the Sears and Eaton’s Christmas catalogues arrived in the mail.
“I’m sure they were pretty tattered by the time mom ordered anything,” Loren said.
On Christmas morning there were always chores to do, yet the children were allowed to open their stockings and one gift before they headed outside to milk cows and feed chickens.
Inside the stocking there would be a Japanese orange, peanuts, a candy or two and one little gift like a Tonka toy or something.
After their chores were done, they would open up the rest of their presents, including one from Santa.
A live Christmas tree was the norm, with garland, Christmas balls, plus an angel on top.
Without electricity, however, their Christmas tree never had lights.
June would not use candles because her parents’ house had burned down from a candle back in the 1940s.
Loren can still remember the first time he saw Christmas lights on a tree.
He was two-and-half-years old.
His mom was in the hospital four months after his youngest sister was born so Bert took the children to visit their uncle Jack Durrell at the Wingelass Ranch two days before Christmas.
Bert loaded up the children on a tractor, tucking them into bales of hay to keep them warm.
Wineglass Ranch was about 10 miles south of the Chilcotin Highway.
Jack was one of the first people to get a generator, Loren said.
“We came into the house and the tree was all lit up. My sisters don’t think I could remember it because I was so young, but I can still see it in my mind today.”
Bert was killed in 1959 in an accident and June later remarried a widower named John Klassen who had three children and they became a blended family.
Winters in the Chilcotin were cold when Loren was growing up.
“Our house wasn’t the best insulation-wise. The insulation was sawdust and we had single pane windows.”
His mom would get up to make sure the two wood stoves were burning, but he remembers every once in awhile she’d sleep through and they would wake up in the morning freezing “half to death,” and the water bucket would be frozen inside the house.
There was no indoor plumbing or running water.
“The joke was running water meant running to the creek to get it,” he said, smiling.
A terribly, terribly, cold winter was in 1968/69, when it was -53.89 C in Riske Creek, and even colder at Puntzi.
“Mom had just graduated from a wood stove to an oil propane heater and the oil gelled.”
They ended up moving into a cabin on their property that had an airtight heater and they stuffed it with wood to keep warm.
When his parents learned Chiwid, for whom the Cariboo Friendship Society women’s shelter is named, was living outside four or five miles up the road from them, June decided to make her some food.
“Chiwid had her dog, horse, bedroll and gun for hunting on her,” Loren said. “It was bitterly cold and she’d built herself a shelter from pine boughs and stuff, but my mother, when she heard this, cooked up turkey soup and a stew, canned up some tea and coffee.”
Loren and his stepfather John set out to take some things to Chiwid.
Chiwid was a little leery at first until she realized they were there to help her, he said.
As a child Lorne attended Bald Mountain School from Grade 1 to 7, which was only about a kilometre from their home.
The school was heated with oil.
“There was a couple of times when the oil stove kind of backfired and the school would be closed for a day or two until they got if fixed and cleaned the school, but that didn’t happen very often,” he said.
With one whole wall of windows the school room got lots of light during the day and the heat from the sun added warmth.
In the winter, the students would go sledding, make snow angels and forts. Once in awhile there would be fluctuating in the weather resulting in freezing rain.
The snow would get a crust on it and the children could walk on top of it without falling through, something he remembers fondly.
Every year the community club, located where the Riske Creek rodeo grounds are today, would host a community Christmas concert.
Students from Bald Mountain School and Riske Creek School participated.
One year Loren was the narrator for his school’s performance of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
Following in his mom’s footsteps, Buckle loves to bake Christmas cakes, peanut butter cookies, cherry tarts and mincemeat tarts.
“You cannot have Christmas without mincemeat,” he said.
He has tweaked his mom’s Christmas cake recipe a bit because he does not care for candied cherries, citrus peel and dried pineapple, so he does not use them.
Instead he adds three different types of raisins, currants and three different types of nuts.
All of the fruit is soaked in Lamb’s Navy rum beforehand.
After the cakes are out of the oven he lets them sit overnight, soaks them in the rum again, puts them in tins and lets them sit for six weeks before Christmas.
“Mom always made sure she got a bottle of Lamb’s Navy for cakes and cookies at Christmas time,” he said.
His favourite way to eat a slice is with a cup of coffee, usually a week before Christmas to taste test it.
Most of his Christmas cakes he gives away to family and friends.
“I love baking and hate cooking,” he admitted.
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