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Home for the Holidays: Cowboy Christmas

Home for the Holidays:
Cowboy Christmas

By Henri Marchand

“The memories of childhood have no order, and no end,” wrote Dylan Thomas in Reminiscences of Childhood.  A popular holiday song claims that, “there’s no place like home for the holidays.”  These lines come to mind as my family prepares to celebrate Christmas, 2020.

We cannot see nor can we celebrate Christmases yet to come but even as we create new Yuletide traditions and experiences, we easily recall and readily share stories with family members and invite the comforting spirits of Christmases past to adorn another Christmas season.  In so doing we gift pieces of family history to our children and grandchildren and family members yet to come.

House exterior – 2018

Since 1975, my wife and I have celebrated Christmas in several homes, for the first five years by ourselves, later with our children and grandchildren.  We spent the latter part of each Christmas day at what we considered the extended family home where I grew up.  We returned regularly to celebrate not only Christmas but other holidays, birthday, graduation and special theme parties, and weddings.

Three generations of my family lived under one roof, creating moments and memories tied to the space and structure, giving our home something like a soul if that can be said for a house.  Over the years, the house, a large, roomy Colonial Victorian, sheltered our nuclear family that included Memère Brouillard and Aunt Rose.  Tech students rented two rooms from September to May and relatives visiting from Quebec, usually when an elderly aunt or uncle passed away, stayed with us.

Prior to my parents purchasing the house at 118 Riverside Street in 1953, five other families called it home.  The house was built in 1896 by George C. Osgood, a doctor and apothecary who bought the lot in 1891 from the estate of Ezra B. Welch.  Welch acquired the land and earlier buildings from a family named Pierce when the area was still farmland.  The gnarly remnants of an apple orchard held out in our neighbors’ back yards in the 1960s.  Osgood and his wife Louisa had three children—John, Harry and Mary.  They called the house home until June of 1903 when they sold it to Louis Olney, a Textile School professor of dyeing technology.  Olney and his wife Bertha also had three children—Edna, Margaret and Richard.  They reportedly kept a pet monkey and a goat.

I picture the Osgoods and the Olneys celebrating the holidays in their own times, in more formal attire and the home’s more formal furnishings, navigating heavy snowfalls and the still thinly developed area in sleds and sleighs.  Recently posted photos on Facebook capture Riverside Street across from the Osgood’s home on February 1, 1898.   The view is towards Moody Street (now University Avenue), the sky is cloudy, the ground covered in deep snow and there are only three homes all along that side.  Young trees, presumably elms line the street and the street light is a gas lit Victorian.  A woman poses on the front porch of the gambrel house overlooking the Merrimack River.  A child, half obscured by snow, plays in the yard.  Some fifty to sixty years later that would be my siblings and our neighborhood friends.

There were three other, short-term owners after Louis and Bertha Olney died in an automobile accident in 1949 and before my parents moved in when I was two weeks old.  It was a large home and over the years my parents filled it with eight children—Monique, Gerard, Henri, Andre, Louise, Rene, Paul and Anne Marie.  It became the place where our extended family gathered for informal visits and for holiday celebrations.  And where childhood memories were created and where they reside still.

An early memory is of watching Mom and Memère prepare special meals, bake pies and cakes, and fry doughnuts.  An incentive to behave as we observed was the promise of raw pie dough and cake batter treats.  We each took turns visiting Memère and Aunt Rose who lived upstairs in an in-law suite created by a previous owner in 1952.  They were my parents’ live-in child support and we happily joined them for lunches and seemingly endless games of cards, checkers and Parcheesi.

Halloween was a memorable season as the home lent itself to our imaginations and to the telling of ghost stories with its long hallways, nook stairwells, connecting rooms and passageways and the not-so-secret, secret room in the library Olney added in 1922.  My Dad had a flair for embellishing stories whether fact or fiction.  He claimed that the Olney’s pet monkey was buried somewhere in the yard or beneath the basement floor; that ghosts wandered the halls and resided in the secret room; that a squirrel who camped out under the hood of his car dashed out clean-shaven one morning after he turned the ignition.  He spun tall tales of treasure hidden within the walls and in as-yet-undiscovered secret spaces.  The storytelling tendency was inherited by at least one family member.  My sister Monique, not one given to lying, to this day swears that she saw Dad chatting and shaking hands with Santa Claus one Christmas Eve.  She recalls her memory in fine detail, insisting that she heard the sound of bells as Santa flew up the chimney.

It is Christmastime that evokes the most vivid of home connected memories, with tinseled, Charlie Brown trees strung with colored lights, yuletide aromas of baking pastries, roasting turkeys and C7 bulb warmed balsam scents.  There were white Christmases and bare lawn Christmases, rainy Christmases and warm ones, but in my selective, disordered memory they all appear white.  There remains, stored in boxes, unsorted collections of black and white snapshots of our earliest holidays and color prints of later ones, some dated, some not, so that attaching an exact year to each memory is difficult and perhaps wholly beside the point.  Nor is the memory of a particular holiday tied to the gifts received—Popeye Colorforms one year, a Boxer dog model another, and a visible man model later when I had expressed interest in becoming a doctor.  But try as I might I could not figure out what organ went where and the patient was never made whole.  Whatever the gifts, it is the memories that endure and give added richness and meaning to our family’s ongoing celebrations and the requisite disputations of dates and names and whose memories testify to the official record.

Colorforms

One Christmas in particular stands out, Cowboy Christmas, as my older brother Gerry and I came to call it.  We were six and seven years old, our younger brother Andy five.  The parlor that year was in what we later determined to have been Olney’s waiting room outside his library.  The tree was another beautifully scrawny and heavily tinseled, glass adorned specimen.  Gerry, Andy and I received cowboy hats, holsters with guns, faux leather gloves, a banjo and a ukulele.  In memory, we also received matching homemade flannel shirts that year to complete the singing cowpoke look but the memory is disordered, like the photos stored in shoe boxes.  In recently unearthed black and white glossies, we pose proudly, ready to gallop off on our imaginary steeds not in flannel but in long-sleeved jerseys.  No matter, it was the high noon of TV westerns and we spent that Christmas vacation chasing each other and yippee ki-yaying around the house.  I imagine now that my parents may have regretted their gift choices.  It remains one of my fondest childhood Christmas memories, and even now, with an aversion to guns as gifts, I happily recall and replay Cowboy Christmas.

Cowboy Christmas – 1957

It wasn’t until several years ago that I learned that my cherished Christmas memory was created at a difficult time for my parents.  I was visiting my Mom, reminiscing as we often did in her later years.  As we spoke of the holidays I expressed how I remembered that Christmas as a wonderful time.  She seemed pleasantly surprised and shared that for her and Dad it was a season of struggle.  Dad, a self-employed painter and paperhanger, had been hospitalized and out of work.  But they were determined to provide gifts for each of their children which by then included four sons and two daughters.  They were equally determined not to let their worries diminish our joy.  So they purchased inexpensive felt hats, six-shooters, and plastic cowboy instruments for my brothers and me along with other simple toys for our siblings.

As we got older Christmas memories shifted from toys to traditions.  At some point, around ages eleven or twelve, we began attending Midnight Mass and enjoying a Réveillon, traditions carried down through New England from mostly farming communities to factory towns by our Quebecois forebears.  The Réveillon followed Mass with an early morning buffet of Franco favorites—tourtière, salmon pie, apple and squash pies, homemade caramels, and fudge.  Once done, it was off to the parlor for the sharing of gifts.

Over the years Christmas celebrations evolved as we each left the family house.  We continued to return with another generation after time spent with our in-laws and at one point fifty-plus showed up at what was now a more reasonable time (4 p.m. rather than 1 a.m.) to feast, exchange gifts, and delight in an ever growing, ever lively Yankee Swap.

In the late 1990s my parents began a new, adults only tradition as a way to spend, relatively quiet, time with us.  Two weeks before Christmas my brothers and sisters and significant others gathered for dinner with Mom and Dad, joined by our cousin Rick, who was by then living in Atlanta.  Each of us was responsible for one course of a dinner that often broke with Franco-American cuisine traditions.  Between the main meal and dessert we formed a production line to cut and wrap several batches of homemade caramel (with regular testing for quality control) and decorate the family tree.  Mom and Dad delighted in these annual gatherings.  Dubbed the Christmas Progressive Dinner, it was initially conceived as a traveling feast with a different course served at each of our homes but a blizzard the first year convinced us to abandon the travel part.

We have known for a few years that our long run of celebrations in the family home was nearing its end.  As the years passed and we all had our own homes, the family house remained the common ground, our parents the center that held and their being and nurturing drew us all back at Christmas.  My Dad died in 2001, my Mom in the spring of 2019.  We agreed that we would not sell the home before one more Christmas season, one more round of gatherings to celebrate the memories and to say goodbye to the spirit of the place.

Living Room – 2018

Living Room – 2020

Our family house passed on to another owner this past spring and after sixty-seven years will no longer host our family’s holiday communal gathering.  But it remains with us in muddled memories that “have no end” and in stories of Christmases past and of the people who have called it home.  There is no longer a home spacious enough to accommodate fifty of us for a single holiday celebration so we will atomize and gather in cautiously smaller groups.

Covid Christmas 2020 will be celebrated with new traditions and family members, likely via new technologies.  Photo moments will be saved with screen shots.  Still, we will remember those that came before and will look forward to passing on, as one passes on family heirloom ornaments, those endless memories of Christmases past.  Even as we look back, we will look forward to 2021 and to “Cowboy Christmases” yet to draw near.

Grandkids

“How to Forgive”

“How to forgive” – (PIP #89)

By Louise Peloquin

     Tucked in the local news columns, L’Etoile occasionally slipped unusual pieces inviting readers to introspection.

 L’Etoile – January 6, 1926

 HOW TO FORGIVE

      We believe we have made a marvelous moral effort when we have not caused our neighbor any harm and we think that such behavior is akin to perfection.

      However, our duty is not limited to avoiding harming. It must also include learning to forgive the harm done to us, and this is difficult.

      When we are gentle, patient, helpful, caring, we cannot admit that others may not behave likewise. Bad-mouthing and meanness revolt us. We stand against those who exploit us, mistreat us and try to destroy us. Our soul allows itself to be overwhelmed by anger and we consider that our animosity is still quite moderate because it does not turn into retaliation.

      By admitting that all of our complaints are founded and that the one we are complaining about actually behaved like an enemy, must we hate them? Does the hate fueled against them have the power to give back the slightest bit of what was snatched? No, you know it well. Far from restoring anything, this lowly sentiment, which fills us with fratricidal passion, only extinguishes serenity and peace. It exacerbates our initial chagrin and prolongs distress.

      Our indiscriminate self-love is what makes our wounds so cruel. We cannot support anyone saying something unpleasant about us. We only accept praise, even clearly unjustified. We do not accept to lose the least of our advantages. We hold onto everything and, ceaselessly, we want to acquire more. We seek glory and widespread esteem.

      These pretences stir up our fury. We believe we are honorable and, in reality, we are vindictive and hostile. The wrong committed by the person who stole part of our possessions, our reputation, our prestige is, in our eyes, such a huge crime that it could not possibly be punished severely enough. Our hate greatly threatens to turn into aggressive behvior, as blameable as that endured.

      This is a new disadvantage for us. To the list of wrongs caused by our enemy is added an even greater one since we have become as fiendish as our foe. In other words, the injustice that we were not able to accept tends to belittle us morally and to make us base.

      Taking everything into consideration, we must not allow hate, that pernicious leaven, to rise within us because the disasters caused can become boundless. (1)

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1) Translation by Louise Peloquin.

Contributor Chath pierSath Featured in ‘New England Review’

Our longtime contributor Chath pierSath, writer and painter, is featured in the current issue of the prestigious “New England Review” with collaborator Seán Carlson. In the category of “Testimonies,” the duo has “Painting the Last Photograph: Art and Memory After Genocide.”

Chath and Seán are organizing a series of reading and speaking appearances. Watch for details on social media.

Seán’s work has been published in “The Irish Times,” “The New York Times,” “Motif” magazine in Rhode Island, “Trasna” and elsewhere. Chath is the author of several collections of poetry and has exhibited artwork in galleries in Europe, Cambodia, and the U.S. He hold’s a master’s degree in community psychology from UMass Lowell and works part of the year on a farm in central Mass.

To order a copy of “New England Review” with the piece by Chath and Seán, follow this link.

Lowell Politics: December 14, 2025

Tuesday’s Lowell City Council meeting lasted just over an hour and was mostly undramatic. Councilors did cancel their meetings of December 23 and December 30, so this coming meeting on Tuesday, December 16, 2025, will be the final one of this council session and the final meeting for outgoing Councilors Corey Belanger, Wayne Jenness and Paul Ratha Yem. Traditionally, outgoing councilors make conclusory remarks at their final meeting, so that should occur on Tuesday. Of course, incumbents who lose an election sometimes run again and win, so we may not have seen the last of the three as councilors.

Before we reach last Tuesday’s substantive matters, recall that the week before, at the meeting of December 3, 2025, councilors rejected an effort to borrow an additional $40 million to fund the final phase of the Lowell High project. While most councilors supported the measure, it needed a supermajority of eight votes because it involved spending, but only received seven, so it was defeated. Voting against it were Councilors Erik Gitschier and John Descoteaux, while Mayor Dan Rourke and Councilors Corey Belanger, Sokhary Chau, Wayne Jenness, Rita Mercier, Kim Scott and Paul Ratha Yem all voted for it. If Councilors Vesna Nuon and Corey Robinson had been present at that meeting (which they were not) and, if at least one of them had voted yes, then the measure would have passed that night, but that’s not what happened.

Two items about the high school project were on the council agenda last Tuesday. Both were joint motions by Councilors Gitschier and Robinson. One motion requested the city manager “have the proper department explore and provide the council with process required to replace the owners project manager (aka, the OPM which is Skanska) for the remainder of the high school project.” The second motion requested the city manager “explore hiring a clerk of works to protect city’s interest on the remainder of the high school project.”

Both motions were taken up together. After Councilors Gitschier and Robinson explained their reasoning for the motions, the other councilors began to speak. The first two, Councilors Mercier and Yem, essentially said that even though they didn’t support the downtown high school in the first place and that they weren’t happy with aspects of the job that’s been done thus far, they were concerned that replacing the OPM at this point would create even more problems. When Councilor Mercier asked the City Solicitor to explain the possible legal jeopardy that might flow from replacing the OPM, Mayor Rourke interjected that the motions just asked for a report “exploring” these suggestions and the vote before the councilors now was not to decide whether to replace the OPM or hire a clerk of the works. He said that if these motions passed, then at some future meeting councilors would receive a report on the procedures needed and the repercussions of doing it. That prompted an almost audible sigh of relief from the body and Rourke quickly called for a voice vote and moved on to the next item.

Regardless of what happens to the OPM, the council collectively must extricate itself from the funding mess created by the defeat of the bond vote two weeks ago. What impact will that vote have on current work? School vacations have been critical to the sequencing of the Lowell High project. Before the funding fiasco, the plan was that when LHS classes are dismissed this Friday, December 19, 2025, for Christmas vacation, workers were scheduled to move all the classrooms in Coburn Hall and the southern part of the 1922 building into the just-completed northern part of the 1922 building so that when students return on Monday, January 5, 2026, they will occupy that new space and work should commence in the just vacated portions which will be the final phase of this project. Will these plans be disrupted by the funding snafu? If so, how much more will the project be delayed?

Then there is the challenge of bringing the matter back before the city council. Legally and procedurally, I’m not sure of the mechanism that permits a “do over” of a spending measure that was defeated after a public hearing. At a minimum, I assume it must come back before the council for a first reading, then be scheduled for a public hearing two weeks after, and then the public meeting be held and the vote taken. There is nothing on the agenda for this coming Tuesday night related to high school funding and that’s the final council meeting of 2025, so any further action will have to wait until the new year.

Even if the law permits the council to revisit this vote, it will not be the same council voting on the matter. The three outgoing councilors, Belanger, Jenness, and Yem, all voted for the $40 million bond. Will their replacements, Belinda Juran, Sean McDonough, and Sidney Liang, all vote similarly? We shall see.

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The $40 million high school bond discussed above would be in addition to the $382 million previously authorized to be borrowed. Not long ago, people were calling the Lowell High project the most expensive in the Commonwealth’s history. That didn’t last long.

On Monday, December 8, 2025, the people of Lexington, Massachusetts, authorized $660 million for the construction of a new high school in that town. The vote was 5,283 in favor with 3,276 against. According to the Boston Globe, the total reimbursement from the Massachusetts School Building Authority will be $122 million, which is a reimbursement rate of less than 20 percent. (See “Lexington OK’s new high school” by James Vaznis, Boston Globe December 10, 2025.)

The high cost of the new Lexington High School is due to factors familiar to those following the Lowell High project:

“The projects eye-popping price tag comes as school construction costs have been soaring. Much of that has been driven by rising costs for steel, cement, and other materials; a labor shortage in the trades; and higher interest rates on the bonds needed to finance the projects.”

Interestingly, those most vocal in opposition to the Lexington project did not argue about its cost, but that the new school as designed would be too small to meet Lexington’s future needs. The current school, which was built 70 years ago, was designed to hold 1,800 students, but 2,400 attend it now. The new school is designed for that number. Project opponents contend that new multifamily housing now under construction in Lexington as mandated by the MBTA Communities Act will increase the student population to the extent that by the time this new school is completed, it will already be overcrowded.

Proponents of the design responded that the population in Lexington’s lower grades has been going down so any influx of new students will leave a net result of high school students equal to those attending the school now, and that the design has built into it the flexibility to expand to accommodate more students at no additional cost.

Finally, the Globe reports that the annual property tax impact on a Lexington homeowner with the town’s average assessed value of $1.4 million will range from $50 to about $1,800 during the peak years of the bond repayment.

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Earlier this month, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) added Lowell to its Global Network of Learning Cities. For nearly a dozen years, a small cadre of volunteers led by now-retired UMass Lowell professor John Wooding, have been working towards this goal.

The selection of Lowell is especially significant because it is the first city in the United States to be so designated.

The mission of UNESCO is “to build world peace by fostering international cooperation in education, science, culture, and communication, aiming to create sustainable development, eradicate poverty, promote human rights, and bridge cultural divides.”

While the US is currently a member of UNESCO, the Trump Administration has announced the US will withdraw from the organization due to “cultural disagreements and bias.” (The US also withdrew from UNESCO during the first Trump Administration but renewed its membership under President Biden.)

The purpose of the UNESCO Global Network of Learning Cities (GNLC) is to mobilize cities around the world to promote lifelong learning for all. The goal is to use education as a tool to solve urban challenges, ranging from social inclusion to economic development and environmental sustainability.

The following quote from a UNESCO official summarizes the concept:

“Education transcends the classroom – it is a collective endeavor, and cities play a key role in promoting learning for all. The 72 new UNESCO Learning Cities announced today are redefining what it means to learn – turning every street, library, workplace, museum and home into a space for knowledge and innovation. By making education a priority, from early childhood through adulthood, these cities are empowering people and unlocking opportunities for all.”

That quote could have been pulled from the doctoral dissertation of Patrick Mogan, who is seen by many as “the father of the Lowell National Historical Park.” Mogan’s longtime quest was to make Lowell an “educative city” by which he meant that from birth through death, residents could partake in learning opportunities from the city around them rather than in a strict classroom environment. Consequently, Lowell as a Global City of Learning is a perfect fit for the community and completely compatible with one of our guiding philosophies over the past half century.

Finally, the City of Learning recognition is a great complement to Lowell’s recent designation as the first U.S. city to be designated a “Frontrunner City” under the Global Frontrunner Cities Initiative which is led by the United Nations Institute for Water, Environment and Health along with the Urban Economy Forum and the World Urban Pavilion.

Both designations should lead to some worthwhile events in the coming year which is particularly appropriate given that 2026 is also the bicentennial of Lowell’s founding.

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For the past several years during the annual Lowell Celebrates Kerouac Festival, I’ve attended walking tours of St. Joseph’s Cemetery in Chelmsford and of Downtown Lowell led by Kerouac scholar Kurt Phaneuf whose specialty is documenting the real people and places in Lowell that Kerouac depicted in his writings. Kurt recently shared that he’s compiled an archival photo essay of Kerouac’s short story, “Home at Christmas.” Here’s how Kurt described the project:

This archival photo-montage attempts to capture something of the flavor of Jack Kerouac’s “Home At Christmas,” a poignant autobiographical narrative chronicling his Depression-era Lowell boyhood. Written in the spring of 1951, “Home At Christmas” was first published in Glamour Magazine in December 1961 and later reprinted in Good Blonde & Others by Grey Fox Press in 1993. The story contains numerous references to people and places in Pawtucketville that Lowell natives may still recognize. Reading by Paul Marion, 2007 at WUML Studios Lowell Outro music by Chet Baker, 1986 Varrick Records.

The 24-minute video is at this link on YouTube. I recommend checking it out, especially if you’d like to be transported into the holiday spirit.