When Linda Weening talks about Christmas, her memories come tumbling out quickly, layered with family, noise, tradition, and the kind of childhood stories that stay vivid decades later. “I’m from Toronto,” she says. “Holland Marsh. Just north of Toronto.” Where she grew up, winter was not something you watched from a window. You lived in […]
When Linda Weening talks about Christmas, her memories come tumbling out quickly, layered with family, noise, tradition, and the kind of childhood stories that stay vivid decades later.
“I’m from Toronto,” she says. “Holland Marsh. Just north of Toronto.”
Where she grew up, winter was not something you watched from a window. You lived in it.
“We had a canal right in front of us,” Linda says. “And it froze.”
The ice became part of everyday life. One year, her brothers turned it into a birthday celebration she still laughs about.
“They cut a hole in the ice and flooded it,” she says. “My whole class came for my birthday party.”
Another year, it was tobogganing.
“There was a big hill near our school,” Linda recalls. “We’d ski down it at recess.”
Sometimes, looking back, she wonders how nobody was seriously hurt.
“We went down the hill on skates,” she says. “When I think of it now, I don’t know how we didn’t all break a bone. Someone did.”
Linda grew up in a house full of children. Seven brothers. One sister. And Linda, one of the two girls in the middle.
“Seven brothers,” she repeats. “And one sister.”
It sounds chaotic, but Linda says she was well looked after.
“They didn’t bother me much,” she says. “They kind of spoiled me.”
Christmas in her family followed a rhythm that never really changed. Gifts were not opened on Christmas morning.
“We didn’t do the gifting thing on Christmas morning,” Linda explains. “We did that the night before.”
Christmas morning was reserved for church.
“Christmas morning, we went to church,” she says.
After that, the family gathered.
“We’d all get together with our cousins and grandparents,” Linda says. “We had a big dinner at somebody’s house. Sometimes ours, sometimes theirs.”
Dinner was always turkey.
“Always turkey,” she says.
And dessert was never an afterthought.
“My mother was a big baker,” Linda says. “Apple pie, lemon meringue, mince, peach sometimes, cherry sometimes. Every kind of pie.”
With so many people coming through the house, baking became a family skill.
“As kids, we learned how to cook,” Linda says. “I wrote my own recipes when I was 10. I remember rolling pie dough for hours leading up to Christmas.”
There was no Santa Claus in Linda’s childhood.
“Nobody ever told me Santa was real,” she says. “And I never told anybody else either.”
It was a choice she made deliberately.
“I refused to lie,” she says simply.
The magic of Christmas came from family, not fantasy.
“We did go into Toronto one year,” Linda recalls. “Eaton’s on College Street had a theatre upstairs.”
She remembers the performance clearly, decades later.
“Ali Baba,” she says. “With marionettes. I was amazed by how they could manipulate them.”
Her sister remembers it too.
“I just talked to her,” Linda says. “She remembered that as well.”
Not every Christmas was picture-perfect. One year, the family lived in a trailer park during a flood.
“We were in a trailer in the middle of winter,” Linda says. “Seven kids.”
Her youngest brother slept in the bathtub.
“He slept in the bathtub,” she says again, shaking her head.
Still, Christmas mattered because it was when families came together.
“That was always important,” Linda says. “It was the time when we got to see our cousins.”
Linda went on to have five children of her own, all born within a 10-year span.
“They’re still young,” she says. “The oldest is just finishing second year of university.”
This year, Christmas looks different. It will be the first without her husband, Pete.
“We were married 53 years,” Linda says quietly.
They met young.
“We were in elementary school,” she says. “Third grade.”
Pete was never much of a Christmas shopper.
“That was me,” Linda says with a laugh.
She carried traditions forward in her own way. Because her birthday falls in December, she created something unique for her children.
“From my birthday to Christmas, instead of an advent calendar, I’d wrap little things,” she explains. “Ten little gifts.”
Every day, they opened one.
“I kept that going for years,” Linda says. “Even when my daughter moved to B.C., I mailed packages.”
It was a lot of work.
“At times, we were wrapping 120 little things,” she says. “It would take a month!”
Her husband helped.
“He was good at that,” she says.
Now, some traditions have softened with time. This year, Linda is hosting around 20 people.
“We’ll order Chinese,” she says. “We’ve been doing that for a few years.”
Looking back, Linda sees Christmas not as one day, but as a collection of moments, stories, and people that shaped her life.
“Some traditions are getting lost,” she says. “But the meaning doesn’t have to be.”
For Linda Weening, Christmas has always been about gathering people together, making space for joy, and carrying family traditions forward, one memory at a time.
