THE HOME-COMING 



ice is firm in most years before the middle of 

 December. 



And making ready for Christmas was the great 

 occupation in every household. A good deal of 

 decorating seemed to be going on, for the storekeeper 

 was evidently doing a brisk trade in wall papers, and 

 people were constantly coming to me for illustrated 

 magazines to eke out ; in fact, I found that some of 

 the poorer ones had their walls completely pasted over 

 with pages torn from various weeklies and monthlies. 

 I, being an Englishman, was often asked to explain 

 the pictures, and hard work I sometimes found it. 

 " Are there really animals like these in the forests of 

 England ? " said one innocent old man, as he pointed 

 an oily and tobacco-stained thumb at a page of 

 political cartoons birds and dogs and lions, adorned 

 with the faces of parliamentary personalities. I did 

 my best, but he could not see the humour in the 

 idea. " There is no sense in it," he said ; " if they do 

 not exist, why should there be pictures of them ? " 



Every house had its Christmas tree, and sometimes 

 more than one. Big Julius, who is the proud father 

 of a family of plump daughters, had a tree for each of 

 the girls, to say nothing of a special little tree at the 

 foot of the grandmother's bed to the huge delight of 

 the old lady. It is no great trouble to get a Christ- 

 mas tree ; it can be brought home on the top of a load 

 of firewood, for the spruce fir, which looks exactly 

 like the Christmas tree of all our picture books, is one 

 of the few trees that grow in Labrador. The most 

 northerly trees that I know on the coast are a little 

 forest of these firs at the head of Nappartok Bay, forty 

 miles north of Okak. No Eskimo thinks it a hard- 

 ship to run twenty miles or so with his sledge and 



64 



