When I phone my mother, Blanche Ruth Jamieson Moses, born in 1924, to wish her a happy birthday, she challenges me.
“So how old am I?”
“You don’t look a day over eighty!”
She rarely talks about the past—she’s so present—so when she mentioned that, once upon a time, she’d been in the Santa Claus Parade, she got my attention.
The first Santa Claus Parade, such as it was, took place the second day of December 1905. Santa Claus arrived by train at Union Station and was greeted by Mr. and Mrs. Timothy Eaton. Santa then walked through the streets to the Eaton’s store.
My own experience of that parade, once upon another time, was always on television and only in black and white. Though my parents might take or send me into the actual city of Toronto in the summer for the CNE or to visit family who lived here, the televised town where that parade took place, sometimes through electronic snow, was always somewhere beyond the horizon. It was not any part of my quotidian imaginings, although at night it was certainly often a distant light.
