1914-12-19a

In mid-December 1914, the Hamilton Times, the Hamilton Herald and the Hamilton Spectator, including a special section in the Saturday papers for a host of Christmas features.
    For the Christmas number of the Spectator published on December 1914, the popular columnist Richard Butler, loving referred to as the Old Muse, turned the first part of his Saturday Musings to the subject of what Christmas was like in the time of his youth in 1850 :
    "How slowly Christmas comes to the young! They can hardly wait for its advent; but the time will come to them, as it has to the rest of us who have advanced in years, when the days and weeks and months will fly with electric speed, and no sooner will one Christmas pass than they will be making preparations for the coming one. Like a ship passing in the night, they glide by never to return. But here we are, right on the eve of Christmas, and hardly a sign of winter to remind us that Jack Frost and Santa are to pay their annual visits on runners and not on wheels. Instead of Canada being the Lady of the Snows, as Kipling once said, we are enjoying weather suitable to a reasonably mild winter resort. We are told somewhere in the good book that the wind is tempered to the shorn lamb; and may not this account for the mild weather that spares the coal bin to the unfortunate who has not a savings bank account to fall back upon, now that the pay envelopes from the factory are few and far between? (When this article was written atmospheric conditions were much milder than they are at present.) When Hamilton was just emerging from its infantile days, say sixty years ago, the winter began earlier, and at Christmas time the young people enjoyed sleigh rides to the merry jingle of sleigh bells. Out in the country, the churches and the Good Templars’ associations held their annual tea meetings and socials and invited their city cousins to partake of the feasts of reason and the flow of soul, but to be sure and not forget the quarter or half-dollar that was an essential sesame at the door. Young men did not have much money in those days, as wages were small, but they always managed to save up a little so as to chip in their share for a couple of seats in the bed of straw for their best girls and themselves. And then, muffled in blankets and buffalo robes, they defied old Jack Frost, and went skimming along the well-beaten snow roads to Ancaster or some one of the suburbs of the Ambitious City. Ah ! those were times never to come again to those who participated in them sixty years ago! Those were the happy days, when young people married early in life and became the staid citizens of the Hamilton of the future. Old maids and old bachelors were an unknown quantity, for every young man wanted a home of his own, with the girl he loved best to keep house for the both of them. The return of those days would be a blessing, and there would be fewer blasé young men and frivolous girls."