Cold at Christmas
     by Shivering Simon, the Spokesman 

Mom was in a car of young people one evening in the mid thirties, one Christmas Eve, and their Model T ran out of fuel. This happened somewhere near Friedensruh, some 7 to 10 miles from Winkler, MB. . She was wearing an ankle length dress, nylons and high-heeled shoes. Not 4 inch heels, of course, but probably an inch or two. Outside the car the temperature was somewhere near 25° below zero. Very cold. The group was heading for Rhineland but when they broke down outside of this other community they separated, each going to his or her home village. Before they did that, however, they tried getting help where they were. They walked through the village of Friedensruh, knocking on each door, hoping to be let inside to warm up. But no one invited them in, and no one even answered the door if my memory of mom’s story serves me right. How brutal! How inhospitable! Here the young people are freezing to death, cold and chilled to the point of near insanity, and their fellow Mennonites are too busy with their own Christmas Eve events to allow them in, wanting instead their own family time to not be interrupted by someone strange.
     There was nothing for them but all to go their own way. The distance for mom was approximately 3 to 5 miles. I’m not sure of the distance, but it was a long way. The depth of snow at some places reached almost to her knees. She walked the first miles and then could stand no longer and crawled on hands and knees the last half mile to her house. When her father saw her in her condition, with her hands, feet and legs frozen, he had her sit in the kitchen and he went out and got a pail full of snow and rubbed her arms and legs until the freezing left them. Strangely, mother did not develop any signs of gangrene. I have been cold at Christmas, too, in only a church outfit, a church suit, when the car stopped working and I had to walk in the wind from one end of our village to the other where my house was, about half a mile. On the way I got so cold I knocked on a strange person’s door and was allowed to warm up inside there until I was able to go the rest of the way. Such cold is hard to describe. It just simply hurts!