Spreading cheer as history repeats itself
Star fund attempts to add warmth to a bleak pandemic Christmas
The family of six had all been infected with the strange new disease.
The father, mother and four children were recovering. But the dad had been laid off for weeks. “A terrible hole” had been made in “the resources of this little family.”
It was December 1918, and as an article in the Boxing Day edition of the Toronto Daily Star noted, families across the city were “saddened by ravages of w The Great War had come to an end only the month before and a terrible flu had swept the globe, casting a shadow over the Christmas season.
But the Star’s Santa Claus Fund was there to provide a bit of joy in a dark December. Just as it will be this year. The article, placed alongside an ad for charcoal to heat homes and a news brief about the need for transparency at he upcoming peace conference, made it clear that “7,000 city kiddies” benefited from the fund.
That included the four with the laid-off father: “Once again, old Santa was able to banish dull care and open the door to admit the Christmas spirit.” It also included kids in the west Toronto neighbourhood of Earlscourt, where every widow who had lost a husband received a box, delivered by motorcycle.
“Star readers who contributed to the fund that makes it possible for Old Father Christmas to visit many a home which would otherwise be minus the joy that goes with the ringing laughter of happy kiddies, will feel all the better for knowing that Mr. Hard Luck was gently but firmly ousted from his customary abode to make room for Old Santa’s smiling countenance,” the unnamed Star reporter wrote.
Volunteers, like the young man who had been “working from 7 a.m. until nearly midnight” for more than six months and still somehow found the time to help deliver the boxes, and, “what is more … provided an automobile for the purpose,” were and are still essential to the operation.
The fund was started in 1906 by the Toronto Star’s founder, Joseph E. Atkinson, who wanted to recreate the holiday happiness a stranger had brought him at a young age.
Like many in 1918, he’d lost a parent. His father was killed in an accident when he was a baby, leaving his mother to support her eight young children.
The story goes that one day, he was watching children skate on a pond and a woman approached him and asked why he wasn’t joining in. When he told her about his situation, the woman surprised him with a pair of skates for Christmas. It was a generosity he tried to pass on at the Star, organizing gift boxes with fruit, candy, socks and mitts for children, with money he collected from readers.
The contents of the boxes have changed a little — the candy has been swapped for a dental hygiene kit.
But the spirit, just like in 1906 and 1918, is still there, enduring through a Great Depression, another world war and now, yet a disrupted daily life around the world.
More than 100 years later, with the world in the grips of another pandemic that has cast
pall over the holiday season, cancelled events and family dinners, caused layoffs and left a hole at the dinner tables of families where loved ones once sat, the Santa Claus Fund is still here.
And this year, it’s also an opportunity to give generously to those who’ve been hit particularly hard.
In 1918 that was a “little blueeyed Edna” with a lisp who couldn’t believe how lucky she was to get a gift.
A west-end “urchin” who was told Santa Claus was dead so as not to expect anything.
And a “poor, curly-haired youngster in a basement,” who proclaimed “ha, ha, ha … Santa has come after all” when his box arrived.
In fact, Santa himself had been informed of many cases of the flu and “decided to try and make the little kiddies who had lost relatives through the dreadful disease as happy as he could.”
“Thus he brought ‘double portions’ to the sad little home where not long ago a double funeral had been held.”
The goal for 2020 is $1.2 million, a sum readers in 1918 probably couldn’t have fathomed.
But please, like them, give generously.