Tale sparks memories of Christmas past
A heartfelt story moved Millie Quinn to donate to the Star’s Christmas fund
Millie Quinn has vivid childhood memories of wartime Christmases when gifts were scarce.
With her father serving overseas for five years, Quinn’s mother did the best she could to keep the little girl and her two brothers fed and clothed with meagre resources.
At Christmas, there was always a tree. After all, living outside Brighton, Ont., a beautiful pine could easily be chopped down in the nearby countryside. And there was always a turkey or goose on the table. The family would raise one in anticipation of the holidays. Mom, also, always made a Christmas cake.
But presents? Those were rare in the 1940s.
Dad’s army pay didn’t allow for extravagance. Then, postwar, things got even tougher. The family grew — there would eventually be 11 children — but household earnings didn’t. Dad earned a modest wage as a farmhand. It was the family’s only income.
“It was tough,” Quinn says. “It was tough for a lot of families.”
So when she read a recent story in the Star recounting a 100year-old tale of a two impoverished young boys who appeared at the newspaper office looking for Santa Claus, it rekindled her memories and tugged at her emotions. The lads in the story had lost their father to influenza and their mother struggled to make do. They were looking for Santa because they knew Santa would never find them.
“I read the story of those two little boys and it just breaks your heart. I just wanted to cry. I thought, ‘Oh my goodness, they could have been my brothers,’ ” she said.
“Every kid in the world looks for Christmas. That’s the day they look for and there’s kids out there who … it’s just so sad.”
Inspired to make a difference, Quinn and her husband, Tom, who now live in Carrying Place, became first-time donors to the Toronto Star Santa Claus Fund. Millie, along with her close friends, continues to give to the Adopt-A-Child/Keep Kids Warm program in Belleville (it supports low-income families with new winter outerwear for children) but she also felt compelled to send $25 to the Santa Fund.
Something to ensure a better Christmas for modern versions of the boys she read about; something to ensure a better Christmas for modern versions of herself.
“Everything helps,” the 79year-old said. “I said to Tom, if everybody gave $25 it would add up pretty quick.”
The goal for the fund this year is $1.7 million. That would provide 45,000 gift boxes to children of families in need and mean 45,000 underprivileged kids will receive a present when, otherwise, they might get nothing.
And Quinn is correct, there are thousands of individual donors like the Quinns who generously support the fund. So those smaller numbers become a big number quite quickly.
Each child receives a colourful gift box that contains a warm shirt, hat, mittens, socks, small toy, book, candy and dental hygiene items. Each of those packages costs approximately $35 because the Santa Fund works with suppliers ordering directly from manufacturers. The retail price would be between $50 and $75.
Imagining a child without warm clothing is something that is particularly troubling to Quinn. She can’t abide the thought of children being cold or forgotten at Christmas.
“It’s pretty sad to know there are little ones out there without warm clothing,” she said.
In some ways, Quinn’s childhood was similar to Joseph E. Atkinson, the Star’s publisher from 1899 to 1948, who created the Santa Claus Fund.
Atkinson, too, was from a big family with seven siblings. His father was killed — he was hit by a train — when Atkinson was just 7 months old. That left the children to be raised by their mother and the family budget didn’t allow for frills.
On one winter’s day at Christmastime, young Joseph was watching children skating on a pond when he was approached by a woman who wondered why he wasn’t in on the fun. He explained his family’s circumstances and how there was no money for skates. The stranger bought him a pair.
It was young Joseph’s happiest Christmas and Atkinson never forgot the gesture; nor did he forget his own povertystricken past. So when he became a man of influence in Toronto, he promoted humanitarian causes and championed social reform in the pages of the The Toronto Daily Star, as it was then called.
In 1906, a letter arrived at the paper asking how it might be possible to help a poor family and implored the paper to bridge the gap between the haves and have-nots in a city that had extremes of both.
Atkinson published the letter on the Daily Star’s front page and asked if there were others willing to help. The paper wrote: “There are many hundreds of little folks in this wealthy city, and in this pros- perous year, to whom Christmas and Santa Claus are unfortunately meaningless terms.” That was the birth of the Santa Claus Fund which 112 years later is still rallying bighearted readers such as the Quinns to help those little folks.