2021
Home for the Holidays: Cowboy Christmas henri marchand
“
T
he memories of childhood have no order, and no end,” wrote Dylan Thomas in Reminiscences of Childhood. A popular holiday song claims that, “There’s no place like home for the holidays.” These lines come to mind as my family prepares to celebrate Christmas, 2020. We cannot see nor can we celebrate Christmases yet to come, but even as we create new Yuletide traditions and experiences, we easily recall and readily share stories with family members and invite the comforting spirits of Christmases past to adorn another Christmas season. In so doing we gift pieces of family history to our children and grandchildren and family members yet to come. Since 1975, my wife and I have celebrated Christmas in several homes, for the first five years by ourselves, later with our children and grandchildren. We spent the latter part of each Christmas day at what we considered the extended family home where I grew up. We returned regularly to celebrate not only Christmas but other holidays; birthday, graduation and special theme parties; and weddings. Three generations of my family lived under one roof, creating moments and memories tied to the space and structure, giving our home something like a soul if that can be said for a house. Over the years, the house, a large, roomy Colonial Victorian, sheltered our nuclear family that included Mémère Brouillard and Aunt Rose. Lowell Tech students rented two rooms from September to May, and relatives visiting from Quebec, usually when an elderly aunt or uncle passed away, stayed with us. Prior to my parents purchasing the house at 118 Riverside Street in 1953, five other families called it home. The house was built in 1896 by George C. Osgood, a doctor and apothecary who bought the lot in 1891 from the estate of Ezra B. Welch. Welch acquired the land and earlier buildings from a family named Pierce when the area was still farmland. The gnarly remnants of an apple orchard held out in our neighbors’ back yards in the 1960s. Osgood and his wife Louisa had three children—John, Harry and Mary. They called the house home until June of 1903 when they sold it to Louis Olney, a Lowell Textile School professor of dyeing technology. Olney and his wife Bertha also had three children—Edna, Margaret and Richard. They reportedly kept a pet monkey and a goat. I picture the Osgoods and the Olneys celebrating the holidays in their own times, in more formal attire and the home’s more formal furnishings, navigating heavy snowfalls and the still thinly developed area in sleds and sleighs. Recently posted photos on Facebook capture Riverside Street across from the Osgood’s home on February 1, 68
The Lowell Review
