DAY 14

 

We’re going to have Aunt and Uncle with us, and Mr. and Mrs. Boehm have promised faithfully to come. We have some left over candy boxes that we’re going to fill with sugared popcorn, “old hard Xmas candy,” and the Orofino Mercantile’s best assorted nuts. Listen, the hard candy cost 9 cents a pound, cream 15 cents a pint, nuts two pounds for 35 cents. Some change! I had some chickens and eggs to send down to the Merc lately and so got supplies and some treats, and Lydia put in an extra pound of the hard candy. Aunt and Uncle felt unable to get treats, so in a way that makes the tree loom larger. We promised to have a regular tree and we’ll all be children and have a lot of fun out of it. – Ina

Such a descriptive phrase – “the tree looms larger!” So, Grandma Ina took on the responsibility of making sure that everyone was well remembered on this skimpy Christmas. She bartered for treats at the general store, the Orofino Mercantile, with her chickens and eggs. It wouldn’t happen today, but it worked then. And Lydia, the clerk at the Merc, put in an extra pound of hard candy. It’s not much, but it’s something when folks have nothing.

My mother also wrote a few words about the Orofino Mercantile:

We moved back to Orofino when I was eight. That was during the First World War and there was a scarcity of everything. My best memory of the next few years was Christmas in the [Orofino] Mercantile. There was a long table near the center of the store filled with toys of every description. As soon as school was out, we hurried down town to “play with” the toys. There weren’t any decorations in town but that toy table was enough. KW