Victor's Christmas

Victor was my adopted uncle

But I don’t think he was ever formally adopted. He was over 10 years older than any of my dad’s family, and he was Victor Bernard, not Victor Beaton.

So I knew Victor when I was a child as a somewhat eccentric old man who visited off and on. He had big glasses and a hat full of souvenir pins, and he would offer you one of them if you liked. 

He would also talk to you. This did not seem unusual at the time, but, Victor would have a conversation with you as if he was talking to anyone, and most adults didn’t do that with children. He spoke to you like he saw you there, instead of seeing a child there, if that makes sense. 

If it doesn’t, it will shortly. 

Victor used to tell us stories about his life. They were not nice stories. But he was frank, because it was normal to him to have lived his own life.

He was born in 1924. He was what they called a “Home Boy” back then, kids who came from “The Home” - an orphanage. His orphanage was St Vincent De Paul, in Charlottetown, PEI. He was put there when he was at least 4 years old. 

It’s not likely that Victor was a true orphan. At St. Vincent’s in the 1930s, about 1/3 of the children had two parents alive, 1/3 had one parent alive, and 1/3 were “illegitimate.” Very few were missing both parents. But he called himself an orphan. 

The history of Home Children is a cruel one. The most famous of these are the British Home Children who came to Canada, and your heart will break for them if you read their stories. It was a stigma, there were Home Children everywhere, and even when they were elderly, when I was a child, they were still called that. 

Between the ages of 4 and 12, Victor was in ten different homes. The most vivid story I can remember Victor telling me was that he once lived in a place where he wasn’t allowed to eat with the other children, he had to eat in the barn. There were more stories, but in summary he was used, basically, as slave labour for periods of time and then returned to the orphanage again and again.

At 10:57 in this interview, you can hear a woman talk about Victor, who knew him when he was a child.

It is hard to understand cruelty to children, but it exists in the foster system today, so we are not doing much better. 

At age 12, Victor was adopted by my Papa, Angus Beaton. Angus took over his sister Margaret’s farm, because Margaret had the misfortune of being married to a ne’er-do-well, and both the farm and her marriage had gone to hell. The story is, when Papa got there, there was nothing but a dead cow in the barn. Poor Margaret.

But Papa wasn’t married yet, and he could not handle a farm alone, so he went and got a boy.

My grandfather was full of humour, but he was also powerfully built and very brusque and he had a gold tooth and old-fashioned slicked hair. Victor said he was terrified when he saw this man walk in, supposedly for him. But then Papa, in his gruff way, started banging on something saying “Where’s my son! Where’s my son!” 

And as Victor said, when he heard himself called “my son,” he thought, it’s ok for me to go with this man. 

There are funny stories about the two of them living on this farm. My favourite is one time Papa made a bunch of moonshine for a party he was having. Victor took a drink thinking it was water, and thought “oh no, this is poison!”

and he poured all the jugs down the drain. 

And there is another one where a man was visiting the house and casually referred to Victor as “the little bastard.” Papa took his big fist and slammed it so hard on the table that the table cracked. “When he’s here, he’s my son,” said Angus. That’s the story anyway.

Papa would know a thing or two about being “the little bastard” because he was an orphan himself. His parents died one after the other when he was a little boy, and the eleven children were scattered. Angus and Margaret were raised by an uncle.

Rough old Papa, who butchered cows for neighbours, drank the moonshine he made and anything else, ate raw eggs including the shell, smoked enough to get those yellow nicotine fingers, spoke bluntly, banged his fist on things and split peppermints for his grandchildren with an axe he used to chop chicken heads off with (they were fighting, there weren't enough peppermints for everyone), had the experience that informs a fierce decency and kindness.

Victor stayed with Angus for 9 years, in which time, my grandparents got married and had several children. Victor would rock the babies in an old rocking chair that inched along the more you used it, so that he would start on one side of the room, and end up on the other when the baby was asleep. 

There is this one detail about Christmas that I think about a lot. 

Every year, Victor put a little tree in his room. Even when the family grew and there was a tree in the house, Victor liked to keep his own in his room. Because he was living with a crusty bachelor, he made the decorations out of what was available. The silver paper collected from cigarette packages. But shiny paper is beautiful wherever you get it. 

I wonder about Victor in his room, with his tree, and what kind of Christmas he kept.

In his early 20s, Victor moved back to PEI. He lived in Montague for the rest of his life. 

And he became famous there, as Santa Claus. 

In 1946, he filled in the role of Santa at the last minute for someone who couldn’t make it. Then for 57 consecutive years afterwards, he would be Santa. 

Like Santa Claus, Victor saw children as full people. And like Santa, he loved to make people happy and feel seen and wanted. He was a janitor at a retirement home, but he came in early every day to visit the residents. In the late 70s, Victor was voted “Islander of the Year” in a provincial newspaper. The town of Montague made that happen. They wrote of his “tireless and faithful” service to the community, and as the newspaper described it, ever aware of his background, “the community adopted him.”

That's Victor's handwriting, correcting the mistakes in the article.

There are so many stories of Home Children who were treated so poorly that they despaired in life, in so many tragic ways. But here is Victor, who had a painful childhood and turned it into a life of generosity. I think too that the child in him needed the love that comes back to you when you give of yourself. I think of him and his little tree with the silver paper, and what it means to want love, to love, and be loved. Especially at Christmas.