(ROCKWALL, TX – Dec. 17, 2015) Traditionally, every Christmas season I either read or watch Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. It just feels like the holiday should feel: the snowy streets, roasted chestnut peddlers barking their fare, and carolers bunched up serenading passers-by. I love the scene when all the Cratchits gather for their simple Christmas feast, especially when Mrs. Cratchit brings the goose, roasted with the legs hiked up, steam rolling up from the crispy, golden-brown skin. “There never was such a goose,” Dickens penned, “Bob said he didn’t believe there ever was such a goose cooked. Its tenderness and flavour, size and cheapness, were the themes of universal admiration.”
Seeing that poor family circled around the succulent bird takes me back to my Christmastime childhood. We never had an official Christmas goose, but we definitely had one during the chilly winters. When cold creeps into the northern hemisphere, the great Canadian Goose migrates across the continent. The “honker” can fly up to 1500 miles in 24 hours, but will often take a more scenic trip, setting down at specific rest stops year after year to fuel up and stretch their webbed feet. These fields and ponds are where we’d pursue the masses. I’d bundle up and head out with Dad and my buddy,Chad, and his father to a flooded cotton field we’d staked with decoys.Chad’s dad was a hunting guide and we’d assist in setting up clients and then hunker down in the frozen reeds as the great V-formations flew overhead.
The goose was regular table fare in the age of Dickens. Like ducks, they develop a thick fat layer in fall and winter that make for wonderfully moist meat contrasted to a turkey’s tendency for dryness. In the Middle Ages, it was traditional to serve goose at the fall Feast of St. Michael. The belief was that in eating goose on Michaelmas Day, you’d want not for money the rest of the year. So, often, the common man feasted on goose annually, with prayers to not merely scrape by again.
When Chad’s dad blew his call, sometimes the formation leader turned, and the flock circled lower and lower. We’d let them get so close you could hear the wind in their five-foot spans before we raised our guns. The pride I felt later when we roasted the harvest, knowing I had a hand in providing it, made me feel like a rich man no matter how the year turned out.
This holiday season, Phil (my oldest son) and I plan to trek up to Colorado to hunt Canadians like I did as a kid in Tennessee. Obviously, we hope to fill the freezer with the classic winter bird. But for me, this trip will mean so much more than the mere success of the hunt, it will be another adventure with one of my kids, a memory, and that’s enough to last me for the entire year. As Dickens described the changed Scrooge, my own heart will laugh and it will be quite enough for me.
By Blue Ribbon News guest columnist Scott Gill of Rockwall, a teacher, coach and author of Goliath Catfish. Follow Scott’s blog at scotttgill.tumblr.com and read all of his “Front Porch Ramblings” at BlueRibbonNews.com.
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