Christmas is a time for remembering, and it's the sad family that has no good memories of times gone past. This is the story of one of those good memories.

There were worse winters before, and worse winters after, but the winter of 1939 was the worst until then in my young lifetime. And it was the best winter I ever experienced.

You may have noticed me ramble on about winter in Canada where I now live. In Ottawa, its capital, we count ourselves fortunate if winter lasts just four months, and by winter I mean snowy ice-covered ground.

My first beard was grown in Yukon during one particularly cold January. In the wetness of Seattle I spent a lonesome Christmas Day in a tavern not far from the docks. But my mind always returns to that winter of 1939, in the town of Ballyshannon, in Donegal, the northernmost county in Ireland.

The snow that fell that year was the mother of all snows. In a country where snow in winter was a rarity, that year made up for all the missed snowfalls of pervious years.

True, the Annals mentioned really bad winters, longer lasting winters, death-dealing winters, taking life from humans, wildlife and birds, with no distinction made between young and old. That, of course, was long ago.

The young Red Hugh O'Donnell lost both big toes to frostbite escaping from his English jailers in the depth of winter. The long death march from Kinsale back to Tyrone and Tyrconnell was also something that happened long ago.

This, this was real. This was seven weeks of unremitting cold, of frozen snow and icy streets, that set old folk to arguing about when did they remember anything like it.

Old folk are like that. Depending on the season, "It was always colder when we were young." "It was always hotter when we were young."

Now that I've joined their ranks I know they were right. That winter in Ballyshannon was colder than any young people nowadays can imagine.

In those days youngsters wore short pants all year round. And stockings, not socks. The stockings reached just below knee high. In winter they were woolly and warm, usually hand knitted by our mothers. But they stopped at the knee.

And in cold weather we all had cold knees. Girls suffered the same fate. Coming indoors all we wanted was to warm our knees close to the kitchen range or sitting before a fire in a grate.

We went out and came in a lot.

Our hands were the worst. Chilblains were exquisite torture. In the damp coldness of an ordinary Irish winter we learned to live with them. Somehow gloves were not considered essential. Anyway, you couldn't make good snowballs wearing gloves.

The contrast in coping with winter in Canada could not be greater. Here no mother would dream of allowing young children to go out on a snowy day without snowsuit, mittens, gloves and scarves, all topped with hood or hat.

It wasn't that parents in Ireland were less caring. It was just that snow came so infrequently, and didn't last. There was no snow culture, nothing ingrained or inbred that made coping with snow a natural process of living.

Elsewhere on this web site will be found two or three items recalling winter snows and the joy they brought to young and old. Yes, joy, for there was little traffic to interfere with sleigh rides down Main Street, across the fourteen arches of the bridge spanning the River Erne, and ending in the Purt of Ballyshannon.

This story is different, up close and personal, of that one snowy winter and how it affected publication of the family weekly newspaper, The Donegal Vindicator.

The machine room which housed the Wharfedale printing press, the hand-fed platen, the make-up stones, the trays of type fonts, the racks of poster types, the chases, brass rules, composing sticks, coigns, keys, all the "furniture" required in make-up, the iron cylinder cases into which melted rubber composition was poured to set and cool, eventually to become inking rollers for flatbed or platen, all the bits and pieces that made up the stuff of a printing works, not forgetting the tins of printers' ink with their distinctive smell --that machine room with its corrugated tin roof, planked sides, and cobwebbed windows, was a separate edifice that could only be entered from the outdoors.

In other words, to reach it from the main structure, one had to walk outside and traverse a pathway to the door of the machine room.

The room was heated by a potbellied stove, fed with coal, turf, or whatever other combustible might be handy when both were in short supply. With its corrugated tin roof and chinks in its walls, it was never a warm place at the best of times, but in the depths of winter one learned to enter and exit quickly to a loud refrain: "Shut the door!"

Somehow this snapshot has survived the vicissitudes of time to show the icicle clad exterior and snowdrift walls. The stone building at the rear was the original printing works which housed some twenty compositors who "hand set from case" before machine setting equipment replaced them.

The room in which the Intertype was housed was part of the main building which housed the paper's offices and our living quarters above.

Why there was no passage between the Intertype room and the machine room was a mystery. In the dim and distant past there had been a connecting link, closed for some forgotten reason, and never reopened. Hence the necessity to go out to go in when passing between them.

This meant that galley trays of type cast in hot metal by the Intertype had to be carried by hand outdoors in all weathers to the machine room, there to be made up in demy size page lengths , interspersed with strategically placed advertisements, the lot being locked in steel frames called chases, which in turn were carried to the Wharfedale and locked in position on its flat bed.

After printing, the lead slugs were placed in a pot on the hot pot bellied stove which returned them to a molten state, which was cast in ingots, carried back to the Intertype room, and began their cycle once more into slugs of hot metal type.

The hot bellied stove was the only thing which made the machine room habitable in winter. Correspondingly, when used in summer to melt the metal slugs, it almost made the machine room uninhabitable.

Now with the turn of a switch in Canada I can summon up heat in cold winter and air conditioning in hot summer. But there still comes the odd shout , in both winter and summer, "Shut the door!"

There is just no pleasing everybody.

To return to that memorable winter of 1939, the Vindicator machine room was a veritable hive of activity in the pre-Christmas season, and much of the to-ing and fro-ing fell to my father. He it was who supervised the making of illustrations to go with the advertisements, again a hot metal process, one that required a certain delicacy of judgment in pouring molten lead into small iron frames which held an impressed deep-relief matrix. The end product, if the temperature of the molten metal was right, and the matrix wasn't burned, was a metal plate with a picture indented on it.

Only one of these could be made at a time. Dad, it seemed to me, was continually interrupting his work as editor and one-man general factotum to don overcoat and gloves and plow his way through snow, long frozen, still falling, to the machine room to make a metal plate, and back again to his office, cold going and cold returning.

As a youngster of twelve it was an exciting time for me, watching and learning, seeing everything done by hand in the printing process of the times.

At 7:30 each morning "the metal was switched on". What this meant was that the electric heating for the Intertype pot was begun, a process that took an hour and a half to turn the ingots into molten form which in turn became the slugs of lead type keyboarded by Frank Burke or Mick Slevin, the Intertype machine operators.

Eight columns a day was the norm for an operator's production of straight text. Anything requiring the switching of fonts could cut into the normal output.

My uncle, John McAdam, was responsible for the Wharfedale, keeping it liberally supplied with oil, casting the inking rollers in the carefully greased cylinders, setting the blades on the printing press ink duct to ensure the proper amount of ink reached each individual page, and feeding the paper sheet by sheet with each rotation of the big roller that impressed paper to type with just the right pressure.

Do you know that you can handle sheets of white paper with hands black with printer's ink, without leaving a mark on it? This was something that always puzzled me when I saw my uncle working. The secret was simple. He slid his hands down the outside of his trousers or dungarees, and the friction left his hands and fingers glossy, like modern-day teflon coating, so that they were incapable of transferring any of their oily blackness to paper.

That winter saw a return to sleighing on the Main Street, from just above Reid & Sweeny's , the solicitor's office, all the way down to the Market Yard, across the fourteen arches spanning the Erne, and into the East Port.

The Erne at that time was a wide river, not the constricted tailrace that flows through a man-made narrow rock cutting, a consequence of the hydroelectric dam erected where Cathleen's Falls once were.

It ran behind the roofless building shown in the photograph above, cold, dark, and deep. That winter small fingers of ice laced its sides wherever it slowed and backwater eddies formed. The weather wasn't cold enough to permit the ice to grow longer, but it was cold enough to let the ice cover Lough Bracken and several other ponds and lakes not far away, where in colder, harsher winters people had skated.

That winter was the first of the Second World War.

It was the first winter I recall with the clarity of a young boy's memory undimmed by time. The crunchy snow, the early morning chill, the clearness in the air, the cold hands, the reddened cheeks and numbed toes, the walk to school, Sweeny's Steps, the sting of the wind on top of The Rock, and not a worry in the world, all that day by day, and the red hot stove with its pot of melting metal when school was over, all those made up the wonderland of that winter of 1939.

I wish all readers of this new cyberspace Vindicator their own happy memories of the winter of 2003.

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