Archbishop Anthony Mancini recalls his favourite Christmas

We asked you to share your #CBCGreatest Gifts with us. Today, Archbishop Anthony Mancini tells us about a special Christmas presence from his childhood.

Being the head of the Catholic church in Nova Scotia means amassing a lot of Christmas memories.

Still, the one Archbishop Anthony Mancini most treasures is from long before he started studying for the priesthood.

Mancini was six or seven years old in the early 1950s when his family began cooking and preparing the house for their new tradition: Christmas in Montreal.

They were still adjusting to Canadian winter. About three years earlier they had sailed from southern Italy, arriving in Halifax and then Quebec in early December.

For Mancini's father, the snow was a special struggle. He had gotten a job for a railroad, and in winter he supported the family by shovelling the tracks all night long or whenever the company called on him after a storm.

The joy of it was that we were able to be there together as a whole family.- Anthony Mancini

"I remember days, my mother used to prepare him a lunch, but the lunch was a shopping bag, because he'd literally be out two, three days and wouldn't come home," said Mancini.

In Italy, his father had been the manager of their town.

"My father didn't say very much, but I discovered later on in life that for him, it was quite a sacrifice," said Mancini. "He had left what was quite a good job in Italy, and to go from being a white-collar worker to a labourer, that was a very difficult thing for him to do."

The job also kept him away from his wife and three young children. As a boy, Mancini remembers waiting as Christmas Eve approached, hopes rising that his father would stay around, but it always seemed like the snow would start to fall at exactly the wrong moment.

"Because of that, I would often experience Christmas in a kind of a negative fashion, because here we were gathered as a family, but my father would not be able to be there," the archbishop said.

A silent night

That one year, Christmas Eve arrived, and the phone hadn't rung. The Mancinis began eating their special seven-course meal, and went to midnight mass, then got up the next day and snow still wasn't falling.

"That particular Christmas stands out for me as really significant, and the joy of it was that we were able to be there together as a whole family," he said. "Being immigrants, and in a sense being on our own, the fact that we were able to be together this one time was a great joy and a great gift, certainly to me."

His father, normally a silent type, sampled his homemade wine on Christmas Day and told his kids how happy he was to be home with them.

"It's hard to describe," said Mancini. "I suppose we're so conditioned to associate Christmas with very tangible things, it's hard to describe how something as simple as your father being at home at Christmas with the family. That's hard to appreciate, I think."

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