Writing about her family’s Christmas traditions taught Tammy Gale an important life lesson while helping to heal the pain of losing her mother.
Tammy was born in St. George’s, where her mother, Kay, insisted on solely blue lights instead of the multi-coloured strands favoured by Tammy and many others during the holiday season.
The two remained close through the years, but Tammy never really warmed to the blue lights or found out her mother’s reasoning behind the particular choice of holiday décor.
Even so, she decided to hang some blue lights on a tree next to her house after her mother passed away in 2008 following a short battle with cancer.
Upon taking a few writing courses through Athabasca University as part of a business management degree she’s pursuing, Tammy decided to write a story about her own life.
“The instructor said to write what you know,” she said. “So I was looking out the window at the tree and I realized those lights that were so ugly to me as a child were now a good way to remember our time together.”
The story Tammy wrote detailed the story of the blue lights and how their changing perception in her life helped her deal with the loss of her mother.
“It felt good to write, but was also emotional,” she said.
“I showed it to my brother and he said I should submit it to ‘Our Canada’ for possible publication. He said people should read it because there’s a good life lesson in the story.”
She wasn’t too keen on the idea at first, as she never had anything published before, but eventually mailed the story to the magazine’s editors.
A couple of months went by before she received a reply saying the story would be published.
“Once I got the magazine, I started to cry,” she said. “Mom would have loved it.”
She said that’s because her mother was also a writer, who penned poetry and personal stories about her own life, but never had any of her work published.
Tammy’s story, “A Blue Christmas,” appears in the December-January edition of Our Canada magazine, which is published by Reader’s Digest Canada.
