PAUL:	My fabulous aunt on my mother's side, my aunt Betty, 
was an almost mythic figure of fabled stature in our family 
during my childhood in the early '50's.

Aunt Betty had married a boy from Halifax in March 1915, and 
as tragedy has a way of touching every family, he volunteered 
for the Army the following month and gave his life on the barren 
vistas of the Western Front, in Ypres, aiding the kibosh of the 
German menace in Europe.

Betty was understandably heartbroken.  Married for a month before 
the husband enlisted, a very short honeymoon in Quebec, and then 
... nothing.  
 
She never remarried; resigned herself to a childless, manless 
spinsterhood; draped herself in dark velvets and remained an old 
woman from the time she was 21.

But forty-odd years later, when Frank and I and our cousins knew 
her, we weren't privy to this history.  We just loved the lacy 
mantillas, the liver-spotted hands with the swollen veins, the 
handkerchiefs stuffed up her sleeves, the sturdy stern black shoes.

Though she had no children, Betty loved them. One of the highlights 
of the Xmas season was the annual nieces and nephews party at Aunt 
Betty's 'grotto', as we called it.

The crew arrived piecemeal and scattered about the house. We'd then 
be retrieved from out of the cupboards and bathrooms; and lost again 
as we filtered to the basement, been found messing around with the 
furnace and saved; and then finally all collected into the drawing room.

Then Aunt Betty, seated like a queen above her court, would speak at us.

"Do you know what I got for Christmas," she would ask.

"No, aunt Betty, what did you get for Xmas ?"

"I received a huge box of glorious chocolates."

"Oooh" we'd coo.
"Would you like to see them?"

"Oh, yes, Aunt Betty, yes."
"Paul" she would say, or "Ethel", or "Rosemary", every year a different 
child, "go upstairs to by bedroom, and on the dresser you will find a 
large box of chocolates.  Bring it down to us, would you, my dear?"

The appointed child disappeared out the hall and up the stairs.  We 
could hear the tiny feet through the ceiling, imagining the journey 
to the bedroom, the sight of the box, and the careful return to the throng.

"Thank you, my dear" she'd say, always the courteous one.
 
Then, she'd hold out before us the hugest, thickest box of chocolates 
any of us had ever seen.  Whether it was our imaginations or reality, 
the box seemed to get bigger every year.  We all inched closer to her.

She'd work off the cover.  Out slipped the map - the one that showed 
you where the hard caramels were so that you didn't have to poke your 
thumb through everything else to find them.

Then the ruffled sleeve would be removed, and revealed to all - an 
array of glistening globs.  The deep dark dusky hue of bittersweet 
chocolate, the lighter lustre of the most-favourite milk chocolate, and 
the chalky pearlesence of the acquired taste of sweet white chocolate.  
We conjured up mental images of chocolate robed nuts and nougat, toffee 
and Turkish delight.  We were practically in her lap by now.

"Aren't they beautiful?" she asked.

"Yes, Aunt Betty" we answered, hardly drooling at all on the cousin in 
front, "yes, they are beautiful."

"Yes", she said, "they are."

And then, back in would go the sleeve, then the map, and on would go 
the cover.

"They are beautiful chocolates.  Now, dear, bring them back to my room 
and put them back on the dresser."

Every year.  The same drill.  And never a chocolate for any of us.

It was only after Aunt Betty died in 1995 and I was helping Mom sort 
out the estate, that I found the box of chocolates, still intact still 
on the dresser.  They were chocolates of the highest quality, I realized.  
Belgian chocolates. A Christmas gift from a lonely infantryman, away from 
home for the first time, to the young wife he'd left behind.