Christmas 2025: Garlands spread the love around over the holidays

BY SHAWN LOUGHLIN

For Linda and Elwin Garland, at their picturesque rural property near Bluevale, Christmas with family, friends and community members can be a fluid experience, flexible in terms of time, but they always make time and create opportunities to give back to those who find themselves wanting around the holidays.

 

Earlier in 2025, Linda was named the Citizen of the Year Award winner for the Brussels community thanks to her extensive work with a number of local organizations, including Soup and More 2, the 5R’s thrift shop, the Brussels Agricultural Society, Brussels Mennonite Fellowship and more. She has spent more than 50 years teaching in one capacity or another, from schools in Huron County to Alberta to the Centre for Employment and Learning back in Huron County and even now for Fanshawe College in Bruce Power-adjacent math courses. 

 

Elwin also spent his life teaching throughout the area at schools like North Woods Elementary School (which was Grey Central Public School back in those days), Wingham Public School, F.E. Madill School and more before retiring and turning full-time to a life as a local pastor, a role he still fulfills on occasion at area United or Presbyterian churches, in addition to their beloved Brussels Mennonite Fellowship.

 

Elwin grew up around the Ottawa area, while Linda was born and raised on a farm near Blair on the outskirts of Cambridge. They made their way to Huron County by way of their teaching careers and have, with the exception of a handful of years in beautiful Alberta, lived on their same Browntown Road farm since the late 1970s, a property they hope to keep in the family as the next generation comes of age.

 

Growing up, Linda lived on a dairy farm with her family, so every Christmas morning began not with presents or mugs of hot chocolate stuffed with marshmallows, but with milking the cows. Once the chores were done, they’d come into the house and have breakfast and wash all of the dishes before they could commence with the more traditional aspects of Christmas.

 

Linda says her family was relatively poor, so gifts were modest, but that was just fine with the parties involved, who understood their economic situation. However, they made the most out of it, celebrating the holidays to the extent that they could.

 

On the other hand, as Elwin grew up in the Ottawa area as an only child, he said Christmas didn’t seem like a major concern for his father. He wasn’t a Grinch or anything, he just didn’t prioritize celebrating Christmas in the house. There were years, Elwin said, that he almost had to twist his dad’s arm to get a tree.     

 

That all changed when he and Linda married and he inherited not only new, more fulsome Christmas traditions, but new brothers, sisters and cousins with which to celebrate them. He said that he felt like he had struck a gold mine in addition to marrying Linda. All of sudden, they were part of pre- and post-Christmas celebrations, in addition to a more robust Christmas celebration than he’d been a part of previously.

 

As they had a family of their own, the couple created their own new traditions, but Linda has retained the breakfast followed by doing the dishes rule that she adhered to in her younger days. Then, whether it’s she and Elwin, their children or their grandchildren, everyone opens gifts one at a time so that they don’t get lost in the shuffle.

 

However, beyond the traditional Christmas meals - including baking, which Linda really only does around the holidays, keeping recipes from her mother, aunt and others alive for the younger generations - and gift-giving, there is another type of giving that has, for most of their lives, been central to not just life around the holidays, but life in general as members of a community church and congregation members who have dedicated their time to missionary trips abroad.

 

As she flips through the gift guide from the Mennonite Central Committee, she explains which “gifts” her children and grandchildren had chosen from their grandparents. Options include measures to keep young women in school, paying for a well or clean drinking water or perhaps even an animal for the family, all benefiting those less fortunate in countries like Mozambique, Bangladesh, India, Ethiopia and more. This generous gift-giving process has been part of the holidays for the Garlands and their children for as long as they were old enough to understand the need and what they were doing to help. It has now extended to the couple’s grandchildren as well, who all take the time to peruse the pamphlet and make a choice of their own.

 

Elwin also recalls a charitable endeavour they first took on in Alberta, which was the church’s congregation hosting an expansive Christmas Day meal for those who may not have anywhere to go for the holidays or the means to put on  such a meal themselves. The meal was always well-attended with everyone leaving with smiles on their faces, he said. That tradition has since migrated to Brussels Mennonite Fellowship, where the Garlands were one of the first few families who worked to found the church and get it off of the ground.

 

For the Garlands, that method of outreach extends beyond the community and their church and into their home, where they’re known to host one or two people from the community each year who may not have close family or another option around the holidays. For them, it’s all about being together with good people, whether they are your family, friends, neighbours or fellow community members.