The Christmas Carousel

When I was an Archaeology undergrad student in the late 1980s, I remember picking up a piece of 1,500 year old pottery, and placing my thumb and index finger into the very “pinch” the potter made to decorate the rim of the pot. It was an extraordinary moment of connection with another person I’ve never met, over a great gulf of time, through a single object.

Working in museums, I’ve been fortunate to experience this kind of connection many times, although never as viscerally as that first time. One of the big challenges that museums face is in trying to bring that kind of experience to our visitors. Today, for Christmas Eve, I’d like to share another experience I’ve had, with the toy carousel pictured here.

When I first started with the museum in 2002 (it was then called the Medicine Hat Museum and Art Gallery), the carousel didn’t look like much. It had been taken apart to better fit on our too-crowded storage shelves, so it was a jumble of beams, boards, cardboard and fabric. It had been that way for years, and I left it that way for a few years more. But, in 2005 the Esplanade was nearing completion, and we had to prepare our collections for the move into their new home. I didn’t even know if the carousel was complete--the only way to figure that out was to put it together. It was the kind of job where you wish you had five or six hands instead of two—a lot of “hold this and this, while trying to fit this into that and there” business. With the final piece, though, everything just snapped into shape; it was like setting the keystone into an arch. Not only was this previously frail piece now strong and rigid, but whole thing balanced beautifully from the top peak, and a gentle push was all that was needed to send it ‘round, and ‘round, and ‘round…

The carousel was so much stronger assembled that we moved it that way, with just a bit of crumpled paper beneath it to support the floor through the move, and to keep the whole thing from turning. We still store it that way, fully assembled.

The carousel made such an impression on me (not only from the precision of its construction, but also its size—it’s 66 cm in diameter, and 60 cm high), that when I had an opportunity to develop an exhibit based on our collection, I chose toys as the theme—so we could show off this piece (that exhibit, “Playful Revelations,” ran July through October 2009). It was in the course of researching that exhibit that I found the carousel had been made by Tom Woods, an employee of the Canadian Pacific Railway, around 1920. Mr. Woods cut out the beams and floorboards, and his wife stitched the fabric and sewed on the beads and bells. The carousel was displayed in the Woods’ Braemer Street home every Christmas, and was a popular attraction throughout the neighbourhood. The donor of the carousel, a family friend of the Woods, recalled being one of the child admirers of this piece. The carousel was first exhibit by the Museum over Christmas 1995 (the first Christmas after the carousel was donated) as a nod to the Woods' tradition.

In that spirit of child-like awe for a marvellous toy, I’d like to extend to you the Esplanade Museum’s best wishes for a Merry Christmas.