My name is Gertrude Chubbs. I grew up in a small place called Deep Water Creek. I have many fond memories of my time there. Many of those fond memories are times I would spend jannying during the twelve days of Christmas.

Deep Water Creek was a small fishing community and once was home to 6 families. Photo courtesy of Rene Poole

When I was growing up in Deep Water Creek it was great fun going jannying. I remember a crowd of us would get together and dress up. The trick was to dress up as foolish and different as possible so nobody would recognize you. Men would dress up in women's clothes and women would dress up in men's clothes. Some women would wear old oil clothes and old overalls. Other woman would wear men's longjohns and stuff clothes down inside them to fill them out. They would stuff old clothes down in the back of them also to make it look like they had big old rear ends. They would disguise their faces with pieces of cloth or something and then put on old hats to keep the piece of cloth from falling off. Some men would put on woman's dresses. Other men would be a bit foolish and put on women's bras and drawers. They would stuff the bras and drawers with old clothes. What a sight they would be! They would also wear a scarf or something to cover over their face with. When we were all dressed up there was some hard looking cases amongst us.

When we were ready we would head out to our first house. We would knock on the door and ask in a strange voice, "Are you going to let the jannies in?" Just about everybody loved to see the jannies coming. We would go inside the house and carry on and torment the people. lf they had an accordion or violin we would have a little dance. Some people would offer us a drop of spruce beer if they had it. People would be trying to guess who we were and some would try to haul off our masks but we would not let them. Everyone would be laughing, joking and having a good time. When we would leave the house the people would be sad to see us leave.

We would visit all the houses in Deep Water Creek. There was not many houses there at that time so when we had finished all the houses we would walk up to Fox Harbour and do some jannying up there. When we got back to home it would be late at night and we would be pretty tired. The next day we would make plans to go jannying again that night and this time dress up in a different costume.