Auntie Knickers’ Advent Storytime/Advent Calendar of Christmas Memories: December 4

Today is St. Barbara’s Day, which is celebrated (according to Mimi Sheraton’s wonderful Christmas cookbook, Visions of Sugarplums) in the Levant by Christian Syrians, Lebanese, etc. and also in German-speaking countries. Look back to my post of December 4, 2008 for more information about St. Barbara and tonight’s story and song. I’m really glad I have a backlog of recorded stories to use because I have a dreadful cold and can’t go two minutes without coughing!
Tonight’s story, Schnitzle, Schnotzle, and Schnootzle, is from The Long Christmas, a book of tales collected and told by Ruth Sawyer, the master storyteller and writer.

Her book, The Way of the Storyteller,
is still a great manual of instruction and inspiration for anyone who wants to be a storyteller. She was also the mother-in-law of Robert McCloskey,

of Blueberries for Sal fame. (I’m supposed to be writing about Holiday Foods today but I used up all my thoughts on the subject last year. We had blueberry pie at Thanksgiving, so does this count?)
The song for tonight, to go with the story from the Austrian Tyrol, is “Aba Heidschi Bumbeidschi,” a rather eerie lullaby sung in the Austrian dialect by the Konrad Plaickner Chorus and Orchestra. The words of this lovely song are so disturbing that many modern singers (Nina Simone, for one) have recorded it with changed words.
Since I did get a request from a Mac user, I’ll post links to individual files as well as the zipped files which I’ve compressed using the WinZip program. Be aware that the Mac-compatible (I hope) files will take longer to download since they are not compressed.
DOWNLOAD TONIGHT’S ZIP FILE HERE
DOWNLOAD INTRO FOR MAC HERE
DOWNLOAD STORY FOR MAC HERE
DOWNLOAD SONG FOR MAC HERE

Advent Calendar of Christmas Memories/Auntie Knickers’ Advent Storytime: December 3

One of our Christmas trees this year will be decorated with handmade ornaments. Some have been made by us, some by friends and family members, and some were bought at church Christmas fairs or brought as gifts from foreign lands. I don’t remember having homemade ornaments on my childhood trees, although my siblings and I may well have made some in school or Sunday school. Onkel Hankie Pants’ family at least had the Danish paper hearts,
and in later years we learned to make these and various other ornaments at West Denmark Family Camp.
Tonight’s story is more about the absence of ornaments: The Tree That Didn’t Get Trimmed by Christopher Morley. It seems to have been published first in a book of essays, later as a stand-alone book, and on GoogleBooks I found it in an issue of Boys’ Life from the mid-50s. Morley was “a man of letters” who did not confine himself to one format. His first novels, Parnassus on Wheels and The Haunted Bookshop,became cult classics among a certain bookish crew; a later novel, Kitty Foyle, was made into a movie. Morley also was one of the first judges for the Book-of-The-Month Club and edited two editions of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations; he was a regular contributor to the Saturday Review of Literature, a magazine with which I whiled away many hours while I should have been studying. In Nassau County, New York, there is a park named for him where his “writing cabin,” The Knothole, is preserved.

The songs are a Norwegian song to the Christmas tree, Sang til Juletraeet, by Mike & Else Sevig, and a humorous song, Revenge of the Christmas Tree, by Erik Darling.
DOWNLOAD TONIGHT’S STORY HERE

Advent Calendar of Christmas Memories/Auntie Knickers’ Advent Storytime: December 2

Once again, I find I have nothing further to report on the writing prompt for today in the Geneabloggers’ Advent Calendar: Holiday Foods. Since I went on and on about them last December, you should look there if you want to know about some of our food traditions. Or, you could listen to tonight’s story, Robert P. T. Coffin’s Christmas in Maine.  Robert Peter Tristram Coffin is one of four literary figures memorialized in the sidewalks of our town, and the only one who is a native of this area (the others, who all sojourned here for just a few years, being Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.)

Coffin not only grew up on a farm in Harpswell, he stayed around as a professor at Bowdoin College, while also writing Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry as well as memoirs and other works. I wrote more about Coffin in the blog for December 21, 2008. 
I chose the song “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen” as sung by the BBC Welsh Chorus to accompany this night’s reading because it sounded to me like something the Coffins might have sung on their sleighride. According to both William Studwell in his useful The Christmas Carol Reader and Walter Ehret and George K. Evans in The International Book of Christmas Carols, the melody dates from at least the 18th century and probably earlier; the words are probably 18th century and may have originated with the London Waits, carolsingers of the time.  This carol is even mentioned in DIckens’ A Christmas Carol when Scrooge nearly assaults a carolsinger who dares to serenade him.
The recorded introduction was for 2006 when Sisterfilms was still living in City of Lakes and was flying out to be with us for Christmas.
DOWNLOAD TONIGHT’S STORY HERE

Advent Calendar of Christmas Memories/Auntie Knickers’ Advent Storytime: December 1

Today’s writing prompt for the Advent Calendar of Christmas Memories is the Christmas Tree. Now, I think I said just about everything I can recall about our Christmas trees last year, on December 2. So rather than repost, I’ll just send you there.
We have two Christmas trees at our house this year. One is the traditional balsam fir and the other, as best we can determine, is a hemlock (more on this anon.)
Sisterfilms has just unformed us that what she’d really like is a Scotch or

Norway pine with long needles.
Perhaps next year our woods can at least provide a white pine.

For tonight’s story, I had several Christmas tree stories to choose from; I picked one of the oldest, The Peterkins’ Christmas Tree by Lucretia P. Hale. Here’s the book it comes from – one of the Junior Deluxe Editions I used to get in the mail. I’ve had this book for about 55 years!

Lucretia Peabody Hale came from old Boston stock, and literary stock at that. Her father, Nathan Hale (named for his famous Revolutionary uncle) was an editor, and her mother an author. One of her many siblings was Edward Everett Hale, author of The Man without a Country, which I remember being assigned to read in junior high. And on her mother’s side, Lucretia could count as a relative the orator Edward Everett, now famous chiefly for being the “main” and lengthy speaker on the occasion when Lincoln gave his Gettysburg Address.
Lucretia, who was born in 1820 and died in 1900, saw the introduction of the Christmas tree into New England. In Germany, Austria, and Scandinavia, Christmas trees were a long tradition by the 19th century, when Ernst Anschutz wrote some new words to an old tune, O Tannenbaum. I’ve selected a version by the Wiener Sängerknaben (The Vienna Boys’ Choir). Although Tannenbaum means “Fir Tree,” this is where we get back to our hemlock, for Maine’s own Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, apparently in the throes of unrequited love, wrote a non-Christmas poem, The Hemlock Tree, which is obviously meant to be sung to the Tannenbaum melody.
DOWNLOAD TONIGHT’S STORYTIME HERE

Friday Five: Christmas Past

“Tell us about five Christmas memories you have,” says Jan at RevGalBlogPals, who must be just as frazzled as I am by now. One of the reasons I’m feeling as though it will never all get done in time is just that – since I’ve been trying to blog Christmas memories as well as post readings of Christmas stories, and I’m three and two days behind, respectively. I’ll share some briefly, and you can read my “Advent Calendar of Christmas Memories” posts for more.

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1. Waking up on Christmas morning 26 years ago. Not just waking up, but realizing that labor was beginning and the doctors had been right – our third child would be a Christmas baby. I woke my husband and the older children (not unusual, I’m always the first one up that day), we had stockings and then brought them, still in their new pajamas, to their grandparents’ house and went to the hospital. At 1:30 pm we got our best Christmas present. Big sister and Bedstemor meet her for the first time in this photo. Note the stocking in which she was presented, which became her birthday stocking.

2. The skating Santa. A week or two before the above events, I was feeling a bit nervous about the upcoming addition to our family and how we would all deal with it – financially and otherwise. I worked downtown then, in a job-sharing situation where I worked all day, every other day. One day I was riding the bus home and as we passed Peavey Plaza, near Orchestra Hall, where there was a skating rink, I saw Santa Claus walk up to the rink, remove his boots and put on ice skates, and begin skating. It was such a lovely sight that it made me feel everything would be all right, and it was.

3. A starring role. Our first child and only son was a June baby, so on his first Christmas he was the perfect age to portray the infant Jesus in our church Christmas pageant. As we then lived in a farming community, the manger was handmade and filled with real hay. SonShineIn did a great job – no crying he made, but waved his hands and feet charmingly. I just hope that hay wasn’t what gave him hay fever!

4. Christmas Eve church. Specifically, the 5:30 pm service during the years when we had many responsibilities both at home and in church – after my in-laws moved to Wisconsin and we began hosting the Christmas Eve dinner, and while spouse and daughters sang in the choirs and I read the children’s story. It was always a rush to get there on time for choir warmups, while making sure the dinner preparations were well underway; snow and cold often complicated things. The beginning of the service would find me still jittery, but once I had read my story I was filled with a sense of peace and contentment. I could enjoy the beautiful music, the candles and poinsettias, the lighted tree and pews crowded with festively-dressed friends and their visiting families, and best of all that moment when our minister read the words: “In the beginning was the Word….”

5. A special gift. In 1964, my father was transferred to Stuttgart, Germany by the Army and we, of course, went with him. We arrived in August and by Christmas, although I was making some new friends, I was missing the friends I’d left behind a lot. My friend The Boss sent me a Christmas present which was probably the start of my large and still-growing collection of Christmas literature. It was the beautiful little paperback edition of Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales. I’m not sure I was even aware of that piece before then, although I did know of Dylan Thomas. It seems that each year, there is one gift received or given that stands out in the memory, and for that year, this is the one.

From Atlantic to Pacific, Gee, the Traffic is Terrific

(I’m concentrating this post, which deals with Holiday Travel, the writing prompt for December 13, on one particular Christmas. I can’t warrant that everything took place in the order stated or even that it took place on that particular Christmas, but it’s all true one way or another.)

Holiday travel for my family in 1957 covered a lot of ground, sea and air and started early. By Thanksgiving, our apartment on Mississippistrasse in the Hainerberg housing area of Wiesbaden, Germany was denuded of all but the most necessary items and the furniture provided by the Army. We even ate Thanksgiving dinner in the mess hall of my father’s unit. (This was the infamous raw-shrimp-cocktail Thanksgiving, about which I think I’ve written previously.) We had all had our shots updated and been tested to make sure we hadn’t contracted tuberculosis from injudiciously eating ice cream on the street. For a few days, after moving out of our quarters, we stayed in a once-magnificent spa hotel downtown, where I think there was a fountain of dreadful-smelling mineral water in the lobby. At last our port call came, and we made our way to nearby Frankfurt and Rhein-Main Airport. We were fortunate to be flying, as my mother and brother were prone to seasickness.

The flight home was not without incident. I’m not sure why, but we had a layover in Montreal that I’m pretty sure was unscheduled. We were put up in a motel, and when we tried to get something to eat in the restaurant, we were met with “So sorry m’sieu, the kitchen, she is in the fire!” I think that night ended with our first experience of take-out fried chicken.

We did eventually reach McGuire AFB and neighboring Fort Dix, and after the usual Army “processing,” we were ready for the next leg of our journey. We children were excited to learn that this would be in a new (to us) car. And not just any car – it was a two-tone, blue and cream, 1956 Ford Fairlane Victoria in the hardtop convertible style. It wasn’t really convertible, but it looked as cool as one. V-8 engine, just enough chrome, and take a look at those cool headlights! I couldn’t limit myself to just one picture. Here’s an old advertisement I got from Uncle Phil; ours, however, was a two-door model, we think. I seem to remember the car as having a lighter blue in the blue parts, like one of the photos below; but I may be confusing it with the Edsel that replaced it.

This one could use a little restoration. You may think this a small car for a family of seven, but none of us were very big at that time, ranging in age from 7 to 3 1/2.

Take a look at those cool headlights! Thanks to Uncles Phil and Carl for helping me figure out the make and model of this car.

Since I don’t remember the exact dates of any of this, I’m not sure exactly what happened next. I think we drove to Bridgeport or New Haven where my father would be working as a National Guard Advisor, and he reported in. Then we looked for a house to rent. They found a dark green duplex, two-story, with one very large bedroom in the front that could be divided into a boys’ side and a girls’ side, a couple of blocks from the beach and our school could be seen from the back door. I think they probably went to a used furniture store for beds and such. AND, because Brother #1 was sick (not seriously, but he was pretty miserable, poor little fella) Daddy brought home a color television! Since we had basically had no television for two years (very little was broadcast in Germany then and of course, it was all in German) this was a very exciting development for all of us. I think we stayed in Milford, our new home, long enough to get a bit settled and for my parents to enroll four of us in school (the twins had turned 5 in October so they hadn’t started kindergarten in Germany, but the principal of Point Beach School decided they could begin in January). Then we headed for Maine and Christmas.

There was no I-95 then as far as I know; we started out on the Wilbur Cross Parkway and continued on various turnpikes, parkways, and US and state routes. Some of the more outstanding advertising structures (a giant Indian, a giant steer, and so on) would become familiar landmarks over the next seven years, but they were all new to us then and to be pointed out and exclaimed over. At last, we paid our dime and crossed over the Piscataqua River, and we were in Maine.

There’s one family story I must tell that we think took place on this trip. We were only about 30 miles from Bowdoinham, near Exit 9 on the Maine Turnpike at Falmouth, when we saw a lone airman in uniform hitchhiking north. My parents briefly considered picking him up, but decided our car was really too crowded with kids, luggage, and Christmas presents. Not long after we arrived at my grandparents’ house, there was another homecoming – my uncle Carl, who was then an airman stationed at Pease AFB in Portsmouth, NH. Ayuh. He was the hitchhiker we had passed by. My mother always said, “If we had known it was you, we would have made room!” But he hasn’t held it against us.

Ah, Christmas in Maine at Grammie and Grampie’s house! My memory is that we actually stayed there, though we had our own little house up the road. In addition to Carl, my aunt Kate was still at home since she was still in high school, and my bachelor (at the time) Uncle Dick lived there as well. There were still two large bedrooms free upstairs, and since the house boasted no central heating, crowding in together could help keep you warm. The kitchen stove, living room stove, and a small one in my grandparents’ room were the only woodstoves in the house as far as I know. Bricks and old flatirons were heated on the stove in the evening, wrapped in newspaper, and used to warm the beds and our chilly feet; we huddled under mounds of Grammie’s homemade quilts until we got warm enough to sleep. Aunt Kate had a pair of ski pajamas, or that’s how I remembered them; she assures me that they were really red flannel with white snowflakes, made by my grandmother, in place of the kind you could buy in stores which cost $3.77 in the Sears catalog.

But what of cold? It was Christmas! I don’t remember any of the presents I got that year, though I’m sure I enjoyed them at the time. I recall a few we gave – the cuckoo clock brought from Germany that played “The Last Rose of Summer” on the hour in Grammie’s living room for many years; and the smoked dried German sausage my parents had smuggled in. I think perhaps we had Christmas dinner at my aunt Celia’s farmhouse on the Ridge. I know it was great to be there, to hear the grownups talking and telling stories, to see the cousins (all older or younger than I was), and most of all for me, to have such a wide choice of reading material! I had been sadly deprived during those weeks of moving and travel, and now it was all here – the children’s books from my mother’s childhood, (this may have been when I first read Little Women), the green-bound set of Dickens in the hall bookcase (I never got beyond the first few scary pages of Great Expectations until I was in my 20s!), Grampie’s Life magazine and Westerns, Uncle Dick’s Argosy, True, and Field and Stream. I dipped into them all.

We didn’t talk a lot about homesickness in my family. Our parents took the line that wherever we were together was home, and avoided complaining about any place we lived, at least where we could hear them. But I know it was a special Christmas for all of us, to be at home in Maine again with all our loved ones nearby.

Ye Who Now Will Bless the Poor….

(Today’s writing prompt is Volunteer/Charitable Work. I’m focussing on one activity that was very important to our family for many years.)

On the first Sunday in Advent in the early 1980s, you would probably find our family making an emergency stop at Snyder’s Drug Store on the way to church, to buy a package of ornament hooks. In the early years of the Wreath of Love program in the TRUST Church Group, the organization supplied a plain wreath to each church, which was to be decorated with small construction-paper cards. On the green cards, the outline of a tree waa on the front with someone’s first name written on it. On the red cards, a stocking with a name. Inside, three Christmas ball shapes with the description of a gift written on each – the green cards might have a wish for a sweatsuit, a comforter, a radio, or a pair of Velcro-fastened sneakers; the red ones might be wishes for candy, cookies, cologne,or even a stuffed animal. These were all wishes from residents of two local nursing homes. These homes, unlike many in the Twin Cities, were not affiliated with any of the major denominations, and TRUST helped provide a chaplain for them. The residents, some of whom had no close relatives and most of whom were on Medicaid, had some simple wishes they could not fulfill on the $40 a month left to them for necessities and small luxuries. So each year the TRUST churches would distribute these cards among their members and gifts would come rolling in. I was the coordinator of this program at my church for many years – until we left town. It was one of the most satisfying parts of Christmas for me and my family, and for many other church members.

The program did not always exist in that way. As editor of the church newsletter, I’d spent several years putting in the yearly article requesting a variety of generic gifts for the two homes’ residents, and always wondered a little – what if, for instance, all the people who brought in gifts brought slips and eau de toilette, and there were elderly men getting nothing? Someone else must have considered this and come up with a brilliant solution. The chaplain and social worker would go to each resident and develop a wish list of three large and three small gifts (staff members would choose gift ideas for those who were unable to communicate any wishes) and the church members would be asked to buy one from the “Tree” card and one from the “Stocking” card for each resident, wrap and address the package, and bring it to church for pickup in time for the nursing home Christmas party.

The increased personalization of the giving process made all the difference – from the very beginning, all I had to do was announce that the cards had arrived, and I’d have to hightail it out of the sanctuary to beat the stampede of members and their children eager to get a card. My responsibility (besides hanging the cards on a wreath, which custom disappeared within a few years) was to note who had taken which card, make sure all were distributed, and make sure all the gifts came in safely and on time. There was never a serious problem with any of it. In fact, when other churches couldn’t get rid of all their cards or when new residents arrived at the last moment, we could always be called upon to take a few extra cards. (To be fair to the other churches – being a United Church of Christ congregation, we did not have any denominationally-run homes as most of the other churches did, and which they supported in similar ways.) Well, our one problem was that sometimes people would not be able to stand getting just one gift and would buy all three items the person had asked for. Not a bad problem to have.

It was always interesting to see how people made the choice of “their” resident to buy for. Sometimes it was just the name – if the resident shared your name, or the name of a favorite relative, of course you’d want to pick that one. Other people looked at the inside of the cards to see what gifts were asked for, sometimes with a view to getting a bargain (“Comforters are on sale at Penney’s this week, I can get a nice one there….”) and sometimes because it would be fun to look for the item, or the wish list suggested a kindred spirit. One friend, a historian, was quite tickled one year to be able to purchase a subscription to a Civil War history magazine for “his” resident. There was great competition for the stocking cards (these gifts were to be approximately $5 and under) among the children of the church, and great pains were taken in selecting and wrapping these gifts. The adults, too, delivered beautifully wrapped presents, which piled up in the minister’s office over the next couple of weeks until he could hardly reach his desk. They too took great care to find the right gift. I recall one dear friend, now gone, who looked all over town for a pair of blue Velcro tennis shoes. After finally being successful, she somehow found out that the person who wished for blue tennis shoes was blind and unable to communicate, and the social worker who made up the list just thought “Blue would be nice.” (This did not discourage my friend, who continued to be a loyal giver to the Wreath of Love.)

We moved away five years ago, and I handed the Wreath of Love to a friend who is still coordinating it today. She’s probably checking her list right now to make sure all the gifts are in. Over the years, one or perhaps both of those small nursing homes closed; the relationship now is with a larger home which also has a small daycare, so in addition to presents for older people, we now have some cards for children – for each child, someone chooses a book. It’s one of the best-functioning little programs I know and I hope it goes on a long time. Indeed, we ourselves found blessing.

Nu har vi jul igen!

(I’m pretty sure I’ve covered most of the traditions from my family of origin in the other posts, so this is going to be all about one tradition I married into.)

Nu har vi jul igen,
og nu har vi jul igen,
og julen varer ved til påske.
Nu har vi jul igen,
og nu har vi jul igen,
og julen varer ved til påske.

Now it is Christmas time, and now it is Christmas time, and Christmas lasts till Easter.

It’s Christmas Eve and the pork roast and ris à l’amande have been eaten, leftovers put away and at least the dishwasher is loaded. Now it’s time! We move the tree from its normal spot (currently in front of the picture window) into the middle of the room, being careful that the angel doesn’t get knocked off by the ceiling fan. Of course the presents must be moved too, some under the tree and some moved into another room for the time being. A braided rug made by my great-aunt Lida covers the cord from the tree lights to forestall accidents. After some explanation for anyone who is new to this ritual, we all hold hands and circle the tree. The bravest among us starts a Christmas carol and we walk around the tree; after one verse another song is begun and we reverse direction. We sing a mixture of religious and secular Christmas songs (“Up on the Housetop” seems to make an appearance every year) until somehow an unspoken consensus is reached – it’s really time now! We begin singing “Nu har vi jul igen”, going faster and faster, until we can’t go any faster and are all out of breath. Then, and only then, can we sit down and begin opening presents.

You may have seen this Scandinavian custom in Ingmar Bergman’s film Fanny and Alexander. If memory serves, the Swedes in their palatial home did a sort of conga line all through the house or at least the ground floor. We call it “dancing around the Christmas tree” even though it is more like walking and jogging. A few years ago my niece’s husband videotaped the event:

A couple of years ago, after we had introduced this custom to our Maine relatives, we went to City of Lakes for Christmas. We heard afterwards that our nephew and his girlfriend had made up their own version, the words to which went something like “I love you again and you love me again and you and I eat lots of pasta.” This custom came with Onkel Hankie Pants’ grandparents and great-grandparents from Denmark in the 1870s and 1880s when they came to America. I’m sure it will continue in our family for a long time.

The Only Thing I Want for Christmas (Is Just to Keep the Things That I’ve Got)

Eddie Cantor sang this during the Depression, and this is one of the years I feel the same way. Oh, I like getting presents and I’m sure my loved ones will find some things to delight me. But what I’m most looking forward to this Christmas is to be celebrating with family, in our own warm home, thinking of our daughter at her first Christmas Eve services as an ordained minister (she’s got three of them!); and the cards and calls from relatives and friends far away.

My brother and his son, I think, 20+ years ago.

My parents “yust went nuts” at Christmas. They always seemed to figure out which of the things we asked for were really what we most wanted, and then they always came up with something we didn’t know we wanted. The year I was 10 I got a clock radio for Christmas. This meant not only that I was old enough to get myself up in the morning, but also allowed me to listen to the DJs and radio programs I wanted – Murray the K on WINS, Oscar Brand and Make-Believe Ballroom on WCBS. (We were only about 70 miles from NYC so we had a wide choice of media.)

One year we all got US Army mess kits.

I’m sure my siblings each have at least one special present they can remember.

When we became parents, we fell into all the usual traps, such as having to put things together at the last minute and buying too many advertised toys that were soon forgotten. But there were many happy moments on Christmas Eve and Christmas morning. Observe:

Cordeliaknits and SonShineIn with some of their presents; the hats came from South America, brought by their aunt.

Our best Christmas present ever, Sisterfilms, Christmas Day 1984.

The play food was a big hit!

This Time of the Year Is Spent in Good Cheer

(From “Drive the Cold Winter Away,” as sung by the Baltimore Consort, among others.)

It will probably give anyone who doesn’t know me in real life a false impression to say that most holiday gatherings I’ve attended with pleasure centered on family or church. Onkel Hankie Pants’ parents and his uncle and aunt alternated for many years hosting a New Year’s Eve gathering which centered on a festive soup with dumplings (could not locate a recipe or picture) and was more fun than almost any New Year’s Eve party I’ve attended, except perhaps the Y2K party we had at church at the end of the millennium. Another yearly event I looked forward to was the Caroling Party – we would meet at church and divide into two or three groups to go caroling to our shut-ins, reconvening for a potluck supper. In early years the entrée of Sloppy Joes was furnished, and I still add a little bit of brown sugar to my Sloppy Joes as the church lady who made them taught me.

When we joined our church in City of Lakes, there was a core group of “church ladies” who were about the age I am now. They were very welcoming to us younger women who were beginning to join, and I especially remember my first Christmas Tea – an annual event which at that time was held in one of the nicer homes nearer the lake. It featured musical entertainment, delicious treats, a silver tea service (and coffee too of course), and beautiful decorations, and was held on a weekday afternoon. I was able to attend because I was going to night school at the U and OHP was temporarily unemployed. Over the years the tea was simplified and began to be held in the church lounge. Then came the Christmas that the “church ladies” realized that, in their late 70s and 80s, they really didn’t have the energy to do this any more. A few years before, I had begun reading a story as part of the tea entertainment, and I didn’t like to see it go. A few friends and I decided to continue the tradition, with a few changes – it became an Epiphany tea held on the Sunday afternoon nearest Epiphany. One friend with a Martha Stewart eye decorated the tables, and for as long as she could, a long-time member who was nearly a recluse the rest of the year came and played the piano for our carol singing – her playing was much better than our singing even though the singing wasn’t bad. Later my sister-in-law took over the piano. I always enjoyed the tea, but it describes my personality pretty well to say that my favorite part was the day before, when two or three friends and I would gather to make the cream-cheese frosted sandwich loaf which was the traditional main dish for the tea. (Here’s a photo of one that looks a lot like ours:

(Since my grandnephew, an expert garnisher at age 10, was nowhere near, we did not have the radish roses, which I have to say look a little Hallowe’eny to me; and we had only three layers, one of egg salad, one of tuna salad, and one of cream cheese mixed with cucumbers.) After our labors we enjoyed the leftovers and scraps along with whatever other goodies were available, and tea out of a Peter Rabbit teaset like this;

Three or four good friends is a fine party in my opinion.

You Can Put Some Rømmegrøt * and Rosettes on Your List

(This rather obscure line was the only one I could think of about Christmas cookies. It’s from “I’ll Be Home for Lefse” by Leroy Larson and the Minnesota Scandinavian Ensemble – get it from the UffDa Shop, where else?)

Fancy cookies like rosettes (pictured above, about which more later) were not a part of my childhood, although I do recall my mother making pinwheel cookies, which always seemed like a lot of work to me. I mostly remember the sugar cookies which were slightly different from the year-round variety and were cut in shapes and iced or sprinkled with colored sugar.

Mama also made year-round a filled cookie with a soft sugar cookie dough; at Christmas time she was apt to fill these with mincemeat. I remember also my grandmother’s soft molasses cookies (and though not a cookie, the popcorn balls she made for the grandchildren each year – she had 27 of them, and since my eldest cousin is, I think, 12 years older than I, several great-grandchildren too. Those popcorn balls were the tastiest I’ve ever had.) One of my aunts used to make and distribute around the family some of the no-bake cookies that featured cereal, coconut or maybe chow mein noodles I bought some at a cookie walk a few weeks ago and was instantly transported back to childhood.

Rosettes are a deep-fried cookie requiring special equipment and made by nearly everyone in Minnesota. I well remember my first sight of them, at a Christmas concert at one of the Lutheran churches in the small town where Onkel Hankie Pants and I lived when I first came to Minnesota. I had seen klejner (the Norwegians call them fattigmand or “beggarmen”)

and brune kager (these don’t look quite right, my mother-in-law’s were larger and diamond-shaped) the previous Christmas, when my new mother-in-law had sent them to Berlin for our first Christmas. But rosettes don’t travel well. So I was amazed and delighted to see them on the cookie plate at the after-concert reception. Even though it’s been many years, and I’ve even made some myself, these fragile beauties still amaze and delight me.

I love to eat cookies, but I’m not so fond of making them. It seems that once one has prepared the dough, that should be enough – but then there’s the rolling, shaping, dropping, and the multiple cookie sheets, the short baking time…it’s a good thing that Sisterfilms loves baking cookies and will be here soon to take charge. It’s much more fun baking with her than alone. Before then, I might make some cookies to take to my niece’s caroling and cookies birthday party; probably these, which I’ve been making ever since early in our marriage when I had a chilly kitchen and no electric mixer, because they use melted butter and can be stirred by hand.

Cardamom Cookies (Kardemomme Kager)

1 egg

1 cup sugar

1/2 cup melted butter

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon crushed cardamom seeds or ground cardamom

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1 cup flour

Mix ingredients in order given. Refrigerate dough one hour or more. Roll into balls and flatten down to the size of a fifty-cent piece.

Bake on a greased and floured cookie sheet in a preheated 350 degree oven until lightly browned on the edges. (Not very long! Try six minutes and see how it goes depending on your oven. However, I have overbaked these and as long as they aren’t burnt they will still taste good.) To me, the taste of cardamom is especially Christmasy. The recipe came from a book called Wonderful, Wonderful Danish Cooking by Ingeborg Dahl Jensen.

*Rømmegrøt: is a Norwegian dish which contains no rum. For that you want Rombudding, which I’ve had once. I’ve never tasted Rømmegrøt, which is basically cream – sour or sweet – cooked a long time with a bit of flour. You can find one recipe here, or Google to take your choice. Not for the lactose-intolerant!

Voices Singing “Let’s Be Jolly”

I’m just not a party person; I’m like my mother and grandmother in that. That’s why I don’t find many photos of parties in my files.

When we were young children, I think our parents must have gone to some parties at the NCO Club, as least I do remember an occasional babysitter. When my father was a First Sergeant on our first tour in Germany, he would sometimes invite some of the men in his unit to our home, but I think those were more like family dinners than parties.

There must have been several holiday parties at school during my elementary years, but the only one I remember was in my fifth-grade year, when it happened that my teacher was Jewish – although that has nothing to do with the story. This was during the era familiar to many baby-boomers, when overcrowded schools had some children going to school in the morning and others in the afternoon. That happened for me in sixth grade, but in fifth grade I got lucky and was assigned to an all-day class made up of both fifth- and sixth-graders.

This story does not reflect well on my ten-year-old self, but it taught me several lessons. I’ll just tell the story and let you find the lessons in it yourself.

One of the features of our holiday party was that we drew names for a Secret Santa gift exchange. Now there was one girl in our class who, while she wasn’t bullied in school, was not well-liked. Brenda was not an unpleasant person, rather self-effacing, but she had greasy hair, unfashionable clothes, and a bad complexion – and sadly, these things meant that no one wanted to be her friend. So I wasn’t pleased when I drew her name in the gift exchange. Rather mean-spiritedly, I chose a bottle of iridescent lavender nail polish, which I thought was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen. (It was like this, but not as high-quality.)

Brenda loved it. She was really pleased with her gift and wore it frequently for the rest of the school year. I don’t remember her being in school after that year, and I suspect now that her family was poor and somewhat transient.

And what did I get? There was a small group of sixth-grade boys (they probably went on to play football) who were the Alpha Males of the classroom, and one of them drew my name, as I could tell from their covert glances as I opened my gift. Unwrapping several layers of aluminum foil, I came at last to a handful of shelled peanuts. And what’s more – some of the peanuts were real, but some were rubber.

I’ll continue the discussion of Christmas parties in the December 9th “Grab Bag” post.

They Know That Santa’s on His Way

(Note: This is the memory slated to post on December 6, a day without Internet for me. I hope to be caught up by tomorrow.)

It is Christmas Eve, 1952, early in the evening, for my brother, not quite 2, and I, 4 1/2, are still up. The new twins are sleeping, and some aunts and uncles are visiting with my mother. Daddy is in Japan, and will soon be going to war in Korea, but my brother and I don’t understand this. We are excited about Christmas. Suddenly there is a knocking on the window and a face appears out of the darkness – a face with a big white beard and crowned with a red hat with fur trim. We know who that must be. Yet one of us is frightened and hides behind the big armchair, while the other laughs excitedly at this visit from Santa. But which was the frightened one and which the brave? It seems to me I used to know, but now I can’t remember. Perhaps the fact that I can’t recall whether Santa came into the house suggests that I was the scaredy-cat. This is my first memory of Santa Claus.

I don’t recall much about “commercial” Santas in my childhood, other than the advertisements for Coca-Cola and other things that appeared in the Saturday Evening Post or other magazines we took. I can’t recall ever visiting a department store Santa, although when we lived on military posts there may have been Santas at the NCO Club parties – more about one of those in the next post. Santa, to us, was a spirit or “ghost.”

As such, Santa (and we) adhered to some very specific rules. On Christmas Eve we hung our stockings (Daddy’s big olive-drab Army socks) on the backs of chairs. I don’t recall ever having a fireplace or worrying about the lack of one. Then we went to bed earlier than usual, after leaving a snack for Santa. No cookies and milk for our Santa – he liked pie and coffee, we knew.

We could get up as early as we wanted on Christmas morning – 4:30, 4:00, maybe even 3:30! (To this day I can’t sleep late on Christmas morning and usually wind up waking everyone else up.) We would wake our parents, and then came the tantalizing minutes while they went to the living room and the kitchen and put on a pot of coffee. Thus fortified, they called us in to attack the stockings. Santa does not wrap presents; he puts them in the stockings, or underneath if they do not fit. Santa always left us a thank-you note for the pie and coffee. It was written in a special “ghostly” handwriting – very shaky like the handwriting of a very old person. By the time we were done exclaiming over our gifts from Santa, and had reached the tangerine or orange in the toe, our parents were ready to face the day (I suspect Mama had already been out in the kitchen getting the huge turkey into the oven). Then my father would begin to hand out the tree presents, one at a time, with everyone watching each other unwrap the gifts from our parents and others, and those we gave.

I don’t know a lot about Santa in my mother’s childhood home (and still less of my father’s), but I do remember her saying that they always heard reindeer hooves on the roof and could see the prints in the snow on Christmas morning. Was it just Grampie throwing snowballs? If so, he missed out on a baseball career, because it would take a powerful arm to throw snowballs onto that roof. Here’s a picture of their house, just before it was torn down to make room for I95. The rooms had tall Victorian ceilings and the children nearly all slept on the second floor.

Raising our own children in the city, Onkel Hankie Pants and I did take them to see Santa – for many years, in conjunction with the Christmas show of animated figures at Dayton’s downtown store. Polaroid photographs were sold of the occasion; the children’s reactions to their Santa visits varied, as you can see below.

One year when Sisterfilms was small, we discovered the Santa at Bachman’s, the giant florist/nursery/gift shop whose lilac packaging is a familiar sight in the Twin Cities. I would readily believe that this was the Real Santa. And there was no hard sell – bring your own camera, take your own picture.

Santa’s duties are shared in our home now, and even the grownups and the dog get stockings. In some way, even when I’m staggering around early in the morning filling stockings, I still believe in the Santa Claus spirit my parents taught me about.

Merry Christmas Power Company

(The post title is from Neal and Leandra’s song, Boswell’s Lights, which appears on their album Angels and Fools. Highly recommended.)

Putting up outdoor Christmas decorations was not something we did much of in my childhood. Most of the time we were living in rented or military housing, and that may have had something to do with it. When we lived in Connecticut, my parents admired the colonial houses with one simple candle in each window – as do I. Here’s a picture of one from our neighborhood:

Unfortunately, although I would like to do this, I suspect our dog Rusty would make short work of them as soon as he saw a squirrel outside.

We did enjoy an occasional eveing drive to see decorations others had put up, and this continued once Onkel Hankie Pants and I formed our own family. For the many years we celebrated Christmas Eve at my in-laws’ home, the short drive home with sleepy children still awake enough to exclaim at the lighted houses on dark streets were a magical part of Christmas.

One year, after a few months of empty-nesting as our son was in his own apartment and both girls were in college on the East Coast, we got one of those inflatable snowmen and installed it on the front lawn with a sign reading “Welcome Home Sister Aimee and Little Nell.” (The “Sister Aimee” was a nod to Cordeliaknits’ newly-discovered, and now fulfilled, call to the ministry). They were both suitably embarrassed!

In our “new” house in Maine, we have sometimes decorated the three concrete lions in front with greenery or Santa hats. And since our house was built in 1951, it has a picture window through which our lighted tree can be seen all the way down the block.

An Old Christmas Card

Have you noticed I’ve been trying to title these posts with a line from a Christmas song? Jim Reeves was a favorite of my father’s so this is doubly appropriate.

I remember that cards were sent and received in my childhood home, but I don’t remember much about them. I think my mother picked out a package or two, addressed and signed them in her lovely Palmer-method cursive handwriting, and that was that.

At some point, probably when we moved to Germany after my sophomore year in high school, I started sending a few cards of my own. For a long time I bought cards from UNICEF. This continued during the first few years of our marriage with the addition of input from a spouse. Given that I had attended three high schools and a college, and Onkel Hankie Pants one of each, plus our friends from jobs and the Army, plus our relatives – soon we had over a hundred cards to send, and both of us felt that we needed to do a bit more than just sign our names. A personal note updating the recipients on our year’s activities was called for. By Christmas of 1976 this seemed an insurmountable task, so I decided to write one of the dreaded Christmas letters. When OHP saw my effort, he felt he could do better, and he did – writing a humorous verse that hit the high and low spots of the year and was a big hit with our correspondents. He continued doing this sort of thing for several years; subsequently we sent some “straight” letters and have finally settled down to a sort of newspaper format, now published in February as the Groundhog Day Gazette. So, once again I’m sending Christmas cards at Christmastime.

We’ve had some creative cards come into the house over the years, too. We appreciate every greeting we get, and we do like the Christmas letters. And here is a sample of one card we always look forward to (it’s a different scene every year)

My brother’s family does this; in the card above, Cordeliaknits is also present, as she was celebrating Thanksgiving in Maine that year.

Now I’d better get at those cards!

Hang a Shining Star upon the Highest Bough

Today’s writing prompt from the Advent Calendar of Christmas Memories is Christmas Tree Ornaments. I’ve already talked quite a bit about them in my first post on the Christmas tree. After all, a tree without ornaments is too minimalist for most of us.

I’ not sure if any of the German ornaments, or any others, from our childhood survived to be divided up among us five children when our parents died. Five children, moves hither and yon, and after retirement and settling back in Maine,cats and dogs, probably took care of most of them. I remember a lot of those little glass ones from Germany – was there once a teapot? A gingerbread house?

As I said, our tree always had a star on top. But when I was looking for a treetopper in Berlin, I found an angel with a wax head. She held a tiny candle and had gold paper wings. She ended up gracing our trees for over twenty years – maybe even thirty. Sadly, first her head was broken off while she was on display for an ornament show at church; it was reattached with a pin, but one year the poor angel fell apart and the head could not be found. We experimented with various treetoppers for a few years until Cordeliaknits made a beaded angel with hand-knitted, fluffy white wings.

That first Christmas in Berlin I did a lot of shopping by mail, One thing I bought was the first issue of a new set of star ornaments from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I believe the star, gold over sterling silver, cost $12.50. We continued to buy the stars each year until we had 25. By that time the price had increased to $50 and the Met was no longer commissioning a star design from a living artist, but using elements from items in its collection. So we stopped. Here’s a photo of this year’s star (I couldn’t get all the bits of the silver snowflake out of the picture). Apparently it now costs about $120 or more, as you can buy both the star and snowflake for $240. Too rich for my blood! We have bought or been given other “collectible” ornaments over the years, but we haven’t started any official new collection.

Most of our ornaments now were bought one by one, or sometimes three by three – as the children got them for Advent calendar presents or in their stockings. Others were gifts from friends and family who traveled or made them, and of course there are the precious ones made by little hands at day care or kindergarten. A few years ago, I attempted an inventory, and also got one boxfull photographed. Here are a few of them.

This was Sisterfilms’ first ornament – received the night before she was born. (Yes, she is a Christmas baby.)

A Christmas Eve tradition for many years was going to the Dayton’s Auditorium Show first thing in the morning. For a while they sold these fancy glass ornaments based on whatever story was being portrayed – this was Beauty and the Beast. Of course, I bought this at the after-Christmas sales for 50 or 75% off.

Our daycare provider Faye made up for my lack of craftiness with many nice projects. There’s another angel like this with pearlescent cellophane instead of copper; I’m not sure which girl made which (but they probably remember.)

Big Bird was a favorite of SonShineIn’s. As a small child he had a life-size cardboard cutout of him in his room, and I would be Big Bird’s “voice” as they chatted at bedtime.

Cordeliaknits was very proud of being in “Kindergarten Readers” and making this long word chain to hang on the tree.

It wouldn’t be a Danish Christmas tree without some woven heart baskets.

What do you remember about Christmas ornaments?