When I was a kid growing up on an Illinois farm, I loved Christmas! I loved all the pre -Christmas activities, the parties at school and the school programs.
Let me send you back to Altona, Illinois in 1954. Altona is a small town on the main railroad lines between Chicago and the west; both the Santa Fe and the Chicago Burlington and Quincy Railroads run through our town. (The CB& Q later merged in 1970 with James J. Hill’s Great Northern Railway and the Northern Pacific to become the Burlington Northern Railway. In 1995 the Santa Fe and Burlington Northern merged to become BNSF.) We can still catch trains in Altona to go into Galesburg or to even go to Chicago and beyond. The idea that we might catch the California Zephyr and travel all the way to San Francisco is nearly too exciting to consider!
Altona is a town of 600 people. In these years immediately after the Korean War, business is booming and things are looking up. Local farmers are keeping four carpenter gangs busy and the source for building materials is the Houghton Lumber Yard, with branches in Oneida and Galva, Illinois. In a small town where the Houghton Lumber Yard is one of the main businesses, Mr. Houghton always hands out cylindrical boxes of molasses kisses to every one of the children at our school as soon as we complete our grade school Christmas performance.
Our grade school is the old Walnut Grove Township High School, the school from which my dad graduated. Although Dutch Elm Disease is making its way through the country, this year the elm trees still proudly guard the school. By next Christmas those trees will be only a memory. My first grade class helps sing a few Christmas carols as part of our contribution. This program is much easier than the one I will face at Immanuel Lutheran Church. The Lutherans expect us to recite “pieces,” short poems that hopefully link together to present a Christmas message. My mother has been working with me on my recitation for weeks. I have been standing at one end of our large living room while Mom stands at the other end, encouraging me to speak up loudly and clearly. Woe betide any child who stands up and mumbles or – even worse! – forgets their piece entirely. Sunday School teachers sit on the front row to prompt the children, knowing that if their classes fail to perform well, they too will be criticized.
I am not alone. We have three churches in Altona, Immanuel Lutheran Church, the Methodist Church, and the Presbyterian Church. My school classmates whose families attend these other churches are going through the same experience: trial by Christmas program. One year, one little boy standing on the platform and waiting for his turn to recite began gathering up his trouser legs through the pockets of his trousers. With his parents dying a thousand deaths in the pews, my friend managed to hike the hems of his trousers up as far as his knees. The worst part of the whole thing was knowing that the little old ladies of the church would have LOTS to say after the program! (This was at the Lutheran Church, where we took EVERYTHING very seriously!)
Our main street in Altona is Depot Street. We have two grocery stores – Bob’s Locker, owned by Bob Olson, our local butcher and Nelson’s, owned by Howard Nelson and Larson’s Variety Store. Around the corner, there is Johnny Andrews’ Andrews Implement, which now deals mostly in refrigerators, stoves, and other electrical items. Bob Olson does all our butchering and at Christmas time also makes Swedish potatiskorv, potato baloney. Nobody owns deep freezers at this point in time; we all rent freezer space at Bob’s Locker and then take things home as necessary to keep in our refrigerators. Bob also carries the rennet my mother will use to curdle fresh milk to set the curd for ostakaka, Swedish cheese cake, another Christmas favorite. Both grocery stores also carry pickled herring, wheat flour, rye flour, cardamom, and the candied fruit so necessary for creating fruit cakes and raised tea rings decorated with frosting and candied cherries. During Christmas season, my Grandma Delphia Bjorling will bake Swedish limpa rye bread laced with and butter horn rolls, both laced with cardamom, in wholesale amounts.
My little town has very modest Christmas decorations. We might have cut out lighted wreaths hanging from lamp posts, but that’s about it. And most people settle for Christmas trees that they set in their front rooms so that the lights will shine brightly for passers by.
At Immanuel Lutheran Church we still maintain the 5 AM Julotta services – the church service early on Christmas morning. Although Immanuel stopped using Swedish in church in 1917, there are still many in the congregation who both read and speak Swedish. Someone will read the Christmas story in Swedish, and the choir will sing a Christmas anthem while the congregation will sing “When Christmas Morn Is Dawning.” After church, the adults will have coffee and rusks while we kids will have cocoa and rusks before returning home to do farm chores, including milking cows by hand, and then to open presents. By the time church is over, Christmas morn really is dawning.
We still have party lines with several families on one line. The switchboard is at Oscar Johnson’s house, and the Johnsons must be vigilant so that people will be able to connect with friends and relatives. Our phones are antiques, the originals with huge batteries. The telephone wires are strung on poles and in ice storms, the phones go out. We know when we are receiving a phone call by a code composed of long rings and short rings. Our ”ring” is three longs. A general line ring of four longs means an emergency or a disaster such as a barn fire or a death or an announcement that there is so much snow that not even the Lutherans can hold church. Even our party phone lines are bilingual. Listen in on the neighbors as they chat and you had best know both Swedish and English if you want to understand what they are saying. (The story is told of one of my cousins whose parents felt safe in gossiping about the neighbors in Swedish because they believed their four year old daughter wouldn’t understand them. That lasted until the day when my cousin began asking questions indicating that she understood VERY well!)
What kinds of gifts will be under our Christmas trees? These are the days in which children are still allowed to be children. Of course, Grandma is going to give us underwear or pajamas. We might get new sleds or baseball gloves. One year I got ice skates. When I was nine, I asked for – and received – a football stamped with the autograph of a professional football player. We do not have huge numbers of gifts, but they are selected with great love. Then there was the year that my parents got me a doll.
Let me be quite frank; I couldn’t care less about dolls! For most of my early childhood, my mother was chronically ill and I began changing diapers for my younger brothers as soon as my baby fingers could bend those horrible big safety pins. Nothing tells you that you are a three year old failure like being unable to close the safety pin on your brother’s diaper! And these were cloth diapers; if they were poopy, they went into a diaper bucket, most likely a five gallon feed bucket that had been re – purposed. And yes, I was cleaning baby bottoms at the age of three. But the Christmas I was four or five, my parents decided to get me a doll.
I am certain that doll was not cheap. The doll was large and I think Mom might have even sewn an outfit for her. When I opened the package, I knew two things; I knew I did not want this doll and I knew that my parents were watching me like hawks! That was the Christmas when I earned my Oscar as Best Child Actress in a Christmas Morning Drama. I managed to bug my eyes out and make all kinds of cooing noises. And it worked! That night as I was going to sleep, I heard Mom say to Dad, “Did you see Jean’s eyes when she saw that doll?”
We hang up stockings for a long time. In the beginning we hang up whatever knee socks or clean work socks we can find, but one Christmas in the late 1950’s my Grandma Mathis creates wonderful Christmas stockings for each of us with our names on them. From that point onward, those are the stockings we hang up. Those stockings might hold a navel orange, nuts, small toy cars for the boys, barrettes for me, and candy of various kinds. We know that our parents have filled the stockings, but who cares? they are fun anyway!
Generally, we have live Christmas trees that we have cut at a friend’s tree farm. A few years we actually had trees in pots and we later planted those trees out in front of the house. We don’t go in for tinsel, but we have lots of glass ornaments and other ornaments that we have made, plus strings of large lights that require being untangled every year.
Christmas means family gatherings on Christmas Eve, and we are frequently the hosts because we have the largest house with plenty of room for everyone. It’s lots of fun when everyone gets together, and family cooks contribute their specialties. We read the Christmas story and then open presents. Sometimes we get together with Mom’s side of the family on Christmas Day and sometimes we wait until the following weekend.
As we celebrate Christmas 1954, we have no idea that in seven months my father will be fighting for his life after a near – fatal car crash. We are blissfully ignorant of several other impending family tragedies. But our house is warm and cozy and we are together. Our little community has tucked itself in for a long winter’s night. Our animals lie peacefully on clean straw out in our barn. And the Christmas message is still the same: ”Peace on Earth. Good will to all men.”
God Jul! Merry Christmas!
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