(This memory has been requested by some of my cousins. I hope I can do it justice.)
The house is on the very edge of a small Midwestern village. You can tell this once was a working farm; there’s a small horse barn, a corn crib, and a chicken house, and possibly a small hog house as well. There’s a glider swing in the side yard, and all of these structures are all hidden under a blanket of snow. Someone has shoveled the drive way and the sidewalk leading up to the front porch and around to the south side of the house. The house lights are all on, and you can see a brightly lit Christmas tree in the front window of the dining room. The bubble lights transform the snow into fairy patterns.
It’s six o’clock, and relatives are beginning to arrive. Except for one or two families living in town, the rest of us all live on farms; to get here on time, we had to begin evening chores earlier than normal. For those of us on farms, this night represents a rare opportunity to get together. We spend most of our time isolated in the country, coming to town only to attend church, to go to school, to do grocery shopping, or to get feed for cattle and hogs ground at the local elevator. In such surroundings, even the visits of traveling salesmen selling spices and Fuller Brush supplies becomes an event to be celebrated with coffee and cookies.
America is still recovering from World War II, and the thrifty habits gained during rationing have not yet disappeared. To communicate information about tonight’s gathering, the ladies have had to call one another on party lines shared by several other families. The switchboard is still at Oscar Johnson’s house, and Oscar and his wife man it. We all know when we are receiving calls because the phone will ring differently for each subscriber on the line. Our ring is three longs. Four longs is a general line ring and is used for spreading information as quickly as possible in emergencies. This lack of privacy means that everybody in town knows we are gathering at Great Grandma’s place tonight. Grandma is hosting the get together because she is centrally located and because she has no vehicle and depends on friends and family members for long-distance transportation. Grandma can walk to Immanuel Lutheran Church and the downtown grocery stores belonging to Bob Olson and Howard Nelson, as well as the variety store run by the Larsons. Why travel out of town when you can get everything you need here, assuming that you have maintained a large garden and have canned fruits and vegetables throughout the summer? Grandma continues to use tools and equipment she has used for decades; planned obsolescence remains a thing of the future.
Family gatherings remain key parts of our social experience. Although Great Grandma was born in America, her parents, her husband, and her four brothers-in-law all came from Sweden. Our gathering tonight will definitely be bilingual and bi-cultural, with many family members switching back and forth from English to Swedish. Tonight is a big social occasion, and most of us welcome the chance to relax, eat, and visit; however, by 9 pm we must go back to our farms so we will be able to get up in the morning to continue our chores. Many of us will also attend the Julotta, early Christmas morning service at Immanuel Lutheran or one of the other local churches.
As our cars pull up, families emerge carrying covered dishes exuding intoxicating odors. Although there will be some American favorites such as candied sweet potatoes topped with melted marshmallows, much of the food tonight will consist of traditional Swedish treats. We will feast on potatiskorv, potato baloney from Bob Olson’s store. Bob does his own butchering and most of the local families bring their animals to him to be slaughtered and turned into cuts of meat wrapped in white butcher paper and stored in the freezer locker at his store. Although we all have refrigerators, many of these fridges are small and home deep freezers have not yet become common.
We will have Oestkaka, Swedish cheese pudding, for which my mother buys rennet tablets from Bob, adding it to milk and allowing the milk to curdle. We then place those curds in cheese cloth and hang them over a basin so the liquid can drain out of them before we combine them with eggs, milk, vanilla, and cinnamon and bake the mixture in long pans. There will be Bon Ost, Swedish cheese laced with caraway seeds. There will be Sill, Swedish pickled herring with pepper corns in it, and Kottbullar, or Swedish meatballs, as well as ham. Spicing things up, we will also have pickled beets and other kinds of pickles the ladies canned last summer.
We will have thick creamy rice pudding and we will serve the pudding and the Oestkaka with lingonberries or raspberry jam. There will be spritz cookies, butter cookies the ladies have created using a hand press they fill with dough and then push out through a specially designed nozzle to give the desired shapes. There will also be snicker doodles. Whether or not these cookies are Swedish, they have become a big part of our celebration. And my Grandma Delphia will bring her amazing Butterhorn Rolls spiced with cardamom. When dripping with butter, those rolls are food for angels; Grandma is probably baking them in heaven for cherubs right now.
One food item we will push around our plates is the Lutefisk. Lutefisk is a kind of white fish with a very mild flavor. Unfortunately, Lutefisk used to be imported in dried slabs; I remember seeing slabs of Lutefisk at Christmastime outside the Ericson Brothers grocery store in Galva, Illinois. Many cooks would soak this fish in lye to soften it, resulting in something that tasted and looked like slightly fishy library paste! Lutefisk was food for poor people, and our ancestors were poor. I never appreciated Lutefisk until my non-Swedish stepmom Mary discovered a wonderful recipe for Lutefisk in white wine sauce over toast. That recipe propelled Mary to the title of Lutefisk Queen of Bishop Hill and made her the go-to lady for doing the Lutefisk for all the Swedish Christmas events at Bishop Hill. (Google Bishop Hill, Illinois; it’s a charming village that has become a virtual living history museum.)
Although I have already mentioned Grandma’s rolls, I have not described her Limpa Rye bread. In Sweden, the poor ate bread made from unrefined rye flour, thus gaining useful vitamins, while the rich ate bread made from wheat flour that was mostly starch. Many of the cooks in our area would bake rye bread including small bits of grated orange or lemon peel, as well as cardamom. This was an age when many ladies baked their own bread, their own cookies, and their own coffee cakes and yeast rolls. As a treat on Christmas morning, my mother would make a braided yeast coffee cake, decorating it with maraschino cherries and powdered sugar icing.
Before starting the meal, someone would pray in Swedish. We would then eat far too much far too rapidly. While the ladies were clearing the table and people were waiting for dessert, we kids would turn the dining room into our speedway, racing around the dining table, crawling under it, and chasing each other. If things became too boisterous, our mothers would order us to put on our warm clothes and go outside, where we would continue to chase one another until it was time for singing and presents. I’m not sure how we determined who would chase whom, but kids in those days were always chasing one another in a modified game of tag. Now it was time for presents and singing.
My dad once told an interviewer that everyone in his family sang; it was just that some people sang better than others. Most of my dad’s cousins could sing quite well, and in our immediate family we had 5-part harmony. We would gather around the Christmas tree, sing some carols with my mother leading us, and then open presents. Very few people had televisions at this point, so watching TV wasn’t even an option. In the 1950’s our expectations for presents were quite modest. Since this gathering involved close to 40 people, the adults would draw names among themselves and then make sure that each child likely to come would receive one gift. The one exception was Great Grandma; I think most families tried to make sure that she received something special. There was good reason for this.
Great Grandma Mamie had survived two world wars and the Great Depression. In retrospect, I think my Great Grandfather might have been bipolar, running off on financial tangents while my eminently practical Great Grandmother and her sons held things together. For many of the adults in that room, Grandma Mamie had been one of the rocks on which they could rely. Little wonder then, that they would want to specially honor her at Christmas.
By 9 PM people would be looking through the piles of coats in the spare bedroom and hunting up the dishes they had brought so they could get back to the farm. After all, the Julotta service was going to start at 5 AM, and they either had to do chores before or afterwards. Most of our relatives still had “Old Mc Donald” type farms with a variety of animals. Those cows weren’t going to milk themselves and those chickens weren’t going to parade into the house with their eggs.
In later years, I came to realize that family relationships were not nearly as simple as I had envisioned as a child. But that is true for all families, at all times, and in all places. What those gatherings did was to give us a sense of belonging, of rootedness, and of pride. Our fathers and mothers and grandfathers and grandmothers had come to America as hired men and hired girls, working for less than minimum wages. Now we could rejoice that the family was doing well. These facts called for celebration.
By today’s standards, that gathering was incredibly modest. We made the food, we brought ourselves, and we entertained ourselves by appreciating one another. Some of the kids there may even have been wearing clothing with patches sewed to cover defects. Others might have been wearing clothing or shoes handed down from some of the cousins. But in a world of Zoom meetings, there is still a crying need for human touch, for hugs, for laughter that is not transmitted over a computer or a cell phone, and for wonderful food prepared lovingly.
I can scarcely remember any of the presents I have received for Christmas, but I will treasure the love of that night forever. Never make the mistake of substituting form for substance. Some day your cell phone will die, and you can replace it and back it up from the cloud. But the day you lose a friend or loved one, there are no do-overs. Spend the time while you still have those close to you! Look them in the eyes, sit with them, listen to their heart cries. Those are the memories that will sustain you when other things fail.
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