If it involves sleigh bells, silver bells, or cardboard bells, it’s probably a Midwestern Christmas. For those of us who are lucky enough to call the Midwest our home, living here is mostly like having Christmas all year ‘round. Therefore, the Christmas season itself crystallizes memories from one year to the next, and nostalgia about traditions takes hold almost immediately. It’s unique. Some “traditions” last only a year or two, but their legacies are long-remembered as an established pattern of celebrating together, for whatever the duration. We happily become our traditions.
Midwestern families don’t turn inward during the holidays. It’s completely normal to purchase and wrap gifts for people we don’t even know, and about whom we have the sketchiest of information. We will pick a tag off any number of trees found at many locations, and use the information provided as a starting point.
“Mom. Family # 23. Underwear, Size 9.” What we get her is Underwear, Size 9, a sweater, and a bottle of good-smelling body lotion.
“Boy, age 8. Family #14. Pajamas.” That package will probably hold the pajamas, a set of racing cars, and some Silly Putty.
We shop, we wrap, and we wish we could do more, so we pray and we give thanks.
Sharing the Spirit of Christmas is as expected as the bottomless cup of coffee at an Iowa restaurant. Churches are busy with Sunday School programs, and the public schools in our hometowns unabashedly spread Christmas cheer in halls decked with holly. People have always greeted one another in any number of ways, so we don’t get all bent out of shape about feeling happy and expressing it in what ever form it comes from our mouths.
“Merry Christmas!”
“Season’s Greetings!”
“Happy Holidays!”
In my hometown in Southeast Iowa, the season started when the city crews put up the decorations right after Thanksgiving. There were silver-tinseled garlands with plastic red, green, and yellow Season’s Greetings signs that spanned the center sections of the major downtown thoroughfares. The light posts were fitted with more garland-and-plastic forms – candy canes, wreaths, candles, all done in the weatherproof technology of the era – more plastic. I suppose the city budget allowed these public displays to be updated every twenty-five years or so. I don’t know when ours were new, but I can provide an eyewitness account for some of the fifties, all of the sixties, and most of the seventies. The plastic cases housed light bulbs, and they lit up to accelerate the unbearable anticipation of whatever requests had been made of the department store Santa.
My sister Lora and I were both allergic to evergreen trees. We were blissfully ignorant that an artificial tree was outside the norm until our early Christmases at Wildwood Elementary. The Peg told me years later that when I was in the first grade, I came home with my eyes nearly swollen shut in response to the classroom Christmas tree. Lora had a similar experience down the hall in Mrs. Carlson's kindergarten class. Every classroom had its own tree, and the one in Mrs. Opal Smith’s room had to be removed because of moi. The PTA sprang into action and bought two artificial silver Christmas trees, one for my classroom and one for my sister’s. You remember them. The ones with the revolving color wheel. How utterly embarrassing! They could have at least gotten the green ones, like we had at home, but silver stuff was space-age in the 1960’s, and the decorating committee of the Wildwood Elementary Parent Teacher Association had made their decision. The things followed us as we ascended the grades, and were finally put into moth balls after our 6th grade years. Junior high ended our December disgrace.
I was chatting with a Calmarite (a resident of Calmar, Iowa) recently, asking about some of the holiday traditions that dot the memories of past Calmar Christmases. There are too many to recount, because things would change from year to year and everyone expressed themselves differently. One group would do this, another would do that. Memories of activities tend to blend together, and the misty edges of Christmases remembered seem to include everyone.
At one time in the late ‘50’s or early ‘60’s, a few Calmar friends gathered to go Julebukken. Julebukken (pronounced "YEW-la-bokken" around here) is a Scandinavian Christmas tradition where children will dress up like the elves of St. Nicholas, and go about singing carols. Similar to Halloween here, in exchange for singing, the children are given candy for their effort. This is usually done between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve.
Julebukken has been Americanized somewhat, and it is mostly adults who carol each other through the night, accumulating more carolers at each stop as the evening progresses. Some residents may remember a time when several couples would julebukk, warming themselves with coffee or cocoa at each home, and ending the night with breakfast together at nearly 4:00 a.m. One event had nearly sixty people at an early morning call, and the last family made bacon and eggs for the entire crew.
Another Calmar memory came during a time of national mourning. The mood was glum during the Christmas season right after the Kennedy assassination, and it was hard to get into the spirit. A few friends were assessing the situation and decided everyone needed a little holiday cheering-up. They called Jim Huber, who had a hay wagon fitted with sleigh runners. Jim agreed to hook up his team to his hay wagon/sleigh, and he took around forty people on an impromptu hay/sleigh ride on the outskirts of Calmar. It was a family affair, and afterwards everyone gathered for chili and cocoa. It did the trick, and that holiday had one bright spot in an otherwise emotionally barren season.
Outdoor Christmas decorations were made, not bought, in Calmar Christmases past. There was one word for it: cardboard. The competition for large chunks of cardboard was keen, as imaginations went wild with what could be made from the booty behind the hardware store. Once the forms were cut from the cardboard, out came the tin foil, glue, and glitter. Apparently the craze for things silver at Christmas was regional during this time in history. Encasing just about any shape in tin foil created The Look, and sprinkling glitter over glue gave the final piece the detail it needed. One home had a beautiful display of a musical page, and the words and notes of “Silent Night” were done in blue glitter on a backdrop of Reynolds Wrap. A light shone on the simple message for all to contemplate, because the focus of the season then was obvious. For children, Calmar Christmases always revolved around the Christmas story; the angels outnumbered the Santas in those days.
Precious memories will be made again this year. People come home to Calmar during Christmas, whether in person or in spirit, and the tenacity of local retailers allows residents to shop locally for hometown treasures and foodstuffs to share. Calmar-made cookies will no doubt be eaten by our service men and women. Digital videos of St. Al’s students will most likely be cyber-shared from one coast to the other, because being Midwestern doesn’t mean being backwards. It means quality. It means memories worth retelling. It’s the Silent Night, Holy Night of our Midwestern hearts.
So, let the sleigh bells jing-a-ling, the silver bells ting-a-ling, and remember those cardboard-and-glitter bells when you stick that white-lighted deer in your front yard. White lights, after all, are this millennium’s answer to the silver tinseled everything of another era, and the basis for your children’s memories-in-the-making. Believe me, it’ll be a fair trade.
Copyright © Kari E.O. Burns December 2005
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