Editor’s note: Every few years, we like to re-run a Christmas column that Roger Matile first offered our readers back in 1980. In this modern Christmas season of social and economic turmoil, it’s appropriate to dust it off once again:
I doubt anyone would deny the celebration of Christmas has drastically changed over the years.
In recent years, Christmas decorations have been coming out immediately after Halloween, and by Thanksgiving we’re bombarded with demands that we buy this or that gift.
Unfortunately, I suspect some of my ancestors might be responsible for this holiday excess. Soon after the Pilgrims arrived, they outlawed the celebration of Christmas, and it took a couple hundred years for the country to get back in the swing of things again. Not until large numbers of German Protestants immigrated to North America in the early 1700s did the celebration of Christmas get a shot in the arm. Along with a number of traditions and foods without which our life would be bleak in the extreme (imagine, if you dare: Existence without sauerkraut, bratwurst, or apple kuchen), this German wave brought Christmas trees (a colorful remnant of their pagan past) and all manner of festive cookies and pastries to celebrate the season. In fact, Christmas as we now know it pretty much came with that and subsequent waves of German immigrants.
During the past 100 years, Christmas has undergone the greatest change in the celebration’s long history, as commercialization has run amuck. In 1978, I interviewed my grandmother, then aged 88, and my mother, then aged 67, about how Christmas was celebrated when they were young German Americans. My grandmother’s Pennsylvania Dutch ancestors immigrated from Germany to the Keystone State about 1750 and then came west to Illinois in 1850. Grandmother died in 1979 following a long, hard and extremely happy life. My mother followed her in 1987 after a knock-down, drag-out battle (the only kind she knew how to fight) with Lou Gehrig’s Disease. Here are their stories, in their own (Pennsylvania Dutch flavored) words.
Grandmother’s story...
Q: When you were a little girl, what did you get for Christmas?
A: Well, dear me, we didn’t get much! When my grandpa was alive yet, we always had a Christmas tree. That’s all I can tell you. Santa Claus used to come, but he never brought us much – a doll once in a while, maybe.
Q: Do you remember what your Christmas tree looked like?
A: Ya, it was real nice. I think we had candles on it. And we used to string popcorn.
Q: Did you get any fruit or nuts or anything special?
A: Well, we’d set a cookie [baking] sheet down – Mother and Father had the big ones – and there they’d put our nuts or whatever candy we got, and an orange probably, or an apple. We’d put the cookie sheets on the floor in a row. The oldest child got the one next to Mother and Father and so on down. There were eight children – each cookie sheet got a little smaller, you see, so we knew which one belonged to us.
Q: You didn’t hang up stockings?
A: No, just the cookie sheets. We’d set them on the floor. We didn’t have as much furniture as we do now. I remember our living room had ingrain carpeting and under that we had straw, if you can imagine that! And by spring when you’d houseclean, that straw was nothing but dust.
Q: You said you got oranges ...
A: Ya, one orange. We never got oranges through the year, but at Christmas time, there, we had an orange.
Q: What about presents?
A: Well, after grandpa was gone [John Lantz, Mabel’s grandfather, died in 1899 when she was 11 years old], we didn’t have no Christmas tree then. I remember one Christmas when we had just gotten a new buggy – well, we called it a carriage, you know. The night before Christmas, they must have taken a board and run it down the siding of the house. What a racket it made! We got under the covers because we thought old Santa Claus was coming. We weren’t supposed to see him, you know. Then, in the morning, there lay the harness, a new double harness. That was our Christmas that year.
Q: Did you ever go to anyone’s house for Christmas dinner?
A: No, I don’t think that we ever had what we call a Christmas dinner nowadays.
Q: Did you ever have sleigh rides or anything like that?
A: Well, that was the only way you could go in the winter time! We’d drive right through the fields you know.
Mother’s story...
Q: Was Christmas any different when you lived in town in Aurora than when you moved to the farm in 1920?
A: Ya, it was different! When we lived in Aurora, there was evidently some money and when we moved to the farm there wasn’t any. When we lived in Aurora, Mother and us kids went to church [old St. Paul’s Lutheran Church on Jackson Street] every Christmas Eve, and when we came home, Dad would have the Christmas tree up. We had candles on it, and they would be lit, but Dad would be very careful. We would go to everybody’s house to see their Christmas trees.
Q: Everybody in the neighborhood?
A: To the relatives, my great aunts and uncles. And then when we moved out to the farm, we always had a Christmas tree, we always had nuts and candy and fruit. I always got a new dress so I could speak my piece at church. We always had a Christmas program at school. We worked for weeks and weeks. We would march and sing and give a play – everything had to be perfect!
Q: Did you send or receive Christmas cards back then?
A: We didn’t have money to spend on things like that – we went to visit the people. Things were different then.
As we prepare to celebrate another Christmas, it may be instructive to recall that not only have economic hard times been frequent occurrences, but also that family traditions can survive them, and prosper. From my family to yours, whatever your traditions may be, have a happy, rewarding holiday season.
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