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Christmas [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-12-23

I grew up on a small dairy farm in the 1950’s and it truly was a different world that simply does not exist anymore, as far as I can tell. Even then small farmers were struggling and they were wiped out as a group under an absolutely indifferent Jimmy Carter… but I digress.

Dairy cattle have to be milked twice a day. No ifs, ands, or buts. No days off, no excuses. So holidays are what you can do after the cows are milked in the mornings and before they are milked in the evenings.

We lived in a very uniform culture. Everyone was white Protestant Christian. Some of them were pretty lapsed but we were all Christian in theory if not in practice. The diversity was between Dutch Reformed and Germans who were mostly Methodist in my area with a few Lutherans scattered in. (My mom, who sometimes helped clean the rural Methodist church, said she found a box of Lutheran hymnals in German in the basement there, so there must have been a story behind the switch from Lutheran to Methodist, but I never heard it.)

Protestants don’t really have a lot of holidays and as farmers we were limited in what we could do anyway. Back to the two milkings a day problem. Memorial day we usually took a Sunday and went to decorate the graves of our family members. Fourth of July we went and parked in the lot of the local American Legion who had a big party for themselves and then when they were properly lubricated went and shot off a few fireworks for the visitors. But their celebrations got longer and longer and the fireworks less and less until it just wasn’t worth it.

Labor Day, who even knew that was a holiday? Farmers are small businessmen anyway so the idea of blue collar workers was all hypothetical and not anything to throw a celebration for.

Thanksgiving was very important. My mom and her family (us) and her sister and her family, her mom and stepdad, we got together and had a good meal, good conversation, good times. I am sad that a holiday with a lot of good memories for me has been demonized by people with an agenda but all of my people are dead anyway so that is all just hypothetical and people dumping on my childhood memories, but such it is.

But Christmas was the thing. I attended a one-room grade school and about three weeks before Christmas the teacher literally shut the schoolbooks and we prepared for our Christmas program. The menfolk built a stage along the back of the room with rough slabs of wood on sawhorses and we began to practice our show.

Every student was given a little poem to say and the older kids performed a play. We had three or four basic standard plays and more or less rotated them from year to year. No, they were not religious. Usually they were some sort of rustic humor and a bratty kid who got his come-uppance (I was the only boy of the right age for that role so I was usually the brat).I honestly don’t remember any plots. Probably all for the best.

Even then I had absolutely no fear of performing in public and I was smart enough to memorize my lines. So it was kind of fun for me. The other kids were terrified in varying degrees. I suppose it was good for them.

Anyway, at home we decorated the Christmas tree the second week of December. My mom put a serious effort into it and when it was done it was beautiful. They had some cool ornaments. One was a little wax Santa they had bought in San Diego during the War. At some point he had been hung too close to a light and the lower extremities had melted off but hey, memories made up for it.

Once a year, about a week before Christmas, Dad would drive us to the local Big Town to go shopping in the only real department store in the whole area. It was my only chance to ride in an elevator so I thought that was cool. We never bought much because dairy farmer= poor but it was fun.

Then the excitement of Christmas eve. My parents had taught my older brother to believe in Santa but the kids at school disillusioned him and he was so broken hearted that he immediately told his little sister, who cried so much that my parents said never again and I wasn’t fed those well-intentioned lies. It may have warped my personality but I never felt that I missed out on not believing in Santa. I enjoyed the story as much as anybody else, I just didn’t believe it. So I didn’t have to worry on Christmas Eve that Santa might get the flu or something and not show up.

Christmas morning we started with stockings filled with little nick-nacks, I suppose to keep us kids busy while Dad milked the cows. Mom and Dad always filled them with neat little things with an orange at the toe. (I had great parents! They did their best for us always.)

Then the big show, passing out and unwrapping gifts. Greatest gift we ever got, an honest-to-God toboggan. We kids were the kings of the neighborhood with that thing. All the other kids couldn’t wait to line up to slide on it with us.

Then a ham dinner and, on Christmas night, a visit with our grandparents whom I loved.

I’m not sure this diary has a point. That world is gone, everyone is dead, and there is a dark side to my later Christmas holidays that pretty much wiped out all of the childhood joy, but….

Oh, incidentally, regarding the Happy Holidays/Merry Christmas controversy (if it even rises to the level of such) my parents sent out dozens and dozens of Christmas cards back in the day and I distinctly remember cards with Happy Holidays printed on them. This back in the 50’s. So no, “Happy Holidays” was not something created by anti-Christians just to get around saying Merry Christmas.

Anyway, for those who celebrate and those who do not, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

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