Vintage Christmas card (Photo by Cheryl Tevis)
Dear readers,
Merry Yuletide! I’m posting a few singular greetings from holidays past: postcards from a bygone era, with images of a simpler time portraying a slower pace of life. My dear grandma tucked these away in a drawer, unsent; I’ve collected them in a small album I treasure.
Postcards were the text messages of their time, and their heyday was between 1900 and 1915. The cards, with a small space for a personal note and a stamp, were inexpensive, and didn’t require an envelope. They were slow to arrive, but time-saving to the sender. Writing letters in the proper format of the day was time-consuming in an era when people had to complete the tasks of daily life without modern conveniences.
Yet today we often feel our lives are so busy and rushed. Sometimes I wonder how did I ever get everything done ahead of the holidays?
My friend Mary is a journaler, and during a recent visit, she brought a copy of her entry following a 1993 visit to our farm. Mary wrote that my older daughter was decorating the windows in preparation for a party in two weeks. “We can never get ready because Mom has to get the baby to sleep,” my daughter told her. It made me laugh aloud, and released a rush of December memories:
- Holiday parties at the homes of two great-grandmas;
- Christmas at my in-laws with siblings and cousins;
- New Year’s with my siblings in northwestern Iowa;
- The holiday office party in Des Moines;
- School and Heartland Youth Choir concerts;
- Piano recital
- Sunday School pageant
My December shopping list included gifts of appreciation for an array of important people:
- school bus driver
- teachers
- piano teacher
- dance instructor
- babysitters
- Sunday School teacher
Trading in traditions
All that hustle and bustle yields a bumper crop of memories today. Our celebrations immerse us in memories of loved ones, their customs, recipes, and decorations. Holiday melodies and carols transport us back in time – to our childhood home, a Christmas Eve program, or favorite sledding hill.
One fond memory is the day my husband’s dad hitched his two Belgians, Queenie and Babe, to a bobsled, and treated six of the grandkids and our neighbors, the Larsons, to a ride to the hill pasture behind the barn. The ground was covered with snow, but the temperature was mild, and the winds were calm. It was a perfect day for a winter outing.
Music echoed throughout our home, and especially during the holidays. Long before the kids could play piano, I accompanied them as they sang our favorites: “Jingle Bell Rock,” “Have a Holly Jolly Christmas,” and many others. Our older daughter learned “The Twelve Days of Christmas” at an astonishingly young age, and performed it on cue for her grandparents – and anyone else – who would listen.
But one of our favorite musical memories is her rendition at age 2 and a half of “Deck the Hogs.” You know the one, “Fa La La La La, La, La, La, La!” We were raising hogs, and in the context of her toddler frame of reference, the lyrics made sense.
The tradition of cutting a live tree began with our children, and for many years we made the scenic drive to Ho-Ho Holt’s Christmas Tree Farm near Stratford. We enjoyed a tractor-drawn hayrack ride into the woods where we found the “perfect” tree.
More recently, we loved piling into the car with our grown kids and their spouses, and driving 10 miles to Dayton’s Festival of Lights, a drive-through lighted display at Oak Park.
Those days are gone. It was sad when Ho-Ho-Holts closed, and we miss the Festival of Trees. But we’ve grown to love Deal’s Orchard in Jefferson, and its delicious samples of hot cider, popcorn, donuts, and hard cider. This year we arrived so late that our size of tree was in short supply. So we unexpectedly broke with tradition by buying a pre-cut tree. Who knows? We may never cut another
one.
Other losses are irreplaceable: the empty chairs of loved ones around the family table. This year, we bought a new artificial tree for our church, and ordered an engraved tree collar in memory of my husbands’ parents, the only grandparents our kids ever knew. It’s not always the most wonderful time of the year, is it?
Lighting the way
For decades, on my drive to northwestern Iowa at the holidays, I watched for a favorite landmark signaling: “You’re almost home.” A small cedar tree on the steeply-graded hillside along a two-lane stretch of Highway 20 just west of Correctionville was decorated with lights. As the years passed, I pointed it out to my young daughters. We wondered who decorated it, and imagined why.
In 2009, I decided to find out. The tradition began in 1979, when Becky and Gary Bollmeyer fastened vehicle dashboard lights and signal blinkers to a tree, wiring it to a car battery. A few years later, they asked the Rural Electric Cooperative to bring power to the tree. The first 500 feet (about one-third) was donated by the REC, and $600 was raised by the community and radio station KSCI to make year-round lights possible.
Truckers stopping at local gas stations would tell cashiers that the little tree was a beacon on foggy nights, and how much it brightened their days. They left donations.
After Gary had a stroke in 2001, a local 4-H club adopted it. But in recent years, the little tree has gone dark.
Unexpected treasures
We seldom know when an experience, event, or tradition will be the last time, do we? So we must celebrate in the moment. Although the holidays are rooted in traditions, the ways we celebrate can evolve, along with our lives.
This brings me back to my tradition of holiday letters sent just after New Year’s. Thanks to technology, I have a letter file from the past. Each year when our children visit, we print a fresh supply of old letters, and read them aloud together. They provide a written record of what we’ve enjoyed – and endured – as a family, linking us to the past and one another, and renewing our sense of continuity across the generations.
We’ll search through our stack of DVDs converted from VCR tapes, and relive memorable moments, like the bobsled ride, cutting live trees with the kids, moving the barn, Christmas mornings – and so much more. We’ll share favorite memories of our Grand Teton/Yellowstone family trip last fall.
And sometimes, the discovery of an unexpected gift from the past opens the door to creating a new tradition.
Many years ago, I gave my mother-in-law a set of holiday dishes. In her later years, as she was downsizing, she told me she had planned to return these dishes to me, but she no longer could find them. It remained a mystery after she died in 2019.
Recently my sister-in-law, Lorna, and two nieces made another push to sort through Grandma’s belongings. Soon after, Lorna showed up at my door with a cardboard box discovered in an unexplored office closet. After opening it, she recognized the missing dinner plates, serving bowls, cups, and saucers.
So this Christmas, we’ll set our table with Grandma’s long-lost holiday dishes, and we’ll celebrate her life. We’ll laugh as we read her Class Prophecy and Grandpa’s in a recently unearthed Jordan High School issue of “The Bomber.” We might even gather around the piano and sing a few old favorites. As it turns out, they’re still favorites!
This week’s top five holiday songs in the U.S. include: #2 “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” #3 “Jingle Bell Rock,” and #5 “Holly Jolly Christmas.”
Not everything is lost to time. The past always is with us. Some gifts, like old postcards, holiday songs, and Grandma’s mistletoe dishes, are simply waiting to be rediscovered.
No matter how you celebrate the holidays, I wish you and your loved ones the gift of unexpectedly memorable moments.
— Cheryl
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