Holiday Post from Christmas on the Great Plains

 From "Making Bows" by Ted Kooser

In the weeks just before Christmas, my father’s store was busiest, its narrow aisles crowded with shoppers, its carefully arranged displays rumpled and disarrayed, and its floors slippery with melting snow. On Saturdays and when school let out in the afternoons, my sister and I helped out. She worked on the sales floor, and I made bows for the women in the gift-wrap booth.

The bow machine was set up in the furnace room. A single lightbulb hung over the card table upon which it sat. Behind my chair, the great gray furnace sighed and ticked, and piles of bald and disassembled manikins watched my back with wide unblinking eyes. In the shadows, bugs rustled across the floor, and above me the footfalls of customers knocked up and down the wooden floor. There I wound green and red satin ribbon into shiny bows that I dropped into a big cardboard box beside me. It was a job like those in fairy tales, in which a child is imprisoned in a castle and made to spin golden thread from flax straw.

Christmas on the Great Plains, edited by Dorothy Dodge Robbins and Kenneth Robbins
Art by Claudia McGehee 

Holiday Post from Christmas on the Great Plains

 From "What I Took from Minnesota Christmases" by Rosanne Nordstrom

Before I married Roger, he often talked about the many times during his childhood when his family had gone to St. Paul, Minnesota, for Christmas. His stories sounded like the Christmas celebrations I’d always wished my family could have: lots of people who enjoyed each other in a beautiful house with good food. “Usually,” he said, “we arrived on the evening of the twenty-second or twenty-third and had a lutefisk dinner at my grandmother’s.”
     “You had what?”
     “Lutefisk. It’s cod cured in lye.”
     “You’re kidding me. Wouldn’t that be dangerous to eat?”
     “Nah, Rose, it’s delicious. My father, brother, and I have contests to see who can eat the most. That meal is the beginning of the Christmas feasts.”
     “What do you do on Christmas Eve?”
     “We go to my uncle’s house. That’s where all my cousins live. My grandmother and at least one of her sisters come also. It’s a good thing my uncle has a really long dining room table.”
     “And you eat?”
     “Reindeer.”
     “No. I don’t believe it.”
     “Well, we did have it once. We always have Swedish meatballs and potatoes, loganberries, a vegetable or two, sausage, and limpa. Sometimes we have fruit soup, and my aunt really did serve reindeer. She’s Finnish. Maybe that was part of her family’s Christmas. For dessert there is always rice pudding and homemade cookies.”
     “Well, except for the reindeer meat, which I wouldn’t think of eating— that would be like eating Rudolph—the Christmas Eve meal sounds pretty tasty.”

Christmas on the Great Plains, edited by Dorothy Dodge Robbins and Kenneth Robbins
Art by Claudia McGehee

Little bluestem - Art by Claudia McGehee

Little bluestem, Schizachyrium scoparium

Little bluestem is abundant in the tallgrass prairie. In the fall, its rich rusty color makes the prairie glow.

Claudia McGehee, A Tallgrass Prairie Alphabet