Holiday Post from Christmas on the Great Plains

From "Winter Break" by Jon Hassler

Christmas Eve with my father’s people in Omaha, during my boyhood, was invariably stiff and unfestive, whereas we always spent a jolly Christmas Day at the O’Kelly farm. Not that the Edwardses were unkind or inhospitable. It’s only that the O’Kellys, by nature, were more spontaneous and high-spirited. The minute we entered the farmhouse, we heard stories so uproarious they must have been invented, though they usually began or ended with the phrase “Swear to God.” The laughter and tall tales continued through dinner and into the evening as more aunts and uncles and cousins came pouring through the house to greet us. Any given Christmas, we probably saw thirty-five O’Kellys.

A Christmas Eve conversation, on the other hand, followed a serious, predictable line, beginning with the unreliability of the weather and leading on through the deteriorating condition of their ailing friends and neighbors and automobiles. As a boy, I considered this talk painfully dull, but over the years I learned to take a certain pleasure in the constancy of it—the way you will sometimes come to appreciate the cheerless old hymn in church simply because it’s so familiar. I suppose, as we age, any sign of permanence consoles us, no matter if it bores us besides.

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 "The Christmas Offering" by O. E. Rolvaag, translated by Solveig Zempel

It was Christmas Eve and the moon shone brightly. The sharp, biting north wind burned the face. That same wind had worked itself into a fury far, far north of all human habitation. It had stormed down over the whole northwest of Canada, taken in all of North Dakota in one fell swoop, hadn’t even given itself time to catch its breath and look around, before it raged far to the south in Minnesota. Here it took it easier, whining around the eaves, whistling down every lane, stirring up every little heap of snow it could find, but still burning just as cold as it had when it left the area up under the North Star. “What a cold north wind!” everyone remarked as soon as they came inside and could speak. “If we don’t get more snow, and that right soon, everything will freeze solid!”

In a low, one-story house on a back street in Greenfield, an old couple sat by the Christmas Eve table. They were eating in the kitchen, and that was good enough for them, for here everything was clean and shiny and freshly polished for the holidays. All the nickel on the stove shone like a mirror, there were freshly ironed curtains at the windows, a new white paper fringe on the clock shelf, and the floor had been scoured and scrubbed so that one scarcely dared to step on it. The door to the little living room stood open. There the fire crackled so merrily in the stove that the north wind was put to shame as it blew along the walls. Another door led from the kitchen into the bedroom. That room had to get along on the warmth it received from the other two.

There was plenty of food on the kitchen table: lutefisk, lefse, rice cream, and coffee with extra tender Christmas cookies to go with it, everything that was necessary according to good old Norwegian tradition. The lutefisk was so delicate that it shook like aspen leaves in the wind when one barely touched the plate.

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

Plant of the Week

Poison hemlock
Conium maculatum L.
other common names: snakeweed, St. Bennet’s–herb, poison parsley, wode-whistle, spotted parsley, bunk
Conium: from the Greek coneion, name of the hemlock by which Socrates was put to death in ancient Athens
Maculatum: from Latin, meaning “spotted” or “mottled”
Parsley family: Apiaceae (Umbelliferae)

Photograph by Thomas Rosburg, Wildflowers of the Tallgrass Prairie: The Upper Midwest, Second Edition

Holiday Post from Christmas on the Great Plains

 From "The Christmas of the Phonograph Records" by Mari Sandoz

Holiday week was much like Christmas, the house full of visitors as the news of the fine music and the funny records spread. People appeared from fifty, sixty miles away and farther so long as the new snow held off, for there was no other such collection of records in all of western Nebraska, and none with such an open door. There was something for everybody, Irishmen, Scots, Swedes, Danes, Poles, Czechs as well as the Germans and the rest, something pleasant and nostalgic. The greatest variety in tastes was among the Americans, from Everybody Works but Father, Arkansas Traveler, and Finkelstein at the Seashore to love songs and the sentimental Always in the Way; from home and native region pieces to the patriotic and religious. They had strong dislikes too, even in war songs. One settler, a GAR veteran, burst into tears and fled from the house at the first notes of Tenting Tonight. Perhaps it was the memories it awakened. Many Americans were as interested in classical music as any European, and it wasn’t always a matter of cultivated taste. One illiterate little woman from down the river cried with joy at Rubinstein’s Melody in F.

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

This Week in Iowa Nature

Bobcat sightings are on the increase in rural, forested areas of the state. Look for their tracks and those of other animals while you snowshoe and ski cross-country.

The Iowa Nature Calendar, by Jean Prior and James Sandrock

Plant of the Week

Water hemlock

Cicuta maculata L.

other common names: beaver poison, cowbane, musquash root, spotted cowbane, spotted hemlock

Cicuta: the ancient Latin name for poison hemlock

Maculata: from Latin, meaning “spotted” or “mottled”

Parsley family: Apiaceae (Umbelliferae)

Photograph by Thomas Rosburg, Wildflowers of the Tallgrass Prairie: The Upper Midwest, Second Edition

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