Amanuensis Monday: Christmas on the Farm (part 1)

I can’t believe it. I can not believe it. After all these years…

I have always been a festive person, of the type who not only doesn’t mind, but actually enjoys hearing Christmas carols and seeing tinsel and holly long before Thanksgiving. So it should come as no surprise that I spent a portion of yesterday watching holiday videos on YouTube. With a renewed interest, I watched histories and recipes regarding a traditional English Christmas. I contemplated attempting a plum pudding, despite having never seen one in person, and was fascinated with the game of “snapdragon,” in which children snatch raisins from flaming brandy. To any British readers, this may seem a natural and ordinary part of Christmas, but to a plain Oregonian like me, it seems exotic and frightening. I wondered how my British ancestors celebrated Christmas and whether they had ever played snapdragon. I thought about Aunt Elsie’s typescript, remembering that she had written “My Christmas book is separate form this one,” and I wished that such a book actually existed.

Yesterday, when I should have been strapping on my face mask and heading to the mall to finish up my Christmas shopping, I opened up my cedar chest and began flipping through the family files that Dad and I had hurriedly organized a few months ago, with the intention of scanning some of the more interesting items. And I did. I found some of my grandpa’s Army records, including his discharge papers, which I will examine more closely later. I found the pages torn from the Wade family Bible. I found the missing Civil War pension papers for Allen C. Wade. And then I found about a gazillion copies of Elsie’s typescript, all bound. (I will finally be able to make sure the pages of my copy of the typescript are in order!)

Curiously, only one of the bound volumes was in the blue cover I remembered. The rest had red covers. I opened one up, and a chill ran up my spine.

CHRISTMAS ON THE FARM WHEN I WAS A SMALL CHILD

read the first line. Was this truly the missing Christmas book? I read on… and on… and on. I closed the book with an exhaled “huh!” and a chuckle. I had actually found it. The lost Christmas book really did exist.

Naturally, the next step is to transcribe it. The same policies I used for the original typescript will apply to this one, namely:

• I intend to retain all of Elsie’s original spelling and punctuation except in the case when it is an obvious typographical error or when the meaning becomes unclear. Most of the manuscript was typed with the caps lock turned on, so the choices in capitalization are mine.
• Elsie used few titles or divisions in her manuscript. All titles (i.e. title of the blog), except those included in the text, are my own. The divisions will be at my discretion and seldom original to the manuscript.
• The original typescript was just that: a typescript. I hope to sometimes include relevant pictures. Any comment or caption to a picture is my own, and not original to the manuscript.
• Once or twice there are stories or names that would not measure up to today’s standards. Remember, this was nearly a century ago, when people had different notions about what was and wasn’t acceptable. I do not believe in revising history to suit modern tastes. This does not imply approval of the old attitudes, but rather an idea that we cannot deny our past and must be able to face what we were in order to move forward.

Now I will present the first couple of pages.

Christmas on the farm when I was a small child

Elsie Crocker

This farm was located ten miles from Boise Idaho and six miles from Meridian Idaho. Right in the middle of the fertile valley of Boise, Idaho. The place my dad had been looking for.

This ranch was called “Shaw’s and Dorr’s Orchard”. It was owned by two families, that lived in Boise. They visited the ranch often. They each had a family. The Dorr’s had a boy my age. The Shaw’s had a girl, whose name was Inez Shaw, whom my sister Inez was named for.

We stayed on this ranch for five years. We had a new house and all the necessaries when we moved in. They had a well dug and had it run by a motor. This was great, lots of nice pure water to drink. It was used for the animals and gardens.

Dad had hired men to help build the sheds, barn, and pig pen. We had two horses, one cow whose name was Queenie. One horse was coal black, his name was “Nig” The other horse was named Dick He was a pretty roan, with a white star on his forehead. Dick was a high spirited, but Nig was slow and easy. My mother thought Dick had a lot of “spunk”

We finally got turkeys, chickens, a couple of pigs, and our first big black and white dog, which we all loved. We called him Blackie, he would wake us up every morning.

Dad planted all kinds of fruit trees. The trees were small, so we had to wait a few years for their fruit.

Dad’s real job was to plant eighty acres of prune trees.

We finally got a root cellar where we kept our milk, eggs and fruit cool. The summers in Idaho were very hot Things spoiled fast in the heat. We never had an ice box, refrigerators were unheard of.

We felt fortunate to have a real nice house to live in. Lots of good pure water to use anyway we needed. Good rich soil to grow vegetables, chickens for all the eggs, we needed, and Queenie to give us milk and enough to feed the animals. Milk to drink and whipping cream for cakes and goodies. Yes we made our candy and pop corn balls. Money was scarce but money isn’t everything, Dad would say. We had each other and we were very happy.

Dad liked to see things grow, therefore we always had a lot of vegetables and flowers. Dad always planted violets close to Mothers bedroom window, she loved the scent of violets and always did.

Dad would plant a lot of popcorn between the rows of squash, pumpkins, and melons. The summers are real hot and dry just the right for growing melons. Oh! How good they are right off the vine. We had enough to share with neighbors and school friends.

We dried the popcorn on a spread out canvas or by twisting the tops together and hung up by the tops on a nail in the woodshed.

The popcorn had to be real dry to pop good. The ones that didn’t pop we called “old maids”. I think we still call them that.

My brothers and I had to shell the popcorn. We’d take two ears and rub them together. After the first kernels loosened up the others would come off easy. You had to be careful shelling the corn, because the popcorn had sharp points as sharp as a needle. That’s the way we could tell the popcorn from the regular corn. I think they have popcorn different now, without points.

A few days before Christmas we would pop a lot of corn getting ready to take it to school, where we would thread it with cranberries to make garlands. We used a needle and a strong thread. The red and white was very pretty.

Our tree wasn’t fir or noble as we have now. These kind of trees were scarce in Idaho. They had a few shipped in. I suppose they have all kinds there now.

The school was a one room school with all eight grades one teacher for all eight grades. My brothers went there with me or I with them. It was nice to have some help making our decorations, from the older students.

Our school Christmas tree was one the older boys, cut from the vacant lot next to the school house This tree was a willow or a shrub bush, no matter we loved it just the same.

We made ring chains and cranberry and popcorn garlands. We made other ornaments out of what ever we had to work with. The teacher had a beautiful honeycomb big bell in the middle of the room. She kept this always for the next Christmas. It was snowy white.

We would make paper doll strings, folding the paper many times and cutting a string of paper dolls, and holding hands.

Of course we had to clean out our desks to be all clean for Christmas.

This was a special day!

 

This is one of two photos in my collection showing the actual schoolroom Elsie describes. Elsie is sitting in the front row, closest to the camera, wearing a white dress. Walter is in the front row closest to the teacher, wearing overalls. Bill is, from the camera's perspective, directly in front of Walter, in the second row, also wearing overalls.

 

I will arbitrarily end there, as this memoir is difficult to divide into chapters. 

 

To continue with the next installment of Elsie's Christmas book, click here.

Citation:

Elsie Crocker, "Christmas on the Farm when I was a Small Child" (typescript, 1990); copy in possession of Amber Brosius, 2020.