Last week I discovered that Aunt Elsie really had written a Christmas book and I transcribed the first two pages. Now it is time to transcribe a couple more pages.
You may remember that she was telling about how they would prepare for Christmas in the one-room schoolhouse she attended. Here she continues:
The last school day before Christmas we would have a party. All the children were looking forward to it. We were to ask all our parents to come and enjoy our labors of preparing for the special day.
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| This is the second of the two photos I have showing the actual school room Elsie describes. Elsie is sitting in the front row, second from the right, in a white dress. Her brothers are also in the photo. Bill is in the second row on the very end, wearing overalls. Walter is standing behind him, on the very end of the third row, also wearing overalls. |
I think all the parents were there, dressed in their best. We had a small program, then a sing along where every one joined in, parents and all. Some of us had to recite poems. My poem Dad told me. I was in the first grade. It was like this.“The first time I stepped upon the platform”
My heart went pitty pat
For I thought I heard
Someone say Who’s little girl is that?
Refreshments were much the same as ours now: coffee, cookies and a mince ham bun sandwich. The children got lemonade. The very last thing the teacher would hand out a red mesh stocking, she had made out of the red mesh, she had bought for maybe five cents a yard. She sewed these stockings by hand or on a sewing machine she peddaled with her feet. Those days men worked for fifty cents to a dollar a day.
In the toe of the stocking was a apple or a orange, a little candy and a few peanuts with the shells on. Sometimes a small candy cane. Gee! We were happy we could hardly wait to get home to see just what we had. We’d put everything back in the stocking to admire for a while. Little things meant so much.
We got our chores done early that evening. Of course the chickens had to be fed, eggs gathered, woodboxes filled, the cows milked, horses beded doun. See that all gates closed, feed the dog. The dog always slept under our porch outside. We also helped Mom with the dishes.
Sounds like a lot of work but we had a lot of hands. Many hands make light of the work. We all had our jobs to do If we got thru our jobs we would help the others get theirs done. Then the evening was ours to do what ever we wanted to do.
I liked to sit on my dads lap and comb his pretty hair. At one time Dad had a mustache, I loved to curl his mustache. It curled up on the ends just like Grandpa Gene’s. Dad had some wax he used on the tips.
It was time to hang up our stockings for Santa to fill. We each hung up our own clean stocking. We didn’t have a fireplace We laid them on the couch all in a row. We called the davenport a couch those days. Dad would smile seeing three different size stockings all in a row. I was afraid the boys having the largest stockings would get more than I but Santa saw to that. But I was mistaken, we all got the accurate amount.
The excitement of Santa and his eight reindeers, with his big sack of toys, kept my brothers and I wide awake.
We had a lot of snow, so we were expecting to hear his sleigh bells. It seemed so long before morning, we tossed and turned, so hard to settle doun. Wondering what he would leave us.
My brothers room was next to mine, so we could holler back and forth, making it more difficult to fall a sleep. We listened real hard for his sleigh bells in the snow.
This was a long night however we finally fell asleep Early the next morning we were awake. The first one awake would wake the others. One of us would tiptoe doun the stairs, to see if our stockings were filled. Then he or she would tip toe back up the stairs and tell the others. He had been there, what a rush, everyone jumped up at once. We ran doun the stairs into Mother’s and Dad’s room to a waken them. Of course they were already awake, with all this excitement going on, how could they sleep? They seemed as happy as we were, with our gifts.
Looking back we never received much but no one could have been happier.
Our stockings were filled with nuts and candy, not so full you couldn’t take a hold of the top and carry them around.
Sometimes we had different kinds of candy allways wrapped in tissue paper, when it was put in our stockings. There was no waxed paper, aluminum foil or saran paper. Plastic was unheard of.
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| A platter of ribbon candy, a favorite of my mom's as well as Elsie. Photo by Travel Photographer from StockSnap |
We had peppermint sticks or hard candy with soft fillings, with different fillings and colors. We always liked these soft fillings, it was a surprise to see what color was inside. There was some round, round and flat with a pretty flower in the middle of it. These we never could [figure out] how they got the flower so perfect in the middle. We also had ribbon candy, it was different, it had different color stripes, it was about one and half inches wide and looped and pushed together like soft according pleats. This ribbon candy is still sold in the special stores today, at Christmas time. Also the candy sticks of different colors and flavors.
We didn’t get all this candy all at once but what Santa wanted us to have or what he could afford. Sometimes Santa gets short of money. He has a lot of children to visit.
When I was a little girl we were told, if we had been bad we wouldn't get any thing. He was supposed to have fairies to help him check up on us, if we had been naughty or not.
This time it is a little easier to choose a stopping point, as the subject changes slightly after this.
The reference to “Grandpa Gene” and his mustache puzzled me. I knew he wasn’t one of Elsie’s grandfathers; she never met either of hers, and their names were William and George anyway. After some cursory research, I am still puzzled. I am supposing that “Grandpa Gene” was a figure in popular culture at some point during Elsie’s life, obviously at a point prior to her writing of this memoir in 1990. Since I could find no mention of anyone with that nickname before 1990, I suspect that it may have been a local figure, well known in the Portland, Oregon area to a certain generation, but without a national audience to remember him frequently online.
I also chuckled at “We called the davenport a couch those days,” as one would be hard-pressed to find many people who still call a couch a davenport! Well, at least around here. Perhaps it is still common in other parts of the world.
Citation:
Elsie Crocker, "Christmas on the Farm when I was a Small Child" (typescript, 1990); copy in possession of Amber Brosius, 2020.
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