An Old-Fashioned Christmas

Sometime back in the early 1960s, I believe it was, the La Grange Garden Club or the Ladies’ Hospital Auxiliary or some other non-profit raising funds for their cause sponsored a holiday homes tour in La Grange early in December, each house being decorated for Christmas. One of the featured places was the home of Robert (“Bob”) and “Dumpty” Weeren on Highway 159, just beyond what is now the FayCo Print Shop. The Weerens, good friends of my grandparents, lived in a white frame farmstead house, probably built in the early 1920s or 1930s, and touring it was like walking into an Old World Christmas for me.

In the main living area was a large natural-grown cut cedar tree that went from floor to ceiling. It was decorated with REAL CANDLES, all lit and burning brightly on the tree, with ornaments of painted glass, strung strands of popcorn and cranberries, with apples and oranges tied on with string, decorated Christmas cookies of all shapes, and actual candy canes. The tree absolutely GLOWED, entirely magical in its smells of the popcorn, apples, oranges, and candle wax; its flickering lights; its white and red garlands.

My grandmother, Elsie Tiemann, was as taken with the tree as I was. For her, it was a memory of her childhood, growing up on the west side of La Grange in the Bridge Valley Community, in a simple wood frame house also, where the Christmas tree was also lit by candles, and the ornaments and garlands were mostly hand-made yearly. Until electricity came to the Bluff area in the late 1930s, where she lived after her marriage, she would also have had only a cedar tree with candles while her own children were growing up. Candle-burning became a virtual no-no when electricity came, however, because of the danger of fires and because the power company did all it could to promote both safety and power use, and so encouraged the new “string lights,” some of which featured the bubble lights that remain popular in some homes even now.

In the mid-1960’s, Grandma inherited some small acreage west of La Grange. Largely fallow (after having been farmed by a tenant up until the Depression years), and used by the family for periodic picnic outings, to pick plums and dewberries, or for cutting cedar fence posts, it was there Grandma decided to build a rustic cabin (no electricity) and put in a stock tank for family outings and fishing. It was an A-frame building of cement blocks, and it was ideal for what became her signature entertainment of the holiday season: a Christmas tree with real candles.

From 1966 on, every year until about 1985, my family had our normal Christmas celebrations in our homes, but on the Saturday or Sunday night between Christmas and New Year’s and sometimes on New Year’s Eve, we had an enormous celebration there at the Dogwood Cabin. Family members from the Tiemann and Citzler branches gathered together, sometimes as many as 65 of us crowded into the small main room with the Christmas tree in the corner of the open stairwell and we lit the 40 or so candles after dark and sang Christmas carols until we couldn’t remember any more to sing. We oohed and aahed over that tree, the magic of the room lit only by the candles on the tree, with face reflecting those candles and shining with joy and happiness.

We still talk about that celebration: cousins ask whether we still do it, college classmates remember being in the area and dropping in for the gathering, even visitors from other states and countries recall having been at the Citzler Family’s ”Christmas at Dogwood!” But we don’t do all that work anymore. The camphouse at Dogwood now has electricity; it’s used mostly by the deerhunters; we have no wifi or cable there, so the place seems pretty dull to kids today. If anything, they’d rather be outside running around, fishing, or hunting for arrowheads instead of stringing popcorn or cranberries onto dental floss to hang on a Christmas tree.

Each generation has its own special traditions, and every generation creates new ones. Don’t mourn the old, but celebrate the new, dear friends. It’s great to remember the past with gratitude and joy, but it’s far more exciting and interesting to look forward with anticipation to the future! And so we welcome the new year, 2024, hoping and praying it brings peace and well-being to the world and to everyone we love, as well as to those we have yet to meet.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, dear friends, and God bless us, one and all!