Happy New Year. This fall, Last Frontier Magazine ask me to write a homestead Christmas
piece for the Winter edition about what Christmas was like on an Alaska homestead in the fifties. After several failed attempts to write something interesting and heartfelt, I threw everything away and wrote a letter to my grandchildren. I share this with you as a Holiday greeting.
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| Yes, that's me by the front door. |
Dear Sawyer and Molly,
Almost
sixty years ago when I was five years old, I had my first Alaskan Christmas. In
fact that holiday in 1958 was the first Christmas that I remember. It was memorable
for many reasons. For one, I was finally old enough to look forward to the
excitement of draping a tree with garlands of popcorn and watching the presents
pile up under it. I was old enough to look forward to the sound of mom singing
carols, the smell of hot cinnamon rolls, and dressing up for Church pageants. But
what made it really memorable was Christmas in our own log cabin in the wilds
of Alaska.
We had finished
our cabin in October and moved in just in time for Halloween. It seemed like no
time before snow was falling and icicles were hanging off the eaves. A whole
forest of Christmas trees surrounded our cabin, and by November they were
already flocked with snow. When we drove down the lane to our house on clear
frosty evening, the lamps in the cabin window filled the windows with golden
light that spilled out on the snow and it was as if we were living in a Christmas
card. This was nothing like Christmas back in Sugar Tree Ridge, Ohio.
My brothers
went out the back door and crunched across the snowy yard to a cut a nice
spruce tree that they stood in the corner of the living room. It must have made our little cabin really
crowded, but I only remember the rich smell of the evergreen forest as the tree
warmed and the last of the snow melted from the boughs. Suddenly, we heard popcorn rattling in the
pan, and Amy ran for the sewing thread so we could string garlands of
popcorn. We made paper chains and cut
pictures from cards and magazines for ornaments. Finally, our tree received the one store
bought decoration, foil icicles that gaily twinkled in the lantern light.
In those
days, there were no stores around for Christmas shopping and this was long
before the Internet, so we only had catalogs to order presents from. And since
we didn’t have much money there wasn’t much of that. Most of the Christmas
presents we received were made right there on the homestead. In our family,
there were no letters to Santa or pretending that a jolly fat elf was coming
down the chimney on Christmas Eve. Every present we got came from some one we
knew, some we loved, we knew loved us.
The only
Santa we believed in was a local guy that wore the red Santa suit and showed up
at the Christmas carnival just before the movie started. He arrived with ching, ching, ching, of bells
and a hearty hoo hoo hoo then sat in a chair by the Christmas tree where he read
our names one by one from a long sheet of paper. When our name was called, we
walked up to Santa and received a gift, wrapped in green paper for boys and red
for girls. On the way back to our seat, we were handed a paper lunch sack with
an apple, an orange, some peanuts, and a candy cane. For some of us that was
the only orange we would have all year because fresh fruit like that was rare
and expensive in 1958.
After all
the kids had received their presents, we sang a few Christmas carols, and then
one of the dads started the movie projector, and the lights went down. The only
sound for the next hour and a half was the rustle of treat bags and our gleeful
laughter for we were totally enthralled by watching a movie – a rare treat in
our little frontier community with no TV or regular theater.
After the
movie, the Walkers headed home to their homestead cabin to build up the fire
and light the lantern. And even though there was no Santa, there was still magic
for under our tree we found bags of nuts, nuts of all shapes and sizes still in
their shells just waiting for us. We also found a fancy tin box of candy, And
this was not just any candy, it was Christmas Candy, candy in looping rainbow ribbons
of red, green, and white. But, most
magical of all, and still dear to my heart was a small wooden box that with a
cargo so precious that each was separately wrapped in it’s own paper. These
golden jewels were Mandarin oranges — what you kids now call Clementines. Today
they are as common as apples, but back then we only saw them at Christmas. When
we peeled one of those tiny oranges, it released the aroma of summer like a
moment of sunlight had been trapped inside it. The memory of those magical
mysterious fruits is so strong that their smell no longer makes me the think of
summer but of Christmas.
And so, with
the spruce logs crackling in the woodstove and carols on the radio, the Walkers
settled down in their cabin on that first Christmas Eve and opened gifts they’d
made each other. The way I remember it we drew names, so that each person made
a gift for one member of the family. Of course, Mom and Dad had something for
each of us. Mom had made shirts and dresses, mittens and dolls. Dad had shaped
rough lumber into wooden spoons, checkers boards, doll beds and toy barns. We
all went to bed wondering how Christmas Day could be any better than Christmas
Eve, but it was. We spent the day
playing with Christmas toys, eating once a year treats, and feasting with new
Alaskan friends.
Every Christmas
since that first one, we try to remember some of those traditions, and I
figured out over the years that it was not all the treats, gifts, and
decorations that made Christmas special; It was a family together in that cabin,
sharing a great adventure and warming a winter night with our love for each
other.
Merry Christmas,
Poppa Walker
