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Books and Beyond

“Christmas in Minnesota: A celebration in memories, stories, and recipes of seasons past” is a book you can check out and then have on your coffee table, or on the nightstand next to your bed. It is edited by Marilyn Ziebarth and Brian Horrigan, published by Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2005. Wherever you open it, there’s something to read and enjoy fairly quickly, then get back to making your Christmas shopping list or reviewing fruitcake recipes. I decided to first read authors I had never read.

As I paged through the book, the first thing I chose to read was an illustrated story by Lee Mero, “Christmas in the City, being a sequel to Christmas in the Country.” Published originally in 1974 by Augsburg Publishing House, it’s nine pages of very interesting small illustrations, each with a short narrative or description by it. The sketches have horses and sleighs or buggies, so the time of the story is the late 1800s or very early 1900s. The text is a traditional Christmas story, with the decorated tree, presents, a special meal with family and friends, and ice-skating. Did you ever hear of an “accommodation train?” It was new to me. Uncle Erik and Aunt Stella rode this train, which “accommodated” freight, livestock and people, to Minneapolis, to visit John and Clara. Lee Mero is author of many titles, including “A Christmas Alphabet,” and “One Christmas Back in Grandfather’s Time.”

Florence Page Jaques and her husband spent Christmas day, 1942, on Gunflint Lake in northern Minnesota, at their lodge with friends from the Ojibwe community. They had gotten their tree from a nearby hill, and they set it up near the lodge. Packages were brought on Christmas Eve by the Wilderness Express. Watching out the window, they see woodpeckers, a downy, and chickadees on the Christmas tree.

Samuel Bloomer wrote about Dec. 25, 1861, when he was a Union Army soldier from Stillwater, serving in the First Minnesota Infantry Regiment. He was performing picket duty along the Potomac River. One of the boxes of goods delivered had “choice Whiskey-Brandy” written on it, but Samuel saw that box taken to a nearby hospital. The soldiers in his company got oysters and milk and made oyster soup. Bloomer didn’t like oysters, so he ate bread and molasses.

Jerry Fearing was a cartoonist who lived near West Seventh Street in St. Paul. He was born in 1930, so his childhood memories tell us what it was like to grow up in the Depression. His teacher at school knew he drew pictures most of the time, so she had Jerry go from room to room and draw Christmas scenes on the board with colored chalk. At home he and his brother and sister would lie on the floor with catalogs from Wards and Sears. They made lists of things — inexpensive items — they might like as presents. For more fun, they went sledding at Irvine Park.

In the poem “Gifts,” Maura Stanton is shopping for a Christmas present for her aunt, who is very ill. What to buy her? This may be her last Christmas. The poet remembers a gift her aunt, a nun, gave to her when she was a little girl — pictures of Mary “bending over the swaddled child” (p. 131). The poet hopes the soap she is buying her aunt will “smell to her of heavenly gardens” (p. 131). The poem was published in Glacier Wine, Carnegie Mellon, © 2001.

“A Minnesota Christmas Eve Feast” gives many delectable recipes, including Buñuelos — “A traditional Mexican Christmas dessert” (p. 170). I’d like to make it for company. There are recipes identified as German, Norwegian, Finnish, Mexican, Italian and Swedish. The photograph on page 169 is of the Barilla family at their kitchen in 1953 in St. Paul. Before it’s time to go shopping for holiday food, you could page through the book just looking at photographs and illustrations.

Evelyn Fairbanks’ story, “Daddy’s Gift,” is an excerpt from her book “The Days of Rondo: A warm reminiscence of St. Paul’s thriving Black community in the 1930s and 1940s,” © 1990. She and her daddy talked a lot as she was growing up, and after he died, his gifts to her were still coming. A man who had worked with her daddy at the Great Northern Railway Company, brought a sack of Christmas gifts to her every Christmas Eve for many years. In the sack he gave her were apples, oranges, a one-dollar bill, candy and a chicken to have for a meal. He was a Mr. Anderson, who lived in White Bear Lake.

I liked reading about celebration times in the winter, and I really enjoyed getting to know authors I had not read. Author names I know in the book include Bill Holm, Susan Allen Toth, Jon Hassler, and Faith Sullivan. Other places in the book are Cloquet, Hawley, Albert Lea, Mankato and Cass Lake.

“Christmas in Minnesota” is available through the catalog at Marshall-Lyon County Library as are so many more holiday books. Don’t forget to stop there and say hello to friends, browse the shelves and find authors you haven’t read. Our library is a gift to us in all seasons.

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