Christmas Dinner by
Russ Hanson
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| Doc Squirt and friend, 1900 Cushing Christmas. Doc often played Santa, coming into the Church and distributing gifts to the children. The tree seems to have popcorn and cranberry chains and other homemade ornaments Real candles were often used--with a man standing by with a bucket of water for emergencies. |
Winter nights here at the cabin are full of winter
echoes, the frigid air adding clarity and volume to distant sounds. The lake booms displeasure as its new skin
cracks, oozing clear blood from the warm interior that clots instantly,
shedding a final puff of frosty steam. A
band of coyotes howl nightly across the lake, as if at our door warning us to
stay within where the stoked fire keeps us cozy. Owls woefully hoo wooing whispers to wives
while our neighbor’s neighing nag complains of frozen hay. Crusty roof snow magnifies the gray squirrel's
delicate trot to the feeder at dawn; an elephant tromping us awake in our
sleeping loft below. We awake to frosty
breaths and the pressing need to restart the now cold wood stove. The huge quilts have fooled us into letting
it go out. Winter has moved in with us, an uninvited guest, who, for a time
will entertain us with her novelty and beauty, but surely outstay her welcome.
We are at the lake cabin until
Christmas. Then we drain the water, set
a thousand mousetraps and close the doors until early March when brother
Everett calls and says "maple sap's running." This year we expect to spend January and
maybe February with the tent-camper down south where snow is a delightful rarity;
where people freeze to death at 50 degrees; and Midwesterners and Canadians
flock to escape God's punishment for Original Sin. The Garden is still open if you head south,
and all you need are your fig leaves for modesty.
O lutefisk, O
lutefisk, how pungent your aroma / O lutefisk, O lutefisk, you put me in a
coma. American folksong by Red
Stangeland
“They wanted $7.00 for just a little piece of lutefisk at
the store” Mom complained at the Hanson Christmas. “I always used to buy some for us at
Christmas with lefse and pickled herring.
Aunt Dena, Dad and I liked it—I guess that is our Scandinavian
heritage.” Aunt Dena, Dad’s aunt, stayed
with our family until she was over 100 years old. Her father and mother came from Norway and she
could speak Norwegian and really liked Norwegian foods. Norwegians call it Lute-fisk (two syllables)
whereas Swedes call it lute-ah-fisk according to Dena.
“Does your family
eat lutefisk?” I asked cousin Nellie at the Christmas open house at the Luck Museum America in the 1600s, so we never
had it at home. One year, my husband,
Adolph Hanson, a Swede, asked me to have lutefisk for Christmas dinner. I bought some at the store and asked my
Norwegian neighbors how to make it. I
got it ready for our dinner and prepared it just as they told me”
Nellie continued,
“Adolph told his four sons ‘We have a treat today—just like when I was a young
boy at home and my Mom prepared lutefisk for all eleven of us children. My dad came from Sweden , and my Mom’s parents too.
Christmas dinner was not complete without lutefisk.’”
“Well, each of the
four boys and I took a small piece to try.
Adolph took a larger piece. He
ate a little of it, and then turned to the rest of us. ‘It isn’t very good is it’ he said. We tasted it too and agreed it wasn’t any
good.”
“After dinner, I
had John take the leftover lutefisk out to the cats to eat. They always liked fish. They wouldn’t touch it and even the dog
didn’t try to take it away from them! I think it ended up in the manure
spreader being spread out on the back field,” said Nellie.
My cousin Esther
Gunn, who passed away a few years ago, grew up on her grandpa’s farm near
Arland in Barron County Cumberland .
The Christmas before she passed away, she wrote me saying how much she
missed having some “beggies” at her Christmas dinner. Cumberland ,
she said, was the rutabaga capital of Wisconsin
when she was living there and going to high school.
Her grandfather, a
brother to my great grandfather, came from Sweden as a young man from a farm
along the Swedish coast where it was too cold to raise sweet corn, but root
crops—potatoes, beets, turnips, mangels, parsnips and rutabagas thrived. Potatoes were staples with every meal, but
the sweeter beggies were a treat.
That reminds me of
a story Dad told us boys: “A young neighbor man, Ernest, liked to dream big. He grew a couple of mangel plants, sort of a
huge beet, in his garden in 1931, a relatively wet year in the depression. They produced well and had large roots. Mangels were cut up and fed to the cows and
pigs during the winter along with pumpkins and some of the poorer potatoes.
Feeding root crops was a Scandinavian tradition—they didn’t have ear corn or
beans in the cool climate of central coastal Sweden .”
“If I plant an
acre of mangels, with each plant one foot apart, that would be more than 40,000
plants according to Teacher. It
shouldn’t take more than two plants to make a bushel, so I would get 20,000
bushels. I should be able to sell them
to Dad for ten cents a bushel—that would earn me $2000. I can buy a good farm, a car and have enough
left over for a bicycle for my sister, Edna,” said Ernest earnestly.
Dad told us, “It
sounded good, but of course, but the reality was his dad was too poor to buy
mangels; the normal yield was about 100 bushels per acre; there was a huge
amount of hand labor in raising them; and of course, Ernest was way too lazy to
do it anyway.”
“After that, in our
family,“ Dad said, “when someone had an
unrealistic plan to make money, someone was sure to add ‘and there should be
enough money left over to buy Edna a bicycle’ bringing them back to reality.” I recently heard that from a brother about
our book selling project!
When I first
remember, we had Christmas dinner with my Grandparents, P. H and Hannah Hanson
with most of their 8 children and families.
It was somewhat rare that all eight of them were talking to each other
so someone would be missing. After Hannah died in 1951, that stopped and we had
Christmas dinner with our other grandparents Eugene and Nettie Hanson.
Nettie was an
excellent cook and always had a few extra folks at the table. The family had moved away from their nice 40
acre farm in the early part of the depression and bought the old Blair
homestead out on the Sand Barrens in West Sterling .
I think they were in debt for their new house replacing the one that burned
down, and decided to start over where the land was cheap.
Nettie was a crack
shot with their 22 pump Winchester
that only used shorts. Many times she
took the gun and shot some squirrels, a rabbit or grouse when they were short
of meat in the summer. When an
unexpected visitor came, she sent Mom out to catch a chicken that would be
dinner a few hours later.
An old man came one
fall and asked to stay for the winter.
“I don’t want any money—just a place to stay and some tobacco
money. I will work on the farm and cut
brush for you. So “Granddad Brown” came
to stay with them.
One winter Mom
helped Grandma cook for a nearby pulp cutting crew. They worked hard and ate a lot, and were
happy with the food. A few miles away,
an old man living by himself in his rough cabin was found dead in mid
winter. He was lying in bed, covered
with his blankets, coats and other clothes.
Beside the bed was a jar part full of honey and a trail of dribbled
honey from the jar to his mouth. He was
frozen stiff.
Up the road from
Uncle Alvin’s house was a neighbor’s home.
They had a lot of kids, a drunken father, and no money. Their old cow made the half mile trip to Alvin ’s haystack and corn
shred piles each day to find something to eat before returning home. “I’d chase her away,” said Alvin as he threw her a couple of ears of
corn, “but it would probably result in the babies dying”
Mom tells us her
story. “When I was 9 years old, my Dad
died. It was in 1930, and the depression
was already bad. My Mom had five kids,
the youngest was only a few months old.
We moved from our house to an old granary on the farm Dad had
rented. In December, we ran out of food.
Our last meal was the potato soup from
the frozen peelings off the garbage pile
from our neighbors that my brother Archie collected. My Mom couldn’t handle it—she was 25 years old
with five kids and no food--she just left us alone. I was the oldest so I tried to keep us 5
going by begging food from the neighbors and milk for the baby until Mom came
back again. Finally after a week,
someone realized we were on our own and the Sheriff came out and picked us up
to bring us in to stay at the jail until we could be adopted. We were split up,
but we all got good homes. At my adopted
parents, Nettie and Gene’s we may have been poor, but we always had plenty of
good food!”
You may be wondering
where this is all headed. Well, the
1930’s was the last time when our economy looked as bad as it does today. The stories of hardship then should remind us
to share what we have now with those less fortunate. There is really no excuse for us to ignore a
neighbor who needs help. The food
shelves in the area are a good way to donate money and food, but it is good to
check on your neighbors too.
I am particularly
blessed, having, like the Bible says, had my seven fat years and am ready,
according to my doctor, for at least seven lean years ahead. Poor Margo has barely stored enough for a
lean month.
