Whatever Happened to Christmas?
Remember when no one started Christmas shopping until after
Thanksgiving?
Wisconsin author LeAnn R. Ralph remembers it very well.
"When I was growing up on our dairy farm forty years ago, the
stores didn't put up Christmas displays until the day after
Thanksgiving. No one was really thinking about Christmas
shopping before that," Ralph said. "In fact, my mother felt so
strongly about it that she didn't even like to hear the word
'Christmas' until after we had finished eating Thanksgiving
dinner."
Ralph's new book, Christmas In Dairyland (True Stories From a
Wisconsin Farm), celebrates Christmas during that simpler time.
"Back then, happiness was baking cookies, decorating the
Christmas tree, and eating lefse that my mother had made," Ralph
said.
Lefse (pronounced lef'suh) is a flat potato pastry brought to
this country by Norwegian immigrants who settled in Wisconsin.
Ralph's mother was the daughter of Norwegian immigrants, and
their 120-acre family farm was homesteaded by Ralph's
great-grandfather.
"When I was a kid, people enjoyed simple pleasures. The Sunday
school Christmas program was an event at the little country
church just down the road from our farm that was attended by
nearly everyone in the neighborhood," Ralph noted.
"At the time, if someone had told me the Christmas season was
going to change so drastically that you would eventually get
Christmas catalogs in the mail in August and September