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