Christmas in My Heart

by Joe Wheeler

  “A poor street, miss?” said the puzzled man.

  “Yes, a very poor street. The poorest in the city.”

  The doorman looked doubtful. “Well, you might try Harlem. Or down in the Village. Or the Lower East Side, maybe.”

  But these names meant nothing to Ursula. She thanked the doorman and walked along, threading her way through the stream of shoppers until she came to a tall policeman. “Please,” she said, “can you direct me to a very poor street in … in Harlem?”

  The policeman looked at her sharply and shook his head. “Harlem’s no place for you, miss.” And he blew his whistle and sent the traffic swirling past.

  Holding her package carefully, Ursula walked on, head bowed against the sharp wind. If a street looked poorer than the one she was on, she took it. But none seemed like the slums she had heard about. Once she stopped a woman, “Please, where do the very poor people live?” But the woman gave her a stare and hurried on.

  Darkness came sifting from the sky. Ursula was cold and discouraged and afraid of becoming lost. She came to an intersection and stood forlornly on the corner. What she was trying to do suddenly seemed foolish, impulsive, absurd. Then, through the traffic’s roar, she heard the cheerful tinkle of a bell. On the corner opposite, a Salvation Army man was making his traditional Christmas appeal.

  At once Ursula felt better; the Salvation Army was a part of life in Switzerland, too. Surely this man could tell her what she wanted to know. She waited for the light, then crossed over to him. “Can you help me? I’m looking for a baby. I have here a little present for the poorest baby I can find.” And she held up the package with the green ribbon and the gaily colored paper.

  Dressed in gloves and overcoat a size too big for him, he seemed a very ordinary man. But behind his steel-rimmed glasses his eyes were kind. He looked at Ursula and stopped ringing his bell. “What sort of present?” he asked.

  “A little dress. For a small, poor baby. Do you know of one?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “Of more than one, I’m afraid.”

  “Is it far away? I could take a taxi, maybe?”

  The Salvation Army man wrinkled his forehead. Finally he said, “It’s almost six o’clock. My relief will show up then. If you want to wait, and if you can afford a dollar taxi ride, I’ll take you to a family in my own neighborhood who needs just about everything.”

  “And they have a small baby?”

  “A very small baby.”

  “Then,” said Ursula joyfully, “I wait!”

  The substitute bell-ringer came. A cruising taxi slowed. In its welcome warmth, she told her new friend about herself, how she came to be in New York, what she was trying to do. He listened in silence, and the taxi driver listened too. When they reached their destination, the driver said, “Take your time, miss. I’ll wait for you.”

  On the sidewalk, Ursula stared up at the forbidding tenement—dark, decaying, saturated with hopelessness. A gust of wind, iron-cold, stirred the refuse in the street and rattled the reeling ashcans. “They live on the third floor,” the Salvation Army man said. “Shall we go up?”

  But Ursula shook her head. “They would try to thank me, and this is not from me.” She pressed the package into his hand. “Take it up for me, please. Say it’s from … from someone who has everything.”

  The taxi bore her swiftly from dark streets to lighted ones, from misery to abundance. She tried to visualize the Salvation Army man climbing the stairs, the knock, the explanation, the package being opened, the dress on the baby. It was hard to do.

  Arriving at the apartment house on Fifth Avenue where she lived, she fumbled in her purse. But the driver flicked the flag up. “No charge, miss.”

  “No charge?” echoed Ursula, bewildered.

  “Don’t worry,” the driver said. “I’ve been paid.” He smiled at her and drove away.

  Ursula was up early the next day. She set the table with special care. By the time she had finished, the family was awake, and there was all the excitement and laughter of Christmas morning. Soon the living room was a sea of gay discarded wrappings. Ursula thanked everyone for the presents she received. Finally, when there was a lull, she began to explain hesitantly why there seemed to be none from her. She told about going to the department store. She told about the Salvation Army man. She told about the taxi driver. When she finished, there was a long silence. No one seemed to trust himself to speak. “So you see,” said Ursula, “I try to do a kindness in your name. And this is my Christmas present to you …”

  How do I happen to know all this? I know it because ours was the home where Ursula lived. Ours was the Christmas she shared. We were like many Americans, so richly blessed that to this child from across the sea there seemed to be nothing she could add to the material things we already had. And so she offered something of far greater value: a gift from the heart, an act of kindness carried out in our name.

  Strange, isn’t it? A shy Swiss girl, alone in a great impersonal city. You would think that nothing she could do would affect anyone. And yet, by trying to give away love, she brought the true spirit of Christmas into our lives, the spirit of selfless giving. That was Ursula’s secret—and she shared it with us all.

  Christmas in the

  New World

  ROSINA KIEHLBAUCH

  The year was 1874 and the Dakota prairies were lonely, cold, and virtually treeless. How was a German immigrant family, transplanted from the steppes of Russia only three months before, supposed to find a Christmas where not even a Lutheran church had been constructed?

  Where would a tree come from? Where, for that matter, would toys, gifts? This was the dilemma that faced Johannes and Codray (Katherina), but they set about making the best of it.

  Unique in Christmas literature is Rosina Kiehlbauch’s trilogy of three Christmases (1874, 1884, 1894) on the Dakota frontier. Nothing I have ever read is comparable to these three accounts: not only do they have power and pathos, but they also graphically reveal the interweaving changes in frontier life.

  Rosina Kiehlbauch’s daughter, Catherine Sherry, felt so strongly that these memories deserved a wider audience that she made them available to the editors of The American Historical Society of Germans from Russia in Lincoln, Nebraska, who ran them in three issues of their Journal.

  The institutions of the dreaded Pelznickel and beloved Kristkindle were born in the Valley of the Rhine, and shadowed by the alpine heights where Germany, France, and Switzerland meet. When those native to this region emigrated to America, they brought these Christmas traditions with them.

  We begin with the earliest of the three accounts.

  Eighteen hundred and seventy-four. In a sod house on the Dakota prairie, 6,000 miles from last Christmas in Russia, Johannes and Codray Kulbach were facing the holiday season with many misgivings.

  Since September, when they took up their Clear Lake homestead, these south Russian German immigrants had been so busy putting up a sod house in which to live and sod shelters for their farm animals and plowing fields that the trip to Yankton for holiday supplies and a few extra comforts for the long winter had been repeatedly postponed.

  What would they do about Christmas for their three little children? The demands of homesteading left no time for the pioneer parents to provide more than the bare necessities for pioneer life. There was still money in the black lacquer cash box. It had provided first class passage on the S.S. Brunswick from the old country. In the new country they had bought farm implements, a team of horses, and the necessary household furnishings. It wasn’t the lack of money; it was the lack of time now that snow had come so early and the menace of a Dakota blizzard that made the two-day trip to town hazardous even with good horses.

  During the weeks spent on the seemingly barren prairie, the immigrants had learned to solve all kinds of problems. Surely somehow they would also solve the problem of a tree and gifts for the children’s first Christmas in the land of their adoption. Was it not for the children’s sake that they h
ad left their comfortable home in south Russia and come to America? They must not fail in this their first Christmas celebration.

  Johannes and his wife were courageous pioneers, descendants of liberty-loving Swabians, who almost a century earlier, rather than submit to compulsory military service in Württemberg, had immigrated to the wild steppes of south Russia and there, under the direct protection of the Russian Crown, had built their homes, tilled the soil, and kept the holy days of the Lutheran Church with appropriate celebrations. Surely God was a God of the prairies as well as of the steppes, and if He marked the sparrow’s fall He would also mark the little soddie so trustfully launched on the prairie’s endless sea of grass.

  In the land of the Dakotas there was no cathedral with its familiar Advent services to remind old and young that the holidays were drawing near. The Church Almanac in which the homesteaders checked each day (there was no other way of keeping track of the days) showed that the Trinitatis Sundays would soon change to the Advent Sundays. In the old country this was the time for the housewife to think of holiday preparations such as baking Lebkuchen, Springerlei, and other Christmas goodies that improved with age.

  In 1874 there were no near, neighborly housewives who were also making Christmas plans and with whom one could exchange ideas; no shops to visit; no evergreens to conjure up pictures of holiday splendor; and nothing in the soddie with which to make fitting gifts.

  Fortunately the children were still so engrossed with their “bon voyage” presents that in spite of the snow, Christmas was not holding the usual importance in their childish thoughts and play. But when they helped their mother set up the Christmas twigs, the two little sisters were reminded of similar preparations for the holidays in Russia and asked, “Will Christmas come on the prairie so far from Russia and Grandfather and Grandmother?”

  It was more because of habit than of faith in what she did, that Codray had cut willows and arranged them in a crock on the kitchen window near the adobe stove. In fruitful south Russia, she, like her mother before her, had always cut peach or cherry twigs and by soaking them in warm water had forced them to blossom for the coming of the Christ Child. On the Dakota prairie there were no fruit trees for Christmas bloom—only here and there a few willows by a shallow lake or slow-flowing creek. In this new country what outward signs for Christmas could they substitute for the dear, familiar symbols of old country Christmas celebration?

  It was clear to these pioneer parents that a prairie Christmas could not be an elaborate celebration like in Russia, but they were sure it could be a Christmas celebration nevertheless. They assured the children that the Christ Child would come to good children no matter where they lived. Content that Christmas would come because Father and Mother had said so, the two sisters began to wonder what Kristkindle and Pelznickel would bring them if they were diligent and learned the lessons and did the tasks that Father and Mother set for them. From their superior knowledge of four and six Christmases they tried to impress upon their 2-year-old brother all the joys of the holiday season.

  The children were delighted with the blooming of the Christmas twigs. To them it was one more assurance that Kristkindle was coming. What if, instead of flowers, the willows had produced soft, fuzzy buds that looked very much like fur-wrapped Indian babies clinging to their mothers’ backs? These little “papoose willows” became a pre-holiday source of much pleasure and excitement.

  The problem of how to get a suitable Christmas tree was still unsolved, but Codray’s attempt to foster the Christmas spirit in America with willows so heartened the family that Johannes thought he’d try his hand with the pliable osiers. But how could one make a beautiful Christmas tree out of a straight, uninspiring willow? “Graceful as a willow wand” might serve the poet, but how could it serve the pioneers whose children expected that tree of all trees, a Christmas tree with many heavily laden branches?

  Johannes put on his Russian Pelz and tall fur cap and went down to the lakeshore. There he selected a straight, stout willow about the thickness of his thumb and hoped for inspiration. He took it to his workbench, bored holes into it about where branches could be and whittled down willow tips to fit the holes. In spite of the make-believe branches, it was only a bare, stiff, ungainly tree skeleton, but somehow there was an innate, sturdy courage about it, and who could say that the Christmas spirit was not in its heart?

  Codray was completely surprised when her husband showed her what he had done out at the workbench. “Can we make a willow blossom like a Christmas tree?” he paraphrased apologetically.

  For a moment his wife was really dismayed by the unchristmas-like tree. But its meek, comical, scarecrow appearance touched her heart, and its utter forlornness aroused her maternal instinct. She wanted something with which to cover its nakedness. “Of course we can make it blossom like a Christmas tree,” she said, talking to keep up her courage until she could think of something to do. “We haven’t the abundance of Russia, but hasn’t God blessed all our efforts? Didn’t we take what the prairie had to offer and make a warm sod house? Buffalo chips and prairie grass have furnished fuel, wild fowls and fish have been our food. Surely a Christmas tree is not impossible when the spirit of Christmas is abroad. Just come with me and we will make it blossom.” And she led the way back to the house.

  In the soddie the homesteaders collected every scrap of plain paper they could find. Even the margins of the few treasured copies of the pioneer newspaper, the Dakota Freie Presse, were sacrificed. Codray went to the homemade cupboard and unwrapped her winter’s supply of Frank’s chicory. Many settlers used chicory as a coffee substitute. She soaked the brilliant red wrapper in water to extract the color. Into the red dye-bath she dipped the scraps of paper. When they were dry she cut the colored pieces into fringe and carefully, lovingly twisted them around each stiff, make-believe willow branch. All left-over scraps were fashioned into rosettes for ornamenting the tips of the branches. Such a Christmas tree as was “never seen on land or sea” began to blossom in the prairie soddie. The tree was its own inspiration for presents. A willow with a twisted root was fashioned into a hobby horse for little brother. But it looked so lonesome that Johannes made hobby horses for each of the girls also. Willow whistles and tops suggested themselves.

  Since Christmas and dolls are almost synonymous in the minds of little girls, dolls would have to be produced somehow. Dolls? Codray thought of cookie dolls. They would be novelties. But a novelty is usually short-lived, and among children with good teeth and healthy appetites, edible novelties would not last long. Then, though their tummies might feel full, their hearts would be empty after Christmas day. Codray would have to devise more substantial dolls. Would the Christmas tree give the inspiration?

  After the children were asleep in their trundle bed, the parents brought the tree into the house and worked on their Christmas preparations. Their little willow emblem of Christmas stood up courageously and tried its best to fill the exalted position for which it was destined. Surely they could not fail the tree or the children who placed such confidence in them. They had used willows for fuel, for fishpoles, for rabbit snares, for brooms, for baskets, and now for a Christmas tree. Why not willow dolls in keeping with their prairie Christmas motif?

  The young mother took a bunch of slender willow-tips and tied them together for the body of the doll. Her skillful fingers fashioned a cloth-covered head and her husband whittled the arms. When dressed, “Willowminna Americana” was very intriguing indeed. To keep “Willowminna” from being lonesome, Codray started to make a whole family of willow dolls and a Russian “Ami” to help care for them. She clapped her hands with delight when her husband evened the tips of the willows and stood the dolls in a row on the drop-leaf table. The little girls surely would enjoy dolls that could stand.

  As the homesteaders surveyed the row of dolls, they noticed that the oil in the glass lamp was getting low. They knew there would be no chance to replenish the one gallon of kerosene oil before spring. But this was Chr
istmas. It would take another evening or two to complete the doll family and the willow trundle bed that Johannes had suggested. So the happy parents decided to work on and forget for the time being all the difficulties of pioneering. After the holidays they could conserve kerosene and use only the wild goose lamp, the prairie substitute for the whale oil lamp of New England’s pioneer days.

  The wild goose lamp—a wick soaked in melted goose fat—was a greasy, sputtering, sooty affair at its best, but it gave sufficient light during the short evenings that the homesteaders allowed themselves for basket weaving, harness oiling, plowshare polishing, wool carding, and such other pioneer occupations that depended as much on touch as on sight.

  On the last evening of their Christmas preparations, Codray sat close to the brightly polished glass lamp and sewed up the little doll feather ticks and pillow cases that she and her husband had filled with wild goose feathers. Then from the tin foil that had been carefully saved from Johannes’ tobacco, they shaped two little cups and two little saucers for a tea set, and covered a few nuts with the remaining tin foil.

  Fervently Johannes wished there were more nuts and candies. But in October, when on one of the infrequent trips to Yankton, the storekeeper had suggested to the immigrant that it might be well to make some purchases for Christmas, Johannes could not take it seriously. Who can get into the Christmas spirit when days are warm and the sun is shining brightly? But because the storekeeper suggested it, Johannes made a few desultory purchases. He felt awkward about it, for he and his wife had always gone to Odessa together for Christmas shopping. Now alone he did not know just what to buy. Of course, candy and nuts were essential to Christmas cheer so he bought some, thinking to get more when his wife would be with him on the next trip. But the early snows had prevented any more trips to Yankton. So, the few tin foil nuts and the red rosettes made from the paper scraps would have to make as grand a showing as possible on the Christmas tree. There would be no candles. Wild goose candles were out of the question, and there was no tallow.