Today, Lou is back with another article. In this one, she writes about her memories of how Christmas was celebrated in the one-room country schoolhouses. It appeared in the Journal on Sunday, December 21, 1969.
Her charming story is rich with details about a simpler way of life long ago that few can remember. But it deserves to be preserved in memory, if only to remind us how Christmas used to be celebrated as a community affair, and how little it took to make children happy.
Lou’s Hearthstone
Santa Claus Came to One Room Schoolhouse Too
By LOU KEPLER
STUDENTS ALL over the Golden Crescent are performing for their PTAs or giving a Christmas program. There’s nothing new about it. Years and years ago kids in the country school did the same, but it was so different.
Most of the little one-room schoolhouses sheltered eight grades. One teacher heard classes from phonics to agriculture.
Weeks beforehand, the best artists drew pictures of Santa Claus, the visits of the Wise Men, the Babe in the manger and Christmas scenes on the blackboard with colored chalk.
The first grade children cut out holly leaves from green construction paper and put red berries on them with flour and water paste. Naturally they were quite smudged.
Teacher arranged the program. Different children were designated to speak pieces. Some sang. One or two played the piano. A short play was put on by the higher grades with the final bit a pantomime of Bethlehem.
Most everyone was on stage in the last bit. Boys, wearing bathrobes were shepherds. The prettiest little girls were draped in their mothers’ lace curtains and labeled angels. An eighth grade girl was always Mary. She had a blue scarf wrapped around her head and was clad in a white bedsheet.
Joseph, the oldest boy in school, wore a bathrobe too and the leftover big boys (there were never more than three) appeared as the Wise Men.
The babe in the manger was usually a doll. All the little girls brought their dolls to school for the teacher to see, hoping theirs would be the chosen one to represent the Christ Child.
One year we had a real, live baby in the crib. It cried lustily through the performance. A Wise Man stuck a pacifier in its mouth and finally shut it up. Pacifiers in those days were made from cloth filled with sugar and tied at the top with a string.
There was always a Christmas tree. The big boys made a production of getting the tree. They cut it down in the woods and hauled it to the school house. The rest of the students made paper chains, strung popcorn and cranberries and cut decorations out of tinfoil.
Of course there were no electric lights. Candles, lighted tapers in tin holders were scattered throughout the tree and were lighted at the beginning of the program.
Beneath the tree were presents. Every kid brought something for teacher. If it was “boughten,” it didn’t cost more than a quarter. You could get real fancy pins for 25 cents in those days, or even a bottle of perfume. Usually the gifts were potholders or hand crocheted handkerchiefs the mothers had made.
Parents brought one wrapped gift for each of their children which was placed in Santa’s pack along with a bag or little cardboard box filled with candy from the school board and on real special times, an orange and a few nuts. I always looked for the chocolate drops. There were two in each box.
As the program drew to a close, there’d be a loud ringing of sleigh bells outside and in would bound Santa Claus, who was probably the president of the school board.
He might not be in a red suit. He might be wearing a bearskin coat, which was quite the thing in those days, but he’d have on a Santa Claus face, a pair of high black rubber boots and a fur hat. A big sack full of the presents and candy would be on his back.
Striding to the front of the schoolroom, he’d dig into this sack, call out the name on the present and the children would eagerly spring out of their seats to receive it.
When the last box of candy and orange had been delivered by Santa, he’d ask us to sing. Teacher sat down at the piano, pounded out “Oh Come All Ye Faithful,” “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing,” and “Silent Night” and everyone, grandmas, grandpas, aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers, sisters and parents sang.
I don’t remember ever hearing of any disaster during a Christmas program in one of those little red schoolhouses. It has all the markings. There were unprotected lighted candles in the windows near the paper holly. The lighted candles on the tree were definitely a safety hazard.
The only casualty I ever heard about was this week. That was when Elizabeth Prescott called me and told me about the time George Holzhauer was Santa Claus in her one-room school house. It seems Santa bent over a candle and his cotton-batten beard caught on fire.
It seems as if it always snowed at Christmas. We could count on going to that Christmas program in the old schoolhouse the Friday night before Christmas vacation in a sleigh.
Sometimes the whole neighborhood would form sort of a parade with the wagon boxes put on runners, the interiors filled with straw and packed with kids and parents. The horses always had on sleigh bells.
Those school programs were the height of the social season on the farm and were outdone only by the Sunday school program at the churches on Christmas Eve.
Great article - every time I see an old picture of candles on a tree, I wonder why there weren't more fires.
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