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 really thought 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."

"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, I wouldn't have believed it," she said.

"I also would have never thought that dairy farming would change so much. I always took it for granted that we lived in 'America's Dairyland,' but today, most of the small family dairy farms have disappeared," Ralph noted.

According to statistics from the United States Census of Agriculture , Wisconsin has lost two-thirds of its dairy farms since 1969. Forty years ago, Wisconsin had 60,000 dairy farms. Today, only about 20,000 dairy farms remain.

Nationwide statistics from the United States Census of Agriculture show the same trend. In 1969, more than a half a million dairy farms operated in the United States. Today, only about 80,000 dairy farms remain.

"One of the best parts of Christmas was going out with my dad to cut a Christmas tree. We had pine trees planted around the farm to stop soil erosion. We would walk around until we found a nice tree, and then we would cut it and bring it home," Ralph recalled.

Ralph is the author of the book, Christmas In Dairyland (True Stories From a Wisconsin Farm). She earned an undergraduate degree in English with a writing emphasis from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and also earned a Master of Arts in Teaching from UW-Whitewater. She taught English at a boys' boarding school for several years and worked as a newspaper reporter for more than eight years. Ralph is the editor of the Wisconsin Regional Writer, the quarterly publication of the Wisconsin Regional Writers' Assoc.

For more information about Christmas In Dairyland (True Stories From a Wisconsin Farm), visit www.ruralroute2.com. The book also can be ordered through any brick-and-mortar bookstore.

Contact information:
LeAnn R. Ralph
(715) 962-3368
e-mail: bigpines@ruralroute2.com