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 many years ago, the stores didnt 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 didnt even like to hear the word Christmas until after we had finished eating Thanksgiving dinner."
Ralphs new book, Christmas In Dairyland (True Stories From a Wisconsin Farm), celebrates Christmas during that simpler instant.
"Back then, happiness was baking cookies, decorating the Christmas tree, and eating lefse that my mother had made," Ralph said.
Lefse (pronounced lefsuh) is a flat potato pastry brought to this country by Norwegian immigrants who settled in Wisconsin. Ralphs mother was the daughter of Norwegian immigrants, and their 120-acre family farm was homesteaded by Ralphs great-grandfather.
"When I was a kid, everybody enjoyed simple pleasures. The Sunday school Christmas code
was an event at the little country church just down the roadway
from our farm that was attended by nearly every body in the neighborhood," Ralph noted.
"At the measure
, 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 and that you would find Christmas decorations on sale in August and September, too I wouldnt 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 Americas 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 many years ago, Wisconsin had 60,000 dairy farms. Today, only about 20,000 dairy farms remain.
Nation-wide 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.
"As far as I was concerned, one of the best parts of Christmas was going out with my dad to cut a Christmas tree. We had small stands of pine trees planted around the farm to stop soil erosion. We would stroll
around until we found a nice tree, and then we would cut it and bring it home," Ralph recalled.
Ralphs book, Christmas In Dairyland (True Stories From a Wisconsin Farm)
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