Author: Mari K Flowers

  • (n)O Christmas Tree

    (n)O Christmas Tree

    Part Three of Four–Robert Moulton’s Story

    I don’t think I ever met Robert Moulton, but I remember his father, Bob Moulton.  We lived just down the street from Bob and his wife for two years while my dad was preparing the foundation for a new home in the hills nearby. I always thought the Moultons lived in the most beautiful house in Lark, Utah.

    After Dad was laid off at Christmastime in 1974, Bob Moulton hired him as a custodial assistant at Bingham High School in Copperton, Utah. It wasn’t a full-time job, but Dad was so grateful for it in the months before he found another job in his field of civil engineering the next fall.

    BHS Copperton by Scott Crump
    The Old Bingham High School was torn down in 2002. Photo by Scott Crump.

    The town of Lark no longer exists, but its memories are kept alive thanks to a Facebook group dedicated to former residents. I’ll have to share Lark’s Story in the coming months. I came across Robert Moulton’s Memoirs shared with the group a couple of months ago. I was surprised at how so many of his stories paralleled stories from my father’s childhood in Olean, New York, especially young Robert’s quest for a Christmas tree.

    Just like my father’s stories, Robert’s stories made me laugh. Prepare to be amused.

    REAL CHRISTMAS TREES

    From LARK TAILS, a selection of memoirs by Robert D. Moulton, PhD:

    Lark was surrounded by what we called “junipers” and they were our Christmas trees, and Dick and I hated them. We hated them because they reminded us that other Lark families had more money than the Moultons and could afford to buy “real” Christmas trees. We thought that only pine trees made good Christmas trees. Pine trees have pointed tops that you can attach stars and angels to, and pine trees have needles that you can hang tinsel and ornaments on. But junipers are more bush than tree, have rounded tops, and they lack needles. No matter that the juniper trees came already decorated with blue-green berries and filled our house with their lovely, distinct perfume; and no matter that cutting a juniper Christmas tree meant an outing with our dad and Jill. We were ashamed of juniper Christmas trees and always insisted that Mom and Dad place them away from our windows so they couldn’t be seen from the street.

    I don’t know how Dick and I knew that “real” Christmas trees grew high on the mountain above Lark. Perhaps Dad had mentioned pine trees in his stories of hunting mountain lions and mule deer up there. In any event, we knew that pine trees grew on top of the mountain, and Dick and I decided to go on a Christmas tree expedition. There was considerable secrecy about the trip. The mountain was private property, full of dangerous, abandoned mines and other scary stuff, and Mom and Dad had forbidden us to go up there. But we were convinced that our parents, too, were ashamed of junipers and would understand once we presented them with a real Christmas tree.

    Dick and I probably thought it fitting that we planned the hike to the mountain top on a Saturday when Mom and Dad were in the Salt Lake valley shopping for Christmas presents. I should add that Mom and Dad had earned the family’s Christmas money by thinning and then picking apples in Alpine at a big commercial orchard on Saturdays throughout the summer and fall. They did this along with Mom’s brother, Virgil, and his wife, Rita, who also lived in Lark. Uncle Virg was tall and could work even the tallest apple trees without a ladder, so they said.

    When the day of our big adventure finally came we waited impatiently for our parents to leave so we could set off. We had hoped that they would leave early so that we would have enough time to climb the mountain, find a tree, and return before they got home that night. However, Mom never could leave the house without first making all the beds, washing the dishes and cleaning everything that could be cleaned. It was noon by the time they left and we feared that there wouldn’t be enough daylight left for our trek. Nevertheless, we took Dad’s axe, and with Jill, our lop-eared boxer, headed west, toward the top of the mountain.

    We were hiking through snow that got deeper and deeper as we climbed. We thought we had dressed warmly, but as it got later in the day the sun went behind the peaks above us and it got colder and colder. I don’t know how poor Jill managed with her short-haired coat, and Dick and I were about as cold as cold can be. I kept thinking about one of Dad’s favorite stories. He told us that when he was a boy, his generation of Moultons spent a few winters in Montana. He claimed that winters were so cold there that words froze and conversations were not heard until spring thaw.

    At last Dick and I found a stand of pine trees near the top of the mountain. They were beautiful and came complete with needles and pointed tops. In our minds, we could see them decorated smartly and sitting proudly in front of our living room window. We were so excited that we forgot for a moment how cold we were. We ran from tree to tree looking for the perfect one. When we finally found it, I claimed the honor of cutting it down. With what I imagined was a mighty swing of the axe, I hit the base of the would-be Christmas tree. It shook a little, and all its needles fell to the snow.

    Dick blamed my clumsy axemanship and claimed his turn. Same result: one swing of the axe and we were looking at a naked pine tree. We kept trying, but after we had denuded a dozen or so trees we figured out that they were so frozen that it was impossible to cut them down without shaking their needles off.

    And so we gave up and started our hike back down the mountain toward Lark, cold and hungry. All too soon we were plowing through deep snow in the dark, tripping, falling, rolling, and shivering. We had no lights with us. Dad had a flashlight or two, but we hadn’t been brave enough to “borrow” one. And besides, we hadn’t planned on hiking back in the dark.

    As we got closer to Lark, we saw what must have been thirty or forty lights moving below us and heard people calling our names.

    As the first group of would-be rescuers reached us, they called out, “Seen the Moulton boys? Their parents think they have fallen into a mine shaft or been buried in an avalanche.”

    “No, we’re lookin’ for ‘em, too.” we answered.

    Eventually we got home, cold, hungry, without a Christmas tree, and in big trouble. Later, after we were forgiven a little, Dick and I went with Dad and Jill to cut a juniper Christmas tree.

    My four children will tell you that when they were growing up in Texas I was never very enthusiastic about buying Christmas trees. You just can’t buy a good juniper in Texas.

    The Moulton Home
    From my childhood imagination, I remember the Moulton’s house as the most beautiful in town. Mom tells me it was because of Edna Moulton’s immaculate landscaping.

    I think the only “live” Christmas Tree I’d allow in my home these days would have to be a juniper. Just for old time’s sake.

  • (n)O Christmas Tree

    (n)O Christmas Tree

    Part Two of Four–Mom’s story

    Continued from 12/17/18 Part One

    That lean Christmas in a 19-foot travel trailer was a tough one for me, but it was great preparation for the next Christmas. The trailer was a temporary fix for my family, and even though we called it “home” for less than a year, it seemed like an eternity at the time. In the first few weeks, Mom and Dad slept on the sofa which folded out to a full-sized bed, while two of my brothers slept in a drop-down bunk that acted as a storage cupboard in its “up” position. Both of those beds were not quite full-sized, but they weren’t exactly cramped.

    My sister and I, however, shared the bed over the drop-down dining table. It was not quite as wide as a twin bed, and yes, it was cramped; there was literally no room to roll over. But my four year-old brother had just a thin strip of foam laid down on the floor. He had it the worst. If anyone wanted to get to the bathroom near the entrance of the trailer at night, they would have to step over him (assuming they hadn’t already stepped on him).

    As it was, Mom and Dad only stayed in the trailer long enough for Dad to put a lid of sorts over the cement foundation. It was to be quite a large home in its finished state, so the basement level functioned as a storage unit/work shed, with a corner sectioned off as a master bedroom of sorts. If I remember correctly, Mom kept the bed covered with plastic sheeting in an attempt to keep the sawdust out of the sheets. During that summer, Dad worked hard to get the upper floors framed in. He ran a power line from a transformer to the trailer and another to the house in order to keep an  upright freezer and an old refrigerator running. Extension cords fed a work light and power tools, and we made a weekly drive to the nearest laundromat fifteen miles away . A laundry room and a bathroom with a full-sized tub were the first rooms finished.

    By fall, the roof trusses were up and covered over with plywood and tar paper, and insulation in the form of shredded, recycled, fire retarded  newspaper particles filled the walls. It was the best insulation to be found at the time, the wall studs were covered and it was blown into the walls through a layer of plastic. It was one of the very few projects on the house that Dad contracted out, and my brothers helped with most projects calling for more than two hands. This tough task was compounded by the fact that Dad was working a full-time job and functioning as a bishop in our local ward of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. If Dad wasn’t at his paid job, he could be found attending meetings with church leaders or counseling church members. In his spare time, Friday evenings and Saturdays, he worked on the house. I’m amazed he got so much done during that first year.

    As it was, there were still no windows installed and the roof shingles had not yet been laid on the roof as October neared its close. That fall, Dad spent nearly every waking moment either harnessed to the steeply pitched A-frame roof or installing windows.  There would be no sitting down for a family meal during those weeks. Mom would often bring Dad’s dinner to him while he worked. He even tried working on the house one Sunday, but  ran a two-by-four through a newly installed window as he was cleaning up the next Sunday. Dad never, ever, worked on a Sunday again after that, but he still managed to get the house fully closed in before the winter snow began to collect. Thankfully, Christmas of 1974 would be white.

    America’s Problems get Personal

    1974 was a tough year world-wide, but it was even tougher in the United States than in most nations. In response to its support of Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the United States was banned from oil trades with the world’s oil producing nations (OPEC). By the year’s end, As the country using the largest percentage of the world’s fossil fuel resources, the oil embargo hit hard, causing fuel prices to quadruple, followed by increased prices on imported products, including anything that could not be produced locally. Adding insult to injury, President of the U.S. Richard Nixon, resigned his position  amidst allegations of White House involvement in a break-in of Democratic headquarters during an election year.  To this day, Nixon is the only U.S. president to voluntarily resign, adding political upheaval to the nation’s deepening economic woes.

    To avoid fuel shortages, people were asked to drive only when necessary. We lived a mile uphill from the nearest neighbor, five miles from church, ten miles to school and the nearest grocery store, and more than fifteen miles to work. Walking was out of the question.

    fuel dispenser
    Photo by fotografierende on Pexels.com

    Families across the United States were tightening their belts, including ours. Because of the increased strain on the family’s resources, Mom got a job working at a workshop/school for disabled adults. That really helped, and thanks to her, the building project was moving along as quickly as could be expected under the existing conditions. What wasn’t expected was the loss of Dad’s job in December.  If last year’s Christmas was lean, this year’s would be worse.

    Well, at least we had snow.

    I’m Dreaming of Any Kind of Christmas

    I had finally reconciled with Santa’s fall from Christmas grace, and I figured that nothing could be worse than the binder paper Christmas. The trailer had been moved closer to the basement entrance, and Dad’s tools and building materials went to to the second floor. With windows and insulation added, Mom and Dad’s “bedroom” was moved to it’s permanent home on the third floor despite the lack of carpeting, painted walls, or electrical amenities. Now there was plenty of room on the basement level for a dining/living area. We no longer had to use the trailer for bathroom purposes, and we could actually sit on a full-sized sofa and watch whatever channel might be getting reception on our thirteen-inch black and white television set.

    It also meant room for a real Christmas tree. I didn’t care about presents, but I couldn’t face another year without a real tree. Apparently Mom felt the same way.

    Mom’s Side of the Story

    The only good news coming from Dad’s Christmastime lay-off was that he now had much more time to work on the house. Despite her meager salary, or perhaps to spite it, Mom felt the burden of Christmas falling directly upon her shoulders. Dad took a practical approach–stuff like this happens, and the world would not end without a tree or presents. His focus was on keeping a roof, unfinished as it was, over our heads, and getting a new job as quickly as possible so he could get everything under that roof finished.

    Mom wasn’t quite so pragmatic about it.

    Mom is the most creative person I know. If it’s too expensive or cheaply made, she figures out a way to create a better home-made version. The first thing Mom did was cut down a four-foot juniper tree from our six-acre property. It wasn’t the traditional fir tree we were used to, it had a fuzzy trunk, and it didn’t have that familiar Christmas tree smell. In addition, it was short. But it was still an evergreen,  very nicely shaped, not school bus yellow, and it fit perfectly beneath the open staircase. I was thrilled. We had a Christmas tree.

    Mom must have garnered a lot of trust at her job, because her boss gave her unlimited use of the scrap bins and let her use the shop’s power tools after hours. Mom made wooden ornaments in various shapes and drilled holes for red yarn. They looked so cute on the tree. She also gathered up some nice round branches from other trees on our property, and cut them into evenly shaped pieces. Using scraps of lumber from the building project and her workshop scraps, she built three sturdy lumber trucks–just as good or better than can be found in vintage toy shops today.  I am not at all sure what my brothers thought of them, but I thought they were amazing. I’m pretty sure Dad helped some with that project, but I was impressed to learn that my mom actually had woodworking skills.

    Woodwork wasn’t the only thing mom was good at. In her adolescence,  She learned to sew; and from a very young age, she sewed her own clothes. She made her own wedding dress, and when I got married the first time, she remade it for me. I was aware of a stigma that came with having homemade clothes versus store-bought clothes, but I never worried about it. If mom could find nice affordable fabric, she could make any clothing look better than its commercial counterpart. That year, Mom made fabric dolls for my older sister and I, and although I no longer played with dolls, I thought mine would make a nice decoration when I finally moved in to my new bedroom.

    There wasn’t much in the way of Christmas baking that year but there was one tradition Mom was determined that we would not go without–Stollen and hot cocoa. Stollen is a German sweet bread made with nuts, spices, and dried or candied fruit, coated with confectioner’s sugar icing. As the daughter of an authentic German baker, it just wouldn’t be Christmas without it. I don’t know how she managed to get all of the ingredients, and she does say that she knows the bread went without the usual, albeit expensive, pine-nuts, but I know I didn’t notice.

    Stollen

    Love–The Best Gift of All

    Along with wooden trucks and rag dolls, mom made a new pair of pajamas for each of us. I think, though, that most dazzling was the wide array of treats and trinkets to be found in our stockings. Mom said she scrounged around everywhere to find cool things to fill them up. My favorite gift that year came from a local automotive shop–a transistor radio that bore an uncanny resemblance to a car battery. It worked great, and even though I was no car enthusiast, I truly loved it.

    transistor radio car battery
    My favorite gift in 1974. Not as tacky as a leg lamp.

    When I asked Mom about that Christmas, she told me that year was such a hard one for her that she had forgotten much of it. She suffered so much angst that year, and I know we felt it, but I’m still so amazed at what she was able to pull off. It simply hadn’t occurred to me that it was the worst Christmas in her memory. Looking back at my own motherhood though, especially as a single mother, I now realize that tough times are difficult for kids, but they are always toughest on the parents because we worry that we cannot give our children so many of the things they need, and that at the very least, their innocence will be lost in the process.

    Until I started writing this story it hadn’t even occurred to me that my two younger brothers would have had to come to terms with the man in the red suit that year.  The youngest would have been just five or six years old at the time. If either of them  believed in Santa before that year, they certainly would not have afterwards. I didn’t bother to ask for anything, and if my younger brothers asked, they definitely didn’t ask for wooden logging trucks. For me, the magic I had lost in the abrupt revelation that there is no Santa two years earlier had returned. For my brothers, the magic was definitely changing.

    Lessons Learned

    Christmas can be magical for children, but it’s not about Santa Claus or about the gifts we get. It’s about love and giving. There is no greater love than that of a parent to a child, and there is no better gift than one that comes from the heart. Homemade gifts are thoughtful gifts, and everyone knows it’s the thought that counts. Mom never stopped thinking in December of 1974. That Christmas was filled with so much love that I didn’t care weather or not we had eggnog for the New Year. I wasn’t thinking of what we had to do without, but of our fortune in being able to have the things that we had.

    Dad found a new job by the next fall, and the next Christmas was celebrated in a nearly completed home. Dad received a huge Christmas bonus in thanks for helping his new boss maintain the trust of a very important client. It was big enough that we were able to help out two other families for Christmas. Gifts were more than plentiful, and we even had our very first full-sized color television set. But the most appreciated presents, once again, were the handmade ones from Mom.

    I still have two wooden ornaments from that year– a star and an A-frame house. The star remains in its unpainted form just as it was that Christmas, but the little wooden house, along with many of those ornaments from the Christmas of 1974, is tole-painted to resemble an Austrian style chalet (painting–another one of my mother’s many talents). Mom had managed to capture the image of our mountain home in that ornament, and in the other, the true spirit of Christmas. I normally include them in my annual decorations, but after our cross-country move, and last summer’s bout of bed bugs, the ornaments have accidentally been relocated to a storage unit, and I haven’t yet gone to retrieve them. I’ll add a photo of them as soon as I am able.

    It’s been more than a decade since I celebrated with a real Christmas tree, and these days I don’t even bother with a full-sized tree. Now I have a Christmas tree collection. I display miniature trees everywhere, and every year I add to it, knowing that no matter how lean the celebration, there will always be trees.

  • (n)O Christmas Tree

    (n)O Christmas Tree

    Part One of Four–My Story

    As a Christian, I have often lamented the commercialization and capitalization of Christmas. As a Jew, I have learned to see the season as a celebration of light and miracles in the midst of darkness and oppression. As a historian, I have embraced the combination of the pagan roots behind the celebration of continuing of life in the midst of the deep-winter and the anticipation of the lengthening of days bringing back light, warmth, and renewed life. Among many schools of thought and perspectives, I am finding my place among the deep-seated traditions embraced by my ancestors, both Jewish and Christian, along with the winter celebrations of pagans and skeptics.

    Which brings me to Christmas trees.

    While the history of the Christmas tree is vague and can’t necessarily be pinned down to one particular historical event or individual, the evergreen itself has held a more reliable place in the season’s celebrations. Most historians agree that the tree itself is a much more recent custom with strong ties to Christianity. So instead of deliberation the origins of the tree itself, I’m choosing to go with the legend which so strongly ties to my German-Lutheran roots: Martin Luther’s story.

    The story goes that Martin Luther encountered a snow-crusted evergreen while walking one moonlit winter night. The sight of the snow glimmering on the branches of the tree in the light of the moon dazzled Luther, and he was inspired to bring a similar tree indoors where he affixed candles to the boughs of the tree and lit them at night as a way to bring light and hope into the home during the Christmas season. There are several other legends, most occurring in centuries previous to Martin Luther, and I assume that today’s Christmas tree is probably the descendant of all, or at least most, of them.

    Whatever the reasons for putting a decorated evergreen into the home,  the Christmas tree has become a staple of the season. No matter the circumstances, it just doesn’t seem like Christmas without one.

    No Magic

    My early childhood Christmases were filled with happiness and wonder. But at least two in a row stood apart for me as a deep disappointment and loss of faith in the magic of childish imagination.

    The first  disappointments came just after my eighth and ninth birthdays beginning on the Christmas Eve when my sister offhandedly told me that there was really no Santa. I had begun the day with eager anticipation of the magical event to be coming late that night, but went to bed in deep sorrow knowing that my big sister was downstairs with my parents laying out gifts and filling stockings in the guise of a great man who really didn’t exist. Naturally following, but much easier to reconcile, were the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy. I was still mired in that disappointment when the next Christmas came and went, despite the bounty of gifts appearing beneath the tree and the wonderful treats in my stocking. Surely the next year would be better. After all, I was growing up, and beginning to understand that sooner or later childhood must end.

    No Tree

    Ready as I was to accept no Santa, my eleventh year was even tougher. In the spring of 1973, five kids and our parents moved into a nineteen-foot trailer deep in the Oquirrh mountains of Utah so my father could be closer to the construction site of our new home. Despite my ever widening Christmas comfort zone, that tiny camping trailer sitting beside a boxed-in cement foundation at least a mile from the nearest neighbor was not the place for a traditional Christmas. There was no room for a Christmas tree, let alone presents. To make matters worse, there was no snow that year– the only Christmas in my young memory I had ever experienced without snow.  No one dreams of a brown Christmas.

    It was worse for the whole family because the building project, so carefully planned out, was unexpectedly caught in the midst of a world-wide recession caused by an oil embargo from a land far, far away. Prices of lumber doubled nearly overnight, and though my father had already received a large delivery of lumber for the house, the remaining lumber and building materials had not yet been paid for. Suddenly the building project was no longer feasible within the funds set aside, and Dad would have to take out a loan for the rest. Exacerbating the problem were interest rates on construction loans. They had gone up even more steeply than the price of materials.

    On Christmas Eve, I prepared for bed in very cramped quarters with a heavy heart. Mom and Dad told us that things would be tight that year, and to keep our expectations low. I could see how Dad was stressing over finances, so asked for binder paper.

    I’m not kidding.

    The good news was, we would save money on a tree.

    A few days before Christmas, Mom brought a tiny “tree” into the trailer and set it atop our extremely limited counter space. I could not stretch my limited imagination to see the twelve-inch foam cone with butterscotch disks attached as any sort of tree, especially a Christmas tree. First of all, trees are green, not school bus yellow.  God bless the poor family friend who made it for us. I know butterscotch tastes better, but couldn’t they have attached peppermint candies? At least peppermint looks Christmassy.

    peppermint tree
    Like this, only with butterscotch disks. Seriously?

    All Over but the Shouting

    Okay, there was no shouting, but I probably shed a few tears in private.

    By the time Christmas Eve arrived, I was really regretting my request for paper. All of my siblings had at least asked for something that they wanted. As we prepared for bed, the roar of a motorcycle and a jingling of bells could be heard. Then a knock at the door.

    Was it actually possible that carolers had decided to come up and down the winding hills via motorcycle? Nope. But Santa did. Along with his girlfriend. We were presented with a sack full of treats and presents and then with a Ho Ho Ho, he hopped back on his ride and headed back down the hill. No sleigh, no reindeer, and no helmet. I wonder how he could see under all that fake hair.

    When we unwrapped gifts early the next morning, there was my binder paper, just as I’d asked, along with a handful of two-player games and some much needed clothes. I was disappointed that the only gift I’d really had to myself was that paper. I considered the games family gifts. After all, if I wanted to play them, I’d have to ask a family member to play along.

    It wasn’t terrible. I mean, Connect Four is kinda fun. I don’t even remember what the other games were, but I do remember that my favorite gift that year was some much needed clothes. The binder paper got played with more than the games, I’m afraid.

    I remember watching my brothers and sister playing with their requested toys, and having a great time. I put on my poker face and tried to be happy, but I know I spent a lot of that day drawing and writing on my paper. Believe it or not, I already had a passion for writing by then. Too bad I never caught the math bug.

    I digress. Math has nothing to do with this.

    We had our traditional family dinner, and I know the food was awesome, but I was glad when the day was over. I figured New Year’s Eve would be better.  At least we didn’t have to worry about where to put a tree or presents. It probably  even snowed at least a little in the week between Christmas and the New Year.

    Mom made her famous clam dip served with chips and crackers. There was eggnog in the two-and-a-half foot refrigerator and 7 Up cooling on the doorstep waiting for the midnight “toast.” I was so excited for the eggnog, but I’ve never been a late nighter, so I told my family to wake me up if I dozed off. I think I fell asleep around 10 PM. No one woke me up, and in the morning all of the eggnog was gone and the remaining 7 Up had lost its fizz.

    Curses.

    Maybe next year.

    The next December Dad lost his job.

    Maybe not.

    –To be continued tomorrow with Mom’s Story.

  • Yá’át’ééh, Brody, It is Good

    Yá’át’ééh, Brody, It is Good

    Well, I just repeated myself.

    Before I moved to Page Arizona, I always thought the traditional Diné (Navajo) greeting was pronounced Yah-ta-hey.

    Someone just smack me.

    I came by it honestly, I guess. I learned my lousy pronunciation from the Brady Bunch. Sorry, folks, it was the only point of reference I had at the time.

    I quickly learned, though, that pronunciation wasn’t the only thing I was struggling with. I had confusedly assumed, as I bet you do too, that Hello and Yá’át’ééh meant the same thing.

    Well, they don’t.

    First of all, hello is little more than a holler. You may have even guessed correctly that hello is actually a derivation of holler. But yá’át’ééh is a lot warmer and fuzzier than that. The greeting is an equalizer–a recognition that you approach your fellow human being with good intentions, and that you expect the same from them. The actual meaning of the term is it is good. As it was explained to me: it is good between us. So now that we have set the expectation, we can converse without animosity.

    I love it.

    Now back to pronunciation

    It’s a good thing I listened a few times and actually asked someone to help me pronounce the word before I tried it on my students from the rez. As it was, I absolutely butchered it, but I am getting better at it, even though I now live in Kentucky and have absolutely no one to try it on.

    As I was struggling to figure out how to help my grandchildren learn Dinè terms correctly, I ran across this awesome website called Navajo WOTD (word of the day). I’ll be using it a lot as I explain what I have learned about the Dinè language and culture.

    It turns out that yá’át’ééh is two short syllables and one long one. Emphasis on the first and last. Take a listen:

    Now say it again. Keep trying ’til you get it right. I think it’s gonna take me forever, but I’ll bet those smart grandkids of mine will get it right.

    For the sake of those awesome grandkids, I’m gonna keep at it, so that as I learn, they can learn about their Diné grandmother and their family from the rez. Maybe one day they will be able to go back and actually put their native language to the test.

    What does Brody have to do with this?

    I knew you were gonna ask that.

    I have decided that in honor of my grandchildren’s Native American heritage, I would post a story or fact to help them learn about, and to appreciate, their native ancestors on or near their birthdays, and it just so happens that today is Brody’s fourth birthday.

    brody and rozy
    One thing that everyone said when they saw that big boy with piles of dark hair is that he looks like a little Navajo boy.  I said it too.  Because he is.

    So Happy Birthday, Brody! I love you lots, and I can’t wait to practice this with you!

  • Ready to Launch–No Excuses

    Ready to Launch–No Excuses

    December Newsletter

    Like my previous newsletter, this is more for my benefit than anyone else (I’m still practicing). 

    Before I get this party started, I need to point out that today is the second day of Hanukkah! For Jews, this party is already well underway. Happy Hanukkah everyone!

    menorrah candles-897776_640

    November did not go as I planned. I started off gung-ho, but by the end of the month I was off track, and missed my most important post: Chapter One of The Second Wife’s Story. All I can say is hooray for a new month!

    Maybe the holiday season was not the best time to be reviving and preparing for a relaunch of Stories From the Past. Maybe I should have started off slower. I could probably blame my missing first chapter of The Second Wife’s Story on the flu that I caught immediately after Thanksgiving. Or just maybe I could say, Well, I’m not quite there yet; take a closer look at where I went wrong, and start fresh.

    I think I’ll do that.

    No Excuses

    I was inspired by a simple post from one of my favorite bloggers. Christian Mihai, titled The Five Habits of Extremely Prolific Bloggers.  The first habit on his list? Yeah. “They never make excuses.”

    So without any more excuses, and remembering that every day is a clean slate, I can take a look at the past, see where I went wrong, and try again.

    Habit Building

    As I think about the month of December, and my plans for the New Year, I am reminded that I am building new habits for the rest of my life. Habits don’t change overnight, and I have to be patient and not take on more than I can handle. I am building a blog, writing a book, and building a habit, so I need to take on one task a time.

    In his article, How Long Does it Actually Take to Form a New Habit? (Backed by Science), James Clear debunks the 21-day habit myth and explains, “if you want to set your expectations appropriately, the truth is that it will probably take you anywhere from two months to eight months to build a new behavior into your life — not 21 days.” This is encouraging, and a bit daunting, as I was hoping to have my new daily routine set before the New Year begins.

    There I go again, expecting perfection overnight. Well, that ain’t happening.

    But eight months? I’m not expecting it to take that long, but at least I can be assured that with dedication and determination, my goals of regular, on-time posting and having Mary Davis Skeen’s biography, The Second Wife’s Story, ready for publishing will be accomplished  within the new year. I CAN do this.

    Re-launch

    I have to remember that December is the busiest month of the year in the United States, and that my readers are probably just as overwhelmed with holiday preparations as I am. I still have a lot of planning and organizing to do in order to prepare for a professional New Year launch.

    I intend to follow my own inner clock which tells me that December is a time for reflection while January is a time for renewal. This month I’ll be looking over what I have completed so far, and tweaking and preparing for a clean new start in January.

    My posts will be simple, as my focus will be on completing two chapters of The Second Wife’s Story (appearing after Christmas), and cleaning up and preparing Stories From the Past for its new start in January.

    What to Expect this December

    photo of a fire lamp
    Photo by Vlad Bagacian on Pexels.com
    • Navajo Greetings and exploration of the name (Navajo vs. Diné)
    • Hanukkah for non-Jews (with a nod to rembembering the Shoah)
    • A Slovenian Christmas Eve (Recipe and Tradition)
    • (n)O Christimas Tree (Stories from Olean, New York, and Lark, Utah)
    • Mary Eynon ancestor profile page (not a post)
    • The Second Wife’s Story, Chapter 1, Wales
    • The Second Wife’s Story, Chapter 2, Aboard the Clara Wheeler: from Liverpool to New Orleans

    To accommodate for the holidays, posts will not necessarily appear on their regularly scheduled days and times.

    Fundraising for Austria:

    dachau-arbeit-59.4
    New generations are already forgetting, and denying,

    I’ve been invited to Austria for the inauguration of a museum housing exhibitions on the Jews in Bucklige Welt and Wechselland regions titled “With – Without Jews.” The museum will tell the stories of the many families who disappeared during the Holocaust–including mine.

    I will be able to gather so many more stories of people who can’t tell them.

    Fundraising for this trip begins in January.

    Tentative stories for the upcoming months:

  • On Thanks

    On Thanks

    I have no story to tell today.

    Looking into my own past, Thanksgiving has always been a warm fuzzy day ushering in the holiday season in the United States. But stories? I have plenty to say about Christmas. I can come up with stories about the New Year, Valentine’s Day, and even Halloween, but Thanksgiving just tends to get plopped right there as a place to stop and breathe between ghosts and goblins and shop, shop, shopping. 

    Ugh.

    But I digress.

    I LOVE Thanksgiving. I especially love the history behind Thanksgiving in the United States.  

    I’m not talking about Mayflower Pilgrims and Native Americans; I’m talking about finding opportunities to be thankful even when there doesn’t seem to be much to be thankful for.  

    Take that so-called first Thanksgiving for instance. When the Mayflower arrived in Massachusetts Bay, it carried 102 people. Twelve months later, their numbers had been cut in half. Not a good beginning for people seeking freedom from oppression. But despite loss of friends and family, those 52 pilgrims did have much to be grateful for. 

    They survived a long hard winter full of hunger, disease, and death. They were lucky to have been aided by Tisquantum (Squanto) who helped them learn to survive in their new surroundings and to forge an alliance, albeit uneasy, with the neighboring Wampaoag tribe. Squanto was one of the last remaining members of the Patuxet tribe which had been decimated by European diseases, and the Wampanoag hadn’t fared much better for the same reason. For both groups, the fall of 1621 brought in a decent harvest with the hope for better times to come.

    Thanksgiving in the United States is often thought of to as a uniquely American tradition stemming from that harvest celebration in 1621. But harvest celebrations were really nothing new.  As long as there have been growing seasons and winters, people around the world have been celebrating harvests, and the pilgrims were actually participating in a centuries-old tradition originating with the Celtic Pagans called Lammas. It’s also probable that Squanto and the Wampanoag were sharing their own customary harvest celebrations with the newcomers.

    Despite what we were taught in grammar schools, the Massachussetts Bay celebration was probably not as peaceful as we are prone to believe. Several accounts tell of gunfire and threats resulting in bloody skirmishes within a very short time following their three day meal. Within a generation there was nothing left of the Patuxet people, and the Wampanoag people had been pushed nearly to extinction between warfare with European settlers and neighboring tribes. The peace and harmony of the fall of 1621 was short-lived.

    The celebration of harvest may have waxed and waned depending on the size and qualtity of the harvest, but the idea of finding reasons to be grateful caught hold in Colonial America. At the end of the Revolutionary war. George Washington proclaimed the first official day of Thanksgiving, but that was a one-time thing. But by 1863, several states in the U.S. had officially adopted annual Thanksgiving holidays.

    Thinking back to those early colonial days when two clashing cultures came together to celebrate survival in the hardest of times, I’d like to say that “first Thanksgiving” was the inspiration for Abraham Lincoln’s Thanksgiving declaration in the midst of Civil War. 

    Just that word, thanksgiving, has been inspirational to me in years when I felt like I didn’t have much to celebrate. Instead of lamenting the commercialization of Christmas and dreading the upcoming holiday season, or even decrying the inequity of fate and ignorance leading to the maltreatment of remaining Native American people, I have learned to embrace the opportunity to share a meal with friends and family, and find opportunities to give thanks.

    Because there is always something to be thankful for. 

     

  • When a Navajo Introduces Herself, She Gives her Genealogy

    When a Navajo Introduces Herself, She Gives her Genealogy

    Happy American Indian Heritage Month! 

    Talk about Native Americans and the first two things to come to my mind are my grandchildren. My oldest granddaughter and her younger brother are both Navajo by birthright, but I know more about what it means to be a Navajo than they do, which saddens me.

    I taught high school English to students from the Navajo Reservation for just one year, but that is not where my son met his wife. While I was teaching, and learning from, the Navajo people in Arizona (Most prefer to be called the Diné), my son was living 350 miles away in Utah where he met and married a graduate of Brigham Young University who identifies as half-Navajo. This makes my grand children one-quarter Navajo.

    My daughter in law does not talk much about her family history. In fact, I can easily tell what I do know about her genealogy in just one paragraph. She is half Italian (her father is an immigrant), and half Navajo. Her mother was born on the Navajo Reservation (the largest reservation in the U.S.), but was raised in Utah with a foster family. Her mother passed on a few years ago, and though she remembered her family from the reservation, she was never really interested in returning or integrating with the culture. And that’s it.

    My daughter in law is quite reserved, and doesn’t talk much about her family’s background, but I wish she would. Over time, I believe I’ll be able to get more out of her and I will share as I learn more. In the meantime, I am determined not to let my grandchildren lose their indigenous identity. I hope that one day they will come to understand all sides of their geneology, and maybe even come to embrace the  Diné culture.

    Part of the Diné culture includes knowing and embracing your clans (best described as branches of the family tree). I had originally planned to put the traditional introduction into my own words, but it is a complicated system (maybe not so complicated to those who were born into it), and I don’t feel that I can give it justice. Thankfully there are many indigenous Americans still interested in reviving and embracing their native cultures, so it wasn’t hard to find a good video to explain it. 

    I do feel that it is important to explain one thing that doesn’t usually get explained by the Diné, probably because it is so ingrained in traditional Diné living that that they just don’t think about it. Navajo culture and society are organized matrilineally. Similar to the western patrilineal system of family organization, emphasis is put on the clan of the mother, and mothers are the heads of households and central focus of each clan. 

    Keep the matrilineal system in mind as you watch the video. I liked this one so well that I subscribed to the Vlog. Here is what the author, daybreakwarrior, says about the clan system and proper Diné  introductions:

    This video goes into the “basics” of Navajo clans, describing the importance of Navajo clans in the present day: it’s implications on identifying yourself & establishing Clan-relatives, how it identifies your ancestry, how it can “hint” at where you’re originally from, how it determines who you can & can’t marry, & how having Clan-relatives can help you in times of need. The main role that Navajo Clans have in this day and age is in introducing one’s self in public, and showing respect.

    I recommend watching the video in it’s entirety.     

    I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. I’ll be back at least four times a year with more cool stuff about the Navajo Nation and the heritage of my grandchildren (November, December, March, and July– American Indian Heritage Month and birth months of my grandchildren and their mother).  

    Yá’át’ééh (it is good)!

  • Keeping Up With the (Benjamin) Joneses

    Keeping Up With the (Benjamin) Joneses

    How to track family documents when different people share the same name.

    Jones surname distribution map Wales
    Each occurrence of the Jones surname is indicated by a red dot. Image by Barry Griffin at http://www.celticfamilymaps.com (2016)

    I’ve been helping a friend work on her own family’s history. My friend’s  maiden name is Jones, which is problematic simply because it is the most common surname in Wales. If you live in Wales, or even Southern England, you know exactly what I mean. The name is everywhere. My friend’s problem is tripled by the fact that each successive head of household bears the same first and last name (no middle) for four generations.

    Welsh surnames are the results of an anglicized family tracking system called patronymics, meaning that all children, male and female took their father’s given name as their own surname for the duration of their lives.  The surnames of following generations took the form of the family patriarch’s first name. For example, if your father’s name was David, you would take the surname ap Dafydd, Davis, Davies, or some other form of David. If David’s father was Daniel, he would be known by David ap Daniel, or David Daniels.

    The patronymic system is not limited to Great Britain, though. Take a look at this example from my Dutch ancestry:

    1350 changing Dutch surnames
    I haven’t figured out where the van Beveren name came from, but each surname changes by generation, based on the name of the father. It would be safe to assume that the senior Willem’s father was named Daniel.

    It’s pretty easy to organize electronic files by surname. When I have enough documents under the same surname, I simply create a file with that surname, and organize each file by year of occurrence, for example a birth certificate for John Davies, born in 1820, would be included in the Davies, or Davis, file. The record would be labeled 1820 DAVIES John, but a census record for John Davies would be labeled. That way, all records for John Davies would essentially end up together in the Davies file between the years of his birth and death. Any immediately family members would have records before or after him according to their year of occurrence.

    organization by date and surname
    KNIGHT file. Documents are organized by year, month, day, SURNAME, given name, and middle name or initial. Other relevant information follows date and name.

    My friend is older, though, and prefers to keep each family’s file in a binder, which works too. I use both systems when I am dealing with primary sources (such as photographs and original documents like birth, marriage, and death certificates). It’s always good to have digital back-up. Her problem, she explained, was that she could not keep track of four individuals in her family tree named Benjamin Jones: Her great-great grandfather, her great grandfather, her grandfather, and her uncle. Using my system, I explained how to use birth years of each individual to organize them and to put documents for the most recent Benjamin Jones first.  Instead of including creating a fourth file for her uncle, his documents were included with the rest of his siblings in her grandfather’s family group, so she only needed three new tabs.

    20181113_164408.jpg
    documents ordered by birth year and given name, then surname. If each ancestor had the same given and surnames, I would have easily been able to distinguish between ancestors by looking at the birth year.

    Tabbed inserts don’t work in binders where documents are kept in protective sleeves; they are too narrow to easily distinguish between family sections. I fold a 2×2 post-it note in half and tape it to both sides of a protective sleeve instead of tabbed pages for file sections. My friend chose to purchase adhesive tabs made expressly for that purpose. Either way, an attached tab works best anytime you are working with protective sleeves. All you need to write on each tab is the birth year and first name of the head of household and work backwards chronologically. It didn’t take long, and now my friend can see at a glance which Benjamin Jones is which.

  • The Story of a House as told in Facebook comments

    The Story of a House as told in Facebook comments

    If a picture paints a thousand words, this one certainly did.  More than that, it painted memories.I had no idea of the flood I’d break loose when I posted this photograph to a group in Facebook four years ago.  It’s just an old house that my family lived in for less than two years. My memories of it at the time were minimal. I turned eight a few days after we moved in, and we moved out when I was still nine.

    But this post isn’t about me. It’s about the people from an old mining town overwhelmed by the encroaching ore dumps of the Bingham Canyon Mine, more commonly known as Kennecott Copper Mine.  The town was Lark; named after one of the prospectors who laid claim to the land in 1863. Originally owned by the two miners who started two different claims, Dalton and Clark, the mine was merged and later bought out by the United States Smelting and Refining Company. By 1923 the company owned the whole town.

    Lark expanded and hit its heyday in the decade following World War II. It boomed as the babies boomed. I can imagine spanking white houses, freshly paved streets, and a steady stream of traffic down the main road to the mercantile and post office. But that Lark only exists in my imagination and the memories of the remaining people who bonce built their lives there.

    The mine had closed by the time my family rented the big house in the picture. Many of the old miners had already moved out when we moved in. By the time we left, the old mercantile with the only gas pump in town had closed and the town had come under control of the Kennecott Copper Corporation. In 1977, less than three years after we moved out, the people of the town were told to leave.

    The town of Lark  was set at the foot of the same mountain which housed the old Bingham Canyon Mine. It was a 45 minute drive around the edge of the mountain from Lark to Bingham Canyon. By 1972, the year we moved in, the mine had gained the dubious distinction of being the largest open pit mine in the world, and the town no longer existed at the foot of a mountain but the foot of an ore dump. If my memories serve me correctly, it was the encroaching ore dump from the Bingham Canyon Mine that forced Kennecott to close the town. The dump had nowhere to go except to the edge of the mountain it existed in, and Lark was right in its path.

    Lark in Green Bay Press Gazette
    Article from Green Bay Press Gazzette, Green Bay, Wisconsin, 29 Dec 1978, Main Edition, Page 22. Found on Newspapers.com

    So three years after my family moved out of the old Lark house, Kennecott announced the eviction of the remaining residents.  It took a couple of years to get everyone out and resettled, but when the last resident in city limits left, every building within city limits was razed to the ground.  By 1979, the only buildings left standing were a couple of houses on the way into town and the old Drift Inn (the local bar). Lark had become a ghost town.

    Fast forward a few decades. Being the nostalgia nut that I am, I eagerly joined Lark, Utah’s Facebook Group and started conversing with some of my old classmates. I don’t remember if I posted much, and I visited the group only occasionally, but when I posted that photograph, something remarkable happened. People started commenting, not on the picture, but on their memories of Lark in relationship to the picture. It was really cool to learn so much about a town I didn’t think I had remembered much of.

    I honestly don’t remember what my expectations were, but here is my original post accompanying the photograph:

    This is the house I lived in while my family lived in Lark. Floyd Rasmussen’s family lived there for several years before we moved in. We lived here for two years before moved on to our property in the Oquirrh Mountains. I think we were the last family to live there.

    Within the first few hours a flurry of comments flowed in, and the vibrancy of the old town of Lark immediately showed its face.

    People were remembering:

    Lark house1
    Yes, I was on that zoo trip. I remember girl scouts with much fondness and most of the names as well.

    Remembering 2renewing connections:
    reconnectingand telling stories:

    telling stories
    Mr. Moulton’s first name was Bob. There might be a few other slight inaccuracies, but that’s how we remembered it.

    So many comments and conversations that had absolutely nothing to do with me appeared in my news feed, and this went on for more than a year. I went on with life and ignored the comments for a while. Things were quiet for at least a couple of years and I  essentially forgot about it until a couple of weeks ago when someone randomly picked up the conversation just as if it had never ended. This is similar to all other posts. Just one photo, question or statement leads to all sorts of conversations in the comments.

    where we left off

    I’m really not the greatest fan of Facebook but there are a few things I have noticed. If you’re a history buff or a displaced member of a community or family, Facebook is a great place to reconnect and gather stories that otherwise might not have been told. I’ve used it extensively for Stories From the Past, and thanks to Steven Richardson, administrator of the Lark, Utah group page, I’ll be using it a lot more.

    You can look forward to more stories from Lark, Utah’s past in the upcoming year.

    House photograph from BYU Digital Collections. Image #75. https://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/digital/collection/SCMisc/id/29062

     

  • November Newsletter

    November Newsletter

    This month at Stories From the Past: PPD, NaBloPoMo, and NPO

    (more…)