Lake Wobegon Days (37 page)

In some homes, decorations don’t appear until Christmas Eve afternoon, except for the Advent wreath on the supper table, its candles lit every night during supper. Catholics believe in abstaining before a feast—it sharpens the appetite—so Father Emil gives up his 9
P.M.
finger of brandy for weeks so that his Christmas Eve brandy will taste more wonderful, even when Clarence brought him a bottle of Napoleon brandy far more wonderful than the Dominican DeLuxe Father buys for himself. “None for me,” he said. “Oh, come on,” Clarence said, “you only live once.” Clarence is Lutheran but he sometimes drops in at the rectory for a second opinion. It is Father’s opinion, however, that a person does not only live once, so he put the Napoleon on his bookshelf behind
War and Peace
where he would remember it. Even on Christmas Eve, one finger is the correct portion, by him, and it’s a miserable mistake to think that two would be twice as good, and three even better, or putting both hands around the bottle and climbing into it. That’s no Christmas. The true Christmas bathes every little thing in light and makes one cookie a token, one candle, one simple pageant more wonderful than anything seen on stage or screen.

The Kruegers ask him over to watch the Perry Como Christmas
special and out of respect for their tremendous contributions over the years, he goes, and sits in glum silence watching tanned, relaxed people sing “O Little Town of Bethlehem” on a small-town street like none he’s ever seen. A man appears on the screen to talk about Triumph television sets as the perfect Christmas gift, as behind him a viewing couple turn and beam at each other as if TV had saved their marriage. The Kruegers enjoy martinis, a vicious drink that makes them sad and exhausted, and the Mister gets up during commercials to adjust the picture, making it more lurid—greenish faces like corpses of the drowned, then orange, the victims of fire—and then the Krueger boy says, “Oh,
Dad
,” and fixes it to normal, but even that looks lurid, like a cheap postcard. They sit, enraptured by it, but what dull rapture: not fifteen words spoken between them in the whole hour until, in the middle of “Chestnuts,” the phone rings—it’s Milly’s sister in Dallas—and though it’s only a commercial, Milly doesn’t take her eyes off the screen, doesn’t make a complete sentence, just says “uh-huh” and “oh” and “all right, I guess” as if the lady demonstrating the dish soap is her sister and her sister is a telephone salesman. A dismal scene compared to church, people leaning forward to catch the words coming from their children’s mouths, their own flesh and blood, once babes in arms, now speaking the Gospel. What would the Kruegers do if during Perry’s solo the doorbell rang and they heard children singing a carol on the porch?—would they curse them?

The German club from high school goes caroling, most of them Catholic kids but it’s Luther they sing:
Vom Himmel hoch da komm ich her, Ich bring euch gute neue mar.
Luther League goes out, Catholic youth, Lutheran choir, Miss Falconer’s high school choir, the Thanatopsians troop around and warble in their courageous ruined voices, Spanish Club, G.A.A., 4-H, even Boy Scouts sidle up to a few doors and whisper a carol or two.
O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree/How brightly shine thy candles.
The Scouts carry candles, which drip onto their jackets. Jimmy Buehler, Second Class, whose mother confiscated his phonograph because AC/DC’s song “Highway to Hell” made her nervous, is their best singer; his sweet tenor leads the others.
And from each bough, a tiny light/Adds to the splendor of the sight.

The carols that Miss Falconer’s choir sings along Elm Street are a relief from the
Hodie
they practiced so hard for the Christmas
assembly. Day after day, they sat and looked at the floor, which reeked of disinfectant, and breathed quietly through their mouths as she stood over them, still as a statue, and said, “Well, maybe we should cancel the whole concert. I’m not getting one bit of cooperation from you.” She sighs at the shame of it and folds her arms. In a school this small, you don’t get to specialize: one day Coach Magendanz is trying to bring out the animal in you, and then you are Ernest in
The Importance of Being
, and then you are defending the negative in the question of capital punishment, and the next day you’re attempting sixteenth-century polyphony. “Tenors, open your mouth, you can’t sing with your mouths shut. Basses, read the notes. They’re right in front of you.”

So great is the town’s demand for Christmas music, some of them are going straight from this practice to Mrs. Hoglund’s at the Lutheran church or to Our Lady choir practice and a different
Hodie
under Sister Edicta, a rehearsal in parkas in the cold choir loft, Father Emil having blanched at the latest fuel bill and turned the thermostat down to fifty-five. A cold Advent for Catholics, thanks to Emile Bebeau, the itinerant architect who designed this pile in 1878, no doubt intending the soaring vaulted ceiling to draw the hearts of the faithful upward; it also draws heat upward, and the parish is in hock to a Lutheran fuel-oil supplier. Father is dreaming of a letter from Publishers’ Sweepstakes: “Dear Mr. Emil: It’s our great pleasure to inform you—” or an emergency check from Bishop Kluecker, though Our Lady is not a diocesan parish but a mission of the Benedictines and Father reports to an abbot in Pennsylvania who observes the rule of silence, at least in financial matters.

The Sons of Knute don’t carol in person, God having given them voices less suitable for carols than for wallies and elmers, but they do sponsor a choir of fourth-graders who learn two Norwegian carols well enough to sing them in dim light and make the rounds in the snow after supper, alternating carols house to house. One is usually enough to make any Knute wipe his eyes and blow his nose—
Jeg er så glad hver julekveld, Da synger vi hans pris; Da åpner han for alle små, Sitt søte paradis.
(“I am so glad on Christmas Eve, His praises then I sing; He opens then for every child The palace of the King”)—and two might finish him off for good. Even Hjalmar, who sat like a fencepost through
little Tommy’s rare blood disease on “The Parkers” while Virginia put her head down and bawled, even Hjalmar hears
Jeg er så glad hver julekveld;
his pale eyes glisten, and he turns away, hearing his mother’s voice and smelling her
julekake
, the Christmas pudding, Mother sitting in a chair and working on her
broderi
, a pillowcase with two
engler
hovering over the
krybbe
where Jesus lies, the bright
stjerne
in the sky.
“Glade Jul!”
the fourth-graders cry, and back come Hjalmar’s own boyhood chums in fragrant memory to greet him. “Hjally! Hjally!” they call, standing in the frame of bright windowlight on the brilliant snow of 1934.

Custom dictates that carolers be asked in and offered a cookie, a piece of cake, something to nibble, and so must every person who comes to your door, otherwise the spirit of Christmas will leave your house, and even if you be rich as Midas, your holiday will be sad and mean. That is half of the custom; the other half is that you must yourself go visiting. Everyone must get at least one unexpected visitor, otherwise they’ll have no chance to invite one in and Christmas will be poorer for them. So, even if when they open the door, their thin smile tells you that you have arrived at the height of an argument, and even if, as you sit and visit, sulfurous looks are exchanged and innuendos drop like size-12 shoes, you are still performing a service, allowing them to try to be pleasant, even if they don’t do it well.

Baking begins in earnest weeks ahead. Waves of cookies, enough to feed an army, enough to render an army defenseless, including powerful rumballs and fruitcakes soaked with spirits (if the alcohol burns off in the baking, as they say, then why does Arlene hide them from her mother?). And tubs of
lutefisk
appear at Ralph’s meat counter, the dried cod soaked in lye solution for weeks to make a pale gelatinous substance beloved by all Norwegians, who nonetheless eat it only once a year. The soaking is done in a shed behind the store, and Ralph has a separate set of
lutefisk
clothes he keeps in the trunk of his Ford Galaxie. No dogs chase his car, and if he forgets to change his
lutefisk
socks, his wife barks at him. Ralph feels that the dish is a great delicacy and he doesn’t find
lutefisk
jokes funny. “Don’t knock it if you haven’t tried it,” he says. Nevertheless, he doesn’t offer it to carolers who come by his house because he knows it could kill them. You have to be ready for
lutefisk.

Father Emil doesn’t knock
lutefisk;
he thinks it may be the Lutherans’ penance, a form of self-denial. His homily the Sunday before: we believe that we really don’t know what’s best for us, so we give up some things we like in the faith that something better might come, a good we were not aware of, a part of ourselves we didn’t know was there. We really don’t know ourselves, our own life is hidden from us. God knows us. We obey His teaching, even though painful, entrusting our life to Him who knows best.

The faithful squirm when he says it. What comes next? they wonder. No Christmas this year? Just soup and crackers? Catholic children see Lutheran children eating candy that the nuns tell them they should give up until Christmas and think, “Ha! Easy for nuns to talk about giving up things. That’s what nuns do for a living. But I’m twelve—things are just starting to go right for me!”

Lutherans also get a sermon about sacrifice, which the late Pastor Tommerdahl did so well every year, entitling it “The True Meaning of Christmas,” and if you went to church with visions of sugarplums dancing in your head, he stopped the music. Santa Claus was not prominent in his theology. He had a gift of making you feel you’d better go home and give all the presents to the poor and spend Christmas with a bowl of soup, and not too many noodles in it either. He preached the straight gospel, and as he said, the gospel is meant to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. He certainly afflicted the Lutherans.

I only heard his sermon one year, and I liked it, being afflicted by Christmas, knowing how much I was about to receive and how little I had to give. I was ten, my assets came to eight bucks, I had twelve people on my list and had already spent three dollars on one of them: my father, who would receive a Swank toiletries kit with Swank shaving lotion, Swank deodorant, Swank cologne, Swank bath soap on a rope, and Swank hair tonic, an inspired gift. I walked into Detwiler’s Drugstore and there it was, the exotic Swank aroma that would complete his life and bring out the Charles Boyer in him, so I said, “Wrap it up,” and was happy to be bringing romance into his life until the cash register rang and I realized I had five bucks left and eleven people to go, which came to forty-five cents apiece. Even back then forty-five cents was small change.

I imagined a man walking up and giving me fifty dollars. He was fat and old and had a kind face. “Here,” he said, and made me promise I wouldn’t tell anyone. I promised. He gave me two crisp new twenty-five-dollar bills, a rarity in themselves and probably worth thousands. A Brink’s truck raced through town, hit a bump, and a bag fell out at my feet. I called the Brink’s office, and they said, “Nope. No money missing here. Guess it’s your lucky day, son.” Crystal Sugar called and said that the “Name the Lake Home” contest winner was me, and would I like the lake home (named Mallowmarsh) or the cash equivalent, fifteen grand?

But there’s nothing like a sermon against materialism to make a person feel better about having less. God watches over us and loves us no less for knowing what we can’t afford. I took the five dollars and bought small bottles of Swank lotion for the others, which smelled as wonderful as his. If you splashed a few drops on your face, you left a trail through the house, and when you came to a room, they knew you were coming. It announced you, like Milton Cross announced the opera.

Dad was so moved by his gift, he put it away for safekeeping, and thanks to careful rationing over the years, still has most of his Swank left.

Father Emil still has the bottle of Napoleon brandy.

I still have wax drippings on the front of my blue peacoat.

The
Herald-Star
still prints the photo of Main Street at night, snowy, the decorations lit, and underneath, the caption “O little town of Wobegon, how still we see thee lie”—the same photo I saw in the paper when I was a boy. That’s Carl’s old Chevy in front of Skoglund’s, the one he traded in on the Chevy before the Chevy he’s got now. He’s sorry he traded it in because the new one is nothing but heartache. The one in the photo ran like a dream.

The Christmas pageant at Our Lady has changed a little since Sister Arvonne took the helm. Under Sister Brunnhilde, it was as formal as a waltz, but it had a flaw in that the speaking parts were awarded to the quietest, best-behaved children, while the rambunctious were assigned to stand in silent adoration, which often meant that the speakers
of glad tidings were stricken with terror and had to be hissed at from the wings while a heavenly multitude stood by and smirked and poked each other.

Sister Arvonne is a reverent woman, like Sister Brunnhilde, but is much smaller and light on her feet, so her reverence takes other forms than kneeling, such as reform, for example. It was Arvonne who took the pruning shears and whacked the convent lilacs into shape; overgrown bushes that had been sloughing off for years she cut back and the next spring they got down to the business of blooming. So did she when the new edict came down on nun dress. She put her wimple on the bust of Newman and developed a taste for pants suits. Some old
Catholische
thought it was the end of the world, but looking at her, they could see it wasn’t. She zipped around like it was eight o’clock in the morning. Around the same time, the new liturgy was greeted with a long low moan from the faithful and even from the unfaithful—Arvonne’s sister Rosalie who had not uttered a Pater Noster since the early days of the Eisenhower administration nevertheless mourned the Latin mass as if it were her dear departed mother—but Arvonne didn’t pause for a moment. “English,” she told Rosalie, “is an excellent language. Look at Shakespeare. Look at Milton—hell, if a Congregationalist could write like that, think what you could do if you actually knew something.”