By Neil Hipp of Lidgerwood, N.D.
My grandfather emigrated from Germany when he was 12 years old and there remained a part of “the old country” in Grandpa and Grandma’s home across town. Potato pancakes, red cabbage and apples, dumplings and the like were foods that I enjoyed. German expressions were always present in the conversations. I learned to play German music and songs on my eight-bass accordion. I treasure these things.
So, when I found a “German Christmas Card” while I was browsing for Christmas cards in Hallmark the other day, I had to buy it. It brought back sensational memories of Christmas back in Hankinson. It reminded me of Christmas at Grandpa and Grandma Zanders, when I was a boy.
The memories were so vivid that I could actually smell the cookies fresh from the oven – big, thick, round sugar cookies. Dusted with white granular sugar, and stacked row after row on the kitchen table to cool. Just begging to be eaten.
I don’t think I ever chewed one of Grandma’s sugar cookies. They just sort of melted away in my mouth, with a little help from my tongue. Washed down with a tall glass of cold milk... whole milk – the kind that left a “real” milk mustache (not the wimpy skim milk kind we see today). And I could taste the Christmas Kuchen too. And feel the heat from the oil burner in the living room as I sat in the green fabric rocker, slouched way down, watching the tinsel tree change colors as the spotlight aimed at it changed from red to blue to orange to green and then back to red again.
I wondered all over again how Grandpa and Grandma could stand to sleep upstairs, with only a floor vent to heat their bedroom when it was so cold. Or even how they could sleep with that grandfather clock chiming every quarter-hour. I remembered how quiet and dark it was when I slept over. There were no other sounds in the darkness, except that clock – tick, tock, tick, tock, tick, tock. Ticking steady in the night.
Over and over in my head ran the words, “Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse…” and the words were no longer words, but something I was literally experiencing curled up on the couch in the living room.
Occasionally a car would drive past the house, the tires making a crunching sound as they packed the snow in the sub-zero weather. Light from the headlights shone through the window starting out on the north wall, moving slowly west toward the kitchen, picking up in intensity and speed until they disappeared behind the bookcase in the corner.
You know the bookcase. The one with the glass doors. The one holding a potpourri of musty books – many that had been read to me, not once, but dozens of times. Stories that I knew so well, that if the reader were to change one sentence, nay, one word, I would detect it.
And all of those memories were so vivid and clear in that one Christmas card. So, I knew I had to buy it, so that I could enjoy the wonderful, precious memories of Christmas at Grandpa and Grandma’s house back in 1960.
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