Vigo County Historical Society

It’s nice to recall Christmas past

"Tis almost Christmas Eve and time to put up the freshly cut tree in the front room. During the Great Depression, times were hard and with my father attending college, he would cut a tree for us after school.

In the 1930s, trees were never put up and decorated until Dec. 24. First, my parents would untangle two lengths of lights, then each bulb had to be checked to be sure it would light. A lot of work went into that project.

Next we carefully unwrapped our saved ornaments that had originally come from Germany. At the end of World War I, German ornaments were no longer allowed to be imported. By the time I was a teenager there no longer were any delicate German ornaments left; they had all been broken.

At this time we didn’t have outdoor decorations, but people did drive by houses to check trees through the windows.

In the lower grades of school, we cut construction paper into strips, pasting one end of a strip to its other end so that we now had a round like circle. First we used a red strip, then a green strip until we had made a long, long chain. I used paste but my son going to school used staples, which was much faster. While making the red and green paper chains at home and with the paste left at school, my grandmother showed me how to mix a little flour and a little water together to make my own paste. The paper chains did look nice on the tree.

The next year, we tried stringing cranberries, thus making more chains. Our next project was stringing popped popcorn, a little hard to do as we usually wanted to eat some.

In a lower grade we were giving a holiday program for the school and our parents. We were each given several little spikes of wood, to which we attached the candy. It was so festive, so colorful. We were so proud of our work but upon arriving at school the next day, to our dismay, there wasn’t much candy left. It seemed that mice had gotten into the cloak hall where our tree had been stored and eaten most of the gum drops. But the teacher did a quick job of buying new gum drops, so the day was saved.

One year Mother used blue lights and silver tinsel on the tree, which was really beautiful.

About two years later, one student brought to school a large matchbox full of something called angel hair. It was so pretty, especially spun out over an evergreen tree, but we made the mistake of handling this material. In just a few minutes my arms started to itch, then the next student started scratching. The angel hair was like spun glass, and the students who handled it were cut on the skin.

Another ornament was made of white paper that was folded, then notched or cut with scissors along the edges, and when unfolded, became a pretty snowflake to be hung on the tree with a paper clip. Thus we proved holiday decorating could be fun but at the same time very inexpensive.

Visit the Vigo County Historical Museum. While there, check out the paper chains in the schoolroom.