Christmas Candle Tradition

Christmas 2017

GIFT WRAPPING

So it came to pass as the excitement of Christmas approached
a gift wrapping table was set up in the back bedroom.

The Old Farmer's Wife helped the little ones wrap their packages.

The older ones wrapped themselves! 

The Old Farmer was many things, 

but he was not an artist when it came to wrapping packages! 

Fortunately the Old Farmer's Wife helped out.

 

Guess which was from The Old Farmer to The Old Farmer's Wife?

Christmas On Main Street

The Old Farmer's Daughter would like to say how much I enjoyed

the past couple weeks on her school's facebook page. 

We have been remembering our small town and the stores on Main Street
It was fun to remember many and learn of some I didn't remember.

Go Starpoint! 

So there came a time when The Old Farmer

and The Old Farmer's Wife decided I was old enough

to go Christmas shopping by myself!  

I was dropped off at the corner of Main Street
just above the bridge (widest bridge in the world! at that time).

The street was decorated for the holidays. 

My heart was pounding with excitement! 

With some trepidation I set off up the street.

I had $10.00 and 5 gifts to buy. 

First stop the menswear store to get a tie for The Old Farmer.
Second stop the 5 and dime.
Evening in Paris gift set for The Old Farmer's wife.
Then some gifts for the brother and sisters.
Life saver's gift book? Pez? 
A dollar went a long ways then!

All to soon the adventure over and I waited on the corner

for The Old Farmer's Wife to pick me up.  

Are all those celebrating ready for Christmas?
What are you doing for the holidays?

The Desk and the Rat

I believe I mentioned the backroom of the farmhouse in the past.

Originally it was the kitchen area with a big old cookstove. 

You would come in the back door to this room to warm

yourself by the fire in the winter, and dry your clothes and boots! 

Or when you awoke on a cold morning would hustle down
one of the many staircases to get warm.
There was a narrow back stairs that came down directly here too. 

So now it was kind of a catch all room. 

There were the laundry tubs at one end 
...and the washing machine. 

A big double freezer in the middle. 
Various boxes and cabinets here and there.

And the big roll top desk at the other end. 

The desk had history. 

The family had been in the printing business 
for three generations. 

This was the great grandfather's office desk when 
he printed a local Ohio town newspaper. 

It came to pass that there was rustling heard in the clutter of the back room. 

The Old Farmer observed papers chewed up in the desk drawer

for the makings of a nest! The hunt for the miscreant was on! 

Of course all of us were in on it including the old beagle, our hunting dog,

perhaps we were supposed to circle the area so the "mouse" would be cornered. 

The Old Farmer's weapon of choice was a broom. 

He cautiously opened the lower desk drawer. 

Out burst the mouse who had transitioned into a RAT!

All chaos broke loose, the Old Farmer swiped at it with the broom,
the dog leaped forward, the rat ran between leaping feet, scurried

around the boxes, the Old Farmer all along trying to smack it with 

the broom, while usually hitting the dog who was right in the fray. 

Eventually the culprit was back in the corner behind the desk and
was dispatched to the great beyond.

Nickel on the railroad

Thanksgiving 1957

The feast is over and the I am remembering our

hike earlier in the day.

It is a yearly thing, The Old Farmer takes us out

to hike the rail line that crosses the back road into town.

It is quite scenic, going around a curve and with shale like

cliffs on one side. It was chilly out today.

There were 4 of us kids. We tried to outdo each other

walking on the rails, follow the leader.

Picking up dead leaves and stones along the tracks.

We had a healthy curiosity as all kids do

We were full of questions, what kind

of leaf it this, what tree did it come from.

The Old Farmer had the answers and pointed

out the matching tree. 

What would happen if we left a penny on the rail?

Then The Old Farmer took a nickel from his pocket

And searched along the rock cliff for the perfect spot.

He swept off the debris and put the nickel there,

And told us all to remember where it was, next year

We would come back and find it!

Continued...present day...

 So the Old Farmer's Wife had a respite from family

so she could concentrate on the big dinner.
And when we went back to find that nickel...

...never could find it-after a year of anticipation! 

It was a mystery, did a squirrel or a bird dislodge it? 

Or did someone else actually find it!? 

What is a first cousin....

There were many discussions over the years 

Especially at Thanksgiving dinner,

about extended families and who was who. 

Especially Cousins. Can you imagine such a mundane
subject becoming intense! It can!

Who was a cousin, what was a cousin once removed? 

Who was a first cousin, who was a second cousin..

Oh good grief, now I am getting confused all over again! 

There were many opinions.  

I'll try to sort this out a bit,
First cousins, the children of siblings to each other.
Second cousin, the children of first cousins to each other. 

Cousin once removed. Once removed refers to generations,
So your once removed cousin is the child of your first cousin. 

Now The Old Farmer's Daughter is going on vacation! 

HAVE A GREAT THANKSGIVING FEAST

Let's celebrate our farmers who make this possible. 

Church Life

The Old Farmer's Wife was a good catholic. 

And the Old Farmer loved her so he promised to
go to church with her and raise the children as catholics too.

The Old Farmer and his wife were active community members

and both belonged to the church societies.
 The men of the church belonged to the Holy Name Society.
And the women had the Rosary Altar Society.

The men did the barbecuing at the yearly church dinner.
And helped run the lawn fete. This involved building booths
and running the games, there were darts and balloons, with one
small balloon in the middle for a bigger prize.
And the venerable ping pong ball in the goldfish bowls.
Pounding in a nail with hammer, can you do it in one blow!?

The women cooked and served family style at the church dinner.
They had a rotation for cleaning the church and bringing flowers in. 

My funny memory of the ladies was the teas at our house.
One older lady was something of a diviner.

I may have mentioned the Old Farmer's Wife had a teacup
collection and when she held the tea was proud to use these.
(No? well we will get to it!~)

She went out to buy loose leaf tea special.
And the diviner would read the tea leaves.
This always struck me as incongruous.
But it was "just for fun".

Elderberry Wine

The Old Farm was truely an old farm.
It appeared to be a prosperous farm in the 1800s.
The house was expanded in Victorian times from

its original farmhouse. 

There were old orchards; pear and apple.
A quince tree, vineyard, and black raspberries gone wild.
Walnut trees and a patch of elderberry bushes.

Elderberries (Sambucus) were/are used medicinally by many.

The berries are black or very dark blue and have a sharp, sweet flavor 

that makes them highly preferred for desserts, syrups, jams, jellies.

They are full of minerals, antioxidands, and vitamins.

For many years an old couple would come by in the right season

and ask to pick some berries. Of course permission was given.
That was the way in the country. 

A couple months later a bottle of elderberry wine would appear! 

ELDERBERRY JELLY
(From Kraft Foods page)

3-4 lbs ripe elderberries

1/4 cup fresh lemon juice

1 packet sure jell

4 1/2 cups gran sugar

1/4 tsp butter

Place berries in a large pot and crush with a potato masher to release 

some of the juices. Turn the heat to medium and continue to crush

 as the mixture heats up to a boil. Once the berries and their juices reach a boil,

 reduce the heat to low and let the berries simmer for 10 minutes. Remove from heat.

Slowly transfer the mashed berries and juice over the sieve (or 4 layers cheesecloth)

to strain the juice into the pot. Let strain for an hour. 

 You will need 3 cups of juice to make one batch of jelly if using MCP pectin, 

3 3/4 cups of juice if using SureJell pectin

Place 3 cups (or 3 3/4 cups depending on your brand of pectin) of juice into a large, 

high sided, wide pot (8-quart). Add the lemon juice and pectin. 

Bring to a boil on high heat. 

Add sugar and butter. Stir with a wooden spoon. 

Bring to a boil again. Watch the pot as the mixture will foam up considerably. 

You may need to lower the heat a bit to keep the foam from boiling over the pot.
Add  sugar and butter. Stir with a wooden spoon. 

Bring to a boil again. Watch the pot as the mixture will foam up considerably. 
You may need to lower the heat a bit to keep the foam from boiling over the pot.
Boil exactly 1 minute, ladle into jars and seal in a hot water bath, 5 minutes.  

Sending You a Halloween Postcard

All Hallow's Eve Memories

I look out the window and see the leaves falling

The spiders are weaving the webs around the front door. 

I think the season calls for leaving the webs through the end of the month.

Why you ask? Its soon to be All Hallows Eve!

My mind wanders back to Halloween on the farm.

We always carved the pumpkins and roasted the seeds. 

The Old Farmer would get the pumpkins started by cutting out
a round lid with a notch to fit it in place. And carefully

held the knife on an angle inwards so the lid was beveled
to fit and would not fall in!

The pumpkins went out at sunset with a candle inside.

Then there was the year
The Old Farmer made a pumpkin man
to sit in a chair out by the road.
He stuffed an old pair of overalls with straw
and put him in an old pair of boots.
And he had a spooky pumpkin head. 

Something dark and scary happened overnight
and in the morning his parts were scattered to all corners. 

Halloween did not disappoint.

Fall Leaves and Walnuts

Does it feel like fall yet? 

Are the leaves blowing in the wind?
Is there a chill in the air?

On the Old Farm there was a front woods

and a back woods. 
There were beech trees and ash trees and oaks and maples.
There was a chestnut tree. And english walnuts.

The Old Farmer's children as children all over the world
would collect the prettiest fall leaves they could find.
Beech leaves were yellow. 

Maples were red and golden. 

We would bring our samples home and the Old Farmer's Wife
would iron them between sheets of wax paper to preserve them. 

Then off to school for show and tell. 

And oh the bounty of walnuts. 

We would collect a basket full and spend

an evening in front of tv cracking shells and separating

the nuts into a bowl. 

These would make wonderful coffee cakes in the coming months.

 A RECIPE
This recipe is an easy quick coffee cake we learned in 4-H.
1 1/2 cups sifted flour
2 tsp baking powder
1 cup sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 cup shortning
1 egg, beaten
1/2 cup milk
Grease bottom of 8" x 8" x 2" baking pan.
Sift and measure flour. sift together flour, baking powder, sugar, and salt.
And shortening and cut in with pastry blender or fork.
Add beaten egg and milk. Spread in greased pan.
1/2 cup brown sugar
2 tbsp flour
2 tsp cinnamon
4 tbsp butter
1/2 cup chopped nuts
Mix topping ingredients and sprinkle over cake mixture.
You want it on chunky so it sinks and and forms pockets of deliciousness.
If spread evenly and thin it will not work.
Bake at 350' for 30-35 minutes, serve hot!

Getting the Old Farmhouse in Shape for the Winter

The Old Farmhouse needed a bit of work from time to time.
Painting those fancy corbels was tricky! 

( The ornate decorative brackets under the eaves. )

One Old Farmer's Daughter remembers

 being on the roof where they overlapped
with the Old Farmer 

  reaching to paint them.

Of course in places you could put a ladder

on a porch roof, which made it much easier. 

A blessing was the Old Farmhouse 

having permanently colored shingles.
They were cement asbestos, 

very rigid and stonelike.

Every fall the screens were taken off 

the old windows and storm windows 

put in their place. 

And vice versa in the spring. 

No triple tracks back then.
And think about all the storage space

this took in the off season too! 

 The Old Farmer's children's job was to wash them prior to installing for the season.

This one picture shows the corbels and the siding

and some of the many windows needing to be changed spring and fall.

Shift Work and Children's Games

The Old Farmer had another job. 

He was a printer by trade. 

But his heart was in farming. 

The printing trade was learned through a series of steps.
You started as an apprentice, running and toting for

the master printer. When you had learned all the ins and outs

of the materials and how they were used you moved up to
Journeyman. Then maybe you assisted in loading the ink
and paper rolls. learning to run the presses.
 

  

There was a lot more to this than you might think.
You had to get the ink flowing evenly.
To do it right you ran a test page checked it and adjusted as necessary.
If you just ran it and waited for it to get flowing as it went
you may have wasted a lot of ink and paper in the process. 

And learning to use colors!
The Old Farmer was a Master Printer.

Well the point of this story from the Old Farmer's Daughter's
point of view was how he always made time to play a game

with me before heading off to shift work in the afternoon,
or when getting home after a night shift before going to bed
for the day.

It was often chinese checkers. Or cards.
We played war where when two cards you each put down matched...

the first person to shout war could confiscate all the cards down on the table.
The first person to run out of cards lost. 

And our personal family game, Jud.
Named with a shortened family members name.
This was an abbreviated game of rummy with just
4 cards instead of 7 and you made your sets of 3 or runs. 

I hope all children can have these fun memories of their fathers.
They seem like little things but are big to the children.

The Old Farmhouse Needed a Lot of Work

 As mentioned in my previous entry

the old plaster was coming loose from the lathe. 

If anyone was too rambunctious upstairs a new crack

might form on the ceiling downstairs! 

An interesting aside about old plaster, the coarse base layer
was full of horsehair, which made it strong and then the
skim coat was thin and smooth, sticking well to the coarse base. 

The Old Farmer spent many years as time and money allowed
knocking off the loose plaster and putting up drywall.

 The Old Farmer's Wife was usually in charge of choosing
a suitable wallpaper to finish the project.
She was conservative and classic in her choices
so not to offend anyone's sensibilities.

There were places with old wallpaper and sound plaster. 

Removing old wallpaper was quite the project. Not the easy
damp and strip of the new glues. This stuff was on there!
and in many layers! You had to rent a steamer. It had a big flat head

That fed the steam to the surface, then followed scrapping, 

there were places with 10 layers of old paper! 

It was a hot messy job.

The fascinating thing was when old dates

were found penciled on the wall under the paper. 

I remember in the front hall a place
marked with the paperer's name and date of the project.
My memory recalls 1896, altho there is some disagreement
about that!

How We Got a Farm

I heard a story.

The Old Farmer got a deal on the farmhouse.
He had a growing family. The proposed house was in disrepair. 

An old gentleman lived there. He had an old horse. 

An arrangement was made that the old gent

would continue to live upstairs

and the Old Farmer and his family would live
in the downstairs and renovate as time allowed.
He had his farm! 

 

It was a grand old farmhouse, 

made for entertaining.
With double doors between rooms
that could be opened to make a large space. 

The whole ground floor could be opened 

but for the back room,

which had the huge wood cookstove

 and washtubs 

and a swinging door.

The plaster was coming loose from 

the lathe in several places.
A couple times a large section fell

 and it was luck for no one to be

 under when it happened.

 The Old Farmer's wife,
expecting a child was under one 

such fall, and had moved aside just 

before catastrophe might have struck. 

Over the years new drywall was 

put up and walls were papered. 

The Old Farmer's Wife made her personal project
stripping the paint off the main staircase railing and posts.
It was a beautiful thing of black walnut when done. 

That project took several months.
I can still see her sitting there step after step, 

moving upward as she worked on each piece.

Woolly Caterpillars and other Signs

Summer is winding down.
We are starting to watch for the geese to be flying south for the winter.
We check the Wooly Bear Caterpillars to see how large the band is,
are they more brown or more black, will this tell

us how bad winter will be? 

What other signs did we look for on the farm?
Most seem to foretell rainy weather.

The Old Farmer's Wife liked this one...
Red sky at night, sailors delight; red sky in morning, sailors take warning.

Then does it follow that rain before 7 clear by 11.

Or a ring around the moon means rain soon.

One time The Old Farmer killed a large snake in the yard.
He threw it over the fence saying it would bring rain.
I don't remember if it worked ? 

 
He also taught us that if the cows lay down in the field
rain was on the way. And if the tree leaves flip over
on a particular tree in the back yard, 
I think it was a basswood.
so that the light undersides were showing 
rain is soon to come.




Or if all the insects and birds go silent, something is up.
A storm on the way or a predator
 may be in the area.
(of course you might be the predator
 in question!)
If you stay still awhile and they start up again you were the problem.
But if they stay silent something is amiss.
Now crows will sound an alarm
 if there is danger.
 Crows are very smart.

LABOR DAY

It is Labor Day in America.
A day set aside to recognize the American Worker.

Traditionally a day off from work. 

A picnic day....

Here the average american goes about his day

interacting peacefully with coworkers, shopkeepers and neighbors.
Despite what the news would have you believe. 

These are the American People. 

Thank-you for reading my blog!

Unexpected company

Company was a part of life at The Old Farm

Neighbors might stop by to say hi. 

Strangers sometimes stopped to ask if they could

pick the daffodils that grew wild across the road. 

And sometimes relatives arrived unannounced.

Communication was not what it is now. 

Yes the Old Farmer had a phone.
But "long distance" cost $$$. 

And people used long distance pretty much only for emergencies. 

So you might get a postcard in the mail

that says we'll be there tomorrow for the weekend.
Or you might not, the cousins might just show up! 

Company was always welcomed with warmth.
Coffee? tea? Let us take your coats and bags....

The girls will sleep in together and you can have their room. 

And once in a while one of us girls would get invited

to go back from whence they came for a visit and sightseeing. 

And that would be an excuse for another visit

when The Old Farmer and the rest of the family
came to pick us up!

Family Reunion

Every August we had the big family reunion.

Most of the relatives lived within an easy drive.

It was held at the park on the lake.

This reunion wasn't a complicated affair.

Everyone knew to come that particular Sunday in August.

Everyone brought a dish to pass.

Everyone chipped in on the meats, sodas and beer.

Ice in big galvanized tubs.

The men grilled the hot dogs and hamburgers.

Drank beer and played horseshoes.

The children ran around and played tag...or jarts. 

The women sat and visited. 
Sounds kindof normal, doesn't it? 

But now families live so far from each other this is not so common.

The picnic was set up next to the big open area in the back of the park.

That field was for the big move up baseball game.

When the Old Farmer got up to bat everyone moved way way back.

He would put it the whole length of that field between the roads.

All the cousins yelled, uh oh, move back, move back, back to the road!

The town had amusement parks with nickelodeons and rides.
Some of the kids would sneak away to play before eating,
or after eating. Sometimes we forgot the time and got in trouble.