Duane Hart: “Christmas is all about family”

By LeAnn R. Ralph 

COLFAX —  For Duane Hart, Christmas has always been all about family. 

Nothing else mattered as much as getting the whole family together, Duane said.

“We had four kids. We had a foster boy who was always with us too. For a while we had two foster sons. And we had my mother, and on the other side, we had Elmer and Edna Hill and all of their kids. It was all very good,” he said.

Duane is a resident at the Colfax Health and Rehabilitation Center. 

“Way back when, we had a table that could seat 17. An oak leaved table. We could get 17 around it. Four kids and four more (with spouses). My foster boy and his wife,” Duane recalled.

At the time, Duane and his wife, Alice, were living several miles west of town in the county Highway BB area.

Alice Jane Hill Hart died December 13, 2012. Alice and Duane were married for 50 years.

“Alice and I had 40 cows … and when we first got married we had 400 chickens,” he said.

“Every year we had a good Christmas with all of the families together,” Duane said.

Growing up, “Christmas wasn’t really much because it was only me. I had some awful good years. I didn’t get much for Christmas, though,” he said.

Duane recalled that one year, however, his mother had bought him a toy truck to play with from a store in Colfax. The toy truck was not a Christmas gift, but it was something he had really wanted.

“It was a dump truck, and it was the only one I ever had,” Duane said.

Unfortunately, “I left it out in the driveway. I saw my dad walk up to the milk house to talk to the milk hauler. And he told him, ‘I want that thing smashed when you leave. If you don’t do it, tomorrow you don’t get my milk.’ And so he did it. I left it out in the driveway, and that was the end of my dump truck,” Duane recalled.

“Another time, my dad built me — (there was a man in town) named Harold Olson, and he had a crane on a truck. My dad built me one of those. I had it for years and years and years. It was upstairs in the garage. I don’t know what the kids did with it,” he said.

“We always had a good get-together at Christmas. Lots of food. One thing I didn’t like is on Christmas Eve we would go to my in-laws — when we had oyster stew. I couldn’t do it,” Duane said.

Duane says he really does not have a favorite Christmas cookie, but the best kind of cookie ever is chocolate chip. 

“My grandmother used to make roll-out white cookies, and roll-out molasses. And she frosted them all. They were always good. I had a grandma in Eau Claire who made white roll-out cookies, too,” he said.

“We had to divide up where we went. One year to one place and the next year to the other. If we went to the Hill side on Christmas Eve, we’d go to my side of the family on Christmas Day. It was busy,” Duane said.

Another special memory of Christmas involved a blender, Creme de Menthe and ice cream.

“On the night of the Hill party, or the day, whichever it turned out to be, my father-in-law would get the blender out and he’d make us grasshoppers. Everybody wanted a grasshopper. If you snuck around and stuck your arm through, you could get another (refill). It was fun,” Duane said.

“The get-together with family is what’s really important at Christmas. It’s always been important since I was little. At my grandparents, they were the first ones (in the area) to get a T.V. If it was a Sunday when we were there, it was my job to turn the radio on. Nobody ever changed (the radio station), so it was always Whoopee John. They had a nice, big radio,” he said.

“My grandfather and I used to make a lot of sausage. Cured hams and smoked meat, bologna. He and I could mix up a wash tub of meat, put the seasoning in, and put it in ranks and put it out in the smoke house. He took care of it. That was good stuff,” Duane said.

“We always had smoked sausage when we got together. That was really good. I could almost eat a rank myself. If I put a slice of homemade bread in there, I couldn’t quite do it. We’d make a hundred ranks at a time,” he said.

“Most often we had chicken. My mother and my wife were really good at frying up chicken. Put it in a cast iron pan. It was a lot of what we had back then. We didn’t buy turkeys. Lots of times, we had two different kinds of chickens. We had leghorns, and we had New Hampshire Reds. The New Hampshire Reds would be about five pounds when we were ready to butcher them,” he recalled.

“It wasn’t until later years that we ever had turkey. I guess once Jerome’s really got going, that’s when we started to have turkey,” he said.

“My folks lived in town here, and we took over the farm,” he noted.

“Jerome’s” was Jerome Foods and is now known as the Jennie-O Turkey Store.