Remembrances of Christmases Past Gladys Vogler: “I played Santa Claus once.”
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GLADYS VOGLER
By LeAnn R. Ralph
COLFAX — Gladys Vogler, a resident at the Colfax Health and Rehabilitation Center, remembers playing Santa Claus for a number of years.
“We didn’t have anybody to play Santa Claus, so I did it. I did it longer than I would have had to. It was when our sister was little. There wasn’t anybody else to do it. I did it. Just at our place. We had a red Santa suit,” Gladys recalled.
When asked if her sister figured it out that Gladys was Santa Claus, Gladys replied, “In the end, she knew.”
Gladys, age 92, grew up on a farm near Eau Claire. She had two sisters.
She also recalls one very special Christmas tree.
“Our dad would wait until right before Christmas. They’d sell the Christmas trees cheaper then. And one time, they were all sold out. Us kids, we were so disappointed. We wouldn’t have a Christmas tree that year,” Gladys said.
“So our mother took cedar boughs and she shaped them into the most beautiful tree out of the boughs you ever would see. Nobody could understand that was cedar boughs. It was really pretty,” she said.
“We had a jack pine for a Christmas tree, too, if we didn’t have anything else. They were kind of hard to decorate. But we did it,” Gladys recalled.
“We’d put all kinds of glass balls on the tree. All kinds of trimmings. Little colored balls. We did not use popcorn. We had tinsel. The roping tinsel,” she said.
Cookies
When she was growing up, Gladys and her sisters and mother made many kinds of Scandinavian cookies and candy, including rosettes, fattigman, sandbakels, divinity, Mexican wedding cakes, spritz cookies, cutout Christmas cookies, gingerbread boys, dipped chocolate creams, and fruitcake.
“We all four of us, my sisters and my mother, made cookies,” she said.
“Sometimes we made Christmas bread. But we never made lefse. We weren’t experts at making it. My dad was German. My grandmother was part German. My grandparents (mother’s parents) came from Sweden,” Gladys said.
Best clothes
“We always had a Christmas program at school. We’d all get in our best clothes for our play. We’d put benches out for a stage. The neighbors would come to see the program,” Gladys said.
The country school Gladys attended was only a quarter of a mile from their farm.
“We didn’t have very far to walk to school,” she noted.
“We had programs at church, too. It’s a little hard to remember exactly. We sang a lot of songs. The church was up from us about a half a mile. Trinity Lutheran,” Gladys said.
“I can’t remember what we got for Christmas. We didn’t spend very much, I can tell you,” she said.
Gladys also recalls having Christmas dinner on Christmas day.
“We would go sledding in the wintertime, down our hill, toward the road. It was kind of dangerous,” Gladys said.
She does remember getting a sled for Christmas.
“We got a sled one year, but I don’t remember when that was,” she said.
Although she enjoyed sledding, Gladys said she never went skating.
Farming
Gladys says she was never married and spent her life farming.
“We had hay and cows. Things were so hard those years. Such hard work. Unload hay with a track that ran through the barn. We’d have to pull the fork up with the horse. I always used to hate that. I thought I’d go too long and pull the end of the barn out,” she said.
“We’d plant corn. Sometimes we’d plant it by hand,” Gladys noted.
“We used to plant cucumbers. An acre of cucumbers. We’d pick cucumbers. What an awful job. Took them to the pickle factory,” she said.
“We had strawberries. We had raspberries for awhile. I’d always plant peas. I liked peas. So we’d plant a row of peas. The melons we would put down in the field where the land would raise them better. Muskmelons and water melons. Then the crows ate the watermelons. So we couldn’t plant them there anymore,” Gladys said.
“We always had a strawberry patch. We’d make strawberry jam,” she said.
“We always had help on the farm. And we had chickens for all our years there. We sold eggs. We had dairy cows. Our barn was so old. We had it torn down and built (a new barn). At first we milked by hand, then we had a milker. Toward last, we had the pipeline,” Gladys said.
When asked if they made butter when she was growing up on the farm, Gladys said they did not make very much butter.
“We did some, but that homemade butter, you had to make it really fresh, or else it had a little sour taste. We didn’t like that sour taste,” she said.
