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A USTA–BE--CHRISTMAS

For This Special Time of Year
(An excerpt from "Mama, Root, Hog or Die" by Barbara Oehlbeck)

As little money as they had somehow, Mama and my father were able to scrape together enough materials and whatever it took, to make wooden toys for little children on the other side of town. These were children who, otherwise, would have had nothing on Christmas morning. All year my father saved scraps of wood from the factory where he worked to make the toys. There were little tables and chairs, a rocking horse, a see-saw, cut-out clowns, and flat dolls on which Mama painted the faces, horses, dogs, cats, jigsaw puzzles, and little odd pieces of doll furniture such as the small caned bottom chair and sideboard shown here.

Every year it was the same. The Christmas toy project was started the week after Thanksgiving after supper, on the kitchen floor. Mama did most of the drawings on the wood to show where to make the cuts. She had a big basket in which she’d put the pieces to be taken to the garage shop so they could be sawed. The shop was far too cold to work in in the wintertime and the back porch wasn’t any better so the kitchen became the Christmas workshop. Mama did almost all the band sawing. She was fast and accurate. After the pieces were cut, back in the basket they’d go to be carried back to the kitchen to be glued or nailed. She’d always number the pieces or tie them together so there’d be no excuse for gluing or nailing the wrong pieces together. And at times my father brought a small jigsaw into the kitchen which he used on a heavy wooden box. Anything that was to be painted was put in the pantry so Mama could do the painting during the daytime. Saving enough money to buy different colors of paint was a problem and so frequently Mama had to use colors that as she said, “don’t suit a bit”. Once my father, in trying to console her because she didn’t have the colors she wanted, said, “Maybe these little children won’t know the difference, since they don’t have anything to compare them to.” Mama didn’t even look up from what she was painting as she said, “Well, I know the diff’rence and by this time next year I’m gonna have a can of paint in ever’ color.”

Later my father said that soon after Christmas that year, he’d gone to the paint shelf in the pantry to find some touch-up paint for something he was repairing. It was then that he found a small jar with coins...nickels, dimes, a few quarters and one fifty-cents piece. When he asked Mama if she knew anything about the jar with the coins, she said, “By the time Christmas comes again there’s gonna be ‘nough to buy some diff-rent color paints for the toys.”

We’d always save the wrapping of the toys for the night before Christmas Eve. Even though we saved odds and ends of wrapping paper all year, often we didn’t have enough, so we’d put a toy in a paper bag and Mama would cut out and glue a pretty picture on the bag. And, of course, each toy was marked with either a “G” or “B” for girl or boy.

And somehow Mama found time and energy to bake a few cakes and a lot of sweet potato puddings for those same people....”just in case somebody might be hungry.” There were always more puddings than cakes because sweet potatoes usually grew in abundance on my grandfather’s farm. And in some years, when there were more sweet potatoes than the family could use, Mama would brush and clean some of the biggest, smoothest ones and in the bag they’d go. On one occasion when I told Mama I wanted to help clean them I took a couple of the nice big ones, went to the sink and started to wash them. Mama jumped up from the table where she was working on a basketful of the newly dug potatoes, grabbed the ones I’d started to wash saying, “Don’t never wash any kind o’ potato! They’ll spoil in no time. To clean ‘em you just have to brush or rub ‘em off with a rag. You don’t never wash potatoes ‘til you get ready to use ‘em.” Jars of jams and jellies would also find their way into the cake and pudding bag to be left at a door with the toys.

Then, right after supper on Christmas Eve, all the toys along with the cake and pudding bags were loaded in the car and somehow all of us got in that old car, and off we went to deliver the toys. Mama wouldn’t let us kids get out of the car. All we could do was hand the toys to her or my father through the windows and they’d quietly go to the doors, one by one, leaving several toys and a bag of food. They never wanted any one to know who was leaving the Christmas surprises. I often wondered how they seemed to know how many toys to leave at each door. And so one time after all the toys and bags of food had been delivered, I asked Mama about that. She looked down at me and said, “I wonder how you think o’ ‘astin’ so many questions that I can’t answer.”
---From MAMA, Root, Hog, or Die by Barbara Oehlbeck

335 pages, hardcover, illustrated with excellent photos, many by Dr. Luther Oehlbeck, but some by Mama herself. Mama, Root, Hog or Die - $24.95 -

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