Christmas, 1910

 For the holiday, I’m changing it up with two posts that invite you to compare Christmas past with Christmas present.

If you have a Christmas tree, how do you decorate it? And if you have a traditional Christmas dinner, what do you eat?

Here’s how Edna Patterson, who moved with her parents into a homestead cabin north of Glendive, remembered her 1910 Christmas. (Taken from Dave Walter’s book, Christmastime in Montana).

We were going to get a cedar tree for Christmas. We went up about half a mile or more from the house, and we found two little cedar trees in the coulee. That’s all we found. They were too precious to cut for our Christmas tree so we cut down a bullberry bush, and we took it home.

Mother had a couple of newspapers…she let us cut them into little strips, and she made us some flour past. We made those strips all into chains, paper chains. Then we decorated the bullberry bush with the chains. It was a sight to behold, I tell you….we had some crayons that we had brought from Iowa with us—some color crayons—so we colored some of those pieces of paper…

For Christmas dinner, Mother had put this big prairie chicken pie in the oven to bake. And she had baked cookies the day before, so there were lots of cookies.