Harshbarger line: Christmas traditions

Since I've run out of ancestors to write about, for now, I thought it might be fun to think about the Christmas traditions that our German and Swiss ancestors might have enjoyed.  My first thought was that most of them were so poor that it was hard to imagine that many of them would have had anything to spare for a holiday celebration.  That may be true.  It may also be true that some of the families didn't celebrate at all, for religious reasons.  But most of our families, Lutheran or Mennonite or whatever, would have done what they could to make the day special.  A quick Google search tells us of several traditions that stayed in families for generations, so we can imagine that our ancestors participated in at least some of these practices.

Belsnickel was a man who was dressed in somewhat decrepit clothes, and who was a rather intimidating figure.  He would generally rap on a window a few days before Christmas (that is, if our immigrants had windows, but surely a door would work too) and when allowed inside, he would always ask each child whether they had been good that year.  The children received a gentle rap on the hands if they said yes, and perhaps a "switching" if they said no, so it was important to remember all of one's transgressions.  It also made the waiting for December 24 a little more nerve-wracking.  Would there be gifts, or not?  The children would put small baskets under the tree in anticipation that they had just made it under the wire another year.

The tree may have been a small fir or pine tree, but it may also have been a branch of a deciduous tree, bare and covered with a white flour paste.  Either kind of tree was trimmed with whatever the family had at hand-perhaps end pieces of ribbon, or pieces of material, or nuts that had been painted various colors.  Many families put what we would think of as a Nativity scene under the tree, probably hand carved or perhaps the figures were made of cloth.  Wealthier families generally had more elaborate sets, of course.  The same thing was true of gifts.  Most of our ancestors probably had very small gifts-maybe a homemade doll or spinning top, or an item of clothing for which mother had carded, spun and knit or woven wool from the family sheep into whatever the child needed for his or her wardrobe. 

Most families would also try to have some sort of Christmas feast-perhaps a party with extended family and neighbors (which could be one and the same thing) or maybe just a batch of cookies made with real sugar and other small treats to supplement the regular meal.  After all, Christmas wasn't about the Belsnickel, or gifts, or the tree, or the putz, or even the food.  Christmas was celebrated around the hearth and in the heart, even though chores still had to be done and meals needed to be prepared. 

In some ways, the Christmas I've described is very different from our modern day Christmas.  Our trees are bigger and more elaborately decorated, the gifts we give our children would not fit in a small basket, and we prepare more food than a family can possibly eat.  Yet at the heart of the celebration, we honor our ancestors by the traditions we have built that were built on their traditions, and we still worship the same Lord Jesus.  I think they got the important stuff right!