Greg Brown, Butch Thompson Trio, Dale Warland Singers, Dave Moore. Lake Wobegon Mandolin Orchestra, Dave Moore, Peter Ostroushko, Robin & Linda Williams,
La Adalita (Lake Wobegon Mandolin Orchestra ) Ragtime One-step (Lake Wobegon Mandolin Orchestra ) Hills of Manchuria (Lake Wobegon Mandolin Orchestra ) Victoria-Elizabeth Waltz (Lake Wobegon Mandolin Orchestra ) Russian Rag (Lake Wobegon Mandolin Orchestra ) God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen (Lake Wobegon Mandolin Orchestra ) Adam and Eve (Robin & Linda Williams ) Traveling Shoes (Robin & Linda Williams ) Oh Susanna ( Dave Moore ) Momma had a Sick Child ( Dave Moore ) Train-harmonica Song ( Dave Moore ) The Hen House Door ( Dave Moore ) Canned Goods ( Greg Brown ) The Holly and The Ivy (Dale Warland Singers ) No Rose of Such Virtue (Dale Warland Singers ) Snow had Fallen (Dale Warland Singers ) Personent Hodie (Dale Warland Singers ) The First Noel (Dale Warland Singers ) Benedicamus Domino (Dale Warland Singers ) Silent Night (Dale Warland Singers ) Away in a Manger (Dale Warland Singers )
Bertha's Kitty Boutique (GK and cast - Electric Petter) Bigger Hammer Enterprises (PHC cast - The gift of tools) Chatterbox Cafe (-GK - Chatterbox artillery punch) Pastor Ingqvist PHC Theater (Skit - GK and guests The 700th anniversary of the C major chord) Powdermilk Biscuits (GK - Arts troupes cleaning up except for SPCA (Shy Performers & Clergy Association) / Flight to Egypt play / "Powdermilk Theme Song") Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery Sidetrack Tap Skoglund's Five and Dime (GK - Skoglund's 5 & 10: Making gifts ) Society of Believers ((SOB) - PHC cast - Creeping Christmas Eve-ism ) Yuli Seltzer (GK & guests - Holiday feasting)
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Well, it has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my hometown. The first Christmas visitor arrived up there on Monday, Sister Torvaldson. Senator Torvaldson's cousin, I believe she is, came up from Phoenix to spend the holidays. She was born up around there 69 years ago this last fall. Sister Torvaldson was named for a friend of the family who was a nun, although the Torvaldsons were not Catholic and are not now, best of my knowledge. She lived down in Phoenix for a long time. She kind of missed the snow and she never did get married. I suppose having sister for your first name might discourage some men, I don't know. But she came up to stay with the Tollefson's. Byron Tollefson is her second nephew, once removed, I believe. Showed up there on Monday. She said, I just came because I wanted to see the snow. She said, I hope it's no trouble. I could always stay at a motel. But, of course it's trouble. It wouldn't be Christmas if it weren't some trouble. She was just almost enough trouble. And of course there isn't any room in the motel. We all know that. The Christmas decorations went up there on Tuesday. Bud got them up, the wise men and the star and the shepherds and some other decorations that some people think are clouds, but actually if you look at them right, they're angels. You can see angels there if you look at them when the light is right. Hung them up on the light poles along Main Street, made by old high school shop classes. Those decorations were going back to my day. It was quite a day of work for an old guy hanging those things. Bud kind of wished some of those old shop students could have been there to help and to see that you wouldn't necessarily have had to make those decorations out of three-quarter inch plywood. Two sheets glued back to back. It was like hanging rocks. up there. He's been campaigning for plastic decorations for a long time, but in Lake Wobegon, of course, they do not buy new until the old has broken. And these plywood ones cannot be broken, even when dropped at a great height. He knows that now. It's kind of like Mr. Bowser down at the post office who hated his old Chevy but had to drive it all those years because it wouldn't break. It was still running, and so he had to hang on to it. Thing was all rusted out along the sides. Floorboard was rusted out. He had to... I believe he put in three-quarter-inch plywood there. Put his feet on. Car was named Henry after his late father. who taught him never to throw something away if it's still working, so he had to drive it. Couldn't give it up because even on the very coldest mornings of the winter, after 15 years, all you had to do was just point at the ignition. That car would start up. Drive that thing around. Hated it for 10 of the 15 years he owned it, I'm sure. freezing cold inside that thing, but Mr. Bowser was brought up to endure suffering and to be cheerful about it, so he drove around cheerfully in this horrible car, even though it depressed the life out of him. And he hung on to the thing until finally, I believe it was a year ago, in January, he was sitting in the Chatterbox Cafe. Somebody said to him, well, they said, Don, that old Chevy of yours, that's so amazing car. Boy, that's quite a starter, isn't it? That's a good runner in the winter. What do you ever do for that thing? Well, he didn't do anything. Lack of maintenance only seemed to encourage that car. It thrived on neglect. He hadn't changed the oil in five years. It didn't seem to notice. Boy, they said, we never had that kind of luck with a Chevy like you had there. And something in Mr. Bowser just seemed to snap. He drove that car about two miles west out to the hill by the Halverson's farm. He stopped it. He put it in neutral. He got out and gave it a push. and it ended its life down up against the second telephone pole it ran into. Put that car out of his misery. The happy man who walked two miles back to town, and now he's got a new car, new Chevrolet, named Betty. It doesn't start all the time, and he's had problems with it. But when it does start, the heater is real good. But better than that, it still has that new car smell to it, you know, in the upholstery. It smells fresh. And you get a fresh feeling when you sit in it. And I think that's all he wanted was just something new, which is kind of a Christmas feeling in a way. looking for something new, something to happen, some fresh start, some fresh hope for the world. People who celebrate Christmas know that that is the feeling that we all look for at this time of year. And we hope to find it some kind of inspiration in Christmas despite all the distractions, something more than nostalgia. Because nostalgia, you go home, you get nostalgic in about two minutes. Get out two pictures of yourself as a kid. That's all you need. Nostalgia comes out of a faucet. You can get nostalgic like you run yourself a warm bath. I want something more than nostalgia at Christmas time. Something like wonder and joy, some spark, something to touch us. And if it doesn't, it can be a very unhappy time of year. It can be miserable and depressing. It's like going to the dance and find out that everyone else is in couples and you're the only, only person there. Or going to the supper and you find out after you arrive that the invite said potluck. A through K bring a hot dish, L through R bring a salad, and S through Z bring dessert, or sometimes W through Z if they're trying to lose weight. And there you are, Mr. Blue, Mr. B for blue, without a hot dish to your name, just kind of a thin, wan smile on your face getting thinner by the moment. It can be hard. Pastor Inkvist was feeling kind of blue about Christmas, has been all week, being sort of in the vortex of it there at Lake Wobegon Lutheran Church, and I guess that was why he delivered his fairly surprising sermon this last Sunday. It's his annual The True Meaning of Christmas sermon, which he is obligated to preach once a year, and they do across town at Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility, too. Father Emil gives his. A minister is supposed to do this during Advent at some point, stand up and throw a little cold water on it. As the presents start to mount up in the closets and an avalanche of cookies starts flowing out of the kitchens, a minister is supposed to stand up and say the true meaning of Christmas is spiritual and talk about redemption and talk about the needy and remind people that you can't buy Christmas, it's not for sale. Well, he was going to deliver his true meaning of Christmas sermon on December the 2nd, but he was too depressed. So instead he delivered one on joy and wonder and on the coming of the child, even though he was none too happy with his own children, who had been campaigning shamelessly since Thanksgiving for some incredibly extravagant gifts. and was none too happy with himself for having gone out and bought them. These were the sorts of gifts you can't buy down at Scoglin's Five and Dime. You've got to drive 30, 35 miles into a big discount store to buy them. And so he did that on a Friday night. Drove all the way into the discount store and walked in and almost turned around and walked out. there was four acres of merchandise in a huge hangar under fluorescent lights that are designed by scientists to drive people slowly berserk. And all around him were hundreds of people slowly going over the edge and pushing shopping carts around, picking up rather well-packaged junk, way too expensive, and loading up their shopping carts with this thing driven by some sort of urge, some instinct, some voice inside them that seemed to say, no payments till February. children begging, pleading, whining, parents pleading, threatening, going crazy. Sales clerks looked like they were in the eighth round of a badly mismatched fight with bad headaches just looking for a place to fall. Pastor Inkvist got the stuff fast, but he had to spend a half hour in the checkout line under those lights, mysterious deadly rays passing through his body. And it was a long drive home in the dark to think about it and to think, why for Christmas am I buying a video game called Annihilation? Why? Who's in charge here? Who's running Christmas? Why is this happening? He got home. It was Friday night, Saturday morning. He got up and he nailed the sermon together. And Sunday morning last, he stood up in the pulpit decorated with red and green paper, construction paper chains made by the Sunday school classes under the Advent candles on their ring in a sanctuary that smelled of pine boughs. And he preached his true meaning of Christmas sermon. And he stared them down. And he said that the purpose, the true and only purpose of Christmas is redemption. And if Christmas doesn't serve that purpose, then we ought to throw the whole thing out whether it's still running or not. That is the one, the only purpose of it. That was the beginning, the middle, and the end of his sermon. That was it. And he read it off a page in a very emphatic voice. and when he turned to page two and paused a moment for the next paragraph he heard the voice of a child crying and he looked down and it was his own little boy sitting down there in the fourth row looking up at him with tears running down his cheeks and his mouth hanging open and his lower lip quivering as if he were saying oh no daddy no please no I'll be good I promise it's not easy being a minister preaching to your own family. Sometimes it makes Pastor Inkvist envy the rule of celibacy over across town. Sometimes stand up and preach on mercy and forgiveness and forbearance and look down at a woman who has known you in your worst moments. and has known you during some pretty incredible arguments, including one that isn't quite over yet. Preach a good, hard gospel sermon on the true meaning of Christmas, and there's your own little children thinking that this probably applies to them. Well, it's not easy. It wasn't easy to put his sermon aside and wing it for the next 10 minutes. It certainly wasn't easy. It wasn't the best sermon he ever gave either. But then the church goers of Lake Wobegon don't go in for comparison shopping on these things. And he used up some ideas that he was going to use the next Sunday, tomorrow. But he figured he had a week to think about it, so he changed direction. And he started talking about the three wise men. The three wise men are not the most central characters in the Christmas story. They appear only in the gospel according to Saint Matthew. But they are the only characters who came from a great distance, and so they are the only characters in the Christmas story whom we may think perhaps, probably were Gentiles. and therefore conceivably the only ones who might have been Lutheran. Some Bible scholars believe that they were. At least one of them was Lutheran because the three of them came bearing gifts. They brought gold, frankincense, and myrrh. And myrrh, in case you weren't aware of this, is a casserole. It's a hot dish. It's made from macaroni and hamburger, some tomatoes in it, and it comes from the pronunciation in the Middle East and also in the Midwest of hamburger as hammer, thus its name. So we think that one of the wise men probably was Lutheran and may have intended to stop at a department store and pick up something expensive like gold or frankincense. But his wife, who was a wise woman, said, no, take this. They'll probably be hungry. Take some myrrh. Just bring back the dish. So they might have been our guys, at least one of them. They came from a great distance away following a star, which for wise men was not really very smart when you think of it because a star is up in the sky. And so the sense of direction that you get from a star is going to be a little bit general. And which stable the star is right over kind of depends on where you're standing. at the time. So these guys were navigating on faith. They took a long trip based on less hard information than a person might like to have, but they came through and they found Christmas on faith. They actually found it, and so may we, even though it may be even more of an adventure for us today than it was for them back then. Because there's so much artificial light from Christmas and so much reflected light that there's kind of a general glow, and it may be hard to pick out stars in the sky. just as it is in the city, even a very bright one. But it can be found and it can be followed and we can find it. There is hope for us. This was his sermon of last Sunday. He said it better than I just have, but probably it doesn't need to be said at all. And then church was over and they all filed out into the light, into the snow. go home, have some pot roast, have some chicken. Kind of a shock to leave church sometimes after a sermon. You kind of expect that the world will have changed, you know, and that you will walk out the door into the light and be in the new Jerusalem. And then to walk out the door and to be in Lake Wobegon is kind of a disappointment. And to look and see the old vacant lot across the street, the weeds growing in it that nobody has cut. See the dogs running around in the streets, some of them hauling garbage around. See the deaner's house still unpainted after so long, and the two old junker cars still in the backyard, the refrigerator with the door off. see the back door of the sidetrack tap, the scene of so much sickness and misery over the years. But it can be found here. Even with all that, we can still find it, because after all, it is where all the women are strong. All the men are good looking and all the children are above average.
The story of the C-Major Chord.
1985-12-28 1988-12-17
1984.12.09 Star Tribune
Archival contributors: Ken Kuhl/Michael Owen