Stevie Beck, Greg Brown, Philip Brunelle, Butch Thompson Trio, Prudence Johnson, Garrison Keillor, Leroy Larson, Minnesota Scandinavian Ensemble, Peter Ostroushko, Vern Sutton. Kate Wolf,
This Year I'm Staying Home ( Greg Brown ) I Want to Feel Christmas ( Greg Brown ) Give Yourself to Love ( Kate Wolf ) Lilac Bush and the Apple Tree ( Kate Wolf ) Safe at Anchor ( Kate Wolf ) Log Cabin Home in the Sky ( Kate Wolf ) The Eyes of A Painter ( Kate Wolf ) Baby it's Cold ( Greg Brown , Prudence Johnson ) Minnesota Wassail Song ( Garrison Keillor , Greg Brown , Prudence Johnson , Peter Ostroushko ) Bobby Casey's Hornpipe ( Stevie Beck ) Star of the County Down ( Stevie Beck ) Fanny Power ( Stevie Beck ) Santa Claus is Coming to Town ( Vern Sutton , Philip Brunelle ) Christmas Carol ( Vern Sutton , Philip Brunelle ) Winter Wonderland ( Peter Ostroushko ) The Bells Ring At Christmas ( Leroy Larson , Minnesota Scandinavian Ensemble ) I'm So Glad Its Christmas Night ( Leroy Larson , Minnesota Scandinavian Ensemble ) Nissa ( Leroy Larson , Minnesota Scandinavian Ensemble ) Winter Wonderland ( Stevie Beck ) Oh How A Rose 'ere Blooming ( Philip Brunelle ) Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (latin) ( Philip Brunelle ) Joseph Dearest, Joseph Mine ( Philip Brunelle ) Angels We Have Heard on High ( Prudence Johnson , Greg Brown , Peter Ostroushko )
Bertha's Kitty Boutique (Garrison Keillor - No present for Puff?) Chatterbox Cafe ( Special reduced holiday hours.) Don's Barbershop (PHC Cast - There is only one haircutting day left before Christmas.) National Council on Wellness (PHC cast - Scrooge) Powdermilk Biscuits (Garrison Keillor - Christmas poem: The host's costume (Elvis style theme)) Sidetrack Tap (Closed for the Sons of Kunute Christmas Party) Skoglund's Five and Dime (Headquarters for all of your last-minute Christmas homemade gifts.)
This transcription may have been auto-created from the audio. Can you help improve the text? Email us!
Well, it has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, Minnesota. My hometown's kind of the... Lull before the storm up there, my heavens, just to think of them. All those exiles returning home, probably just arriving about now for a week of Christmas back home. Grown-up children with children of their own come back to spend a week at the folks' house. What surprises they have in store for them. Boy, I'm almost glad I'm not one of them. Yes, sir. Go back to your folks' house, you never quite know what age you are. Forty-two years old one moment and the next minute you're eight and can't be allowed to mash potatoes without direct supervision. Oh, it's quite an experience, and for all of it to happen right in front of your own little kiddos, too. Some of them going to church tomorrow for the first time in a real long time. I wonder if they'll remember what to do. Go back to the folks' house, and the downstairs has always changed so much, you know, from when you were a kid. They've got nice stuff now that... They couldn't have when you were a kid. They got that shag carpeting that you rake with a rake, you know. Got the recliner chair and color TV and they got that couch in the lilac velour and Nice driftwood lamp and a glass coffee table. They never would have had that before. And they're leading a different life, the old folks are. You can see that right off. Dad walks in, across the carpet, sits down in his recliner, watches TV. Your mom goes after him with the rake, you know, and... Clears up his path there. The old guy sits around quite a bit, but he still has a lot of advice for you. But then you go upstairs, and upstairs is unchanged. It's a museum up there. It's the Childhood Interpretive Center. Everything is there. Your little room's up there under the eaves, just exactly as if you just left moments before. Same old wallpaper on the walls and the same linoleum on the floor and your old books, your old landmark books and your model airplanes hanging there just waiting for you to come back. And your penance up there on the... That's penance spelled with a T, P-E-N-N-A-N-T-S. Pennants. Pennants on the wall. The other penance comes when you go to bed and you're a grown up married person but you sleep in one of those little tiny narrow beds that you had when you were a kid and you lie in it and Your teenage body is embossed in it still. You don't quite fit it anymore. Your wife sleeps over where your brother used to sleep. It's a strange, strange thing going back for Christmas. But I want to talk about that. In fact, I don't want to talk about Christmas in Lake Wobegon because I've done that and Christmas is personal. It's your business. I don't want to inflict all of my childhood Christmas memories on you. Christmas belongs to you wherever you are or whatever you are doing. And in fact, I feel like it would be all right if you turned off your radio and gave yourself a little peace and quiet before Christmas. It would be all right with me if you did that. This is not required listening. Other Saturdays, we insist that you listen. But you could miss this and still pass the course. I want to read you a letter instead that I received from an old high school classmate of mine. He left Lake Wobegon about the same time I did. Came back to marry Elaine Halverson at the Lutheran Church and hasn't been back much since except for funerals. He moved out east, doing well out there, and got this letter from him on Friday. He writes, Dear Classmate, We haven't seen each other for a long time. When you mentioned last week the three-quarter-inch plywood Christmas decorations that our shop class made in 1956, which are still hung over Main Street, it woke me up from a nap and reminded me that I had promised Elaine I would finish paneling the room in the basement before Christmas Eve, which is when her folks are coming to sleep in it. I began that project two years ago, last November, when I bought a truckload of cedar paneling because there was a deal on it and let the lumber sit for a couple years, thinking, I suppose, that it would season. But the humidity in the basement is high, and it got a little warped to where the tongues won't fit in the grooves without a lot of force. So I was only able to do a panel every week or so this fall, and now I'm working like crazy to get it done. Elaine has already rented a double rollaway for her folks, so there's no turning back now. It's the sort of rollaway that if you lie on your own side, the bed flips over. The Halversons are a twin bed couple, and they are going to find this quite a challenge, I think. Like sleeping on the high wire, especially with the mister outweighing the missus two to one. And I think they'll probably be too busy to notice if the paneling is finished or not. But I intend to finish it anyway, maybe in memory of our shop teacher, Mr. Scheffelmacher, who said, never put off till tomorrow what you can do today. That motto never made good sense to me though. I can think of 40 or 50 things that can be very well postponed in most cases. And marriage is one and Christmas is another. both of which are getting a little thick around here. For Elaine, Christmas is the final exam in Motherhood 101 and counts two-thirds in her grade for the course. The units on cooking, baking, card mailing, gift purchasing, gift wrapping, tree decorating, and bringing joy into the hearts of others by keeping a house neat. She is passing all of these with straight A pluses. I haven't done very much at all except buy her some cookware and buy a wreath from a Boy Scout. She thought I paid too much for the wreath, but he was an older Boy Scout and maybe had children of his own. I don't know. I paid ten times that for the cookware, five oven casseroles made from earthenware with doves of peace on the covers, made by potters who live in the country and who I think charge more for the fact that they think pure thoughts as they work. I'll bet they have a simple and wonderful Christmas there on the farm and that their children are overjoyed by a few homemade toys, an orange, and a bag of macrobiotic candy. I envy them. I wish I could feel overjoyed at Christmas the way I used to. I would pay any amount of money to feel that way again, and maybe that's my problem. My father believed that Christmas would bankrupt him and put all of us in the poorhouse, and he mentioned this often during Advent. My mother believed that the Christmas tree would burst into flames and burn down the house. So we never ate a meal without her jumping up at least once and saying, did you unplug the lights? Still, I loved Christmas all the years I was growing up, and think perhaps their anxieties made Christmas even more wonderful for me. Perhaps my sitting around now and saying, I don't know, I just can't get into the spirit of it, makes my own children love Christmas as they do. My little girl kneels by the tree. She pokes all the presents, shakes them, massages them, and listens to the mysterious sounds they make. At supper, we light Advent candles, or rather the children do. They fight for this privilege. And on Christmas Eve, Elaine sits at the piano and we sing a few old carols, always winding up with Silent Night. She does a wonderful thing when she does this. I know the children will remember it all their lives, but to me it's only a bunch of songs. Maybe I've sat in too many lobbies at Christmas and ridden too many elevators. Or maybe it's because I sing bass, the most boring part of all. About a year ago last January, I thought I had prostate cancer. That is, the doctor noticed something there that he didn't like, so he sent me to a urologist who, as it turned out, liked it okay. But meanwhile, 22 hours passed during which I said to myself many times, God, you've got my attention now. I'm never going to be bored or angry or unhappy again. I withdraw all complaints. I woke up in the morning feeling pretty cancerous and almost went and put my arms around Elaine and said, honey, you may not have your old pal around much longer, but I couldn't do it. My urine looked green. There was white stuff on my tongue. My hands were cold and purplish and the hair on the backs of them looked like it had died a long time ago. It was a bad morning. The urologist's lobby was empty, which makes me feel uneasy about a doctor. And he was more jovial than he should have been, dealing with a potentially dying person. But I accepted his good news and left and gradually forgot all about it. I'm not a dramatic man. I don't enjoy drama. And when drama heads my way, such as a play about a guy who dies young from prostate cancer, I'm just as happy when I don't have to attend. Christmas is so dramatic, which maybe is why it gives me the willies. I've gone along pretty well since last January, leading a life of constant small miracles and surprises. I have a low threshold of miracle. When the cat jumps on my lap, I feel touched. A great meatloaf can surprise me or a graceful exchange with a person in an elevator. So it's hard when Christmas comes and seems to promise us the time of our lives. And when my brother-in-law comes and I know that he is going to holler, hey, I love it, somewhere between 16 and 26 times. I keep track of his, hey, I love it, by filling my left pocket with Monopoly houses and moving one to the right pocket for each, hey, I love it. He's sort of the Sammy Davis Jr. of fire sprinkler salesmen. And when I open the door and see him and I say, Merry Christmas, Jer, and he says, hey, I love it, The little bit of Christmas spirit I've been tending in my heart goes out. Elaine says, you could learn to like him if you just made an effort, which I suppose is true of so many things, liver, slush. Sheetrock, light beer, heavy metal, the electoral college, jare. But it's hard to forget, having been a kid once, how effortless Christmas was back then, how it simply floated in like a magnificent boat up to our shore, and we all jumped on. Thirty years ago I got a tin parking garage with tin gas pumps out front, and the cars drove into a little elevator which you cranked up to the parking level, and they drove into their parking spaces. All of the drivers had names which I wrote on their space in orange crayon. and they always parked there. One was Mr. Parker, a millionaire, who I charged $1,000 a day, but he always paid me because he had lots. It was good times there at the Christmas garage, and after the customers left, the boys would get in the cars and race them around and do rolls and flips. Sometimes now when I drive into a parking ramp, I imagine that the giant hand of a little child is rolling me along toward my spot. Maybe Elaine imagines that this house is her dollhouse and that she could pick me up and adjust my movable arms and legs and put a tiny hammer in my hand and get me to finish the basement. My sister had a house and a family of dolls that she was devoted to, and we boys used to fly our B-17s in on bombing missions, carrying tons of little Lincoln lugs. The poor Peabody's, Phoebe and Pete Peabody and Little Petey and Eloise, would be sitting around their elegant dining room, eating a delicious dinner. Upstairs, their plastic beds permanently made, the house so neat, when the familiar hum of aircraft was heard from the stairs. Their great protector was gone, off to piano lessons. They were helpless. They sat in pathetic dignity as the deadly missiles crashed in on them. As I recall, their Christmas tree looked a good deal like the one we have now. It was a primary target. Maybe this explains why I'm spending so much time in the basement these days. I suppose this letter strikes you as strange, coming from a Methodist minister. But you know, we all lead complicated lives, even those of us who have the answers. And Christmas is a complicated time of year. However, I am doing my job on all fronts. I am greeting my long-lost parishioners, that phantom congregation that comes in December and fills the church, and giving them their semi-annual sermon. I am bracing myself for Christmas itself, and the man who, hey, he loves it, And today, Tuesday, I am going to shop at Woolworth's, and I'm going to bead on some more cedar paneling. And if I have time, I might make a star out of three-quarter inch plywood and hang it up in our hallway. It would appear to lead me toward the living room or toward the back door, the garage, and the car, one or the other. God bless you and yours. Good luck. Merry Christmas. If you go back home, say hello from me to anyone who looks like they need it. Your friend. Well, I hope he... Star leads him to the living room. As we said last week, we can do it. We can make something of it because, after all, all of the women are strong and all of the men are good-looking and all of the children are above average.
1984.12.16 Star Tribune
Archival contributors: Frank Berto, Ken Kuhl/Michael Owen