A 1996 Christmas letter to Grandma ~ December 24, 1996

David Heiller

Dear Grandma:

We were sitting on the bed watching a Charlie Brown Christmas Thursday night. It’s a good show, with good lessons about people and Christmas.

Charlie Brown can’t find the true meaning of Christmas. For some strange reason he gets depressed around Christmas time. He thinks he should be happy, but he isn’t.

He thinks he doesn’t have any friends. Everyone puts him down. There’s commercialism all around.

The kids and I were soaking all this up, saying “Yeah, you’re right” to ourselves. I thought of Mollie, who had taken a verbal beating from a girl on her bus. I thought of the Tickle Me Elmo doll, which some fine folks are selling for up to $500. People can be ugly.

Then Cindy came into the room and asked me to fix the toilet paper dispenser. It had come off the wall, screws and all.

A toilet paper dispenser doesn’t just fall off a wall. Someone had to have pulled it off, probably by accident.

“Who did it?” I asked. Neither of the kids would say. “The TV goes off until I find out,” I said. And that’s what happened.

Charlie Brown’s good lessons disappeared with a click, and some other lessons took their place.

I won’t rehash the next hour. It wasn’t fun. The mood in the house changed. Ι got crabby looking for an honest answer. The kids protested and stormed to their rooms and struggled to find a way to be honest and save face. All over a stupid toilet paper dispenser.

This isn’t the way Christmas is supposed to be, I thought with bitterness as Ι put new anchors in the sheetrock and remounted the dispenser. What happened to the tranquil scene on the bed, soaking in a Christmas classic? I was starting to feel like a cross between Charlie Brown and Ebenezer Scrooge.

Then one of the kids confessed. That broke the tension. I explained that it was all right to break something by accident. I would not have been mad.

“Yeah right.”

“It’s true. Just be honest. I’ve broken things before. I know the feeling.” I meant it, and the kid knew it. I was not mad that the dispenser came out of the wall. I was mad that they didn’t tell me about it.

We talked it out, and peace returned. It was too late for Charlie Brown, but it’s never too late for peace.

My point in all this, Grandma, is that Christmas isn’t a magical time. We’d like to think it is. A time for soft snow to fall, and Christmas carolers at the door, and feel-good shows on TV. And no family arguments about who broke the toilet paper dispenser.

Life goes on around Christmas, and life includes family squabbles. It includes working long hours, and worries about your children, and wondering how you’ll pay the bills, and a million other concerns.

These things are all a part of the happiness and contentment that we yearn for especially at Christmas-time. It’s pretty obvious, I know. Why am I telling you this? You know it already. You were a wise woman. You saw your share of good and bad in your family, which was my family.

I guess I’m telling myself, reminding myself. It’s called putting things in perspective, taking the bad with the good, mixing them up in the right recipe, living a good life, not having unrealistic expectations at Christmas.

Wow, I covered a lot of bases there.

Generally, the sweetness of Christmas isn't lost,
but occasionally mislaid.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to Christmas. I hope other people are too. If they aren’t, if they just want it to be over so life can get back to normal, that’s fine with me. But the toilet paper dispenser will still come off the wall no matter what time of year it is.

I’m looking forward to church on Sunday too. I guess that’s a part of Christmas! I asked Pastor Owen if we could sing, “A Happy Christmas Comes Once More.” All the Danes in Askov know it. For some reason it skipped this old German.

But Pastor obliged, and it’s in the service. When we sing it, I’ll think of you.

Love, David

1989 Christmas letter to Grandma ~ December 21, 1989

David Heiller

Sunday, Dec. 17, 1989

Dear Grandma:

We had our Christmas program at Sunday School today. I thought you might like to hear about it. You would have enjoyed it.

Miss Malika and her Christmas dress.

First the good news. Mollie and Noah said their parts without a hitch. Noah said, “Grant us now a glad new year” just as plain as could be. Mollie said: “But a lowly manger was his place to sleep.” The bow on her belt even stayed tied, and she only waved to me once.

The other kids were something too. Like Matt Peterson when he said, “He was wounded for our transgressions; He was bruised for our iniquities.” Matt said that last word correctly. He did NOT say “inquinities”. Matt was worried about that. When he practiced it around the Peterson home, he would say “inquinities.” Matt is the kind of kid who could come up with a pretty funny definition for “inquinities.” But not in front of a full church.

His big sister, Connie, had the toughest part of the pageant. She stood in front, jammed her left hand into an imaginary pocket, looked at her feet, then straightened up, and said her bit, four long sentences, 81 words, without a stammer. Now that was a REAL Christmas Program part, the kind I remember when I was a kid and you were watching me. Was I ever that good in sixth grade?

I don’t know why I like Christmas programs so much, Grandma. Remember how you used to like to sit in the waiting room of the parking ramp when we went shopping in LaCrosse, just to watch people pass by? Christmas pageants are like that to me. You can watch children pass by. Wearing new sweaters and dresses, or stuffed in double breasted suits and red ties, or blue jeans and AAU tennis shoes. And some of those kids, like Natalie Booker, so tiny she surely couldn’t memorize her part, yet she did, and better than most of the others. Some with changing voices, like Jeremy Kosloski, a 13-year-old bursting out of his clothes. Some suddenly pretty, like Corrine Cronin in her blue dress, growing up before your eyes.

Then there’s the music. Bev Peterson played the piano, and the notes just poured out when she did “Jesus, Name Above All Names.” The kids sang great too. That surprised me, because sometimes forget how well kids can sing, when they want to. Mona Sjoblom, the director of our Christmas pageant this year, asked me to play the guitar on “Away in the Manger,” and I gladly said yes. It was a different version, with a lovely melody that’s just about as good as the original. Even people who grumbled about the new­fangled rendition complimented me afterward.

What a joy it was to sit in front of those 25 kids and listen to them sing. Loud, clear voices, not all on key mind.you, but that was all right. They haven’t learned yet that they don’t all have perfect voices. I wish they never would. No one in the church complained.

One voice rang out over the rest, Joey Gibson’s. You can always pick Joe’s voice out at our Sunday School. Just follow your ears. It cuts through the others, it climbs to the high notes and reaches them. It tinkles like a bell on a Christmas tree, when angels get their wings. It’s a pure voice, a beacon that mixes with the other voices to make those four songs extra special.

Grandma, we pulled off a darn good Christmas program again. Isaac Sjoblom and Jonathan Zuk didn’t fight like they did in prac­tice. Tory Johnson missed a word, but went back to the beginning and said it perfectly. April Williams read half her part, then heaved a sigh and looked up and said perfectly: “God sent His angel Gabriel to tell Mary that she was to be the mother of His Son.”

Noah and Malika with cousin Sarah.
  Christmas, 1989.

Time stood still for an hour, and this crazy, busy holiday season suddenly didn’t seem quite so crazy and busy.

Even Mollie behaved. She didn’t come down to me when I was playing the guitar, like she did in practice, three times. And like I said, she only waved to me once, and the bow on her belt stayed tied. She tied it herself. Guess she’s growing up too.

And after she said her part, she came to me and sat on my lap. We hugged, and then we sang, “What Child is This?” That was pretty close to Heaven in my book.

I guess you know all about that though.

Love, David

A 2005 Christmas letter to Grandma ~ December 21, 2005

David Heiller

Dear Grandma,

How are you doing? I thought of you last Wednesday, when I watched a downy woodpecker attack the suet in one of the bird feeders. It was in the midst of a respectable snow storm, and the birds were going crazy at the feeders: nuthatches, chickadees, sparrows, and Cindy’s favorite, a tufted titmouse.

Tufted titmouse

I remember how you used to like feeding the birds, and would concoct some fancy meals for them with melted suet and peanut butter poured into half a grapefruit peeling. Something like that. It seemed like a lot of unnecessary work to me, but I liked how much joy it gave you to cook it all up, carry it to the clothesline and hang it up with strings. Then we’d watch the birds gobble it up, just like that downy did last Wednesday afternoon.

Snow really brings on feelings of Christmas, doesn’t it? I know the holiday is a lot more than that, we mustn’t forget it, but I like how snow slows things down a bit, makes us stop and think and maybe even do a good deed or two.

All those Care and Share volunteers, they trudged through the snow to package and distribute gifts for needy families during the storm. Even Alex Betz, who was just a day shy of his 12th birthday, helped out, and he sure could have been doing something else on his snow day from school.

Downy feasting on suet

Greg Foellmi brought Mom some soup and a hunk of venison. His older brother Dave kept a watchful eye on Mom’s parking space in front of the house, and swooped in with his city snowplow to clean it off when she went to get the mail.

Mary Dolle brought us a huge coffee cake at work, and Beth Stempinski did the same with a pan of fudge. The treats were delicious, and so was the thoughtfulness!

There’s a lot of kindness going on. Triggered by the snow? Well, that’s just my theory. It just goes hand in hand with Christmas.

There’s a lot of talk about Merry Christmas these days. You won’t believe it, but some people are upset that that phrase wasn’t a part of the United States President’s Christmas card. Or that clerks at some stores are not supposed to say it, out of respect to the people who don’t celebrate Christmas.

Those omissions seem silly to me, but not as silly as the people who are up in arms. It doesn’t matter what you say. It’s the spirit behind it. Some people are even making political hay out of it, calling it a liberal conspiracy, although I don’t know if George and Laura are going to own that. Things have really changed in politics since you’ve been gone, Grandma, and not for the better.

But enough of those catty slams, as you used to say. I’ll take the Christmas spirit from the birds and the woods and the Foellmis’ good deeds. I’ll take it from the songs at the elementary school concert last Monday, especially when the fifth graders sang Let There Be Peace on Earth, We really need that spirit.

I’ll take it from the cards on the walls from family and friends. The pictures of new babies and their parents who are so proud. I haven’t paid attention to whether the cards say Merry Christmas or not. I never will. I cherish them all. And yes, I remember your Christmas orange this time of year, the one that has lived for about 52 years in my imagination and twice that in yours. I even bought a whole box of them from Michelle Meyer for her FFA fundraising project. All right, I bought them before Christmas was on my mind, but there they sit, on the kitchen counter, and they taste even better how, with snow on the ground;

Merry Christmas Grandma! And Happy Holidays too.

Love, David

Christmas cookies are food for thought ~ December 25, 1986

David Heiller

“Christmas does not end on December 25—boom, Christmas is over. Christmas ends on January first.”

Cindy sits in the next room, reading a magazine in the warmth of a wood stove and Christmas tree lights. Those are her words, spoken to a cynic with writer’s block in the kitchen. The writer can’t think of anything to write about, and it’s Christmas, for goodness sake. All he can do is sip at his cup of tea and devour a plate of cookies that he begged off his wife. He begged her not to give them to the kids’ grandparents, not all of them. Peanut-butter-on Ritz­crackers-dίpped-ίn-melted-almond-bark cookies. Give Grandma and Grandpa an embroidered hanky and shaving cream like when we were kids. Save the cookies for home.

Cookies. The man at the typewriter sits forward now, the blur lifting from his eyes like mist on a river in the winter. Cookies, he thinks as he reaches for another hunk of almond bark crackers. That’s what Christmas is all about.

On Thursday morning, the week before Christmas, my wife hopped out of bed at 4 a.m. to go downstairs and make cookies. Yes, I said hopped. Only the prospects of making cookies at Christmas time will cause Cindy to hop out of bed at 4 a.m., after five hours of sleep.

Half an hour later, our son Noah crawled into bed next to me. Ι looked at the clock—4:30. I could hear pans banging in the kitchen; smell the wood stove crackling in the living room. Ι could almost feel the warmth of the Christmas tree lights filling the dark night.

Noah is only three and a half years old, but he could hear and feel these same things. I reached over to give him a hug, but he was sitting up, looking at his mother’s empty spot, her bare pillow.

“I have to go downstairs, Daddy,” he said, sliding off the bed.

Noah's daughter, is the same age as Noah
was in this column,  and Mariah working on cookies.
The circle goes on

“Come on, Noah, don’t you want to cuddle with your dad?” I asked in a sleepy voice. Nothing tops having your son nestle with you, like two bears in a den on a cold December morning, under a heavy quilt and an electric blanket.

“No,” Noah replied, disappearing down the stairway.

While I turned back to my dreams, mother and son set up an assembly line for chocolate cookies that would fill Santa’s elves with envy, and with hunger. Cindy and the dough for the chocolate cookies all ready. Noah stood on his high chair next to her, with the very important job of rolling each round ball in a bowl of sugar.

There are many ways to roll chocolate cookie dough in a bowl of sugar. It takes a grown up about three minutes to dash out several dozen with quick, thoughtless movements. Not so with kids. That’s why no two Christmas cookies taste the same, even though we make the same kind year after year. Noah rolled each ball carefully in the sugar before setting it delicately on the cookie sheet. He demanded perfect balls, carefully rolled. If Cindy placed too many un-sugared balls before him, he told her to slow down. It confused him.

“That’s too fast Mama,” he would say. Finally they compromised, and Cindy was allowed to have two—and only two cookies waiting while Noah did the rolling.

Patience is an important ingredient in a good Christmas cookie.

With three pans going, the house was soon filled with the smell of chocolate cookies. I rolled over in bed, thanking back 30 years ago, when I was my son. I would walk upstairs to my grandma’s house. She would have cookies spread out on her kitchen table, in bowls, on the counters, in the cupboards everywhere. There were sugar cookies with colored frosting and hard silver beads that I was afraid to bite into. There was Russian tea cakes covered with a strange, sweet white powder. There was candied fruit cake, which I wouldn’t eat on a dare.

And there were chocolate cookies. Grandma made them a special way. They were thick, maybe an inch high at the center. Yet they had a heavy consistency, with almost a crust on the outside, so that to a poor kid in the 1950s, biting into one of Grandma’s chocolate cookies was about as close to a candy bar as he came all year. Chocolate cookies were my favorite.

Christmas cookie delights and family delights.

I rolled over, open my eyes, looked at the alarm clock. Six o’clock. Time to get up. I closed my eyes again. Lying in bed at Christmas time with the smell of chocolate cookies doesn’t happen every day.

Then I heard footsteps coming up the stairs. The steps were careful, determined steps from a boy with a mission.

Noah stopped by the bed, held out his hand. “Here Daddy,” he said.

I grabbed the chocolate cookie that he offered. It was still warm. “Thank you,” I said. I bit into the cookie. It was soft, thick, a taste all its own.

It wasn’t quite like Grandma’s. But it was every bit as good.

Christmas cookies and A Wonderful Life ~ December 11, 1997

David Heiller

One sign of Christmas hit me at work on Monday, December 8. Hazel had brought peppernuts to work for our coffee break. I said, “You know it’s Christmas when Hazel brings peppernuts to work.”

Peppernuts are like miniature gingersnap cookies. They are about the size of a nickel. They must be hard to make, because they are so small. Yet Hazel makes them by the hundreds every Christmas.

I don’t want to go overboard describing Hazel’s peppernuts. Α man could get in trouble doing that.

Besides, Hazel is still mad at me for going overboard about her in last week’s column, when I wrote about what a nice sewing lady she is.

But you haven’t really lived till you’ve tossed a fist full of Hazel’s peppernuts into your mouth and washed them down with a cup of coffee. Wow.

My wife, Cindy, makes a cookie that always reminds me of Christmas too. They are chocolate cookies, chewy and soft, with just the right amount of chocolate.

I still make Grandma Schnick's chocolate cookies 
using her recipe card every Christmas.

She got the recipe from my Grandma Schnick. Cindy still uses the recipe card that Grandma gave her. It must be a good feeling, taking out that old recipe card once a year and seeing Grandma’s friendly handwriting.

Grandma only made chocolate cookies at Christmas, and Cindy has kept with that strict regimen. She subscribes to the rule that absence makes the heart grow fonder and the stomach growl louder.

The chocolate cookies remind me of Grandma and the happy days of youth, and they remind me of the happy days, still ongoing, of my adult life with Cindy and the kids.

YOU KNOW IT’S CHRISTMAS when you watch the movie, “It’s A Wonderful Life.” It’s another thing that can be consumed only at Christmas, at least in our house.

Just as absence makes the heart grow fonder, I believe another saying is equally true: familiarity breeds contempt. You don’t want to overdo a movie like “It’s A Wonderful Life.” It’s too precious.

I think about this movie quite a bit throughout the year. I even have some of the passages memorized.

Like when the mean bartender says, “Listen, Mack, we serve hard liquor to people who want to get drunk fast, and we don’t need any characters to give the joint atmosphere.” Don’t you know a few bars fit that description?

Or these:

When George Sr. says to his son at the supper table: “You were born old, George.” I know some people that seem like they were born old.

When ΖuZu says at the end of the movie: “Teacher says when a bell rings, an angel gets his weeeeennngggs.” That kid is just too cute.

When George realizes he has fallen for his future wife: “I don’t want any plastics and I don’t want any ground floors and I don’t want to ever get married.” This saying is followed by a kiss in which Cindy and I mash our cheeks together with the force of a wood splitter, like in the movie. Maybe that’s how people kissed in 1934. I’ll have to ask Red Hansen.

I usually say these passages for laughs. But there’s one saying that strikes close to a part of all of us. It first comes when George Bailey calls Mr. Potter a “warped, frustrated old man.” It’s true. Potter is a cynical, greedy miser. He’s not working for the betterment of his fellow man, as George is.

But then Potter cruelly turns the phrase back on George when George comes seeking help at the end: “What are you but a warped, frustrated YOUNG man?” Potter asks, and you wonder if there isn’t a bit of truth in it.

George is frustrated. He never left Bedford Falls. He’s stuck. Maybe he never did want to get married and spend his life working at a broken down savings and loan.

Sometimes I think things like that about myself. We all get in ruts. Most people have a time or two when they wonder if the world wouldn’t be better without them.

Most of us can usually pull out of those doldrums and count our blessings, like George is able to do at the end, with the help of his many friends.

Every so often someone can’t. That’s sadder than words can express.

I’m glad it’s Christmas, glad for peppernuts and chocolate cookies and A Wonderful Life.

Bring on the snow ~ December 8, 2004

David Heiller

The sound woke me out of a restless sleep early Monday morning. A big vehicle moving north on Hillside Road, going nice and slow, with a deep rumble and scrape.

I had to smile. A snowplow.

I followed the sound with my ears, then got up and looked out the bathroom window as it passed by the house. The ground was covered with white.

Snow had been spitting down the night before, but I didn't have much faith in the effort. And in fact it wasn't a big snow, just a couple inches of wet stuff.

A pre-plow walk in a wintry wonderland.

But it's a start.

Some readers might think I'm crazy to wish for snow. It's like wishing for bad luck or illness to some folks. But to me, winter doesn't seem like winter, nor Christmas like Christmas, without snow,

Grandma's chocolate cookies don't taste quite right. The birds at the feeders don't seem as happy. The woods look bleak and gray.

But add that white to the ground, and the air lightens up. Things look brighter in more ways than one. I get a spring in my step not unlike the one that hits in April when the snow finally leaves. Go figure.

Some readers might think I'm crazy to wish for snow. It's like wishing for bad luck or illness to some folks. But to me, winter doesn't seem like winter, nor Christmas like Christmas, without snow,

Grandma's chocolate cookies don't taste quite right. The birds at the feeders don't seem as happy. The woods look bleak and gray.

But add that white to the ground, and the air lightens up. Things look brighter in more ways than one. I get a spring in my step not unlike the one that hits in April when the snow finally leaves. Go figure.

I don't like to over-analyze things, but a couple other things come with snow. One is a connection to the past. It's partly rose-colored glasses, but those days as a kid sledding and ice skating and ice fishing, those trips to church for the candlelight service, even the Vikings games on TV, they all had snow in them. The first snowfall of the year, especially in December as the Christmas season hits full-force, reconnects me to that.

But mainly snow helps me feel that things are just the way they are supposed to be. We live in Minnesota. It's supposed to snow in December. Bring it on! That's the way God planned it, if you will.

Seeing that new snow is somehow reassuring, at a time when the world needs a little reassuring.

Last but not least, snow gives us something to complain about. Good-natured grumbling goes a long way to making a Minnesotan happy.

So that covers it. Let it snow.