Texas, My Texas: Musings of the Rambling Boy

34. TEXAS-GERMAN CHRISTMASES

+34+ TEXAS-GERMAN CHRISTMASES WH EN I LI V ED IN Round Top, over in Fayette County, C hristmas was an explosive event. Round Top was a German community and Germans, at least in Texas, like to hold on to old customs . When I moved there in 1970, even though my neighbors' forebears had come from Germany to Texas in the 1850s, I was the only person in town who had not grown up speaking German. Shortly after I arrived, a new Lutheran pastor suggested a minor innovation in the church's annual congregational picnic-something like serving strawberry ice cream in addition to chocolate and vanilla- and he was told in no uncertain terms, "The way we're going to do it is the way we've always done it." It sounds even more final in German. That could have been a motto for the whole community. Until the 1950s, wedding invitations in Round Top were delivered in what my neighbors called "the old-fashioned way." This meant that the bride's father and brothers and their friends mounted up on horses whose manes and tails had been braided with red ribbons and rode from farm to farm to invite their neighbors . They carried with them a big cardboard shield on which had been written, in German script, the words "You are invited to the wedding." It was considered impersonal and impolite to send out printed invitations. By the time I moved there, this custom had fallen by the wayside, but weddings were still followed by dances which were public events, advertised by posters, at which the bride's father was expected to provide beer, barbecue and music for four to five hundred people. The dance was always opened by 126 +a grand march in which an older couple who knew the ropes led the guests around the dance floor in an intricate pattern that terminated with everyone in a circle around the bride and groom. The band would then playa waltz, and the bride and groom would have the first dance together while everyone in the circle swayed in time to the music. There was still one family in the community, the Zwernemanns, who practiced the custom of asking friends to sit up all night in the living room with the corpse when a family member died. The Zwernemanns were a large family, and whenever a Zwernemann died, other folks were reluctant to answer their phone for a few days, for fear they were being tapped for corpse duty. But to go back to Christmas. Most families in Round Top kept Christmas in the old-fashioned German way, which meant that Christmas started not on the day after Thanksgiving but on Christmas Eve. The holiday was foreshadowed, however, by a visit from Santa Claus on December 6, the Feast of St. Nicholas. Before World War II, Santa Claus would go from farm to farm on the night of the sixth, accompanied by his sidekick, Black Peter, whose face was blacked with cork and who took down the names of boys and girls who had been bad during the year, candidates for lumps of coal and switches. By the 1970s, a more benevolent Santa Claus, without Black Peter, paid a visit to the town square on the sixth and asked children what they wanted for Christmas. Santa Claus was always played by Milton Schlabach, a little round pink-faced fellow who was a retired farmer and made cedar porch swings in his spare time. One year word got out among the younger children just before the event that Santa Claus was not really Santa but Milton Schlabach. Milton found out about it and gave his beard and Santa suit to his wife, who was built exactly like him, and then paraded around the square in his bib overalls while Mrs. Schlabach took the children on her knee, and everyone went back to believing in Santa again. On the afternoon of Christmas Eve the men of each family would go out in the woods and cut a Christmas tree, usually a cedar. While the children were distracted, the tree would be smuggled into the house and set up in the living room, the door of which was then closed. A male relative, usually an uncle, would climb into the room through an unlocked window and decorate the tree and arrange the presents under it while the rest of...