Texas, My Texas: Musings of the Rambling Boy

41. THE SEVEN TIMMERMANN SISTERS

+41 + THE SEVEN TIMMERMANN SISTERS T HE CO MI NG of C hristmas always makes me think of the seven Timmermann sisters of Geronimo, Texas, except that I think of them with initial capital letters: the Seven Timmermann Sisters, like the Three Fates or the Nine Muses. The sisters.Willie May, Estella, Mellita, Wanda, Meta, Hulda, and Theklabecame famous in the 1950s for the Christmas decorations they created in the farmhouse they all lived in at Geronimo, which is a small community between Seguin and New Braunfels. Unlike the garish urban Christmas decorations of the fifties, these did not involve brightly-lit yard displays, plastic Santa Clauses climbing into chimneys, or reindeer on the roof. Instead, the Timmermann sisters spent a week each December setting up an enormous C hristmas tree in their living room and surrounding its base with an artificial landscape that reached out to cover most of the living room floor. When it was finished, they would open their house to visitors, and each year several thousand people would come by to view the scene and share coffee and German C hristmas cookies with the sisters. LIFE magazine discovered them in the mid-1950s and carried a picture story about them, and for the next thirty years no C hristmas was complete without a feature story in some magazine or newspaper about the seven Timmermann sisters. They became as much a part of the landscape of Central Texas as Hallie Stillwell was of the Big Bend. The Timmermann sisters were born between 1895 and 1916. None ever married, and none ever left the farm they were born on, a farm their grandfather, Heinrich Timmermann, established shortly after he came to Texas from Germany in the I840s. For many years they operated a florist shop on the farm, serving customers in New Braunfels and Seguin. Articles about them always included a photograph of their bedroom, a large T-shaped room with seven beds in it, and a photograph of them in the matching outfits they wore to Seguin High School football games and on other occasions. That photograph usually showed them posed in ascending order of age on a staircase. Some articles mentioned the cookbook they published, Seven Silver Spoons, which was narrated by a dishpan named Dian. Their tree was usually a cedar, cut on private land somewhere in the area, and the cutting was a ceremony in itself. In a 1973 article in the San Antonio Express, George Carmack described that year's tree-cutting expedition. The seven sisters went out to a farm near McDade, where a neighbor had picked out a tree for them, in a convoy that consisted of their station wagon, two pickup trucks, a trailer, and several chainsaw-wielding neighbors. Before the tree was cut, the group built a fire and had a picnic around it that consisted of sausages, sauerkraut, and camp potatoes. The tree was brought back to the Timmermann house and decorated with ornaments (some of which had been in the family for a hundred years), candles, and freshly baked cookies. After the tree was decorated, the sisters laid out the landscape around it. This consisted of honeycombed limestone rocks covered with Spanish moss which cradled miniature buildings and a hundred or so carved wooden figures. There was an elaborate nativity scene, and a flowing waterfall with real water representing the Guadalupe River, and a model of the orphanage established at New Braunfels in the late 1840s by the sisters' great-grandfather on their mother's side, Pastor Louis Ervandberg. Wooden figures around the orphanage represented the pastor, his wife, and the twenty orphans who lived there. The figures, which were carved for the sisters by a family in Germany, had movable arms and legs and were dressed in clothes sewn by the sisters. Their great-grandfather's orphanage played a large role in the sisters' family history, their idea of themselves, and their Christmas celebrations. They would tell its story to every reporter who interviewed them. In 1844, Ervandberg was retained by the founder of New Braunfels, Prince Carl of Sohns-Braunfels, to minister to the shiploads of German immigrants who were landing at Indianola on the Texas coast and coming to New Braunfels in wagon trains. So many people died of dysentery and cholera on that trip that Ervandberg and his wife established the West Texas Orphan Asylum on the banks of the Guadalupe...