Ben Logan - Christmas Remembered

What drew me so irresistibly through Ben Logans The Land Remembers?... its nostalgia for a world he makes me wish Id known.

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times

This is a book that encourages the reader to listen to his own thoughts. Some collective memory says that this is all familiar, that we ourselves have experienced it.

Time

[A] refreshing vacation from the demands and problems of modern life. A book to be cherished and remembered.

Publishers Weekly

Ben Logan is strikingly successful in recalling his own boyhood world, a lonely ridge farm in southwestern Wisconsin.

The Christian Science Monitor

This touching book promises to resonate. Ben Logan manages to capture the Christmas spirit and deftly connect people with the holidays.

Peter Annin, author of The Great Lakes Water Wars

A beautiful little book for all seasons, not just Christmas.

Dave Wood, Minneapolis Star Tribune

This book glows with a sort of tough tenderness.

St. Paul Pioneer Press

This sense of honesty, of deep emotion scraped clean of sugar-coating, is what makes Logan worth reading.

The Milwaukee Journal

Christmas Remembered is a gift priceless in nature and value.

Thanks, Mr. Logan.

Wellsboro, Pennsylvania, Gazette

Ben Logan

With a New Foreword by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

Published in 2010 by Voyageur Press, an imprint of MBI Publishing Company, 400 First Avenue North, Suite 300, Minneapolis, MN 55401 USA

First published in 1997 by NorthWord Press

Copyright 1997, 2010, 2011 by Ben Logan
Foreword copyright 2010 by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
First hardcover edition published 1997. Second hardcover edition 2010. Digital edition 2011.

All rights reserved. With the exception of quoting brief passages for the purposes of review, no part of this publication may be reproduced without prior written permission from the Publisher.

The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowledge. All recommendations are made without any guarantee on the part of the author or Publisher, who also disclaims any liability incurred in connection with the use of this data or specific details.

We recognize, further, that some words, model names, and designations mentioned herein are the property of the trademark holder. We use them for identification purposes only. This is not an official publication.

Voyageur Press titles are also available at discounts in bulk quantity for industrial or sales-promotional use. For details write to Special Sales Manager at MBI Publishing Company, 400 First Avenue North, Suite 300, Minneapolis, MN 55401 USA.

To find out more about our books, visit us online at www.voyageurpress.com.

Digital edition: 978-1-61060-270-9
Hardcover edition: 978-0-7603-3853-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Logan, Ben, 1920
Christmas remembered / Ben Logan ; foreword by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt.
p. cm.
Previously published: Minnetonka, Minn. : NorthWord Press, c1997.
ISBN 978-0-7603-3853-7 (hbk. w/jkt.)
1. Christmas--Wisconsin--History--20th century. 2. Logan, Ben, 1920---Childhood and youth.
3. Logan, Ben, 1920---Family. 4. Wisconsin--Social life and customs--20th century. 5. Farm
life--Wisconsin--History--20th century. 6. Wisconsin--Biography. I. Title.
GT4986.W6L64 2010
394.2663097750904--dc22

2009033164

Edited by Danielle Ibister
Design Manager: Katie Sonmor
Designed by Elly Gosso
Cover designed by Wendy Lutge
Front cover by SuperStock
Illustrations by Amy Quamme

Printed in the USA

Contents

Foreword

By Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

Ben Logan takes the reader far and wide in Christmas Remembered, his mind-and-heart journey into the past to connect the me of childhood and the me of now, as he puts it. He takes us to Chicago, Palermo, Sicily, and Tunisia, North Africa, where he celebrated lonely Christmases during Naval service in World War II but somehow found solace in the company of fellow servicemen.

He takes us to Mexico in his postwar wanderings, where he experienced the tropical Christmases of a very different culture, and on a ranch in the Mexican state of San Luis Potosi found his wife-to-be, Jacqueline. He takes us to a pre-Revolutionary house forty miles north of New York City, where he and Jacqueline spent twenty years rearing their three children and shaping each annual Christmas ritual around the search for the perfect tree.

Yet for all his travels thither and yon, what radiates most warmly in this touching book are the authors childhood Christmases alone with his parents and three brothersand Lyle, the hired mandeep in rural Wisconsin, housebound in the coldest winters. And in one of the brightest of those long-ago memories it isnt even Christmas. A mighty blizzard blows in, sending the thermometer on the milkhouse to forty-two below zero, frosting the windows with delicate, fast-growing ferns, surrounding the house with snow piled up almost to the top of the chicken coop roof, confining the family to rooms lit by kerosene lamps, cutting it off from the world.

The cheeriness of this isolation is something of a paradox. In the postcard images of Christmas we carry around in our headsfor better or worse, no matter what our religionsthe season is a time for reaching out, to friends, to family members, to neighbors, to the community beyond. And community is indeed important to Ben Logans memories. He recalls his childhood task of dragging his sled loaded with Christmas cookies to the neighbors, and being hugged by a childless woman heartbreakingly grateful for his company. He remembers a holiday pageant at the local schoolhouse, when a boy dressed as an Indian grabbed for his falling head feather while creeping onstage, in the act mistakenly letting loose the arrow from his half-drawn bow, so that it shot up to the ceiling and fell down onto the piano keyboard, playing one sharp pinging note. He mentions the time a neighbor boy came by to wish us Merry Christmas, ate a full dinner with us, then excused himself saying he had to get home for Christmas dinner.

Still, something about the aloneness in that winter Wisconsin landscape lends this book its greatest power. It makes you feel most attached to it when the author and his family are most isolated. It is warmest when the world is coldest.

What does this have to do with Christmas? Not what we usually associate with that ritual. Ben Logans memories are not about religion. True, his Wisconsin Norwegian parents embraced their Protestant heritage. Decorations were essential, and the singing of carols, and the birth of the Christ child, represented in the laying out of a crche. But divinity is not at the heart of his Christmas memories.

Nor does Christmas seem to have mattered much as the hope for seasonal change, a celebration of the turn of the season, when the days at last have begun to get longer instead of shorter. Quite the contrary; it is almost as if the darker, the colder, the shorter the days, the less of the sun, the better.

Nor were his Christmases about the presents. Well, they werent