Man Faces First Christmas Without Wife

Christmas 2010 will be David Etling's first without his wife. The two would have been married for 52 years Dec. 3.

"She passed away July 23. It's been 162 days, but who's counting," he said. "Thank God I've got two sons and six grandkids and this place."

Etling spent the Thursday before Christmas at the having lunch with his friends, the Heppermans. They and others reminisced about Christmases past and the differences between now and then.

At 73, Etling remembers a lot of Christmases. The first to come to mind was the first Christmas he and his wife shopped for presents for their oldest son in St. Charles.

"We spent $5," he said. "That was his whole Christmas and we got a lot for that."

But he also reminisces of Christmases much farther into the past when he was the child and his parents played Santa. 

"I was the third youngest out of seven. Every Christmas Eve day my dad would walk the youngest three children to the movies. It was two miles away. While we were gone, the others would put up the tree," Etling said, adding that he didn't know what the family did when the older ones were younger.

"Other times my dad would put us all in his truck and take us to the round house in Akron, Ohio, where the trains would come in. They would change the engines, not the cars. That was always a big thing for us."

Etling's mother raised chickens and on the special occasion the family would receive a scrumptious meal. 

"I watched my dad ring the neck of that chicken and pluck the feathers and put it in the pot," he said.

Fierce snowstorms in Ohio would leave the children with amazing memories, Etling said. 

"We would go sleigh riding on those Radio Flyers. We would jump off of hills 10 feet high — we never got hurt."

Etling said childhood is lost today to helmets and knee pads and caution rules. 

"It's a nanny state," he bemoaned. "The kids are placed in bubbles and protected from everything. Two kids out of 1,000 get hurt and they put them all in helmets and knee pads."

Elizabeth Herzberg attended eighth grade in the building at 506 South Linn Street where the Green Lantern Senior Center is still housed. She was among the first students to attend for high school before the floor was even laid. 

"There were 400 people in the town when I went to school here in this building," she said. "All the business was done on Main and Allen Streets. The railroad built the town."

Herzberg remembers her daddy telling her stories about the wagon trains that traveled the then dirt-covered Highway N loaded with people and their belongings from St. Charles. The trip took them all day. 

She was born in a farmhouse on Highway Z across from Stone Meadows subdivision that her sister-in-law still lives in today.

Herzberg's Christmases were much different from today's. The Christmas tree did not go up until Christmas Eve and didn't stay long — just until New Year's Eve.

The first few years Herzberg can remember, the family clipped candles to the branches of the tree. 

"You always had to put the tree in a cool room so it wouldn't dry out," she said. "You had to have a bucket of water with a dipper next to it in case of a fire."

One particularly memorable Christmas for the 82-year-old took place when she was five. She awoke to a little table and one chair and a cupboard with dishes inside of it. 

"It was from my mother's cousin's daughter who had outgrown it, but I didn't know," she said. "I played with that for a long time."

And although her house didn't have any electricity until 1944, the family would go the Lutheran church in Wentzville to see the "electric" lights on Christmas. 

Herzberg said she doesn't remember knowing if others outside of her small town were shopping in big department stores, carrying on during the holidays like they do today. She had no radio or television, and certainly no Internet. 

"I do know Pearl Harbor happened on a Sunday. I didn't know until the next day at school when all the children were talking about it."

Connie Vaughn, 80, is a 52-year transplant from San Luis Valley, Colo.

Called "mouthy" by her own grandmother and ornery by her own admission, she and her husband — "a good lookin', hot-headed little French and Irish man" — raised seven children. She was born into a family of 10. 

Christmas was slim in those days, she said. Christmas trees were strung with cranberries and paper chains. 

"Growing up we were pretty poor — my mother had 10 children," she said. "We made our own adobes (bricks) for our house and put plaster on the outside, and we worked in the field for extra money. Daddy hardly ever got paid with money. He got paid in food and chickens. I grew up giving not taking."

Vaughn said although her gifts seem small and insignificant in 2010, they were everything to her. 

"We had enough to eat but all we got for Christmas was a new coloring book, a new box of Crayolas, a new tablet and a new pencil," Vaughn said. "We tied our socks to the tree and filled them with mixed nuts. If we were very lucky, we got an apple or an orange. We were happy and we were content. To me we were happy to just be together. We didn't want for anything." 

Vaughn recalls also buying things with coupons during the depression years that most people take for granted today, such as sugar, coffee, lard and even stockings.

Esther Schwede, now 87, shared a house eight miles south of with her mother and father, six brothers and sisters and her grandmother and grandfather. She remembers Christmas as the time of year she would get a new lunchbox.

Harold and Genette Hepperman, 65 and 64, respectively, remember Christmas time as a special family time. Today pales in comparison, they say. 

"I remember church and church programs and the real meaning of Christmas. It was more prominent then the financial and commercial aspects of today," Genette said. "Today everything begins in October. Back then it was after Thanksgiving before anyone thought about Christmas."

Harold, though very poor in those days, woke to find a Caterpiller bulldozer left under the tree the family had cut down itself. Some 60 years later, he still has that toy.

And Genette remembers an early Christmas with Harold just after their first child was born. They had been trying to have a baby for seven years. She said she dressed her son in a Santa suit and wrapped him up in a blanket, put him under the tree and took a photo of him. 

"It was my present to Harold," she said.  

Their son Loren is now 35.