The Paper Sack

Keeping Christmas traditions alive is getting harder with each passing generation. For instance my wife and I both grew up in Montana – but that’s about where any commonality ends.

My family enjoyed live Christmas trees. Across the street from our home in Roundup where I lived in central Montana grew fir trees and aromatic cedar bushes. South of town were the Bull Mountains and northwest were the Snowy Mountains, covered with nature’s Christmas trees. My oldest brother, who lives near Billings, continues this tradition today as he and his family head to the Snowy Mountains every year around Thanksgiving to cut their tree – one among thousands. However, my wife grew up in Glendive on the eastern Montana prairies so an artificial tree was her family choice, and we have an artificial tree also.

She grew up in a Catholic family where I grew up in a Protestant family, so it was hard to carry-on the tradition of midnight mass.

But there is a tradition that we both believe in…it may seem odd, but it’s a brown paper sack full of fruit, nuts, homemade and store-bought candy and placed under the Christmas tree for all the family members celebrating Christmas in our house.

As far as I know, the tradition began with my grandfather. His name was William, although most people called him Bill. He was born at the time of the Civil War and raised in Tazwell, Virginia, and lived there until he was about 50. That is when he left his first family and moved to Montana with his second wife in the early 1900s. Along with my grandma, they homesteaded and began to raise his second family.

In all, they had 10 children. My dad, Willis, was their third. Born in 1920, my dad’s formative years were in the Depression. So when he received a sack full of goodies for Christmas, chances are that was his only gift under the tree. Dad was raised on a farm called Strawberry Acres along the Musselshell River west of Roundup.

After graduating from high school and working on nearby farms, my father served in World War II before returning to his hometown as a miner in the underground mines. By the 1950s, he began working in the oil fields as a roughneck and in the early ‘60s he joined Continental Oil Pipeline, which feeds Canadian and Montana crude oil to the Conoco refinery in Billings. I don’t know how much you know about oil fields, but they don’t close down for Christmas. Therefore, we never knew if we were opening presents at night or in the morning…it all depended on Dad’s schedule.

Working on a pipeline was a steady job, but working on oil rigs was not. As a roughneck, dad had a job as long as the rig was drilling, but if the rig was torn down and sitting on the edge of town, Christmas could be a lean time.

I had two brothers and two sisters in my family. I was the youngest, so it’s hard to say that I ever went without anything. My parents or an older brother or sister always made sure that there were presents under the tree for me…but I could depend on my Dad for making sure that there was also a paper sack with an orange, an apple, peanuts and mixed nuts, homemade almond bark, gum drops and candy canes.

Dad simply said that the sack was a holiday tradition. His father made sure that each of his 10 kids had one, and my Dad said it was important that his kids had one also.

Growing up, I probably enjoyed my Viewmaster or Etch-A-Sketch more than I did my sack of goodies – which was a little too sensible to be fun. But it was there, it was something that you could depend on – whether dad was working or not.

As Belinda and I began our family 26 years ago in Mandan, we also wanted to bring traditions with us that we had in our parent’s homes. This was hard. One reason was because we liked to spend Christmas with our parents, even after we were married. So we often opened our gifts on December 23rd and then left for Glendive to spend Christmas Eve with her parents before driving on to Roundup for Christmas Day with my parents. The last Christmas we traveled to Glenidve and Roundup was in December 2005. My mom died in June 2006 – and part of our tradition died as well.

This year, like the five Christmases past, there will be five of us celebrating and opening presents at our home. Belinda and I have two sons. They will be home for Christmas, and we will also be celebrating with my Dad, who is now a spry 91 years old.

He has lived with us since July 2006. With mom’s passing, it was easier to have him move with us to North Dakota than to teach him to cook, clean and wash clothes. The idea of putting him into a care center didn’t appeal to me because Dad has always been one who put family first. Just as his mother lived with us when I was growing up, I wanted my children to have that experience of living with a grandparent. Some teenagers may think they are immortal, but believe me, a teenager who lives with a grandparent does not.

With a grandparent and children in the same household, that makes me part of the “sandwich” generation, an expression I’m not very fond of.

To Belinda and I, our children and my dad complete our household. And this year for Christmas, besides all the presents that dad will receive from his five children, his 13 grandchildren and five great-grandsons …there will also be a present that he’s accustom to seeing – a brown sack with his name printed in crayon. The sack full of goodies under the tree this year will be one of five. There will also be one with my name on it, one with my wife Belinda’s name, one with my oldest son Derek’s name, and one with my youngest son Scott’s name.

The tradition will continue…not because it’s the only gift we can afford, but because that sack will remind all of us of how thankful we can be for the year we enjoyed and for the prosperity we as family have experienced.

This one Christmas tradition is how the Steve and Belinda Van Dyke family will continue to tie our holidays of the past with our future.