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.

Home sweet home!

Our utility bill came in the mail the other day, and, frankly, I was surprised. In Mandan, Montana-Dakota Utilities Co. is a combination utility. That means it provides both natural gas and electricity.

There have been a number of changes over the past 26 years we have lived in our home. When we were first married, we didn't use to heat our basement in the winter. However, when the boys got bigger, we needed to make sure the heat was on upstairs and downstairs.

We also didn't have a TV set in every room of the house or as many computers and other electronic games and gadgets. When we bought a new energy-efficient refrigerator a few years ago, we didn't throw out the old, less efficient one. Instead, we moved into the laundry room downstairs where it runs 24 hours a day to keep a few jars of jelly and pickles cold, just in case we'll ever eat them. Scott also has a little refrigerator downstairs that keeps his water and Gatorade chilled.

Now, to be truthful, you must judge your energy use not only by the number gadgets but by how much energy is actually used. For instance, the energy hogs in our house are not the electric blender or toaster. It's things like heating your home and water that really adds up. Also washing and drying your clothes take a lot of energy, and our laundry room seems likes it's always busy.

We heat our home with natural gas and we have a 50-gallon natural gas-fired water heater...a little larger than most. About five years ago, we also had central air installed. Now, living in North Dakota, you know that a good furnace is a necessity, but not so with air conditioning, except for about three months in the summer.

If you don't mind tossing and turning in a bed of your own sweat, then no need to invest in central air conditioning, but if you like sleeping in pleasant temperatures, than it's a must. As we got older, the need for night-time comfort became greater.

So, there's no denying that we've got plenty of appliances that use a lot of energy. That's why I was surprised to see that our MDU bill had actually gone down, significantly!

We're on Balanced Billing, which means that our monthly utility bill is roughly the same every month. A few years ago, our monthly bill was somewhere north of $200. Now it's down to $140. I could chalk this up to Derek moving out, but Scott still lives in our basement and he showers long enough for two or three people. Also, he keeps our basement as toasty as he wants it. Luckily for us, hot air rises so his heating the basement makes our floors warm in the winter.

So what gives? Did the price of electricity and natural gas suddenly drop? No, not really. It's true that energy in North Dakota is quite affordable. The majority of our electricity comes from coal, so we have cheap power. And natural gas prices have remained reasonable, especially since there's so much oil drilling going on in western North Dakota and natural gas is found in conjunction with oil.

However, the real culprit for our lower energy bill has been the improvements we have made to tighten up our home. The first move was to replace an old drafty window in dad's office. Belinda's father and her uncle replaced it with a fiberglass framed, triple-pane, energy efficient window. It was such a nice improvement that it wasn't long before we wanted to change all of our old windows for new ones. Luckily, our church was undergoing the same type of renovations and a couple of retirees went to all the window retailers in Bismarck and discovered that the best value came from Pella. So we went with Pella Windows ourselves, and didn't have to do all the legwork.

Then we replaced our two outside doors and had a craftsman hang the new energy-efficient doors. Suddenly, we didn't have the drafty windows and old metal doors. Our home not only looked better but it also became a lot more comfortable during North Dakota blizzards. Then last year after Christmas, we had some more insulation added to our ceiling. Unfortunately, my brother and his family were visiting at the time, so having people blowing insulation into your attic is a bit odd, but it all worked out in the end.

Yes, the improvements cost some money, but we were able to save several hundred dollars on our taxes by claiming the improvements as deductions.

Add it all up, and our home is more energy efficient, comfortable and cheaper to maintain...plus we have more appliances to make life a little easier. It's all good. And it's like giving ourselves a $60 a month raise.

Tips for the job interview

Recently, we've been conducting a number of interviews as we look toward hiring a college intern to help with graphic design. The process of interviewing candidates brings back lots of memories...of interviewing past candidates and also at times when I've been the one looking for a job.

Let's start with the easiest interview. About six years ago we were hiring a college intern and I had one person apply. So I had to do one interview and when it came time to pick the best candidate, it was easy. Luckily for me, he turned out to be a great hand.

How about interview jitters. Let's face it, we all get them. But there really is no reason to be scared. The employer needs you as much or more than you need the job. Also, very few people make it a career to be the one conducting interviews, so often the person conducting the interview is just as nervous as the person answering the questions.

The questions aren't hard. The hard part is keeping your answers short. How many of us remember the first question asked, "So, tell me about yourself?"

Remember that this is an open-ended question...intentionally. There are a lot of things that the interviewer can't ask you so there's no reason to voluntarily bring the up. Can you imagine the surprise if the job candidate actually said something like, "I'm a career child molester who has just spent five of the last 10 years behind bars. I didn't get out for good behavior, but was released because of prison overcrowding."

That's not the answer anyone would expect. Basically, you can answer the question by simply saying, "I'm a person who believes in hard work, family values and an appropriate salary for a good day's work." You might want to shape this answer in a way that more clearly identifies you, but that's the answer the employer is looking for.

You don't need to tell them your age, your religion, your wife's name, how many kids you have or anything else that you would just as soon keep to yourself.

There's a couple of other questions that get some strange answers. One of them is "What would co-workers say about you?"

No need in airing the family laundry here. Something short and to the point will do just fine. "They would say that I'm punctual, professional and like to get my work done right the first time."

However, there are others that will let you know that they suffer from procrastination, partying and trying to cram too much fun and frivolities into an eight-hour day of work.

Another question along the same vain is, "What would you say a weakness of yours is?"

A couple of sentences is all anyone is looking for as in: "I'm shy and find public speaking difficult." That's a good answer unless you are looking for a job in public relations or broadcasting.

Finally, at the end of the interview, you are asked if there is anything you would like to ask.

At a minimum, find out when they hope to pick the person for the job. You might also want to ask about salary, benefits, etc....but I've noticed a lot of applicants seem like they are too tired to think or talk at this point, so they just pass on this opportunity.

So, Steve's words of wisdom are simple. Keep your answer short and don't volunteer a lot of information that  can easily be misconstrued.

Watch where you're shoving that transducer, lady!

Have I mentioned that I don't like doctors, nurses, dentists and other medical technicians very much?

Probably outside of work, these are all nice people, but when they are working....it's another story. They become scary monsters who really know how to hurt people.

When I was in the hospital last March, I learned to hate the nurses who would come and put the world's largest needles in the tops of my hands for the IV's. First of all, they seemed to have a hard time finding a vein that wouldn't collapse on them. So I would have to be poked and poked and poked. Eventually, my hands turned black and blue.

But that pales in comparison to the torture chamber I was in yesterday.

I was getting my kidneys checked over with an ultrasound device. To do this, they first had me fast from midnight until mid-morning. I'm actually getting used to this drill so it's not a biggie any more. A lot of my blood tests require fasting.

Two weeks ago, I was in for an echo cardiogram, which is really nothing more than an ultrasound of your heart, so why should I expect anything different when it comes to the kidneys?

Well, it's because the kidneys seem to hide better.

The technician grabbed her transducer and started punching me in the stomach with it. Well, my first reaction was to tighten up my abs.

This, she told me, was a no-no. "You have to relax," she said, "or I just have to push harder."

Really? Is that possible. Well, I tried to relax, but that's hard to do when your covered with gel and a transducer is being pushed into your abdomen.

So, for an eternity, it seemed, she was squeezing gel on me and then poking her transducer under my rib cage -- front and both sides.

Now, on a horse, this area is called the flanks, and if you want a horse to buck, just go ahead and punch them in their flanks.

I didn't buck, but I certainly knew how the poor horses felt.

I asked her why she kept punching me with that transducer. "It's like a flashlight," she said. "Our window to the kidneys is through the liver and the spleen."

You wouldn't believe my sense of relief when she told me she was done. I felt like pounded round steak.

But my "pain" isn't over with yet. I still have to wait for the results from the doctor to find out if anything is wrong. I hope not, but I really hope I don't require another ultrasound on my kidneys.

The transformation of a Democrat to a Republican

This confession will shock a few of my loyal readers, but when I got married in 1985, I was a Democrat. I married a Republican so we used to kid each other on election day that our votes merely cancelled each other out. However, it was during the Clinton Administration that I switched parties. This makes it a little lonely at times when I discuss politics with my family, most of whom have remained loyal to the Democratic party.

I, however, made a clean split and there is very little of the Democratic Party's platform that I would feel comfortable supporting anymore.

So the questions arise, "Who changed? Was it me or the party?"

Probably both to some extent, but certainly I changed more than the party. I felt like I could be an FDR New Deal Democrat, but I couldn't be a Clintonite Democrat.

During Clinton's years in office, I was really turned off by his seemingly endless succession of sex scandals with women other than Hillary. Bill's affair with an intern in the Oval Office was the last straw. But you can't blame the party for something that is Bill Clinton's fault.

However, I did feel that the "Progressive" agenda being pushed for by the rank and file Democrats in the 1990s no longer squared with my way of thinking. So, after pondering it for a while, I decided that I liked Republicans and conservative thought better. Now I've got to admit, I couldn't stand Rush Limbaugh when I first heard him 20 years ago. And I don't like him today. I also don't like his MSNBC counterpart Ed Schultz. To me they are both blowhards who try to talk louder than their opponents. Still I find comfort in the conservative agenda of lower taxes and government getting out of the way of companies trying to do business.

This is not to say that I liked everything President Bush did during his eight years, but I was really glad that he was in the White House on and after September 11 and not Bill Clinton. Did we really need to send troops into harm's way in Iraq? Probably not, but I remember when both Democrats and Republicans thought that Saddam Hussein held weapons of mass destruction. That feeling is similar to today when both parties feel that Iran is close to building atomic weapons, if they don't have them already.

In the 2008 Presidential election, I felt I had no real choice between moderate Republican John McCain and liberal Barack Obama. That was the election where I felt like staying home; however, I voted for McCain, whom I felt was the lesser of two evils.

Since that time, the presidency of Barack Obama has galvanized my position in favor of Republicans. I especially felt betrayed when the Senate under the leadership of Harry Reid and the House of Representatives led by Nancy Pelosi were radically changing my country, and not for the better, in my opinion.

So I was happy when the House tilted in favor of the Republicans after the 2010 election and John Boehner became Speaker. I'm not at all disappointed in the gridlock that is Washington, D.C. However, I am looking forward to the 2012 election when hopefully Mitch McConnell becomes Senate Majority leader and a conservative Republican takes the White House.

I would like to see a return to less government and more emphasis on family values. Call me old fashioned, but I still believe that a paycheck is something to be earned and not something to be shared.

I've been proud of my country since I was born, not just since 2008 when Barack Obama was elected President. I would like to see a little more common horse sense played out in Washington, D.C., such as "living within our means" and making government "accountable to the people" and not vice versa.

Yeah, I know that the United States is still a great country, but I would like it to be a greater, stronger country with low unemployment and well thought out domestic energy program.

My mantra comes from a Merle Haggard song popular in the 1970s, "If you don't love it, leave it." But I'm reminded of an old line from 1930s humorist Will Rogers, "We live in the greatest country on earth. Heck, even the people who hate it don't want to leave."

That rose bush used to be second base

When the late Harmon Killebrew was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, he recounted the story of his mom complaining to his dad that their lawn was dug up by Harmon and his siblings playing sports. Harmon recalled his dad saying, "Mom, we're raising boys, not lawn."

That thought has come to me many times over the years. Now our back yard has strawberries where the backstop against the fence used to be and a rose bush grows where second base used to be. The pitcher's mound is hardly perceptible any more.

One of the tell-tale signs that the backyard used to be a baseball diamond is the chalk markings on the inside of the garage. To this day, the score board still stands out on the east wall. The concrete blocks are covered with names and numbers representing the players and runs scored.

We had some wild games...back in the day. Scott would strike a pose at the plate like Chuck Knoblauch, the former rookie of the year for the Minnesota Twins. Derek swung for the fences like Twins Hall of Fame centerfielder Kirby Puckett. I was the perennial pitcher.

Our backyard isn't very big so we had to make some rules to go along with the game. One of the rules was that if you hit a foul ball into the garage, it was an out. If you hit a ball into the fence, that was like hitting the ball to the shortstop because the fence and a good shortstop can both stop a ball.

We also used furry, yellow tennis balls instead of hard baseballs. That was because the back of our house and two windows were only about 15 and 20 feet away from home plate. Line drives would come screaming off the wooden bats of the boys and smack the windows. However, we never suffered a broken glass pane.

The trick, of course, was to hit the ball over the fence between our yard and the city park. First, there was no one in the park to catch the ball. Secondly, the park is built on a hill so a well struck ball can travel a long ways down the hill side, especially if it makes it to the street.

The worst thing that ever happened in a backyard baseball game occurred on a foul ball that went straight back of home plate. Most of the time when the boys were little, the house next door was deserted, but the house beside that one was inhabited by an old, unfriendly lady who seemed to despise children and especially ours.

Anyway, I came home from work and was met by the boys who told me that a foul ball had landed in the lady's backyard. The lady grabbed the ball and took it into her home.

So, I marched over to her house and knocked on the back door...the one the lady used. Her daughter was visiting her so I told the daughter what had transpired. The daughter heard my story and then went back into the house. In a couple of minutes she came back with a furry, yellow tennis ball and handed it to me. She apologized for her mother and I was on my way.

Back in our yard, I'm sure the boys were delighted to get the ball back and might even have been surprised to see me go get it. After all, it wasn't as if it was the only tennis ball we had. Our garage was full of tennis balls. However, I wanted to make a point with the lady that she could no longer get away with being rude to the boys.

As the years passed, the boys got bigger and somehow our backyard kept getting smaller. For a while, the boys would go to the nearby elementary school playground to play baseball. Then they got interested in other things...girls, among them. And it seemed as though baseball was nothing but a memory.

So when I look out and see the rose bush where second base used to be, forgive me if I smile. We now grow grass in the backyard, but once upon a time we were raising little baseball players.

What do you want to do when you grow up?

Most of us heard that question a number of times during our youth. My answer was that I wanted to be a sports reporter that covered the New York Yankees. Actually, I wanted to be the center fielder for the New York Yankees. At the time, Mickey Rivers was the center fielder and I figured that I was at least as good as him. But, alas, no baseball scouts ever came to see the Roundup Miners play baseball, so I was left for the next best thing...sports reporter.

That's why I wrote sports for our hometown newspaper when I was in high school. That's why I went to the University of Montana to study journalism. I even studied Russian as a foreign language when I was in college so that I could cover the 1980 Olympics in Moscow. You remember that Olympics don't you? That's the one that the United States didn't participate in because President Carter boycotted it to protest the USSR invasion of Afghanistan.

So what's a young grad with a journalism degree to do? Well, the Yankees hadn't come calling so my first job out of college was as a reporter in Beach, North Dakota. I was a general assignment reporter and covered everything from writing wedding announcements to covering an oil field explosion. After six months, I had had enough of Beach and I think Beach had had enough of me. We agreed to part amicably.

However, I stayed with newspapers for another couple of years until I made the swap to public relations in 1983, moving from the newspaper in Baker, Montana, to Mid-Rivers Telephone Cooperative in Glendive, Montana. From there, I moved to Mandan in 1985 with my new bride and a new job with MDU. I had another job transition in 2001, and actually worked for six months as the education reporter for the Bismarck Tribune before going to work for my present employer, the Lignite Energy Council.

So for 27 or so years, I've been in public relations. I never did get to write sports or cover the New York Yankees as I had wanted to...but my point of this blog and my question remains..."What did you want to do when you were growing up?"