Bio: Roehl, Evelyn - Holiday Recollections (1981)

Contact: Kathleen E. Englebretson
Email: kathy@wiclarkcountyhistory.org

Surnames: Roehl, Sanger, Happe

---Source: Marshfield News-Herald (22 December 1981)

Although my Dad was considered to be a very good farmer and my Mother was a very frugal housewife and hard-working farm helper, the depression years caught them in debt and they came very close to losing their farm as so many others actually did.

So, Christmas some years consisted of a much appreciated pair of mittens, a piece of dark flannel for making dresses and undercoats (slips) for my sister and me, and maybe a toothbrush or some other necessity.

But, one year when the danger of "foreclosure" was past, the shop in the room across the hall from our upstairs bedroom was locked, Santa's helper, my Dad, was busily at work at his big workbench making a special Christmas for his two little girls.

Finally, Christmas morning came, we rushed down those stairs to find sitting in the living room on the varnished hardwood floor that my Mother was so known for, the dark stained table my Dad had made and tow Apple Brand chairs trimmed with yellow. The stickers on the bottoms said they had been made in Appleton, Wisconsin, thus the Apple Brand, we figured! I can still see the table set with tin dishes and the chairs all sitting below the library table in the center of the room, on which stood a short artificial tree.

Thirty-six years ago, both my sister and I married. It was decided that I would take the table and one chair; my sister would take the factory-made doll bed from a later more prosperous season and her chair.

Later, my three little girls played with the table so much that we thought it necessary to enamel it yellow and top it with black speckled linoleum. When they grew up it was relegated to the attic of the garage and was forgotten when our only son married, bought our farm and we moved away. Later, they moved, but took it along. There I spied it sitting in their garage. By that time we had already made our 3-year-old granddaughter a toy box and a china cupboard to match each other so I offered that Grandpa and Grandma make her a new table (to match those two) and I would get the table back "that my Daddy had made for me when I was little like her!"

So, that is the way it has come about that the paint and linoleum have been removed and the table has been put back into its original condition. It now sits in out living room, surrounded by one Apple Brand chair which has been rejuvenated from the walls of our basement shop, another little red chair for which we had saved the pieces from the days of our three little girls, and a wicker rocker given to me by my Godmother, Lottie Happe, as a gift when I was little. Our seven grandchildren are almost as thrilled with all of it now when they often come as I was that Christmas morning so long ago.

The author of this story is Evelyn Roehl. She and her husband, Alvin, live in Spencer. She taught school for 22 years before retiring. Her parents were Ernest and Emma Sanger.