Alaskan Christmases - Making do in the bush

By: Linda Edwards | Morganton News Herald
Published: December 15, 2008

No Christmas Tree!
Barrow, Alaska, is a world without trees. A fellow from the Artic Research Lab there joked that the tiny willow 'trees,' which hug the earth and appear to be moss, would make fine toothpicks. What is a Cheehako from North Carolina to do?
I turned to my 1962 Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalog. Instructions for assembly accompanied the four-foot green plastic treasure, which arrived via Wein Airline's twin-engine passenger/mail plane, having flown from Seattle, over the Gulf of Alaska, Anchorage, Fairbanks and over the Books Mountain Range.
Only one disastrous year did I use a real tree when were stationed on the Kuskokwim River where there was timber. The fresh, wild thing dropped its needles immediately indoors so the Sears tree has been in use for the following 46 years. It has become such a family tradition that the youngest of my five daughters asked me to leave to it her in my will.
Stockings
Santa Sears was not only called upon to fill my daughters' stockings, he supplied the new stockings also. These, too, are still in service, as pictured with my girls. The additional three stockings in the picture were filled that year in Kotlik for their honorary godfather, Father Plamonton, and the two VISTA volunteers, who all became part of our extended family. More recently they are filled for sons-in-law and grandchildren.
Classroom Christmas
Decorating our classroom for celebrating holidays in the bush, especially 46 years ago, took a lot of imagination, ordering and ideas books. I found the twisted crepe paper Christmas tree idea in an Instructor magazine all those years ago and used it all through my 23 years teaching in Alaskan bush schools. I continued to use the idea in the Morganton childcare programs that I organized and opened for Blue Ridge Community Action and a local church.
Annual Pageantry
In the tiny villages of perhaps 300, counting infants, school children and grandparents, the Bureau of Indian Affairs School classrooms were often the only spaces large enough to hold everyone for a Christmas gathering in the 1960s. Back then villagers generally depended on the teachers to organize their children to put on a play as the main, sometimes the only, village-wide celebration.
By our fourth year in Kotlik in 1967 we had already put on three Christmas extravaganzas with the same 58 first through eighth graders and were at the bottom of our barrel of ideas. Our energy and enthusiasm were sagging when we considered a fourth, so without telling anyone (students, parents or Village Chief) we decided to surprise the village with their first Walt Disney movie. We ordered Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and sat back to a relaxed Christmas season without all the nerves and stresses of rehearsing our scholars' parts and songs.
But the children began to question, "When are we going to practice the program?" When making parent gifts and classroom Christmas music, we smiled cunningly. The kids went home and told their parents, bewildered, "We aren't having a Christmas play."
The surprise was on the "naurista" (teacher)! Unbeknownst to us, the Mother's Club and Village Council organized their own performance, a hysterical spoof on teacher, which included all the outrageous habits and sayings that their children had brought home over the three and a half years of the Edwards' reign.
Somewhere they had located a Sherlock Holms pipe to mimic Mr. Edwards' smoking habit and used a half-gallon pitcher for his ever-present coffee mug. When the "class clown," an impish little woman playing the cut-up to the hilt, wouldn't sit down as instructed, the naurista actor shouted "Fifty push-ups," which was the last resort discipline for the older boys. After their entertainment our Walt Disney surprise was an anticlimax. It certainly was our most unforgettable school program, one I haven't been able to top.