A Prairie Christmas
Willa Cather's "My Antonia"
It’s puzzles me. This year when I think of Christmas, images of American pioneers and immigrants keep coming to mind. I’ve looked for passages about Christmas in books I’ve read, such as Willa Cather’s My Ántonia.
A few years ago on a trip home from out west, Sam and I stopped at Red Cloud, Nebraska, to learn about Willa Cather. We stayed overnight at the Cather Second Home on N. Seward Street.
Sam has reminded me that Willa’s Room was not available, being occupied by an opera singer who might have been performing at the Red Cloud Opera House.
Leaving town the next day, we spent an hour or two in one of the bleakest landscapes I’ve seen, the native Willa Cather Memorial Prairie. It was deserted, with some roadside informational signs.
It was this lonely place that inspired Willa Cather’s My Ántonia. The story is being told by a man named Jim Burden who remembers his youth when he knew the young Ántonia. I learned about the real Jim in a book we bought at the Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial.
Before Cather wrote My Ántonia, she went into Burden’s Store in Red Cloud and asked Mr. Jim Burden if he would do her a favor. “Why yes, Miss Willa. If I can.”
“Would you mind if I used your name in my next book?”
“Why, no. It would make me very happy.
Thus the name of Jim Burden was chosen for the narrator of My Ántonia, but the story is Willa’s own. “You can’t write imaginary things,” she said. “To have universal appeal, they must be true!”
In Part I of My Ántonia, Chapters XI and XII, it’s been snowing and the Burden family decides to have “a country Christmas, without any help from town”. Young Jim wants to give picture books to his neighbors, Ántonia Shimerda and her little sister Yulka. The girls’ family has had bad luck since arriving from Bohemia and they have very little money.
Jim’s grandmother brings gingham and calico out from her “ice-cold storeroom” and helps Jim cut fabric squares for sewn pages. Jim says in the book,
For two days I sat at the dining-room table, pasting this book of pictures for Yulka. We had files of those good old family magazines [with] colored lithographs of popular paintings… I took ‘Napoleon Announcing the Divorce to Josephine’ for my frontispiece. … Fuchs got out the old candle-moulds and made tallow candles. Grandmother hunted up her fancy cake-cutters and baked gingerbread men and roosters, which we decorated with burnt sugar and red cinnamon drops.
On the day before Christmas the Burdens’ hired man Jake “packed the things we were sending to the Shimerdas in his saddle-bags and set off of grandfather’s gray gelding”.
When he mounted his horse at the door, I saw he had a hatchet slung to his belt, and he gave grandmother a meaning look which told me he was planning a surprise for me.
That afternoon I watched long and eagerly from the sitting-room window. At last I saw a dark spot moving on the west hill, beside the half-buried [snow-covered] cornfield, where the sky was taking on a coppery flush from the sun that did not quite break through. I put on my cap and ran out to meet Jake. When I got to the pond I could see that he was bringing in a little cedar tree across his pommel. He used to help my father cut Christmas trees for me in Virginia, and he had not forgotten how much I liked them.
The next day, Mr. Shimerda calls on the Burdens to thank them for the gifts. When Jim lights the Christmas tree candles Mr. Shimerda is overcome and bows before the tree to silently pray. Jim’s grandmother worries that her husband, “rather narrow in religious matters”, will speak out.
[But] Grandfather merely put his finger-tips to his brow and bowed his venerable head, thus Protestantizing the atmosphere.
After Mr. Shimerda leaves, Grandfather says quietly to his family, ‘The prayers of all good people are good.”
Willa Cather insisted against the wishes of her publisher that W. T. Benda illustrate the first edition of My Ántonia. Benda was an immigrant from Bohemia himself, and Cather said “he knew both Europe and the American west.”
I’ve written this post today to try to understand why such stories are on my mind this Christmas. Now I think I know why. Our nation today is so fragmented, so under siege from within, that it feels healing to me to remember our immigrant ancestors. They were guided by faith and good will, even in harsh circumstances. I want to hear their stories.
So beautiful and moving...brought tears to my eyes. Thank you.
Ah! If only times could as peaceful and simple as those days, even for a while. Sometimes not easy to endure but never to the magnitude of what we have to endure in these times. I say hooray for the written words that allow us to escape into a different, kinder time.