December 15, 2024 • 19 mins
Here is a little gift to our GK and Friends subscribers. (In the Back Room, the paid subscribers receive a monologue from the 80’s weekly)12.18.82Calm falls over LW the week before Christmas, yet there still are no Christmas lights on Main St. GK went back after school was done and went to Christmas Eve service with the eldest Ingqvist daughter (they had been chatting through the fall). He was anything but calm at the service. As they sang “Silent Night” at the service, the congregation broke into tears. No matter how hard he tried he couldn’t bring up a tear. After the service, the two of them were talking and he said something he thought was funny. She told him how terribly cold he was and she didn’t want to see him anymore. Now the tears came. GK also remembered the story of the Lundeen family, Mel and Clarice and their eight children. Mel had fallen off the barn and was in the hospital for four months. Christmas was going to be sparse during this time and James was particularly disappointed he wasn’t getting a Lionel train set. BUT when dad finally came home just before Christmas, they all learned this was the greatest present.
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This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Well, it's been a quiet week and like Wobegone, my
own hometown, strange as that may seem to some of you,
and being only seven days before Christmas, lights still are
not up on main Street. Nobody seems to be terribly
excited about it, which seems strange to some people in
Lake wobegonh They say, Oh, it doesn't seem like it's
(00:23):
one week before Christmas. Doesn't. Nope, it doesn't. Persons'd expect
they'd be running around like poisoned rats trying to get
all everything together, but they haven't yet. They may maybe Wednesday, Thursday, Friday,
Saturday morning, but they haven't as yet. Of course, it
(00:45):
is the little town that time forgot, and in a
town like that, there are a lot of people who
forget what time it is, and they're not easily roused
up into a white heat or a frenzy, but maintain
a sort of calm pretty much year round, which back
when I was young and lived there, was the most
(01:08):
aggravating thing about that town to me, and now that
I'm older and don't it's one of the most appealing.
Certain calm prevails in Lake Wobegon in the face of
Christmas and other turbulent events that promised to get us
(01:29):
royaled up, and Christmas is sure one of those. I
don't know of another time of year when the feelings
of so many people lie so close to the surface
as they do this next couple of weeks. I think
back to a Christmas Eve service at Lake Wobgon Lutheran
that I went to. This a long time ago, this
(01:50):
back when I was in college. I was back from
on my vacation from a fall quarter. I had just
taken all all of my final exams, so I was,
you might say it, my most intelligent and my most
critical and perceptive, you see, having filled all those blue
(02:12):
books with my thoughts on wide range of stuff. And
I got up back home and looked around, and everywhere
I looked, I just saw failure and boredom and misery.
You might not have been able to see it, you see,
if you'd been there, But I had just taken my
(02:33):
final exams. I was in the humanities. So the failure
of Jeffersonian agrarian, democratic humanist idealism, or whatever you want
to call it, it was just all all over there
(02:55):
in that town. The only thing that really gave me
any hope was the fact that the old ink fast
girl and I had been carrying on a warm correspondence
an over fall term, and my hopes were up. And
I went to the Christmas Eve service at her church
(03:15):
with her so that her parents could see that I
was a nice young man and not make a fuss
about our seeing each other a lot, which I certainly
hoped we would be doing, because she was a fabulous
young woman at the age of nineteen. She's tall, slender,
(03:37):
she had hair the color of oak. She was one
of the few women you could honestly use the word
willowy to describe. I followed her into that church like
a dog, sat down beside her in the pew, beside her,
(04:02):
and her parents to the other side of her, and
my mind was not on Cristmas. Well. The service went
along pretty well, and they came up to the last
of it. It was almost midnight, and children came and
passed out long white tapers to the congregation, and then
(04:24):
they turned out all the lights, and people lit candles,
and the organ back up in the loft started playing
Silent Night, and then the voices of a children's choir
came out over our heads, singing Silent Night in Norwegian,
(04:45):
maybe the only song they knew in Norwegian. All memorized phonetically.
But in this congregation, first one person started weeping, and
then somebody else did its to cought on until everybody
was crying. There was something about this song that unhooked
(05:08):
their memories, and old times, including old times they'd never experienced,
came down on them. And everybody was standing holding candles
and weeping, the tears rolling down their cheeks, thinking of
I don't know what, Norway, the old country, mother and dad,
(05:32):
home and loved ones and some who died. Everybody was
weeping except me. She was crying next to me, and
I wanted to cry. I wanted to cry right along
with her, do everything she did. And I tried to
bring tears to my eyes, and I reached down for
(05:52):
my handkerchief and I went to blow my nose, but
there was nothing there. She could tell. Well, we left
the service. When we're walking down the street, and I
said something I don't even want to remember what it was,
some witty, intelligent thing. And she turned and looked at me,
(06:15):
and she said, you are the coldest person I've ever met.
You've got no feelings at all and that was it.
She went home. I went home. I knew I'd never
see her again. That's when I cried. I cried at home.
(06:36):
I lay in bed and cried. Wanted to call her
up and ever hear how congested I was. But there
didn't seem to be any point in it. And yet
even I remember these people standing crying, holding candles, sobbing,
there was still a kind of a calm about it.
(06:57):
It was a peaceful sort of weeping. They were all
there with their families, and they just let the tears
run down their cheeks. They just didn't care. And the
lights came up, they all smiled, went downstairs for coffee.
There's a calm about Christmas in Lake Wobgun, which is
(07:18):
a calm that I used to think was caused by stupidity,
but which is a calm that actually is the result
of being in the right place and knowing it comes
naturally to some people and has to be learned by others.
And when I think of that calm in like Wobgun
around Christmas, I think of a story I was told
(07:41):
me by a guy I grew up with whose name
was James Lundeen. And I'm not sure I can tell
it as well as he told it to me, but
I'll try now. James we never called him Jim, He's
always James for some reason. Was the son of Mel Lundean,
who was the man carrier who came down our road
(08:04):
about one twenty two and a half pm every afternoon
Monday through Saturday, driving his old green Chevy, steering from
the passenger side, which I thought was a great feat,
stopped by our mailbox, put in the mail and roar off,
and one day didn't come, and we learned that he'd
(08:25):
been hurt. Mel had been out in the country at
his cousin's farm helping shingle the barn roof, and he
was up on the scaffold when his cousin said look,
and Mel looked down, and the cousin was pointing up,
and he looked up and there was a great helium
blimp floating across the sky. Mel stepped back to look
(08:48):
at him, and he plunged straight down and his head
hit a concrete apron so hard that they heard it
in the house and they all came running out, and
they thought he must be dead. Well. The Lundeans, Mel
and Clarice and her eight children lived in a little
(09:09):
green house which was down just outside of town on
the shore of the lake house that I remember being
full of bunk beds and little kids. And the telephone
rang there about the time she was reaching into the
oven to pull out a macaroni and cheese hot dish
and set it down on the table for supper, where
the children were sitting around. They weren't going to wait
(09:32):
for mel. She answered the phone, and the kids could
tell right away from her silence and then from the
tone in her voice that something terrible had happened, because
her voice was so strong. See, Clarice was always nervous.
(09:55):
She's just a bag of nerves. She's always worrying about
her kids, eight of em, what they might be and
what terrible things might be happening to them. And her
kids knew how to make her nervous, and they enjoyed
doing it. They'd say things like, say, Mom, do you
(10:15):
know where my bike light is? I was gonna go
out biking on that. Well, never mind, I'll go without it,
that's all right, And they'd go out the door and
she'd no, come back, don't, don't. Don't you haven't seen
the life preservers, have you? We were gonna go out, well,
we'll just we won't go far out, and they'd run
out the door, and she'd running after him in a flutter.
Don't no, put on your life preservers. But now something
(10:40):
terrible had happened, and her voice was absolutely strong, and
she put the phone down. She turned to him and said,
your dad's been hurt and he's been taken to the hospital,
and I'm gonna go and I will call you when
I can. And she put on her coat in her scarf,
and she went next door to the neighbors to borrow
the car, and then she went. Kids just sat there,
(11:05):
couldn't eat, couldn't talk, couldn't do anything. The dad had
fallen and for all he knew, he might be dead.
They didn't know. Well, this was in late November. He
didn't die, but he was in the hospital for almost
four weeks. And during those weeks nearly part of December,
(11:30):
Clarice took the kids aside one by one, not once,
but several times, and she spoke to him and she said,
I want you to know that we may not be
able to afford much Christmas this year, so I don't
want you to get your hopes up. We just may
not have the money to have any Christmas. Well, the
(11:52):
little kids didn't really understand that because they didn't think
of Christmas as something that you afforded or not. I mean,
it just was Christmas just happened. Stuff appeared on Christmas
with your name on. They didn't know it involved money,
But James knew. James knew, and his face burned when
(12:13):
she told him that not to get his hopes up,
they might not be able to afford it, because his
hopes were up to where he couldn't bring him down
any more. See, he'd been dropping hints for about six
months campaigning for a Lionel model train in the Wards
Christmas catalog from the year before. A model train with
(12:36):
a locomotive and four cars and a caboose and two switches,
and a depot with a station master who would come
out and raise the semaphore automatically just as the train
was approaching. And a little live stock loader that when
the cattle car would pull up next to this live
stock loader, the little cattle would move up the ramp
(13:00):
and into the cattle car and all go in there
and then the door close and train go off. It
was amazing what a wonderful thing, and he wanted it
so bad that he could not imagine not getting it.
Much as he tried. He thought as the days went
(13:21):
by that maybe some rich person would have read the
story about his dad's accident in the Harold Star and
the rich person would think, well, I'm going to see
that those kids get the biggest best Christmas they've ever
had and go out and buy him a lot of stuff.
(13:44):
And wondered if maybe he ought to write a letter
to the Harold Star in case there were a rich
person out there who wanted to give these kids the
biggest best Christmas they ever had to let him know
exactly how he could do that With the purchase of
a Lionel Model trains sat It was a hard time.
(14:05):
Clarice was gone about half the time off to the hospital,
which was in Saint Cloud. She often stayed overnight when
mel was feeling bad. The oldest girl, Betty, had to
pretty well take care of the others, but she couldn't
really do it. A couple of the youngest kids had
to be farmed out to relatives. Neighbors came in to
(14:26):
bring food and bring a little pity. You know what
you get tired of pretty quickly. Relatives come and visit.
And one night James was lying in bed and he
heard his sister crying into bed, and he asked her
what was wrong, and she had to repeat it a
(14:46):
few times before he could understand what she was saying.
But she said, Dad's never coming back. We're going to
be adopted. Suddenly he thought about it. He had considered
being adopted now and then in the past, maybe being
(15:08):
adopted by a rich person who loved trains and had
a big layout down the basement and who liked kids,
but the actual prospect of it scared him. To go
off with somebody else, pack his bags and go off
with somebody else and be their son and change his
(15:28):
name and be a different person was frightening. Would he
have to go with his uncle Hal and his aunt Agnes,
who lived in the cities and who'd come up to
visit them once and she'd walked into the house and
sat down in a chair and kind of looked around
at their messy house and sniffed and sort of held
(15:50):
her hands on her lap, kind of afraid that something
would touch her. Would he have to go with them?
One Sunday at church, he saw back on the table
where the hymn books were, he saw a shoe box
with a hole in the top and on the side
it said lundeen Family Christmas Fund. And he was so ashamed.
(16:15):
When everybody was down in the basement having coffee after church,
he came up and he took it and he hit
it in a cloak roum, so nobody would ever give
it to him. Well, Mel came back. He came back
two days before Christmas. He was kind of thin, and
he was kind of weak, and he got dizzy when
he walked, but he was back home. He spent most
(16:37):
of the day lying on the couch in the living room,
and they had some kind of Christmas. They had a
little tree, not a big one, little one up on
the coffee table with lights on it, and there were
some presents. There weren't many. James got a new pair
of boots and a hunting knife and a game of
stadium checkers. And Mel managed to pass out all the gifts,
(17:00):
just as he had always done, though of course they
all realized that he was the real gift. He was
the gift. It was a very cold Christmas and there
was a lot of snow on the ground, and out
on the lake. It had blown up into great drifts,
and a hard crust was on it, so you could
(17:22):
walk on top of the crust. He put on his
new boots and he walked out across the lake, walking
on the drifts, like walking on waves of water, and
walked all the way to the other side of the
lake and turned around to walk back, and saw his house,
(17:44):
his little house, tiny lights, and the little town behind it,
and some lights up on the hill, and felt as
if he was standing in a Lionel train layout, a
marvelous layout with realistic snow and little sponge trees that
(18:09):
looked real, and houses with lights in him that looks
so real, one of those perfect model trained layouts that
when you sit down and put your face down by it,
you feel like that's the whole world right there. And
that's what he felt, That this was the whole world
(18:34):
right in front of him, and that Christmas was what
was in that house. Whatever they did in that house,
that was Christmas, and all of the other things that
he thought were Christmas were not really Christmas was in
that house, and that as long as they were all
(18:56):
there together, that would be all that they would need.
That's the news from Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, where all the
women are strong, all the men are good, lucky, all
the children be above ad
Well, it's been a quiet week and like Wobegone, my
own hometown, strange as that may seem to some of you,
and being only seven days before Christmas, lights still are
not up on main Street. Nobody seems to be terribly
excited about it, which seems strange to some people in
Lake wobegonh They say, Oh, it doesn't seem like it's
(00:23):
one week before Christmas. Doesn't. Nope, it doesn't. Persons'd expect
they'd be running around like poisoned rats trying to get
all everything together, but they haven't yet. They may maybe Wednesday, Thursday, Friday,
Saturday morning, but they haven't as yet. Of course, it
(00:45):
is the little town that time forgot, and in a
town like that, there are a lot of people who
forget what time it is, and they're not easily roused
up into a white heat or a frenzy, but maintain
a sort of calm pretty much year round, which back
when I was young and lived there, was the most
(01:08):
aggravating thing about that town to me, and now that
I'm older and don't it's one of the most appealing.
Certain calm prevails in Lake Wobegon in the face of
Christmas and other turbulent events that promised to get us
(01:29):
royaled up, and Christmas is sure one of those. I
don't know of another time of year when the feelings
of so many people lie so close to the surface
as they do this next couple of weeks. I think
back to a Christmas Eve service at Lake Wobgon Lutheran
that I went to. This a long time ago, this
(01:50):
back when I was in college. I was back from
on my vacation from a fall quarter. I had just
taken all all of my final exams, so I was,
you might say it, my most intelligent and my most
critical and perceptive, you see, having filled all those blue
(02:12):
books with my thoughts on wide range of stuff. And
I got up back home and looked around, and everywhere
I looked, I just saw failure and boredom and misery.
You might not have been able to see it, you see,
if you'd been there, But I had just taken my
(02:33):
final exams. I was in the humanities. So the failure
of Jeffersonian agrarian, democratic humanist idealism, or whatever you want
to call it, it was just all all over there
(02:55):
in that town. The only thing that really gave me
any hope was the fact that the old ink fast
girl and I had been carrying on a warm correspondence
an over fall term, and my hopes were up. And
I went to the Christmas Eve service at her church
(03:15):
with her so that her parents could see that I
was a nice young man and not make a fuss
about our seeing each other a lot, which I certainly
hoped we would be doing, because she was a fabulous
young woman at the age of nineteen. She's tall, slender,
(03:37):
she had hair the color of oak. She was one
of the few women you could honestly use the word
willowy to describe. I followed her into that church like
a dog, sat down beside her in the pew, beside her,
(04:02):
and her parents to the other side of her, and
my mind was not on Cristmas. Well. The service went
along pretty well, and they came up to the last
of it. It was almost midnight, and children came and
passed out long white tapers to the congregation, and then
(04:24):
they turned out all the lights, and people lit candles,
and the organ back up in the loft started playing
Silent Night, and then the voices of a children's choir
came out over our heads, singing Silent Night in Norwegian,
(04:45):
maybe the only song they knew in Norwegian. All memorized phonetically.
But in this congregation, first one person started weeping, and
then somebody else did its to cought on until everybody
was crying. There was something about this song that unhooked
(05:08):
their memories, and old times, including old times they'd never experienced,
came down on them. And everybody was standing holding candles
and weeping, the tears rolling down their cheeks, thinking of
I don't know what, Norway, the old country, mother and dad,
(05:32):
home and loved ones and some who died. Everybody was
weeping except me. She was crying next to me, and
I wanted to cry. I wanted to cry right along
with her, do everything she did. And I tried to
bring tears to my eyes, and I reached down for
(05:52):
my handkerchief and I went to blow my nose, but
there was nothing there. She could tell. Well, we left
the service. When we're walking down the street, and I
said something I don't even want to remember what it was,
some witty, intelligent thing. And she turned and looked at me,
(06:15):
and she said, you are the coldest person I've ever met.
You've got no feelings at all and that was it.
She went home. I went home. I knew I'd never
see her again. That's when I cried. I cried at home.
(06:36):
I lay in bed and cried. Wanted to call her
up and ever hear how congested I was. But there
didn't seem to be any point in it. And yet
even I remember these people standing crying, holding candles, sobbing,
there was still a kind of a calm about it.
(06:57):
It was a peaceful sort of weeping. They were all
there with their families, and they just let the tears
run down their cheeks. They just didn't care. And the
lights came up, they all smiled, went downstairs for coffee.
There's a calm about Christmas in Lake Wobgun, which is
(07:18):
a calm that I used to think was caused by stupidity,
but which is a calm that actually is the result
of being in the right place and knowing it comes
naturally to some people and has to be learned by others.
And when I think of that calm in like Wobgun
around Christmas, I think of a story I was told
(07:41):
me by a guy I grew up with whose name
was James Lundeen. And I'm not sure I can tell
it as well as he told it to me, but
I'll try now. James we never called him Jim, He's
always James for some reason. Was the son of Mel Lundean,
who was the man carrier who came down our road
(08:04):
about one twenty two and a half pm every afternoon
Monday through Saturday, driving his old green Chevy, steering from
the passenger side, which I thought was a great feat,
stopped by our mailbox, put in the mail and roar off,
and one day didn't come, and we learned that he'd
(08:25):
been hurt. Mel had been out in the country at
his cousin's farm helping shingle the barn roof, and he
was up on the scaffold when his cousin said look,
and Mel looked down, and the cousin was pointing up,
and he looked up and there was a great helium
blimp floating across the sky. Mel stepped back to look
(08:48):
at him, and he plunged straight down and his head
hit a concrete apron so hard that they heard it
in the house and they all came running out, and
they thought he must be dead. Well. The Lundeans, Mel
and Clarice and her eight children lived in a little
(09:09):
green house which was down just outside of town on
the shore of the lake house that I remember being
full of bunk beds and little kids. And the telephone
rang there about the time she was reaching into the
oven to pull out a macaroni and cheese hot dish
and set it down on the table for supper, where
the children were sitting around. They weren't going to wait
(09:32):
for mel. She answered the phone, and the kids could
tell right away from her silence and then from the
tone in her voice that something terrible had happened, because
her voice was so strong. See, Clarice was always nervous.
(09:55):
She's just a bag of nerves. She's always worrying about
her kids, eight of em, what they might be and
what terrible things might be happening to them. And her
kids knew how to make her nervous, and they enjoyed
doing it. They'd say things like, say, Mom, do you
(10:15):
know where my bike light is? I was gonna go
out biking on that. Well, never mind, I'll go without it,
that's all right, And they'd go out the door and
she'd no, come back, don't, don't. Don't you haven't seen
the life preservers, have you? We were gonna go out, well,
we'll just we won't go far out, and they'd run
out the door, and she'd running after him in a flutter.
Don't no, put on your life preservers. But now something
(10:40):
terrible had happened, and her voice was absolutely strong, and
she put the phone down. She turned to him and said,
your dad's been hurt and he's been taken to the hospital,
and I'm gonna go and I will call you when
I can. And she put on her coat in her scarf,
and she went next door to the neighbors to borrow
the car, and then she went. Kids just sat there,
(11:05):
couldn't eat, couldn't talk, couldn't do anything. The dad had
fallen and for all he knew, he might be dead.
They didn't know. Well, this was in late November. He
didn't die, but he was in the hospital for almost
four weeks. And during those weeks nearly part of December,
(11:30):
Clarice took the kids aside one by one, not once,
but several times, and she spoke to him and she said,
I want you to know that we may not be
able to afford much Christmas this year, so I don't
want you to get your hopes up. We just may
not have the money to have any Christmas. Well, the
(11:52):
little kids didn't really understand that because they didn't think
of Christmas as something that you afforded or not. I mean,
it just was Christmas just happened. Stuff appeared on Christmas
with your name on. They didn't know it involved money,
But James knew. James knew, and his face burned when
(12:13):
she told him that not to get his hopes up,
they might not be able to afford it, because his
hopes were up to where he couldn't bring him down
any more. See, he'd been dropping hints for about six
months campaigning for a Lionel model train in the Wards
Christmas catalog from the year before. A model train with
(12:36):
a locomotive and four cars and a caboose and two switches,
and a depot with a station master who would come
out and raise the semaphore automatically just as the train
was approaching. And a little live stock loader that when
the cattle car would pull up next to this live
stock loader, the little cattle would move up the ramp
(13:00):
and into the cattle car and all go in there
and then the door close and train go off. It
was amazing what a wonderful thing, and he wanted it
so bad that he could not imagine not getting it.
Much as he tried. He thought as the days went
(13:21):
by that maybe some rich person would have read the
story about his dad's accident in the Harold Star and
the rich person would think, well, I'm going to see
that those kids get the biggest best Christmas they've ever
had and go out and buy him a lot of stuff.
(13:44):
And wondered if maybe he ought to write a letter
to the Harold Star in case there were a rich
person out there who wanted to give these kids the
biggest best Christmas they ever had to let him know
exactly how he could do that With the purchase of
a Lionel Model trains sat It was a hard time.
(14:05):
Clarice was gone about half the time off to the hospital,
which was in Saint Cloud. She often stayed overnight when
mel was feeling bad. The oldest girl, Betty, had to
pretty well take care of the others, but she couldn't
really do it. A couple of the youngest kids had
to be farmed out to relatives. Neighbors came in to
(14:26):
bring food and bring a little pity. You know what
you get tired of pretty quickly. Relatives come and visit.
And one night James was lying in bed and he
heard his sister crying into bed, and he asked her
what was wrong, and she had to repeat it a
(14:46):
few times before he could understand what she was saying.
But she said, Dad's never coming back. We're going to
be adopted. Suddenly he thought about it. He had considered
being adopted now and then in the past, maybe being
(15:08):
adopted by a rich person who loved trains and had
a big layout down the basement and who liked kids,
but the actual prospect of it scared him. To go
off with somebody else, pack his bags and go off
with somebody else and be their son and change his
(15:28):
name and be a different person was frightening. Would he
have to go with his uncle Hal and his aunt Agnes,
who lived in the cities and who'd come up to
visit them once and she'd walked into the house and
sat down in a chair and kind of looked around
at their messy house and sniffed and sort of held
(15:50):
her hands on her lap, kind of afraid that something
would touch her. Would he have to go with them?
One Sunday at church, he saw back on the table
where the hymn books were, he saw a shoe box
with a hole in the top and on the side
it said lundeen Family Christmas Fund. And he was so ashamed.
(16:15):
When everybody was down in the basement having coffee after church,
he came up and he took it and he hit
it in a cloak roum, so nobody would ever give
it to him. Well, Mel came back. He came back
two days before Christmas. He was kind of thin, and
he was kind of weak, and he got dizzy when
he walked, but he was back home. He spent most
(16:37):
of the day lying on the couch in the living room,
and they had some kind of Christmas. They had a
little tree, not a big one, little one up on
the coffee table with lights on it, and there were
some presents. There weren't many. James got a new pair
of boots and a hunting knife and a game of
stadium checkers. And Mel managed to pass out all the gifts,
(17:00):
just as he had always done, though of course they
all realized that he was the real gift. He was
the gift. It was a very cold Christmas and there
was a lot of snow on the ground, and out
on the lake. It had blown up into great drifts,
and a hard crust was on it, so you could
(17:22):
walk on top of the crust. He put on his
new boots and he walked out across the lake, walking
on the drifts, like walking on waves of water, and
walked all the way to the other side of the
lake and turned around to walk back, and saw his house,
(17:44):
his little house, tiny lights, and the little town behind it,
and some lights up on the hill, and felt as
if he was standing in a Lionel train layout, a
marvelous layout with realistic snow and little sponge trees that
(18:09):
looked real, and houses with lights in him that looks
so real, one of those perfect model trained layouts that
when you sit down and put your face down by it,
you feel like that's the whole world right there. And
that's what he felt, That this was the whole world
(18:34):
right in front of him, and that Christmas was what
was in that house. Whatever they did in that house,
that was Christmas, and all of the other things that
he thought were Christmas were not really Christmas was in
that house, and that as long as they were all
(18:56):
there together, that would be all that they would need.
That's the news from Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, where all the
women are strong, all the men are good, lucky, all
the children be above ad
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