Naomi’s Christmas Read online

  Whether they recognize Old Christmas or not, an Amish holiday is one that most people in contemporary society would consider very plain. Amish children don’t make lists for Santa Claus or pore through catalogs searching for the latest in electronic gear. Old Order Amish homes don’t have Christmas trees or elaborate light displays. The Amish Christmas celebration, like all of Amish life, is focused on faith, home, and family.

  Holiday customs vary from one Amish community to another. More conservative communities have low-key observances of the holidays. In Pennsylvania, the Amish are affected by the strong Pennsylvania German tradition, and they are more likely to have the customary Pennsylvania Dutch decorations.

  Christmas decorations in a typical Pennsylvania Amish home may include lighting candles and placing them in the windows to symbolize the birth of Jesus. Many homes now use battery-powered candles that pose less threat of fire. Candles are sometimes also used with greens on the mantelpiece and tables. If you visit a home with young children, you’ll probably find doorways and windows draped with strings of paper stars, angels, and sometimes popcorn. If the family receives Christmas cards, they’ll probably be displayed so that they can be enjoyed time and again throughout the season.

  Christmas cards are sent in some church districts and not others. With so many Amish working in jobs that bring them into daily contact with the Englisch, it has become more common for Amish families to send cards to Englisch friends, and the cards are almost always handmade.

  The putz, or manger scene, is an important part of the Christmas decoration throughout the Pennsylvania German communities. The putz developed very early in the church’s history as a way of teaching children the story of Christ’s birth. If you visit Bethlehem or Lititz in Pennsylvania during the holiday season, you can see some beautiful, elaborate depictions, sometimes including other Biblical scenes in addition to the familiar manger. The typical Amish putz is much simpler, using clay or wooden figures and possibly a stable. Some families embellish the scene with natural materials like straw and greenery. Using the putz, the Christmas story is told over and over throughout the days leading up to Christmas.

  The Moravian Star is a twenty-six-point star, first used in Germany in the 1800s. The Moravian community that settled in Lititz has preserved the tradition of hanging the multi-pointed star, and many Amish homes also include the Moravian Star in their decorations as representing the Star of Bethlehem.

  School celebrations are an important part of the Christmas season in most Amish areas. The children begin preparing their parts a month ahead, but their teachers have probably been busy since last year’s program in collecting materials to use! The program, presented before as many family and friends as can cram into the one-room schoolhouse, typically includes readings of prose and poetry, the acting out of skits, and the singing of Christmas carols. Every child participates, and parents hold their breath until their little scholar gets through his or her piece. Teachers sometimes exchange skits and poems with each other, building up a collection so that each year they can provide something new to the audience, which has probably seen countless Christmas programs over the years. The theme of every poem and skit is that of gratitude for the gift of Christ and of the proper response of humility and love. This may be the only time when an Amish child “performs” in any way, but the audience is always uncritical and enthusiastic.

  Gift-giving is part of the Amish Christmas celebration, but it bears little resemblance to the avalanche of gifts common to a typical American household. The presents are often handmade and generally something that is useful. Younger children typically receive one toy from their parents, while other gifts might be handmade clothing, cloth dolls, or wooden toys. An older girl might welcome something for her future home, while tools are popular gifts for older boys. The Amish school often has a gift exchange among the children, and usually the children take great pleasure in making a gift for the teacher.

  The Amish home will probably be filled with the aroma of cookie-baking and candy-making for weeks before the holiday. While you can usually find home-baked cookies on any day, the holidays call for something special, and Amish cooks preserve family recipes for the cookies and treats, passing them on from mother to daughter. Most Pennsylvania Dutch are known for the quality and variety of their Christmas cookies, and you’ll find some traditional ones from my family in the recipe section. Enjoy!

  In addition to celebrating with immediate and extended families, most Amish adults have various groups that plan Christmas lunches and suppers. In fact, there are so many of these that they might still be going on in February! Groups of cousins, people who work together, girls who went through rumspringa at the same time—all of these and more may share a special Christmas treat together.

  But the focus of the Amish Christmas celebration, as of all Amish life, is the family. Gathered around a groaning table spread with roast chicken, all the trimmings, and an endless array of breads, cakes, cookies, and homemade candy, the family celebrates Christmas together with humility and gratitude to God for His amazing gift.

  RECIPES

  Snickerdoodles

  This is a traditional Pennsylvania German cookie, and perhaps the best known with its light brown, crinkled top. A great favorite with children!

  1⁄2 cup soft butter or margarine

  3⁄4 cup sugar

  1 egg

  13⁄4 cups flour

  1 teaspoon baking powder

  1⁄2 teaspoon baking soda

  1⁄2 teaspoon ground nutmeg

  1⁄4 teaspoon salt

  2 tablespoons sugar for rolling

  2 teaspoons cinnamon for rolling

  Preheat oven to 400°F.

  Cream the butter or margarine and sugar together. Add the egg and beat until fluffy. In a separate bowl, stir together flour, baking powder, baking soda, nutmeg, and salt. Blend dry ingredients into creamed mixture to make dough. Add more flour if needed to make the dough stiff enough to form balls.

  Mix the remaining sugar and cinnamon together in a small bowl. Shape the dough into balls the size of unshelled walnuts. Roll cookie balls in the cinnamon sugar. Place on greased cookie sheet and flatten with a fork. Bake for 10–12 minutes or until very lightly browned. Remove to cooling rack, cool, and enjoy! This recipe makes about three dozen cookies, depending on their size.

  Candy Jar Cookies

  My mother called these date-and-nut balls Candy Jar Cookies because she liked to put them in quart canning jars, decorated with bows, and give them to neighbors at Christmastime.

  1 cup margarine or butter

  1 cup brown sugar

  3 cups flour

  11⁄3 cups chopped dates

  2 tablespoons orange juice

  1 cup chopped walnuts

  powdered sugar for rolling

  Preheat oven to 300°F.

  Cream the butter or margarine and sugar together. Add the rest of the ingredients, except the powdered sugar, and mix well. Shape into balls about the size of unshelled walnuts. Bake on an ungreased baking sheet for 18–20 minutes. Remove to a rack and cool slightly, then roll in powdered sugar. This recipe makes about four dozen small cookies.

  Rolled Sugar Cookies

  This is a traditional cookie dough for making cut-out cookies. Using shortening instead of butter gives the cookies a crisp texture and not-so-sweet taste, which combines well with the powdered sugar icing.

  FOR COOKIES:

  1⁄2 cup shortening

  3⁄4 cup sugar

  1 egg

  2 cups flour

  1⁄2 teaspoon baking powder

  1⁄2 teaspoon baking soda

  1⁄2 teaspoon vanilla

  2–3 tablespoons milk

  Preheat oven to 350°F.

  Cream the shortening and sugar together. Add the egg; beat. Add the other ingredients and mix well. Gather together a generous handful of the dough, and roll it out on a well-floured board until it is about 1/8-inch thick. Use cookie cutters to cut the dou
gh into different shapes and arrange the cookies on an ungreased baking sheet. Repeat with the rest of the dough. Bake the cookies for 5–6 minutes. Remove to racks to cool.

  FOR ICING:

  3 tablespoons butter or margarine

  1 teaspoon vanilla

  2 cups powdered sugar

  2 tablespoons milk

  Beat the butter or margarine and vanilla together. Incorporate the powdered sugar in small increments, adding dribbles of milk as you go until the mixture reaches spreading consistency. Beat well. Add drops of food coloring to the entire batch, or to small batches, as desired.

  Frost the cookies with the icing and allow the icing to dry for several hours before attempting to stack the cookies or place them in a container. This recipe makes about five dozen cookies, depending upon the size of the cookie cutters.

  Dear Reader,

  I hope you’ve enjoyed another visit with the people of Pleasant Valley. Although the place doesn’t actually exist, it seems very real to me, as it is based on the Amish settlements here in my area of north-central Pennsylvania.

  It gave me so much pleasure to write about an Amish Christmas in Pennsylvania. Because of the strong Pennsylvania Dutch heritage here, Amish customs are a bit different than they are in some other parts of the country, with a little more emphasis on decorations, although always those that draw attention to the meaning of the season.

  Naomi is one of my favorite characters—a quiet, self-effacing woman who nevertheless has a deep well of spiritual strength. I’m sure we’ve all known women like Naomi, and I’ve developed a special appreciation for those who have such gentleness coupled with such fierce determination to do what is right.

  I would love to hear your thoughts on my book. If you’d care to write to me, I’d be happy to reply with a signed bookmark or bookplate and my brochure of Pennsylvania Dutch recipes. You can find me on the Web at www.martaperry.com, e-mail me at [email protected], or write to me in care of Berkley Publicity Department, Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.

  Blessings,

  Marta Perry

  An Excerpt from

  LYDIA’S HOPE

  The Lost Sis ters: Pleasant Valley

  BOOK EIGHT

  by Marta Perry

  Coming in June 2013

  from Berkley Books

  Years ago, a buggy accident left three Amish sisters orphans. Each was sent to a different family to be raised, and they grew up knowing nothing about one another. When the eldest, Lydia, learns the truth, she sets out to find the sisters who were lost to her so long ago.

  Lydia Beachy continued to tuck the log cabin quilt over her great-aunt, hands moving gently but automatically as she struggled to make sense of what the elderly woman had just said. Great-Aunt Sara’s mind must be wandering, for sure, she thought.

  I still remember your mammi playing with you and your two little sisters in the apple orchard.

  The apple orchard part made sense. The orchard was still there, still producing apples for Lydia and her husband and little boys. But she didn’t have any sisters.

  “You must be thinking of someone else, Aunt Sara.” She patted her, just as she’d have patted Daniel or David when they lay down for a nap. “Rest now. A nap every afternoon, that’s what the doctor said, ain’t so?”

  Aunt Sara flapped her hand as if to chase away the doctor’s words. “I’ll just close my eyes for a minute or two. You and your sisters, ja, and the apple trees with blossoms like clouds. Three sweet girls Diane had, that’s certain-sure.” She smiled, veined lids drooping over her china blue eyes, and in an instant her even breathing told Lydia that she was asleep.

  Sharp as a tack, she is. Mamm’s voice seemed to echo in Lydia’s ears. She and Daad had brought Great-Aunt Sara to stay with them after she’d been hospitalized with pneumonia, even though she continued to insist that she’d be fine in her own little place.

  Stubborn, that was her great-aunt. Always wanting to be the one who helped out, not the one who received help.

  Great-Aunt Sara had another role as well…that of family historian. She was the one who could tell the kinder family stories going back generations and never miss a name or a date.

  Lydia’s forehead furrowed as she slipped quietly across the wide wooden floorboards of the house where she had grown up. Her great-aunt was confused, surely. Illness and age could do that to the brightest mind.

  But she’d said Diane. Lydia’s birth mother was Diane; she’d always known the name. Diane had been married to Daad’s brother, and Daad and Mamm had adopted Lydia when they’d both died in an accident.

  Her birth parents had always been misty figures in her mind, like a pair of Amish dolls with features she couldn’t see. Young and happy one minute and gone the next in the accident Lydia didn’t remember, even though she’d been five at the time.

  When she’d fretted at not remembering, Mamm had always soothed the worry away. It is God’s way of making it easier for you, Mamm would say. The accident was a terrible thing, and better for you not to remember.

  Her thoughts kept her company as she descended the bare, narrow stairs of the old farmhouse. She turned left at the bottom as she always did, her steps taking her into the kitchen, the heart of the home.

  The square farmhouse kitchen was as spotless as it always had been, the long table maybe a bit empty-looking now that all of them were grown and mostly out of the house. April sunshine streamed through the window, laying a path across the linoleum, faded from so many scrubbings. Mamm always had a calendar on the wall over the table for decoration as well as for use, and this year’s had pictures of frolicking kittens. A few violets had been tucked into a water glass on the windowsill, a reminder of spring.

  Mamm bent over the oven door of the gas range, pulling out a cookie sheet, the aroma of snickerdoodles mixing with that of the chicken that was stewing in the Dutch oven on top of the stove. Mamm looked up, cheeks red from the warmth of the oven, and slid the tray onto a cooling rack.

  “Cookies for you to take Daniel and David,” she said, probably needlessly. Lydia’s sons, Daniel and David, would be dumbfounded if she came home from their grossmammi’s house without some treat for them. It was a thing that never happened.

  “Denke, Mamm. That will be their snack after school.” She hesitated, her great-aunt’s words going round and round in her mind.

  Mamm glanced at her, face questioning, and closed the oven door. She dropped a pot holder on the counter. “Was ist letz? Is something wrong with Aunt Sara?” She took a step toward the stairs, as if ready to fly up and deal with any emergency.

  “No, no, she’s fine. She’s sleeping already.”

  “Ach, that’s gut. Rest is what she needs most now.” Mamm reached for the coffeepot. “Do you have time for a cup before the boys get home from school?”

  Words seemed to press against Lydia’s lips, demanding to be let out. “Aunt Sara said something I didn’t understand.”

  “Ja? Was she fretting about the hospital bill again?” Mamm’s brown eyes, magnified by her glasses, showed concern. Hospital bills were nothing to take lightly when, like the Amish, a person didn’t have insurance. Still, the church would provide.

  “It wasn’t that.” Lydia’s throat was suddenly tight. Just say it, she scolded herself. She’d always been able to take any problem to Mamm, and Mamm always had an answer.

  “Aunt Sara was talking about my mother. My birth mother, I mean. Diane.”

  “Ja?” The word sounded casual, but the lines around her mother’s eyes seemed to deepen, and she set the coffeepot down with a clatter, not even seeming to notice it was on the countertop and not the stove.

  “She was…She must have been confused.” The kitchen was quiet—so quiet it seemed to be waiting for something. “She said that Diane had three kinder. Three little girls. I thought certain-sure she…”

  The words trickled off to silence. She couldn’t say again that Aunt Sara was confused. Not when she
could read the truth in Mamm’s face.

  “It’s true?” The question came out in a whisper, because something that might have been grief or panic had a hard grip on her throat. “It is true.”

  Mamm’s face seemed to crumple like a blossom torn from a branch. “Lydia, I’m sorry.”

  “But…” The familiar kitchen was suddenly as strange as if she’d never seen it before. She grasped the top of the closest ladder-back chair. “I had sisters? Two little sisters?”

  Mamm nodded, her eyes shining with tears. “I’m sorry,” she said again. “You didn’t remember, and so we thought it best not to say anything. We didn’t want you to be hurt any more than you already were.”

  Hurt. Lydia grasped the word. She’d been hurt in the accident that killed her parents. She knew that. She’d always known it. Her earliest memories were of the hospital…blurry images of Mamm and Daad always there, each time she woke up.

  “Sisters.” With five younger brothers, she’d always wished she had a sister. “What were their names?”

  Mamm moved around the table toward her, as cautious as if she were approaching a spooked buggy horse. “Susanna. She was not quite three. And Chloe, the baby, just a year old.”

  Lydia pressed her palm against her chest. Her heart seemed to be beating very normally, in spite of the beating it had taken in the past few minutes. She had to hear the rest of it. “They died in the accident, too?”