Schroeder Weihnachtspyramide 2021

This is a Weihnachtspyramide (Christmas pyramid) built by Albert Thomas ca. 1890. Albert and his wife, Wilhelmine, were German immigrants who arrived in Jefferson City, Missouri, in 1888. The pyramide was already about twenty years old when their youngest daughter, Edna, was about five, in 1910, per our family's earliest photo of it. Edna married Walter Schroeder in 1930, and the couple lived in the same house as Albert and Wilhelmine Thomas and continued to display it each year after the Thomases passed away in the 1940s.

With few exceptions, this Weihnachtspyramide has no doubt been used as a Christmas decoration every year since it was built around 1890. That's about 130 years!

Albert Thomas constructed the Weihnachtspyramide from a variety of materials. The paddles at the top were made from scrap wood from fruit crates. The central axle is a broomstick; on it rests the three circular platforms (made of cardboard). One of the hooplike, horizontal supports around the outer structure is from a discarded band saw. In its earliest form, when rising candle heat made the angled top paddles spin, friction was minimized at the pivot point at the bottom of the rotating broomstick by having a downward-pointing nail attached at the base of the broomstick, and the nail tip rested on a piece of glass. It had to be adjusted to balance perfectly in order for it to spin properly.

The family refers to this as a Christmas "tree," but it is more closely related to the wooden pyramiden that are hand-carved in the Erzgebirge region of Germany. Those often have little candles at the four bottom corners to provide the heat necessary to turn the platforms into little processionals at the center. Our family's pyramide has been altered so much over the years it's truly unique; a form of living folk art that changes slightly every year.

We have several photos of the "tree" taken over the decades. Many of the ornaments and figurines go back to the early 1900s and are visible in the old photos. The Thomases used to attach sprigs of real cedar or other greenery to the frame, in addition to the ornaments.

An early change was when the original candles were replaced with small coal-oil (kerosene) lanterns (three of these are still used as ornaments). Then, in the 1940s, those were replaced with strands of multicolored electric lights. A small electric fan, mounted on a nearby window frame, was directed on the paddles, turning the central platforms. (We even still have the fan, though it doesn't work, and the holes in the window frame are still there!)

In the 1950s, Edna's son Walter ("Buddy") procured a music box designed for rotating a small Christmas tree, and the tree was transformed again. This allowed Edna to greatly increase the amount of ornaments, greenery, and other decorations on the frame, the inner platforms, and even hanging from the paddles. Today, in the interest of being kind to the now-antique music box, we have opted to reduce the amount of objects hanging from the paddles.

Edna (my grandma) passed away in 2000, and we purchased her house in 2001. The Weihnachtspyramide (with its special attic closet) came with the house. I'm doing my best to care for it. We've made some changes--for example, replacing some ca. 1950s light strings that no longer worked and whose plastic sockets were literally crumbling away--but that's what Grandma would have done. She kept it "young." So it's my job to fiddle with it, too.

Apologies for the defects of my video. I'll keep working on my skills with the camera. I hope you enjoy this glimpse into our family's unusual "tree," and I hope you have a merry, and a blessed Christmas.

For more information about our Weihnachtspyramide, see my blog posts about it. Here's a good place to start.

And if you're wondering how this comes apart for storage, here's where you look.

Merry Christmas

Video from a few years ago: our singing Christmas tree!

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Not sure what you're seeing? For more information on our family's Weihnachtspyramide, click here.

First Snowfall of the Winter

It’s suddenly seeming very Christmassy here in Central Missouri, hallelujah! Naturally, I can be happy about it, since I don’t have to drive anywhere today—but I think a lot of us have felt creeped-out by the lack of snow both this year (we usually get our first dustings of snow around mid-November) and, well, all of last winter. (Climate change, you all—deeply disturbing.)

Anyway, this one or two inches we’re getting today helps give us the feeling that things are set to rights. At least today, when I look out our windows, anyway. (By the way, for similar views during a bigger snowfall, click here.)

It’s remarkably windy today, with 45 mph gusts, which make the snow blow almost horizontally, and stick it to the screens of our storm windows.

The wind and the snow sticking on the windows makes it seem incredibly cold “out there.” But having the Christmas tree up and glowing helps our drafty ol’ house seem a lot warmer. Yeah, the windows are rattling.

I’ve never lived in a house with a fireplace, and for me, the Christmas tree supplies that kind of visual-psychological warmth. (If you don’t know about my family’s Christmas tree/Weihnachtspyramide, click here for the back story.)

This year, especially, the familiarity of that dear ol’ thing is especially welcome, “grounding” me in my place in time, giving me a sense that I somehow can comprehend history and immortality, or eternity. And it feels like a comfort, and it’s especially welcome on a cold day like this, at the end of this solar year, and upon this first blast of snow.

Slow Saturday, Sliding toward Christmas

We’ve had a reluctant autumn, haven’t we! Here where we live, there hasn’t even been a killing frost yet, so petunias and such are still blooming. But interspersed with our many mild autumn days, we have had some cold, rainy ones, too.

Like today: bllgh. It was gray all day, with rain and drizzle off and on. It seemed like I was wearing sunglasses indoors. Tonight, the streets are shiny and wet, and it’s just simply cold. Brrr, shudder-shudder.




And you know how it is this time of year, with the day length; it’s harder and harder to get up in the mornings. And it feels like “suppertime” when it gets dark around four!

Indeed, tonight’s supper was some nice hot chili and cornbread. Yum!

But somehow I’m totally not ready for “the holidays”—how can Thanksgiving be over, when petunias are still blooming? Weren’t we just cutting grass, like, yesterday? Usually we get our first snow around mid-November!

We’re sliding into December, though, and fortunately we have all the Christmas sales and decorations to make it perfectly clear! Here in the Munichburg neighborhood, one of our favorite “signs of the season” is when the local Optimist club sets up its Christmas tree lot at the Carpenters Building, on the corner of Broadway and Dunklin.




It always makes me happy to see them up there, the friendly men and the pretty trees and the strings of bare lightbulbs shining over there at the corner—even though we never buy a tree from them. (But if you buy real Christmas trees, you should consider patronizing them or another nonprofit service organization.)

As you might recall, we never buy a Christmas tree because we have Grandma’s tree to put up. A lot of people around here know about the tree, and they look up in our window to see it as they go by on Broadway. So it kind of feels like a duty to put it up each year.

But it’s a duty that’s a pleasure to perform—even if I don’t feel ready for “Christmas” yet. I think we’ll be putting it up this coming weekend, either the third or the fourth.

By the way, if you’ve read this far, and you or your group are interested in visiting the tree in person, I hope you’ll contact me. Grandma used to love sharing her tree with others, and I see no reason to end that tradition!

Taking Down Der Tree

Actually, because it goes in a closet upstairs, we technically take it “up.” Yeah, I know we’re all kinda sick of anything that looks like Christmas, but I’ve finally got all these pictures selected and ready for you. Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at what it’s like when we take this thing apart. (A lot of people ask us about this subject, so I figured you might like to see this.) If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then click here for my other posts about our family’s Weihnachtspyramide (“Christmas pyramid”). This decorated object, which functions like a Christmas tree for my family, has been in our family since the 1880s. Since this post is mostly pictures, I’ll just put ’em in order and comment on them like a slideshow. 1. Here’s the Santa Claus that goes at the very top. He’s surrounded by a bunch of old glass ornaments and stands on a stiff round piece of cardboard. I have no idea how he is attached to it. (I’m guessing he’s held on with toothpicks and posy clay.) 2. A view of the base of the Santa Claus, so you can see the round piece of cardboard. That hole in the middle is what attaches to the top of the “tree.” Note the cotton wadded up in there: I have no idea what that’s for. Maybe to keep Santa from being too loose and flopping around up there. 3. So Santa Claus gets taken off and put in a box, like the majority of other ornaments. Here, however, is the place where he stands. The little nubbin at the top of the silver-garlanded pole fits into that little hole in his base. (By the way: To my Schroeder clan readers, take note of the two rounded clusters of crystals—one at the lower edge of the picture, and one with light shining through it on the right: Those are a pair of Great Aunt Minnie’s earrings! Yes! I have no idea how they got associated with the tree, but there you go.) (Memories!) 4. I know that when the “tree” is all decorated and lit up, it’s hard to really “see” the basic structure of the thing. Here it is, though, with all the ornaments (that we take off) removed, and with light shining through. There are four uprights (one in each corner of the square base), and five horizontal “circles.” At the center of the platform is the music box that spins the center pole (literally a broomstick). There are two circular platforms on the central pole. The top one is heaped with shiny glass ornaments, and below, it holds numerous other ornaments from threads, particularly ancient glass birds. The lower platform (these days) is where we put our flock of old sheep (with real wool)—Grandma had taken to heaping ornaments there, too, but we noticed in old pictures of the tree that the sheep were originally here. We reinstated the sheep because (1) we have so many of them, and (2) they are much lighter than the ornaments. “Lighter” is easier on the old music box and overall rickety structure. 5. Here’s a view of the base. This area is called “the garden.” Great-grandpa Thomas, who made the tree, carved the little wooden fence. The Nativity scene goes front and center, just inside the gateway. The bell ornaments above are suspended by the lower platform. The wires you see along the fence are for lighting up the little cardboard houses that go along the sides and back; the mess of wires at the back right is where all of the light strands connect together. The music box was made by the Lador Company in Switzerland, and it chimes “Silent Night” and “O Come All Ye Faithful.” My dad bought it for the tree in the 1950s; before that, the paddles had been turned by a small fan mounted on a nearby window frame. 6. When we cleaned and repaired the tree some years ago, I was amazed to discover details I had never seen before. Here is a view of the underside of the lower platform, which spins like the sky above the Nativity scene. Someone (Grandma?) pasted gold stars on it. 7. Here’s another thing I’d never noticed until about a decade ago—this pretty decoration is wallpapered to the underside of the very top piece. The illustrations are very delicate—holly, pinecones, and (it looks like) birdhouses. No one ever sees this—but here it is. 8. This view of the same thing shows part of the broomstick as it goes through the top wooden piece. 9. Here’s a look at the paddle assembly. Notice that Santa’s been taken off the tippy top. The paddles, I understand, were made from wood salvaged from orange crates. That “very top piece” I showed you in the previous pictures is the wooden board above the fruits and just beneath the circle the paddles are attached to. 10. So okay: Then you stand on a chair (well, at least, I do!) and carefully lift the entire paddle assembly off the top. It’s very lightweight, which is a good thing, because you can’t hold it by the paddles—you can only hold it by the center, with your arm extended parallel to the floor. (I think the paddles are held on with Elmer’s and matchsticks.) 11. Another view of the paddle assembly. Getting this thing through doorways and up the stairway to the third floor is scary, since it has to go sideways yet has all this fragile stuff hanging off of it. And you can’t bang it on anything. 12. I held it up so Sue could take this picture of the attachment area. There are three blunt nails poking out of the bottom. No, they don’t form a perfect triangle, so when you’re putting the paddle assembly onto the tree, you have to get each nail into its own correct hole. (This can get a little frustrating sometimes, because you can’t see, but people in the past have put pencil marks on the outside so you can line the nails up easier.) 13. Here’s an aerial view of the top, minus the paddles. See the three holes the nails go into? At some point, someone inked orange around them the holes. That circle you see is attached to the axle/broomstick, and it spins with the paddle assembly. Those four—um—tabs?—that seem to come out of the circle actually belong to the top of the tree instead (see 7 and 8 above, which show the underside of this piece). In the center of each “tab” you can see the top of the four upright posts. 14. We’re in the home stretch, now: Once the top is safely upstairs, it’s time to gently pack tissue paper inside the tree, to help protect the elderly bells and so on that dangle in there. However, the tree still tinkles daintily as we carry it upstairs. By the way, you can see the pattern of beaded garlands pretty easily in this picture. We removed, cleaned, and reattached these when we renovated the tree (and we replaced some strands that had become sadly unpretty). Grandma’s beaded garlands were much more numerous. 15. And then everything goes up in the closet. You know, even the boxes we use for the ornaments are interesting. One is a metal breadbox with a hinged lid. Another is an old box for Hoover vacuum cleaner attachments. And one is a nifty old box for Meister Brau beer from Chicago—probably worth about twenty-five bucks on eBay, don’t you think? (I wonder if that came from Grandma’s brother, Uncle Doodle? He lived in Chicago . . . Or maybe Dad picked it up in grad school.) And here’s another box of interest. No, I don’t know how this was acquired, and I’m not sure I want to ask! 16. Here’s the paddle assembly, sitting on a platform on a card table at one end of the Christmas Tree Closet, and draped carefully in old bedsheets. 17. And at the other end of the closet is the tree. We swaddle it in a number of old linens: Some old bedsheets that have been mended (yeah, people used to patch bedsheets!), part of an old parachute (I think), and (my favorite) an old smock that my Grandpa used to use for his customers at his barbershop. When we worked on the tree a decade ago, my mom made a cool little square skateboard that the tree can sit on. With wheels, it moves much, much more easily in and out of the closet. My mom’s got an excellent analytical brain for figuring out better ways to do things. She could have been an engineer. So . . . that’s the end of the slideshow. I hope you’ve enjoyed this peek at our weird Christmas tree. It’s not every day that you get to see it go topless!

Grandma’s Dolls

I don’t know about you, but we’re still doin’ Christmas around here. We put up the decorations about mid-December and will leave them up through Epiphany. Of our old holiday decorations that had been Grandma’s, last year I told you about the Knecht Ruprecht, the Weihnachtspyramide, and the preponderance of fruit and fruit baskets on her “Christmas tree.” This year I’d like to feature Grandma’s dolls. As long as I can remember, they’ve been associated with the tree (the “tree” is actually a Weihnachtspyramide, a “Christmas pyramid,” but we call it a “tree” for convenience). When I was little, Grandma always hooked the dolls to the front corners of the tree. And she continued to display them this way to the end of her years. Here’s a picture of Grandma and the Weihnachtspyramide taken around 1969. You can see the dolls at the two sides at the base. Since we’ve become caretakers of the tree, we’ve moved the dolls to a different position of honor: They stand together under a glass dome on the small table that was used as an altar when this building was a church. (Did I tell you our house used to be a church? . . . But that’s another story.) Positioned where they are now, the dolls are the first thing you see as you come up the steps to the second floor. As Grandma did, we put them out every Christmas. They are very fragile. I try to handle them as little as possible. I honestly don’t know what’s holding them together! . . . Love, I guess. One of the reasons we still have the dolls is that when Grandma was little, she wasn’t allowed to play with them. They were too “nice.” She had another doll to play with. In this picture, taken about 1910, when my grandma was about five, she’s holding the doll she was allowed to play with, and you can see one of the two dolls I’m telling you about attached (as I’ve mentioned) to a front corner of the Weihnachtspyramide. By the way, my dad says we still have the doll she played with, too. He and mom have it at their house. Here’s a detail of a picture taken around 1915, where the two dolls were standing on a platform beneath the table holding the Weihnachtspyramide. At the right is the dolly she played with. Grandma would have been about ten when this picture was taken. We have other old pictures of the Weihnachtspyramide, and in some of them the dolls don’t appear. Each year, the tree is different. Maybe when her boys were young, Grandma kept the dolls safe in a box. Boys can be kind of rowdy, of course. Well, there’s not much more to say, except that I know very little about dolls. I wasn’t interested in them when I was little, and I don’t know much about the collecting scene, except that it exists, and that there are about a million dolls for collectors to collect. If you’re reading this and know something about these types of dolls, I’d love you to contact me. Are they German antique dolls? I’d like to learn more about them. Yes, I imagine these fragile dolls are probably “worth” a zillion dollars to collectors, but of course we’re not interested in selling them. They belong to the family. They go with the tree.

Silent Night

Good evening! And Merry Christmas. I was wanting to tell you something really profound this evening, about time and wintertime, hope and peace and love, but after an evening of chopping veggies and preparing for tomorrow's feast--and after enjoying some eggnog and stollen . . . the spell has come over me.

We woke up to snow this morning! We are having a white Christmas. Fortunately, the roads aren't bad, either!




This is how I like Christmas trees the best: at night, when they enrapture me with their radiant, warm light. As I write this, the Weihnachtspyramide glows, just like it always has, and a part of me glows along with it.

I would tell you more, but it's time for us all to get to sleep: "You know, Santa won't come if you're still awake!"

So I leave you with this scene. A quiet room, the glowing tree, the cats curled up.

All is calm, all is bright.





* * * * Merry Christmas, everyone. * * * *

---

(Psst: If you're unfamiliar with our "weird" Christmas tree, see this post from last year.)

Fruit Baskets for Christmas

One of the best things about having a hundred-year-old Christmas tree in your living room is that its decorations inform you about what was precious to our ancestors, to the people of the past. I find this intriguing as well as instructive.




At some point during the holiday season, I find time to sprawl out on the sofa and gaze quietly at the Weihnachtspyramide glowing across the room, and reflect on the themes and symbols it carries—for instance, the Knecht Ruprecht and all that he signifies, and so on.

As you might already know from previous posts, I’m keen on fruits, raw fruits. I love their colors, their flavors, their freshness. Spring fruits, summer fruits, autumn fruits, tropical fruits, wild, cultivated, all of ’em.




I delight in the fact that we here in America can procure just about any kind of fruit there is, at any time of the year. This is so wonderful it’s almost appalling. It’s unnatural. It’s Roman in its decadence.

But I’m not complaining; I glory in the availability of such wonderful edibles, and I’m confounded by anyone who can’t agree—those people who “don’t like” fruits, vegetables, and so forth.




When my grandparents were children during the early 1900s, favorite Christmas gifts included candy, nuts, and fresh fruits. It was the same for my parents’ generation, for they have told me how much they appreciated getting an orange on Christmas.

An orange!

I sit on the sofa in the golden glow of that tree and think of oranges in wintertime, during the cold days, long nights, with meals of meat and potatoes, cabbage, and canned green beans. Sauerkraut, if you were German. And anything else preserved, home-canned, particularly during the Depression. All that fresh stuff from the garden in summer? Gone. No longer fresh—in winter they’re all pulled out of a Mason jar. All winter long.

So to have an orange—a zippy, luscious, fresh, bright, juicy orange—on Christmas morning? Exotic, tropical, something from Florida! It would taste like candy, wouldn’t it?

Some of the oldest ornaments on the tree are miniature woven baskets filled with fruit, or shiny glass balls that look kind of like fruit. One of these has most of the “shine” worn off of the balls, but we leave it as it is.




One of the baskets is full of strawberries—plastic (or really some precursor of plastic).




Some of the old fruit baskets appear on our earliest pictures of the tree, such as this one from 1915.




At the very top of the “pyramid” are clusters of fruits—pears, peaches, grapes, citrus, and so on. Some are quite old; some are newer. Grandma was always ready to add more fruit ornaments to the tree. I guess she never really got it out of her head that fruits are precious, valuable, special gifts from the earth.




Fruits please us and nourish us. They’re nature’s original sugar, humankind’s first candy. I can’t take them for granted, either.

Merry Christmas, everyone, Merry Christmas.

Weihnachtspyramide

As I write this, we’ve been having our first snow of the season; we can see it starting to collect in corners of the sidewalks and the gutters of the streets. The road surface reflects light, and drivers seem more sedate and fewer in number.

It’s been a big weekend in the city. Friday night was the Living Windows, downtown, and the Governor’s Mansion candlelight tours. Saturday was Christkindelfest and the citywide Christmas parade. I’m pretty sure the kids who participated in the parade were mostly the same ones we looked at in the “Living Windows.” Same choirs and scout groups! But it was all very cheerful and entertaining.

There’s more to blog about than I’ve had time to type. Hopefully I’ll post a little in retrospect. Tonight, however, I’m doing a “here is where I am right now” post.

I’m on the sofa, my shoes off, my foot aching. I think that screw in my bone gets cold and then takes extra time to warm back up.

On the stereo, a recording of Joseph-Guy Ropartz’s Le Miracle de Saint Nicolas. (Fitting for today, le 6 Décembre, n’est-ce pas?) Happy St. Nicholas day!

Annnnnd . . . we put up the Christmas tree today. It is there, right in front of me.

It’s not really a Christmas tree. It’s more of a “contraption.”

It’s probably the coolest and most valuable thing I own. . . . I feel very strange saying that, however, because I don’t feel as if it belongs to me. We are merely its current caretakers.

It’s technically a Weihnachtspyramide, a “Christmas pyramid” that consists of a roughly pyramidal structure with a vertical central axle that bears platforms upon which may be placed Christmas figurines. Atop the axle are paddles (like a beanie cap) that spin because they catch rising air from the heat of candles placed below.

You’ve probably seen these wooden pyramiden, usually ones that were hand-carved in the Erzgebirge region of Germany. They often have little candles at the four bottom corners to provide the heat necessary to turn the platforms into little processionals at the center.

Well, my family’s pyramide was built by my great-grandfather Albert Thomas in about 1890. This is the same great-grandfather who created the home that we live in (which is a long story I won’t go into now); it’s my dad’s grandpa on his mother’s side. Albert and his wife, Wilhelmine, were German immigrants who arrived here in Jeff City in 1888.

The pyramide was already about twenty years old when my grandma was about five, in 1910, which is when we got our first picture of it. Grandma is sitting next to it with a big bow in her hair, and she’s holding a nice big doll. Many of the ornaments in that picture are the same that we put on the tree today.

Literally, today. It is always an experience to set up the tree; to carry it down the creaking steps from the third floor where it resides in its own special closet, with a door wide enough to accommodate its annual migration to the living room.

It takes two people to walk it down the steps and squeeze it gently through the doorway into the front hall. Though we pack it with tissue paper each year, the bell ornaments attached at the center still tinkle and ring at each jostle.

It’s traditional to sing “O Tannenbaum” as we carry it. I’ve only recently learned the German lyrics, having “faked it” for many years.

Until I was a young adult, carrying it downstairs was always done by my dad and Uncle Richard. They are both capable as well as immensely careful. The tree is bulky but very light. It is a fragile, old thing, and a dear thing.




I was terrified the first time I helped carry it downstairs. I must have been about twenty. My dad reassured me, and I did all right.

Dad and I carried it again today. We set it carefully on its card table, which we had draped this year with a white felt skirt that my Great Aunt Minnie (Grandma’s sister) had decorated one year with sequins and pictures she’d clipped from her Christmas cards. The Santa Clauses and candy canes, snowmen, poinsettias, roses, angels, and snowflakes are glued on with Elmer’s. It was a nice project for Aunt Minnie that year, since she’d broken her knee on the sidewalk outside of Dallmeyer’s jewelry that year—this must have been in the 1950s.

I don’t use this skirt very often because it’s so fragile, but this year I wanted it.

The paddles are a separate unit that fits at the top. It’s kind of a bugger to get it to fit right, but we always get it somehow, eventually. Again, it’s not heavy—just very fragile. The paddles were made out of wood from old fruit crates.

The Santa Claus at the very top is another separate piece, always packed in the boxes with the various ornaments.

After we remove the tissue paper from the inner cavity, the first job is usually to get a damp paper towel or two and wipe any dust or pieces of greenery from the floor of the base, which we call the “garden.” There’s a little wooden picket fence around the perimeter.




Before too many ornaments get placed, we set up the little houses and trees in the garden, then put the Nativity scene in place. Onto the first platform go a partial collection of miniature sheep that date to the tree’s earliest years (we have a nice picture from 1915 that shows them plainly).

It’s a family joke to say, “every year, we add a new ornament”—but it’s actually pretty true. Grandma insisted on keeping the tree young. Keeping it pretty.

And that’s the attitude that’s kept the tree alive all these years: It changed; it changes. The candles gave way to kerosene lamps, then to a small wall-mounted fan that made the paddles spin. Since about 1957, a music box at the base gently turns the axle while chiming “Oh Come All Ye Faithful” and “Silent Night.” That’s how I’ve known it my whole life.




Similarly, strings of multicolored Christmas lights replaced the glow (and danger) of candles and coal oil lamps. And the baubles and beads have occasionally been swapped out for new and shinier as the years went on. Also, many of the ornaments represent new faces and places of the family. There’s a modern blown-glass chili pepper that I’m sure came from my uncle and aunt when they lived in New Mexico, for instance.

Meanwhile, we continue to put many of the old ornaments on it—little fruit baskets, which always make me think of how precious and rare fresh fruits used to be by the end of December. Wax angels, which are also some of the oldest ornaments. We are always careful not to place them near light bulbs that might melt their pink arms and legs. There are a couple of bottle caps painted to look like Santa faces, with a cotton-ball beard glued on, that I think were made by one of my uncles. It looks like a third-grade project.




When you’re the caretaker of something that represents the experiences, memories, and culture of multiple generations of your family, it’s an awesome and wonderful thing.

I hope lots of people get to see it this year.