New Year’s Eve on Elm Street

Hello, friends—happy new year! It’s a little belated, but I wanted to write a bit about the process of starting a new year, and bidding adieu to the old. I realize if I don’t post this belatedly, then I’ll never post it at all, because each year, I’m far too busy before Dec. 31 to spend time writing about it.

In our diverse American culture, the phrase “happy holidays” has become the most useful and inclusive way of articulating the joy of our mutual year-end celebrations. Yet whether we observe the winter solstice, Hanukkah, Christmas, or Kwanzaa, nearly all of us do something on December 31 to recognize the night—the instant—that we cross over the bridge spanning the past and the future.



I’ve found an intriguing diversity in the ways people celebrate New Year’s Eve. Some people don’t do more than get out a new wall calendar. Others watch the “ball drop” on TV, or go to parties (private or public). Often, people eat special foods, supposed to bring luck or money, such as black-eyed peas or bean soup, hoppin’ John . . . or black bun, oatcakes, and whiskey (as they do in Scotland).

I’m partial to pickled herring, because everyone knows you need to eat that on New Year’s Eve in order to have some money in your pocket!



My family has a tradition of having a New Year’s Eve party each year. In many ways, it’s a fairly normal party, in that we have an array of snack foods and beverages, and amicable and animated conversations develop and overlap as people move about, mixing, sharing one another’s news and ideas.



By the time New Year’s Eve rolls around, the bulk of the holidays—the decorating, the gift-giving, the churchgoing, the entertaining—is over, and everyone is relaxed and ready to have a good time. But what really distinguishes my family’s New Year’s Eve party from all others is the mützens.



The Thomas/Schroeder family of Elm Street in Jefferson City has been celebrating New Year’s with mützens for at least four generations. My great-grandparents Albert and Wilhelmina Thomas came to Jefferson City from Germany around 1895 and raised their family (a son and four daughters) on West Elm Street, in the little “Germantown” of Muenchberg, or Old Munichburg. In 1930, the youngest of their children, my paternal grandmother, Edna Thomas, married my grandfather Walter A. F. Schroeder, and the couple moved, with Albert and Wilhelmina, into a duplex created for them by Albert. This home—formerly the German Methodist Episcopal church the Thomases had been members of—still stands at the northeast corner of Broadway and West Elm. It’s where I live today.

This house has been the setting for the family’s New Year’s Eve mützen celebrations for about seventy-five years. The tradition apparently started in the 1930s as a gathering for Walter and Edna’s bridge club, which had formed in the 1920s.



As the couple’s children grew and married, and as grandchildren came along, the New Year’s party evolved into a family-and-friends gathering. Serving mützens at midnight has been a part of the celebration all along.



What are mützens? As far as I’ve been able to tell, mützen are a festival food, a kind of fritter or donut, eaten in Germany the same way we in America enjoy funnelcakes. I understand that German mützen are enjoyed particularly at Fastnacht (Mardi Gras) celebrations. I’ve seen similar goodies called Fastnachts, which are sometimes rolled out, then sliced into diamond shapes before frying.

Indeed, there are some basic similarities between mützens and funnelcakes: Both are made with a sweet dough that is fried and served topped with powdered sugar, and both are especially good when they’re hot and fresh. Mützens, however, are made with a much thicker and stickier yeast dough than funnelcakes, and in my family they are flavored with mace and currants.

Some recipes I’ve seen for mützen incorporate raisins, apple chunks, cinnamon, and/or nuts. The mace and currants, however, combine for a unique flavor, which for me powerfully recalls New Year’s Eve celebrations.

Anyway—nudged off a spoon into hot oil, the dough bobs, rises, and puffs out into a ball, but often taking bizarre shapes with odd “appendages.”



Across the German border, in Holland, a similar treat is made called Olie Bollen (“oil balls”; sometimes called Dutch donuts). Edna—again, my Grandma Schroeder—lived under the same roof as her German immigrant parents and therefore learned to prepare their favorite foods. It makes geographical sense that she learned to make this pastry from her mother, who was raised in northwestern Germany, where German and Dutch cultures form a gradient. To our knowledge, Edna never used a written recipe for mützens.

Edna’s reputation for her mützens grew. Albert and Wilhelmina passed away in the 1940s; Walter, my Grandpa Schroeder, passed away in 1966, but Edna’s sisters and their families, her sons and their families, and a number of dear friends continued the New Year’s Eve tradition of getting together and having mützens at midnight.

At some point, the job of applying powdered sugar to the outsides of the freshly made mützens (that is, shaking them in a paper sack with the sugar) became the general responsibility of any grandchildren who were old enough to perform the task. It felt like a great honor to be enlisted to help in the kitchen—especially since kids can get kind of bored with hours of grown-up conversations as the clock ticks toward midnight.



Grandma was an enthusiastic entertainer. In between punching down the dough and, as the evening progressed, frying batches, she would dance through the living room, singing “Here comes a duke a-riding, a-riding, a-riding . . . !” She also circulated among her guests, making sure everyone had enough to eat and drink.



There was always plenty to drink!

At midnight, Grandma would bring out a huge platter full of mützens. By this time, the deliciously sweet mützen smell was all over the house, so getting to finally eat them has always brought a climax to the evening, which is a climax to the year. In a sense, mützens are like a dessert to the year passed, and breakfast for the year to come.



Yes, we continue this tradition—and yes, in my next post I’m gonna tell you how to make mützens yourself!

Meet the Baxes!

Hey, folks, today was the annual Fall Supper at St. Joseph Catholic Church, in Westphalia, Missouri!

And it was a beautiful fall day—sunshine, blue skies, a nice breeze, comfortable dry air.

The food, of course, was incredibly delicious: Tender, flavorful German pot roast, homemade whole-hog sausage, kraut with beans, mashed potatoes, gravy, corn, green beans, apple sauce. Bread (you want to sop up all the good juices!), and, of course, your choice of dessert.

I always skip the cakes and brownies and go for a slice of fruit pie—whatever looks homemade and seasonal. Today my choice was blackberry/raspberry pie. Dad selected gooseberry pie!

Gosh, darn it, I forgot to take pictures of the food! I keep forgetting to do that at these church suppers. But you know how it is—as soon as you sit down, the platters and bowls of food start circuiting the table, and then your plate is full, and before you know it, you’re all done. Lickin’ your chops!

Today’s supper was special, however! Remember that newlywed couple my dad happened to photograph on October 17, 1964, as they departed through the church gates riding on the back of a manure wagon? And four days after I posted the picture, the couple had been identified: It was Elmer and Rita Bax!

Well, I met them in person today!

It was really fun to connect with them and their family, and yes, they’re all delightful, cordial, wonderful people. And yes, Rita was slicing pies when I met her! And this afternoon, Elmer was the Bingo caller!

They’re a good lookin’ couple, aren’t they!




I even got to meet Rita’s sister and brother-in-law, who are visiting from Albuquerque. This is the sister who had been casually doing Internet searches on “Westphalia, Missouri” when she stumbled upon the photo of Elmer and Rita: “Hey, isn’t that—!?”

And I got to introduce them to my father, who had taken the two photos of them in 1964, when he happened to be in Westphalia with a group of graduate students, touring the historic sites in the town. Naturally, when he saw the wedding couple riding in a manure spreader (of all things), he had to take a picture.

Rita explained that it’s a tradition in Westphalia for newlyweds to think up novel ways to ride away from the church. It’s not so much a “luck” thing as it is simply fun. Lately, she said, hay wagons have been popular. And one couple, for example, rode away on a pontoon!

The Baxes have been married forty-seven years as of tomorrow. To celebrate their anniversary, and to thank them for letting me harass them publicly on the Internet, I gave them a framed version of this photo.




(Gosh, isn’t the Internet a fascinating thing?)

Spreading Joy in Westphalia, Missouri

It’s a wedding tradition I had certainly never heard about, but if you search the Internet for word combinations like “manure + spreader + wedding,” you can find some information (but not much). If you have done just that, and landed on this Web page, and if you have any information, I hope you’ll post a comment or go to the Op Op Facebook page (see the link at the right) and leave a note there.

As I mentioned in my last post, we drove around south of Jeff City last weekend, and part of that was in Westphalia. While we were there, we asked a couple of locals if they knew about a tradition involving a newlywed couple exiting the church grounds not in a limo but on the back of a manure spreader.

And this couple had indeed heard of it. They said it has to do with good luck—it’s supposed to guarantee a long marriage, or something like that. (They intimated that their observations have disproven the notion, but apparently it’s a tradition that some people might still do.)

—Have you ever heard of such a thing?




The reason I asked them is that my mom has recently been scanning her old slides, and a couple of these show a bride and groom exiting the parking lot of St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Westphalia, Missouri, perched side-by-side on the back of a manure spreader (thankfully it was covered with some kind of tarp!). In the picture, they are being pulled by an Allis-Chalmers D-15 tractor.

(These people, by the way, are not friends or acquaintances of my parents; my dad just happened to be in Westphalia when this occurred and took pictures, which is exactly what anyone in their right mind would do when presented with such a spectacle!)

The manure spreader’s wheels are devoid of tires—they are just bare rims—it must have been a rough ride! Also, there are two old brooms tied upright somewhat decoratively on the front corners of the spreader. A rope swings in a U-shape, hanging at each end from one of the brooms. Dangling from this rope are two stirrups from a horse saddle.




The front end of the spreader is marked “Donated by ?” (I think that’s a question mark), and the side (funnily enough) that the groom is on is labeled “HER.” (I bet, amid all the joy and rice-throwing, the couple inadvertently sat down on the “wrong” sides.) The wheel rim that’s visible in the photos is marked “wheel of” something—I can’t see the part not facing the camera.

I’m pretty sure those are strings of Stag beer cans dragging from the back of the manure spreader. Classy!




The date of this photo is almost certainly October 1964: Anyone know who this couple is? If the luck of the “manure-spreader wedding limo” has held out, they’re getting close to their golden anniversary!

Here’s a photo we took last weekend of St. Joseph’s church in Westphalia.




It’s a very attractive, historic town, and if you haven’t been there, you should make a point of visiting it. Westphalia, you might recall, is home of the Westphalia Inn, with its delicious family-style dinners and house-made wines, and its popular Norton Room, Corkscrew Deck, murder-mystery dinners, and live music. Westphalia also has bed and breakfasts for you to relax at, plus the Westphalia Historical Society now has a museum.

And St. Joseph’s, like the other Catholic parishes in the region, has an annual summer picnic (which was August 7 this year) and fall supper. The fall supper will be on October 16 this year. And you know—not even counting the delicious sausage—that’s a perfect time of year to go for a drive in rural Missouri.

. . . Though I wouldn’t recommend seeing it from the back of a manure spreader!




NOTE: The 1964 photos in this post are property of my Mom and Dad, who gave me permission to use them, so don't you dare copy them. Be nice; ask permission first!

MYSTERY SOLVED. Read the comments below, and click here for a newer post explaining everything. And click here for more on the story!

Valentine’s

It wasn’t very extravagant this year, seeing as our past whole week has been disrupted. Having one foot in a cast, I’m unable to be very useful about much, and Sue has been busy doing all the cooking, cleaning, and cat boxes. And much, much more.

But at this point I’m fairly comfortable with my new/old handicap, able to get around okay, able to take care of myself, as long as it doesn’t involve carrying things around or standing up for more than about ten minutes at a time.

But there was no time for shopping for or making cards, or even for hitting the grocery store for special delectable foodstuffs for a “special evening.” And it’s not like I can drive myself anywhere.

But then, it’s amazing what you can do with the stuff in the fridge. Look what Sue made me for breakfast! I had asked for toast.




As she prepared it, she kept calling to me, from the kitchen, asking if I didn’t want any strawberry jelly or anything; “No,” I replied, “just some ‘I Can’t Believe’ is fine.”

In the afternoon, my folks came over, and look at the pumpkin bread they brought us!




Isn’t that nice? (And yum!)

Uncle Richard and Aunt Carole joined us all for lunch, and they brought us some candy and a rose. My only regret is that I couldn't reciprocate, except with a smile and heartfelt gratitude for their thoughtfulness.

Sue’s and my usual Valentine’s treat usually begins on Halloween night, when we stuff all the mini Hershey’s chocolate bars leftover from trick-or-treaters into the freezer. There, we forget about them until Valentine’s Day, when we break them into small pieces and heat them gently (as in a double boiler) and stir in some half-and-half, to make a chocolate fondue for strawberries, bananas, pieces of cake or plain cookies, or whatever. (Hey, that pumpkin bread!)




We’re quite proud of our brilliant idea! Alas, we didn’t have any half-and-half last night, and we weren’t about to drive to a grocery store just for that. But Sue stirred in a little Cointreau, and that thinned it a bit. (Well, not like it was going to sit around for long.)

We also had a bottle of sparkling Catawba grape juice, which we shared—I know Sue would have preferred actual champagne, but she was kind enough to share with my non-alcoholedness—so we sipped that sweet pink liquid out of some beautiful little goblets that had been Grandma’s. Indeed, these were the same glasses we’d used ten years ago on a Valentine’s evening spent at this house, while we were considering buying it.

The only thing to complete our little at-home date night was a movie—and Hulu to the rescue! We found the movie Charade (1963, Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn, filmed in Paris) on Hulu for free, and naturally that was incredibly romantic and thrilling. We saw some places in that movie, including the American Express office, where we had been when we were in Paris in 2006.

So there you go. Ten years into this homeownership, and a second broken foot, another fondue of melted Halloween chocolate with strawberries and a fun movie, and seventeen years together. Not the most extravagant Valentine’s we’ve ever had . . . but indeed, it was one of the sweetest.

Fourth Foods

It was and continues to be a surprise to me, to think that not everyone has the same food in mind for the Fourth of July.

For other holidays, it seems, we tend to get the same stuff. Turkey on Thanksgiving. You know what I mean.

To celebrate America’s birthday, the party food truly does vary from one region to another and differs with one’s ethnicity. But the basics are: You’re (generally) having an outdoor dining experience in the middle of summer, in some of the hottest weather of the year, so you tend to cook outdoors. You also tend to take advantage of all the farm-fresh produce that’s starting to become available. Beyond that, what does your family history bring to it? And your region? And what is good ol’ “American” food to you?

With my family, we have generally opted for the simple-to-grill hamburgers and/or hot dogs, with all the fixin’s to your heart’s content (BBQ sauce, ketchup, mustard, relish, tomatoes, pickles, onions, lettuce); potato salad (in my clan, this is often German potato salad); corn on the cob; baked beans; potato chips; a Jell-O salad; melon; homemade ice cream with blueberries and strawberries. Or anything with fresh peaches.

Sue’s family, in northern Ohio, often did the hamburger-and-hot dog thing, or—and this blew my mind—fried perch and/or walleye. Fried fish! And then, coleslaw, potato salad (the mustard kind), baked beans, potato chips, watermelon, homemade ice cream, fruit pie or cake.

Other folks grill steaks or ribs or barbecued pork steak. In the south, of course, it’s barbecue. But then also, fried chicken does it for a lot of people, too.

On the coasts, I see from Gourmet magazine, they have lobster sandwiches. Ooh-la-la.

And then there was that summer in San Francisco when I ate at a Chinese restaurant, which was busy with lots of Chinese American customers. . . . Or the year some Mexican-immigrant friends invited us over for a glorious fiesta with a huge pot of homemade chicken mole, fresh tortillas, and margaritas and sangria to make everyone happy.

I think the point I’m trying to make is that the Fourth of July, the quintessential “American” holiday, varies from region to region and from one ethnic root to the next. The coolest thing about this “melting pot” of ours is that the constituent elements (German, African, Mexican, Chinese, Norwegian, English, Irish, Korean . . .) stubbornly and gloriously persist across the generations, preserving the diversity despite our unity as citizens of the United States, the greatest country in the world.

Bong Bong Bong Bong Bong Bong Bong Part 2

Oops, I really veered off the subject there, but I’m not sorry at all.

This here post is about the loudspeakers on top of Jefferson City’s First Presbyterian Church, uptown on the corner of Madison and McCarty. It’s a stately brick building, built in the late 1920s, and the congregation is one of Jeff City’s oldest (it dates back to the 1830s).

The Presbyterians have an electronic carillon system: Bell-like sounds that blast out of loudspeakers, based on preprogrammed digital renditions of “favorite” hymns.

Are these your favorite hymns? If not, too bad for you, because they play for about fifteen minutes three times a day: 8 a.m., noon, and 4 p.m. They play one, two, or three verses of four or five different hymns. They change the hymn selections every month or so—to keep the town from rioting, I suspect.

At times it seems endless; just when one hymn ends, and you think the ordeal is over, another one whirrs into gear.

Here’s where I have problems with it: they do songs that would never have been played on normal (manually operated) bells, because they’re hymn tunes (not traditional bell chime tunes) with chords and diatonic and even chromatic tones or accidentals, and the songs involve many notes and chords in succession. To play these on traditional bells, you’d need dozens of differently keyed bells (like a handbell choir—and don’t get me started on them). And perhaps worst, with the sustain of the chime notes, the various tones run together and create dissonance. To my ear, anyway.

Imagine if a piano player kept the sustain pedal depressed through a whole song: Tonal mush.

One of the things that makes the “Big Ben” tune work for bells is that it’s all basically one chord, so there’s little dissonance when the tones overlap. Only four bells (notes) are needed.

Plus, I think as you get farther away from the Presbyterians’ loudspeakers, the wind and distance take a toll on the sound quality (pun intended). So when that church first started broadcasting their hymns this way, I usually bristled when I heard the system launch into what I knew would be fifteen whole minutes of dissonant hometown holiness.

Okay: Now I’m going to turn it all around, though, and tell you that although I used to gripe about how the Presbyterians and their loud system are drowning out the “traditional” dingers of the Catholics . . . I’m starting to kinda like them.

(Does this mean I’m starting to fit in, here in Jefferson City? Gads.)

But here is what happened: Because I work at home and leave the windows open, because I go outside a lot, I’m finding that like people from a hundred years ago, I’m using those bells to regulate my day. I’m a freelancer; I quit wearing a watch a few months ago.

So I hear the bells and think, “Wow, it’s time for me to get out of bed.” I hear them at noon and trot downstairs to fix myself a sandwich. I hear them at four and start thinking about kicking back in a lawn chair with an O’Doull’s.

And sure, I know all those tunes—they’re standard hymns. And I find them getting stuck in my head. I find myself humming “Come Ye Thankful People Come” and “Faith of Our Fathers.” I don’t think it’s making me a holier person, but the measured tempos and step-by-step chord progressions seem somehow to mirror the emerging pattern of these freelance days, superimposing the idea of structure where I so badly need it.

And so I’m finding it a welcome companion these days.

Even if the sustain of the tones leads to weird dissonances. Even if the sound comes from loudspeakers instead of real bells. This is the twenty-first century, after all; some stuff is going to have to change in order to stay the same.

Bong Bong Bong Bong Bong Bong Bong

Hah! Now I’m virtually assured that people Googling on marijuana paraphernalia (“bongs”) will locate my site and be sorely disappointed to find that this post’s subject is . . . church music. But I’m ready for the annoyed comments. In fact, I think it will be funny.

But let me back up a bit. This is a very bongy town. And by that, I mean ding-dongy: There’s always a bell ringing someplace. From our house we can hear bells from the Cole County Courthouse, St. Peter Catholic Church, and Central United Church of Christ. And then there are the dingers of the Presbyterians, which are not, strictly speaking, bells but a carillon system that plays out of loudspeakers.

Let me back up a little bit more. (Sorry this is so disorganized. Call up some editor and complain.) See, not long after Grandma passed away, I found myself sitting alone in the backyard of her house (our house now), looking at her flowerbeds, hearing the birds chirp, and feeling, quite sharply, the passage of time.

And then the bells rang. It was St. Peter’s. They must have some really old bells—yeah, real bells—and they always do the “Westminster Chimes” melody, which uses four pitches: a first (tonic), a second, a third, and a fifth. The fifth is the lowest tone. You know this tune—it’s the same thing Big Ben uses in London.

And I started thinking about how long those bells must have chimed in this town. I reflected on how my grandparents and great-grandparents on both sides heard those and other bells and regulated their lives by the chimes.

Bells ringing: time to get up.
Bells ringing: time to be at work.
Bells ringing: time to break for lunch.
Bells ringing: time to knock off for the day and get some dinner.

Such bells served an important public service. I sat there on the bench and dialed back to a time I never knew, a time when there weren’t three clocks in every room, before you had a cell phone, a wrist watch, and a clock on the dashboard, all telling you the time.

A time when a pocket watch was a piece of fine jewelry, each adult allotted maybe one, and a clock on the mantel a valuable heirloom. Not everyone had watches, and these clock towers kept the whole town regulated.

It was an interesting thing, to listen to the bells with that perspective.

But here is something funny and quirky about the St. Peter’s bells: the low note is flat. Waaaay flat. Like almost a half step. And it sounds reeeeeaaalllly lame. And it should! A flatted fifth (diminished fifth, a.k.a. an augmented fourth) played against the tonic creates a huge dissonance (like a C and an F# played together).

It sounds so dissonant that early music theorists referred to this interval (a tritone—the span of three whole tones) as the “devil’s interval,” “the devil in music.”

So of course, I find myself chuckling when I hear that flat bell, and I think of how medieval (Catholic) composers and music theorists eschewed this “scary,” “evil,” and “diabolical” interval. There’s some debate about whether or not musicians were actually excommunicated for performing this interval.

I just think it’s funny when I hear that flat bell: “Bong, bong, bong, buuuung . . .” The Catholic devil’s tritone wafting over the heart of the city makes me think of how the overly religious types have moved on over the centuries to find their devils elsewhere, like in households where same-gender couples are living in “Til death do us part” committed relationships and wanting the same legal recognitions, rights, and responsibilities as those in heterosexual unions. And when they finally accept that as normal, like the flatted fifth, they’ll just move on to some other devil or scapegoat.