Murfin Memoir—New Year 1951, Delta, Colorado

The fruits of my mother's determination, the front page of  the Delta Sunday Independent.

It was December 28, 1950.  The small apartment over a Main Street store over looked the movie theater across the street.  I only remember two things about the place.  Once the movie theater caught fire and I watched the fire trucks and the scurrying men out the window.  But mostly I remember the perfectly round holes in the white ceiling.  I spent a good deal of my time on my back in the crib with my brother Tim staring at those holes.  We were twenty-one months old, my twin brother and I, on that winter morning in Delta, Colorado.

A half a world away that day, in the worst winter weather ever recorded on the peninsula, the Chinese Communists crossed the 38th parallel in Korea.  American, South Korean and United Nations forces were reeling before a seemingly irresistible avalanche of Chinese in their quilted uniforms and fur hats, their bugles crying through a frozen night.  Just days before they had poured over the frozen Yalu and encircled a whole Marine division at Chosin Reservoir in frantic fighting at twenty below zero.  Somehow a remnant of the Marines had broken out and fled south, but the Chinese surged forward.  Pyongyang had fallen on Christmas Eve.  Now they were threatening Seoul.

One of my earliest memories was watching the fire department respond to a blaze at this theater from the window of our apartment above a store across the street.  The modest movie palace obviously survived.

Other things were on my mother’s mind.  Christmas had seemed small this year in the little apartment.  She had grown used to living in houses since the war—small houses, rented houses, but places with yards and trees.  This place was so small that the crib took up half of the front room leaving barely enough room for her and Murf’s chairs, the pre-war floor model radio, a brass floor lamp with a silk shade and a magazine table between the chairs.  Now a miniature tree set on the table, lights shining with futile festivity.

It was as if they were just starting out again, like the little apartment in Hibbing, Minnesota.  They had moved there from Des Moines when Murf was finally able to get a real job as a bank teller and they were able at last to move out from her Aunt Myrtle’s.  Then the Sears and Roebuck furniture and the radio had made her proud of her newfound independence and it was with delight they had posed for pictures to send back to the folks at home as evidence of their prosperity.  That was fifteen years and a lifetime ago.  It all seemed small now.

           

But it wasn’t just the cramped drabness that vexed my mother that winter.  It was the terrible loneliness.  Her family, his family, they were all back east in Iowa and Missouri.  Even during war, when Murf was in North Africa or on some sweltering Pacific island, there was always family at Christmas—her mother, brother Pearl, little Mildred and all of his sprawling, rollicking kin.  But not this year in this fly speck town in the middle of nowhere.

Delta lay at confluence of the Upper and Lower branches of the Gunnison River as the western slope of the Rockies slid into dusty semi-desert, miles above where the Gunnison, flowing north, joined the Colorado and made the beginning of a decent river.  No one had ever heard of the place and likely no one ever would, despite Murf’s best efforts to make something of the town.

           

It was for her, exile.  Murf had lost the sporting goods store and hunting guide business in West Yellowstone, Montana.  His partner, a lay about drinking buddy with a glib tongue and fast roadster, emptied the bank account and made off to parts unknown and left Murf with all of the debts and a store full of unpaid for merchandise.  It was only the unexpected discovery of his talent for Chamber of Commerce work while he was in business that led him to this new path as a professional Chamber executive.  Delta, Colorado was the first town willing to give him a try for nearly $2000 a year and it was close enough to the high country so that he could keep the family in game and trout most of the year.  It was an adventure for him and he poured every waking hour into finding ways to convince tourists to come.

           

It had been months now and she, cramped in the apartment with toddlers, hardly knew a soul.  Of course every one knew Murf.  All of the merchants called him by name on the street, bought him hamburgers for lunch at the Woolworth Luncheonette when he could have been home with her, stood him for drinks and hunting yarns in the tavern after the office was locked.  The ranchers came in to discuss putting up guest cabins for eastern dudes or setting themselves up with strings of mules to pack the greenhorns into the high country after elk in the fall.  But the wives didn’t invite her to play bridge, though she played brilliantly, or to join the Literary Guild, though she made it a point to read all of the latest best sellers, or to do charity work, though she had once ran the entire Boy’s State program for the State of Montana.  Even the pastor’s wife at the Methodist church had not invited her for tea.

Ruby Irene Murfin.

           

At the age of 37 she was still slender and pretty.  She tried to stay as stylish as budget and a wish book catalogue would allow.  On Sunday she wore a netted cloche hat over her soft brown hair, silk dresses that showed off her arms and her legs, a string of cultured pearls, white gloves, shiny black pumps with a pretty leather bow, and cloth coat with an arctic fox fur collar.  Perhaps she was a threat to frumpier wives or perhaps they thought she put on airs.

           

But my mother was an independent, intelligent and determined woman.  There had to be some way of attracting notice, of crashing the closed circle of respectable society in a town like this.  Some time just after Christmas, alone in the little apartment with us boys, the cathedral radio humming and popping behind some far away soap opera, reading a flimsy copy of the Delta Independent, she had a brilliant idea.

           

She picked up the phone from the table by the pathetic tree and asked the operator to ring the paper.  “I want to speak to the editor,” she said.  “What are you doing for the front page New Year’s Eve?” she demanded.  “You know it’s going to be not just any New Year, but the first year of the second half of the century and a stock cartoon of a baby and father time just won’t do.  Don’t worry, I have just the thing for you…”

           

Mother busied herself until the photographer came.  Out came the globe on which she had traced my father’s movement during the War.  She cobbled a sword from some pieces of lathing, grabbed her shiniest pot from the kitchen, and even found silk opera hat my father had once used in some Masonic ritual.  The last touch was a small cloth stuffed partridge with a pink feather tail that had hung on the Christmas tree.

           

When the photographer knocked on the door, she hurriedly let him in.  At first she tried to put the pot helmet on me, but I kept swinging wildly with the wooden sword and nearly knocked down the Christmas tree and impaled my brother.  Tim, smaller than me, was as always calm and compliant, so she gave him the helmet and sword.  She quickly put the topper on my head and gave me the bird to squeeze tightly.  Positioning us on either side of the globe, she barked an order to the photographer, “Snap them quick, they won’t stand still for long.”

           

Her triumph came on Sunday morning.  All over Delta folks picked copies of the Sunday Independent from their stoops or doorways and saw Mrs. Murfin’s twins, in all of our diapered glory, the spirits of war and peace contesting for the world in a new age. 

Later the ladies at church surrounded her after services, cooed over the picture, stroked her arms and invited her for tea with The Aid.

Hogmanay—A Very, Very Big Deal in Scotland

Torch bearing Scottish warriors in an Edinburgh Hogmanay street parade. 

Scottish nationalists had a bad year.  They lost their long sought-after vote on national independence by an unexpectedly large margin.  The nationalists, always promoters of the unique Scottish culture, will perhaps take extra solace this year in the celebration of Hogmanay—the last day of the old year and the coming of the new.  This national festival and holiday is far more than just a big New Years Eve Party—it is the principle winter celebration, unabashedly pagan in its dim origins and current practice, eclipsing Christmas or New Years Eve after the pale and sickly manner of the English.  It is a very, very big deal indeed.

The celebration is both ancient and complicated, incorporating elements of the Winter Solstice traditions of the Norse Yule, the Celtic Samhain, and the Twelve Days of Christmas, recast as the Daft Days, minus any religious celebration of Nativity.  You can thank those dour old Calvinists of the National Kirk of Scotland—the Presbyterians for more completely scouring Christmas from the calendar than Oliver Cromwell and his Puritans ever dreamed in England.  If Scottish Catholics kept Christmas in their hearts, the kept their mouths shut about it and the practice faded even in their communities.  Christmas did not become a legal holiday in Scotland until 1958 and only then because so many English were moving into the border areas and were employed at firms in the big cities.

But Hogmanay was always a holiday.  In fact the whole damn country shut down to celebrate.  Both January 1 and 2 are Bank Holidays.  And if the second day, New Years Day, falls on a Sunday January 3 is a Bank Holiday.

If truth be known, the Kirk was not thrilled with Hogmanay either.  They predictably denounced it as pagan, which it surely was.  But either they despised paganism less than Papism, or they simply despaired of wiping out the most treasured celebration of the culture, but they could not wipe it out.  After perhaps dampening somewhat the excess of the season for a while, it came roaring back while the preachers in their wigs, bands, and Geneva Gowns whistled in the dark.

The origins of the word Hogmanay is as obscure as the origins of many of the customs associated with it.  Arguing the entomology of the word, which has had more than 30 variations in spelling depending on region and dialect and has only been standardized in the late 20th Century, is practically a national sport on its own.  Partisans of various theories are passionate.

Among the chief theories of origin advanced are.

·         Greek—the scholars of the Kirk surely got it wrong when they argued in the 1693 Scotch Presbyterian Eloquence that it was derived from a corruption the ancient Greek for Holy Month.  This was simply putting lipstick on a pig to dress it up for company.

·         French—This theory holds it was introduced by the French via the Auld Alliance—the traditional alliance between France and Scotland against England.  It is suggested it came from rural northern dialects of Middle French, aguillanneuf meaning either a gift given at New Year, a children’s cry for such a gift.  This is associated with traditions of ritual begging associated with the holiday in some areas.  It is also suggested that it might derive from the use of mistletoe as an emblematic gift of the beggars as in au gui mener or lead to the mistletoe.

·         Gaelic or Celtic—Although the term for New Years in Scots Gaelic is usually either  Oidhche na Bliadhna Ùire, the Night of the New Year or Oidhche Challainn the Night of the Calends, there are clues from folk usages in various areas.  In Manx, for instance there have been reported a remnant of an early folk song that begins with the line “Tonight is New Year’s Night, Hogunnaa.”  But other sources believe this refers to Halloween, once celebrated as New Years.  Others suggest an old Scottish begging plea thog mi an èigh/eugh corrupted over time.

·         Norse—This theory suggests that both the French and the Manx usages derived from a common Norse source, suggested in an old chant, “Hoginanaye-Trollalay/Hogman aye, Troll a lay/Hogmanay, Trollolay, give us of your white bread and none of your gray.”  The troll would refer to the people under the hill—the elves or the hoghmen, and that the begging chant originated in an ancient Troll banning invocation.

The truth is that the word origin is anybody’s guess.  We may just as well accept that it came down from heaven as a special gift to the Scotts.

The customs of Hogmanay vary considerable from location to location in Scotland but certain things are common—fire or pyrotechnics to welcome the New Year, communal conviviality, hospitality and visiting, and the invocation of one very special song.

The lighting of fires to greet the Solstice was common to both Norse and Celtic traditions.  In some rural areas the old hearth fire is extinguished, ashes removed and a new fire kindled.  In this tradition, visitors often bring as a gift a lump of coal to contribute to New Year flames.  In Stonehaven, Aberdeenshire in the northeast slinging torches are created by stuffing newspaper wadding, rags, and sticks into chicken wire balls which are lit and swung around the heads of revelers marching through the town arriving dockside at midnight and throwing the torch balls into the water.  Bon fires are common.  In Edinburgh, a reproduction of a Viking long ship is burned as a symbolic warning to those old invaders.

 Nowadays spectacular fireworks displays accompany The Bells, the striking of the midnight hour in major cities like Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Stirling, and Inverness.  Unlike the fireworks seen in American cities which often are a cue for revelers to head home, festivities in all of these cities continue through the night and into the next morning.

Revlers from the 1950's link arms for the singing of Auld Lang Syne at midnight.

In addition to wide spread communal and street celebrations, pubs, restaurants, hotels, and many families host large gatherings.  These parties involve festive traditional foods—shortbread, a black bun, special cakes for children, herring in coastal and fishing villages, and steak pie for a feast on New Years Day—story telling, dance, the exchange of small gifts after midnight, and plenty of free flowing whiskey.

At these parties it is common to clear the room so that at midnight all of the revelers form a circle to sing Auld Lang Syne.  Arms are linked at the beginning of the final verse which goes:

And there’s a hand, my trusty fiere!

and gie’s a hand o’ thine!

And we’ll tak’ a right gude-willie waught,

for auld lang syne.

At the conclusion of the song all of the guests rush to the center of the room, their clasped hands held high.  And then the revelry continues.

Auld Lang Syne, of course, was written by the beloved Scottish National Poet Robert Burns in the late 18th Century based on fragments of much older folk songs and set to a familiar air. Although not originally intended as a Hogmanay or New Years song—it was intended for any occasion of parting—the Scotts were singing it for these celebrations by the mid-19th Century.  Scottish regiments of the British Army introduced the song around the world.  By the early 20th Century it had found its way into very different New Years Eve celebrations in the U.S. really taking off when Guy Lombardo and the Royal Canadians began their long run of New Years Eve broadcast from a New York Hotel in 1928.

A First Footer with gifts, including symbolic coal for the hearth.

An important part of the home celebration which continues into January 1 is First Footing.  The first person to step foot across the threshold in the New Year is said to bring good luck.  It is important that the First Footer be a dark haired man.  A blonde or ginger is considered bad luck supposedly because the raiding and pillaging Vikings has light colored hair.  The First Footer is expected to bring gift of spirits, a black roll or other treat, and coal for the fire.  He and his party are elaborately welcomed with a fine breakfast and a dram or two of whiskey.

Visiting between homes continues throughout the day and into the following Bank Holiday and even beyond.  Presents are exchanged.  In some areas the old ritual begging by children continues.

By the time Hogmanay winds down, the whole nation is sated.  Those Scotts know how to party.  Pass the whiskey….