Those of you who are regular MBOB readers may be thinking–North Dakota?

Our Montana farm was nine miles out in the country with  three miles of that being narrow two lane pavement and the other six very narrow scoria road.  My 2 years-older brother and I both attended all four years of our high school at a Lutheran boarding school 180 miles away in Minot, North Dakota.

We had much more opportunity to participate in clubs, athletics, music and drama there than we would have had from the farm because there we had deal with driving through winter weather which could frequently be life threatening.  When it was  25 below zero and the wind was blowing, normal country parents in 1956, ’57, ’58, ’59 weren’t really excited about allowing teens to “run into town for the basketball game.”

Now during 8th grade, Dad took me to town for every home basketball game because another 8th grade girl and myself (both clarinetists) had been drafted into the high school band because they were really short of clarinets so it was not that our parents were averse to our participation in school activities.  In fact, they assumed that we would be involved in many things and it was just hard to get it all done and, by the way, we two youngest were the last of seven.  Our parents were just tired at some level, I think…and Best Brother and I being at the boarding school spared them six additional years of monitoring kids out running around the country.

Now get this straight: this was not reform school!  It was a four year Lutheran boarding school.  We were responsible for taking care of our clothes, getting our homework done(2 hours of scheduled study every night in our rooms–unsupervised), handling all of our behaviors including our free time and our extra-curricular activities, and caring for band and athletic uniforms, etc.  Young people who might represent “reform school” material were not considered for admission.

The student body was mostly made up of farm kids like ourselves from all over Montana and North Dakota.   Those of us from a distance only went home, often by train,  at Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter, so for all practical purposes I left home at age 14 and happily so, although it has always drained my heart a bit that I had no way of knowing that my Dad would die from cancer in the spring of my senior year, six weeks before my graduation.

He had sold our farm to my cousin while he was still able to function with paperwork and legal business…so eight weeks after I graduated from high school, the farm was gone as well. I have no doubt that those losses at that point in my life account for some of the intense early memories that I usually write about in MBOBs, but today’s MBOB is about a precious and repeated  memory I have from being at the academy during those four years.

A little daisy trail here: St. Olaf College was established in Northfield, Minnesota in 1874.  Part of their stellar Lutheran tradition throughout the mid-20th century was the development and training of vocalists anchored in the northern European style of choral musicianship.  Our choir directors at the academy were trained at St. Olaf  and taught us high school kids to sing the same way. End of daisy trail.

The high point of our spring every year was a 10-day A Cappella Choir Tour throughout the upper mid-west, singing 80-minute concerts featuring the finest choral music that the Lutherans had ever produced and some that they hadn’t.  Our choir was second to none in the region.

One of my best memories  from those years is the annual Christmas Concert when we still had the full count of 50 or 55 members.  The cuts for the spring tour that would take it down to 38 or 40 were made right after Christmas but at Christmas, we still had all of our singing friends together for the Christmas performance which was sung from the heart and by heart.

The Christmas Concert was when parents from all the distant farms would drive to Minot to pick their students up for the long Christmas vacation.  When we would go to the gym to sing that night, our suitcases would already be packed and waiting, because the minute the concert was done our parents would be warming up the car and getting ready to drive  180 miles through the night, to be home before morning so that the neighbors wouldn’t have to do the milking again as they had that evening while Mom and Dad were with us in Minot.

Oh, we loved that music.  We loved learning to sing in perfect unison: each of 8 possible parts was expected to sound like a singular voice–only one tone coming from each section of the choir.

We loved the discipline which included the occasional trauma that would fall upon any unfortunate choir member whose eyes strayed off the director during the concert.  Such a transgression would be immediately followed, at the end of the song, by just the movement of the director’s index finger as she pointed “through her own body” to a chair in the front row.  The student who had the straying eyes would understand their next assignment and would quietly step down from the risers, go and sit down, having just been effectively evicted from the balance of the performance. After the final song, they would join the exit procession of the choir, rejoining her alto or his bass section as they went by.

Nothing more was ever said about such an incident and of course, there would be no need, would there?  I think that happened two times in my four years there.  We loved succeeding in the disciplines required to produce the level of performance that was our goal.

So the evening of the Christmas concert we would be at fever pitch!  Excited about the music.  Excited to see our parents.  Excited to sing excellently for them.  I understand exactly how The Little Drummer Boy feels when he plays his song. That’s how we always felt, and of course, we sang his song, too.

Often we would close the Christmas Concert with a song that perhaps wasn’t quite Christmas, although it might be used in an Advent context.  Wake, Awake, For Night is Flying by F. Melius Christiansen was the standard closing number of our spring tour program and we took pride in performing it well in December.  The incoming freshmen would have learned it well enough, even though they were sometimes a little astounded at what they accomplished in such a short time.  

That was always our crowning moment–singing it from memory.  Singing it well, singing it with 55 pairs of eyes locked on the director whom we honored and loved, happily giving the basses and sopranos center stage at their very best moments in the number, and then ending the number triumphantly in an utterly silent auditorium.  Applause after such performances would have been considered inappropriate in our world, so there was just glorious, deafening silence.

(This link is audio only so you can click and keep reading.  My dear SIL-to-be was one of the first sopranos and Best Brother was one of the second basses. I was with the second altos.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLNmt9d6PqM

At Christmastime in my senior year at the academy, my Dad was ill.  Only later did I realize that my parents already suspected at Christmas how it was going to end.   He was already too ill at Christmas for them to come get me, so after the Christmas concert I went up to my dorm room to get my suitcase and then went downstairs to sign myself out, writing in the space provided, “home, by train.”

I walked the four blocks to the Great Northern Train Station, bought my ticket,  boarded the Western Star and rode westward through the night to Montana. I had a precious Christmas with my parents and Best Brother, who had come home from college in Minneapolis.  Until he got home a couple of days after I arrived, I fed the cattle on my own and made sure their water tanks were full and the ice broken a couple of times a day so that they could drink, thus relieving my Dad of the necessity of asking our kind and willing neighbors to do those chores.  I went ice skating with my friends on the frozen pond behind the barn at the homestead farm one mile north of ours, where my Grandfather had started farming in  1908 when my Dad was 10 years old.

It was a quiet-sad time, a Christmas filled with amazing memories and blessings.  Three months and one week later, my Dad’s spirit took flight and he was gone from us.

Christmases don’t have to be perfect to be special.  Memories don’t have to be  lovely to be precious.  Christmases don’t have to be free of sorrow to be good.

Merry Christmas!

 He who never began to be, but eternally existed, and who continued to be what He eternally was, began to be what He eternally was not.  –Unknown