Christmastime in Montana

I just finished reading Christmastime in Montana.  It is a collection of stories compiled by Dave Walter and published in 2003 by the Montana Historical Society Press.  I will admit that I skipped over some of the entries, community Christmas Trees and such are probably more interesting to the community involved. The book  is arranged in chronological order, from before Montana was Montana, to the time of publication. It shows how Montana celebrated Christmas through the good years and bad.  It tells of simple pleasures and feasts one would hardly expect to find in Montana.  It also speaks to the darker side of the holiday season, with tales of lonely suicides in the mining camps.

I particularly enjoyed the section that told how Martha Edgerton Plassmann remembered her first Christmas in Bannack and how disappointed she was not to have received a book for Christmas.  Another favorite was the description of how Christmas is celebrated in a Hutterite Colony. The accounts of  holiday celebrations during the war years and the Spanish Influenza epidemic were also noteworthy.