One of the pleasures of the holidays when I was growing up was the get-together with our cousins and grandparents. It was a time to play with our cousins’ toys, go exploring in the nearby woods, have a big dinner, and later sit nearby while the grownups played cards and told stories.
I don’t know how it is in your family, but in mine, it was the women who did most of the talking at such gatherings. Over games of 21 or cribbage (which they played for peanuts — literally mixed nuts, or if those weren’t available, whatever holiday candy was in the house), my mother, aunts, and grandmother would talk about things that happened decades earlier. I remember those evenings as times of closeness and laughter, but some of the stories were definitely not comedies.
Such as a Christmas near the end of the Second World War.
During wartime, entire towns can spring up from nothing in a matter of months. Think of Los Alamos, N.M. In the small city of Manitowoc, Wis., World War II created a whole neighborhood by the name of Custerdale. The incredibly original name supposedly came from its location between Custer and Dale streets.
In the 1940s, Manitowoc only had about 25,000 people, but it was a town known for some significant exports: I would almost guarantee that at some point in your life you have had products from the Manitowoc-based Mirro Aluminum Company, which used to be the world’s largest manufacturer of aluminum cooking utensils. You have also probably walked or driven past construction sites where large cranes sported the name “Manitowoc.” It was also a submarine-building town, and the U.S. government built the neighborhood of Custerdale to supply housing for a surge of sub workers early in the war.
Are you familiar with the phrase “good enough for government work”? That’s what we had here. Custerdale was built as a neighborhood of 400 ranch homes; some multifamily buildings were added a couple years later. Prefabricated, basic design and construction. The rumor was that the government had screwed up and sent to the snow-belt city of Manitowoc housing that was intended for Florida, and Florida received the well-insulated homes intended for Manitowoc, but that was likely just people trying to make sense of the flimsy little homes the government built for them.
The rumor was that the government had screwed up and sent to the snow-belt city of Manitowoc housing that was intended for Florida.
The homes were not intended to be permanent; they were temporary war housing. But they still stand today. Decades later, when my family lived for a few years in Manitowoc (in a different part of town), the Custerdale houses were perfectly fine small homes that had been fixed up, expanded, and upgraded over the years. But back in the 1940s, that wasn’t the case. And late in the war, my grandmother and her three children were living in one of the units. No, Grandma did not work in the war effort; presumably the rules had changed later in the war, because she lived there while working as a grocery store cashier.
Here’s the thing about Grandma. Her name was Elvira Stieg when she married my grandfather, Walter Holt. I’ll just refer to her henceforth as Elvira, because, well, how cool is it that I have an Elvira in my family tree? Born in 1907, Elvira was forced by her mother to leave school after fourth grade to clean houses for a living. My mother always said there must have been some source of spite or jealousy in that, because she didn’t think her mother’s family was that desperate for money. But those were the cards Elvira was dealt, and she went into life playing them. She was an uneducated but positive, friendly woman who would talk the ear off of anyone lucky or unlucky enough to sit next to her on the bus, to the terrible embarrassment of my teenage mother.
Working as a cashier in a small city in 1945 was not the ticket to riches you might think. According to Indeed, the average salary for a cashier in Wisconsin in 2025 is about $33,000 a year. Try living on that with three kids for a year, or even half a year. Even taking into account inflation, it was worse in 1945. But it was a job and she enjoyed it and she had it. Until she didn’t.
In the leadup to Christmas, the family had gotten its Christmas tree and left it out on the front porch until they were ready to decorate it. Shortly before Christmas, there was a big snowstorm, and Elvira trudged home to find that the tree had blown away. And she had worse news: She wouldn’t be able to give Christmas gifts that year because she had just lost her job. The serviceman who had her job before her had returned from the war, and he was given his old job again, leaving her unemployed.
Out of work, poor, living in crummy housing, not even a Christmas tree in the house. Merry Christmas? Elvira could eke out a Christmas dinner, though, so she and her children went trudging back through the snow to do some last-minute grocery shopping. On the way back through the field of snow beside their home, my uncle Ralph (then little more than a toddler), exclaimed in surprise that he spotted something. There half-buried in the snowdrifts was their tree, having been blown by the storm across the field. It was the one bright spot on an otherwise awful holiday
O.K., as Christmas miracles go, this one sucked. Elvira getting her job back would have been better. Stumbling over a bag of money would have been good. But it’s the one they got.
Hearing that story decades later, as I sat near my elders while they talked their way through cribbage, I could imagine the pain that must have caused them when they were younger. But when they told these stories, it usually resulted in laughter — not a derisive or mean laughter, not a caustic or angry scoffing, but an “isn’t life weird” and “what are you going to do” reaction that served to soften the blows of the sadness and put it in perspective as just one of many rotten things that happen in life. It drew us together rather than separating us. I doubt that’s a uniquely Midwestern attitude, but it is definitely an attitude that is prevalent there.
So this year, I’m going to raise a toast to the woman who inspired so many of those stories, my favorite-named-relative Elvira.
Merry Christmas, Elvira. RIP.