Diane (Oberg) Sullivan (right), is pictured with her sister, Vonda at Christmas. Photo courtesy of the Chugiak-Eagle River Historical Society

“Back in the 1950s and 1960s, things were a lot simpler in a lot of ways because our expectations were lower,” said Diane (Oberg) Sullivan, who grew up in Peters Creek. “People managed with a lot less than they do now.”

Families tended to be larger, too, Sullivan said, stretching the parents' income thinner. Not much was left for the extravagant celebrations that characterize today's Christmas.

Sullivan and her five siblings received a handful of presents.

“Everyone got what we considered a really nice gift and the other gifts were socks, underwear, a new shirt, something like that,” she said. “That was about it, but everyone was happy.”

On Christmas morning, the Oberg kids knew what to expect in their stockings: an orange and a candy cane — to be eaten in that order, Sullivan said.

Phyllis Smith, an Eagle River homesteader, enjoyed surprising her kids with big but inexpensive gifts.

“They always thought we were rich. And we were just as poor as could be,” she said.

Retired Chugiak schoolteacher Carol Connell said their Christmases were not extravagant.

“We had traditional food and exchanged wonderful gifts, like sleds.”

The less-is-more approach didn't make the holiday any easier to prepare for, however, especially when it came to the fine details. Take cookies, for example. Grocery store advertisements in the Knik Arm Courier during the 1950s and early 1960s included ingredients like flour, sugar and eggs, but no Christmas cookies.

“We'd bake cookies for two weeks straight before the holiday,” said Mariann Falcone, who grew up in Eagle River during the 1960s. “We made snickerdoodles, sugar cookies, pizzelles (a traditional Italian waffle cookie) and probably others.”

Craft-making was more complicated back then, as well. Smith, who was a member of the Chugiak Ladies Club, described the painstaking care she took while creating

Christmas-tree-shaped candles to sell at the group's annual bazaar.

“I didn't use a mold,” she said.

Instead, she fashioned tiny branches out of wax and attached them to a wax pedestal, she said. Each candle took hours to complete.

“Everyone did something like that,” she said. “All of what we sold was homemade.”

Families who didn't buy their gifts at the bazaar might have shopped locally at stores like the Chugiak Candy Kitchen, Eagle River Hardware and the Knik Knak Shop, instead of venturing into Anchorage.

Chugiak and Eagle River had no Christmas tree lots in the 1950s and 1960s, according to those interviewed for this story.

“People were just kind of on their own to get a tree,” Smith said. “So we'd go out and cut one down in the woods.”

Sullivan described exploring beyond the edges of her family's hayfield to find a tree each year.

“My mom would have anywhere between four and six kids with her,” she said. “It was a family tradition to get a sled and traipse through the snow and look for the best tree.”

Sullivan is tickled by family photos of Christmas trees past.

“They were always so awful,” she said. “But as long as a tree met the right height and space requirements, we'd bring it home and cover it with decorations and tinsel.

“As kids, we didn't care one way or the other about how bad the tree was. It was just part of the spirit.”

Then, as now, children's rising tide of excitement about Christmas lifted everyone else up. Churches advertised in the Knik Arm Courier and the Eagle, inviting the public to attend pageants performed by kids.

“There was always a Christmas play at (Chugiak Elementary School),” Connell said. “It was a community center as much as a school, so when they had Christmas entertainment, the public was always there.”

But the best pageant Connell ever watched did not take place in a church or a school. It was the one her own children put on at home, along with the children of her two friends, Bunny Beeman and Zona Dahlmann. The mothers had just been discussing the age-old question of whether their kids were overly fixated on receiving Christmas presents.

“And then the kids decided to put on a pageant for us, and they acted out the Christmas story,” she said. “Here we were so worried about how they were interpreting things, and they put on such a wonderful little play.”

Connell still tears up at the memory.

“It was so sweet. I don't think any of us will ever forget it.”

This article published in The Alaska Star on Thursday, December 25, 2008.