Sustainable Sunday: Part One: Christmas in 1966

The Holiday called Christmas has become a festival of pressure and over consumption in modern times. Let's go back in time and capture some old fashioned stories from Christmas Past. They are useful.

Welcome back to Sustainable Sunday and a Letter from the Kitchen’s Garden Farm.

Firstly a big huge ginormous Festive Season thanks to all this weeks readers and observers and commenters and Likers (I love a Good Like). Hugs to my new Paid Subscribers; Your support is putting the sustainable in my Sustainable Sunday. Huge to our NEW readers. So, a big thank you.

Today on Sustainable Sunday I am bringing you the first of three Christmas past stories. A decade apart.

The Christmas I was 6 years old - 1966

Reflecting on my upbringing in a sprawling coastal home in New Zealand, I forage for information that we can transfer to the present day, living a sustainable and self-sufficient life amidst the vast prairies. The beach and the prairies are not natural cousins but kitchens are kitchens and people are people.

Most pertinent this month is the diverging vista of Christmas now and Christmas Past. How can we even align these two for long enough to glean the secrets of a sustainable christmas in this new order. This new world we have created.

The holiday called Christmas has become a grande prix at speed on a mountainous road layered in ice hoping you won’t come upon a car smash round the next bend. (I am not a fan as you can see).

But it underscores a human condition that is governed by the need to have more. To be bigger. To consume and consume. To own it all. And that overconsumption leads to catastrophic over production with ever cheaper goods. This is not sustainable. I hear many people complaining this year that ‘things’ are so much more expensive. Good. Not being able to have everything you want. This is a very old fashioned thing. And it is in fact the beginning of a sustainable lifestyle.

If you can’t afford it - you can’t have it.

And if it is going to end up in one bin or the other - think twice.

It is true that self reliance and self sufficiency and environmental sustainability (boy what a mouthful) are a life-long study of mine. Right here (on Substack) is one of my chosen mediums to share what I know. But I don’t like bullies and I especially don’t like so called experts. I believe that every house-hold will design their own answer to the changes we are facing in our respective environments. So, as you read my words, make your own list. Design your own sustainable lifestyle. Make sure your list is do-able. That it is in your control to do. Then put your list in order of priority and action Number One.

Design is the operative word there.

Actioning it during the holidays is the challenge.

Science is showing us with great clarity that damage has been done to this planet and her climate. We have a choice as to whether we personally work in mitigating further damage or protecting what we have left or preparing our lifestyles for change.

All are important actions.

And going back to a time before mass production and mass communication and over consumption really took hold, we can often find useful information for replacing some of the products that are causing the trouble.

Today let’s look at Christmas.

I use the term Christmas in this letter because in the days I am writing of, (the 60’s when I was 6) it was Christmas that we celebrated in our home at the beach - Hanukah was early December and the Chinese New Year was in February and Matariki was in May. We knew our people and respected their celebrations accordingly. It was a small community and there was no confusion as to who celebrated Christmas and who did not. However I do appreciate the umbrella label of The Holidays. It is useful in this world of friends we have never met.

Actually, I was initially confused by the word Holidays when I first settled in the USA because in New Zealand the holidays; the word holiday is not attached to a date like Christmas or Thanksgiving, the holidays come four times a year and are attached to the school holiday (vacation) dates- so you can see where a New Zealander living in the United States could become confused. In NZ going on holiday means going away on vacation.

This is Part One of a three part series on Christmas. Each set about a decade apart.

At the time of the Christmas holidays I am thinking of today, the holiday we will use to forage for lots of sustainable tips, I would have been about 6 or 7 years old and Mum had mostly recovered from the car crash. We lived in the big house by the sea. Dad was a boatbuilder. Mum was back out of bed and managing the home again, Dad built and repaired boats and they had four children (2 more to come). I was the second eldest and the eldest girl.

This big house was not that big by modern standards. At its conception it was merely a comfortable family home but over its lifetime (Dads parents bought it from the manager of a big freezing works that had been on the docks in the 20’s), the kitchen had been extended, a linen cupboard big enough for us to sit in housed an enormous hot water cylinder, then the roomy washhouse was built on and became a new toilet block, a couple of extra bedrooms later on. The house grew is jagged rooflines down the fence line of a quarter acre beach front property like a vine, and with the latest kitchen changes doors like eyes were opened into the side of the property, facing the trees, as opposed to the beach front.

On this Christmas my little sisters and my mother and I worked in the old kitchen. There was no more music in the house because Mum had lost her voice in the acident but the hub of the house was in the old kitchen with its coal range and window seats and pine table in the center. The French doors opening into the trees and huge windows alongside were sparkling clean of sea spray for the holidays. If you walked out the French doors and looked left and down the drive you would see the sea. Looking right you would see the shed where we parked the car and later Dad would build Mums painting corner and our darkroom.

In this old kitchen, running up to Christmas we baked at the big pine kitchen table. Those were frugal times, rich in sustainable lessons. The mid-60s bore the indelible mark of war, and its harsh lessons lingered in our collective memory. Though for Mum and Grandma these lessons were real memories.

So we saved ingredients towards the day we would make Christmas cookies and russian fudge and marshmallow that we wrapped in waxed paper tied at the top with string like little sugar bombs. My sisters and I delivered them around the neighbourhood inevitably returning with fruit or baking from other households. This way our bounty was shared. And this was the beginning of Christmas.

Even though sugar and butter were plentiful again these collected goodies resided in cake tins and were rationed out a couple at a time. Usually as morning tea time. I remember when I first came to the United States, I was 16 (a story we have not finished yet), I saw a person take a whole packet of cookies from the cupboard to a chair and eat them while watching television. A whole packet! I was aghast. Didn’t he have to ask his mother first? How could he eat all of them without asking anyone else if they wanted some. But there were more in the cupboard. Though this was in the 70’s it was a very different world in the USA.

Back in the 60’s in New Zealand the darkness of the world wars still shadowed our parents decisions in ways we did not even understand or realise at the time. Do you remember Mrs Van?

NZ troops fought in WW2 from 1939 to 1945. From October 1943, tea and sugar was rationed in New Zealand; Butter, meat and eggs were rationed later. Nothing like the rationing in other countries, for New Zealand was small and much of the population lived in rural towns - we were and still are capable of growing our own food but the population cut back on what they consumed so the troops overseas could be fed. Even though families maintained backyard chickens and extensive vegetable gardens, often relying on friends with farms for meat or flour, these were careful years. Plus later in the war the influx of Americans into the Pacific required significantly more food supplies, leading to the diversion of tons of vegetables as well.

It took years to climb back out of this. The frugal lessons our mothers and grandmothers learnt during the war were still firmly in place when I was a child in the mid 60’s. It was when I worked in THIS old folks home that one of the old ladies told me she always added tapioca to the minced beef before making a pie, to make the meat go further.

Over-eating and over-spending just was not done and housekeepers were literally judged by how much waste was in their rubbish bin. My mother taught me to keep a very tidy bin. And checked it.

The war years were the period that meals strong in vegetables got a foot hold in New Zealand. If you go into a cafe in New Zealand now you will see an array of bowls of vegetables and savoury options. Though we like our bread we love our veges. Meat was and remains expensive.

So in the mid 60’s (only twenty years after the end of the war and the beginning of the end of rationing) extravagance just was not a thing. In the holidays we bought our presents carefully with our saved pocket money, we still grew our vegetables and had fruit trees and chickens down the back in our 1/4 acre section. Milk and cream from the local dairy was delivered in bottles to a little box at the gate and the vegetable man drove past once a week in his truck ringing his bell. Dad was often paid in fish. And any meat we needed was delivered by the butchers who bought it from the local farms.

We relied on small local businesses whose names we knew.

But, like I said earlier, meat was expensive even then, we ere served small portions of it.

Every meal was cooked at home. Only once in my life do I remember going out to dinner as a family and it was Christmas day in the year my Mother was pregnant with her last baby. It was not a success and was not repeated.

One of the keys to environmental sustainability is supporting local businesses.

And we only bought what we would afford. Credit cards did not become common in New Zealand until the 70’s. (though I am sure credit cards would be seen differently even now if we called them DEBT cards because that is what they are). So we only bought what we could afford.

You did not borrow money to buy presents. In fact women could not borrow at all.

Living within your means is Sustainable both for you and the planet.

All that to say: Christmas Day in the big house on the beach, when I was a child, in New Zealand, was never about huge amounts of food. It was about midnight mass and then morning mass, followed by a nice lunch, all gathered together as usual around the table. Then dishes. Then, after waiting the required 30 minutes (because Mum was convinced that we would sink to the bottom of the ocean or get the bends or something if we did not let our dinner 'settle'), it was off to the beach. In New Zealand, December is summer, remember? And the beach was just across the road.

Later, full of sand and sunburn we would wander back up to the house, shower in the outside shower built specifically for sand covered children and seminarians then bacon and egg pie for tea, and reading all the books we got for Christmas.

That year I was six and the book was a set of three: Beauty and the Beast. Sleeping Beauty. The Seven Dwarves. (sigh).

Our Christmas Day was only for my immediate (though quite large family). We were not that family you see on TV (in fact we did not even have a TV until I was twelve) that gathered with other family members for Christmas Day. My father’s parents had both died before I was born and my mother’s parents and her family lived on a different island. My mother and her mother exchanged letters once a week but that was about it. No-one ever explained why they were estranged. But one kid at a time was sent down to Grandma each holidays. But that was later in the holidays. So, our Christmas Day was very relaxed.

To be fair I think many New Zealand Christmas holidays were pretty laid back. Christmas comes in the Long School holidays. Also known as the Christmas Holidays. A six week break in the summer and everything closes down between Christmas Eve and January 6. Period. So everyone is On Holiday. Many people already out at their baches by the beach. But we were already at the beach. So, we went nowhere.

But I digress.

In our family we all got a book at Christmas. Everyone gave each other one present each (for a total of eight when we were all old enough to buy presents) and Mum always bought us a book. She also gave us girls a diary every year, too. Dad would buy one thing for each of us as well - he brought me a camera when I was eight (planting the seed of a life long passion), a small wood-turning lathe another year (which was a lovely idea but I just gave it a name, took photos of it and pasted the photos into my home made books). We thought very carefully about what we made or found or bought a person for Christmas because you only got one chance to get it right. You only gave one present. Is it the same in your family?

I am not big on traditions. When a person emigrates we leave all that behind. But I still hold with the tradition of a book every Christmas.

Books - real books can store data for hundreds of years if you look after the book. If you were to buy an ebook (something we could not even imagine when I was 6 years old) you do not own it. You own a license to read it. It is owned by a publisher who can choose to no longer support it, to change it, to edit it or to take it down anytime. Real paper books you can keep forever. In fact data stored on dna is much more stable than the internet as long as it is stored cold. But I don’t know how you would read it!

Real books and libraries are sustainable.

Mum bought rolls of wrapping paper, and brown paper so we could hand decorate our wrapping. I tried to literally make wrapping paper one year when I was in my papier-mache phase but it would not fold so those presents ended up looking like sandwiches tied together with string. But when I was six my sister and I got to work and decorated that brown wrapping paper ourselves.

The wrapping paper was deemed reusable so we unwrapped our presents very carefully. There was a lot of tension around the un-wrapping with Mum hovering, whispering don’t rip it , almost to herself.

The good wrapping paper was carefully folded and placed in a big box for the following year, the string and rubber bands collected for next time

Later I started collecting the funnies out of Dad’s paper for wrapping presents. I can’t find the funnies anymore because nowadays, down here in the rural midwest of America, the big city newspapers are not delivered this far. So I wrap presents in cloth shopping bags.

Our Christmas trees were real trees, that were ceremoniously planted on New Years Day with dad wielding the spade and Mum telling him where to dig the hole. Mostly they were conifers, often natives but sometimes Mum chose a fruit tree, one year it was a gum tree. She hated the custom of chopping down a live tree to die in the front room. We never did that. I never ever saw a fake tree untilI came to live in the USA.

My Mum would buy our Christmas Tree knowing full well where she was going to plant it. Shopping for a Christmas tree meant going to the garden centre - a win/win for my family.

We had a box of awful home made decorations - I made the angel for the top of the tree when I was like I don’t know four or five. I was so proud for it to come out if that box every year. It was all tinsel and twisty wire. The angel was definitely a drinker because she never once stood upright - every year we would try a new tactic to get her to stand up. Every year she would list like a mast in heavy seas.

Our Christmas trees were not works of art. Not by any stretch of the imagination. But as kids we were much more interested in the presents anyway

Planting trees is incredibly good for the planet. So if at all possible buy a Christmas tree that you can plant later in the year. This is a little hard here in Illinois because we can’t plant anything until the spring. I have a small glasshouse as part of living self-sufficiently so the tree goes in there until Spring.

Food is one of your most powerful environmental changes.

Don’t buy more than you can eat.

The Christmas lunch when I was a child was just a Sunday lunch really. Not fancy. Maybe two kinds of potatoes - that is about as fancy as we got. There would have been a ham, that we carved slices off for days. Ham was a very special treat. What ever vegetables were around (early summer - so there were lots of greens).

In my family, when Mum was well, it was all about the desserts. The plum duff (which had been exchanging flavours in the pantry for a month, along with the christmas cake being slowly basted in grog). A lot of this was pre-refrigeration and war cooking; saving the dried fruit to make a cake or pudding then ensuring its longevity by pouring rum into it. As a rule the children did not get to eat a lot of christmas cake but the plum duff was boiled before serving so the alcohol had evaporated.

I made Mums Christmas cake for years in New Zealand but it is not a custom here in Illinois. Making any cake from scratch is not a custom out here so the ingredients are hard to find.

Anyway for dessert after our Christmas lunch Mum would serve the plum duff with the New Zealand twist of Meringues. Maybe a pavlova. Definitely a huge bowl of whipped cream and some hokey pokey ice-cream.

As a child to waste food was a sin. Waste not. Want not. Which is why Mum always allowed us to dish for ourselves. Whatever you put on your plate you had to eat. Your eyes were careful not to get bigger than your stomach lest you end up the last at the table gamely trying to finish so you could go out to play.

Then we would read while our food settled and then go swimming with our neighbourhood friends. Then back up to the house to see who was coming for Tea.

One of the few traditions we still have in my family (when I am on one of my New Zealand tours) is to discuss what we are going to make for the next meal while sitting eating the one in front of us. ‘Don’t eat all the mashed potatoes - I want to fry them for breakfast’ - stuff like that, or -’ this baked pumpkin would go well in a lasagna, do we have enough eggs for pasta?’ So if you don’t want to be doing the cooking just stay silent, nod enthusiastically and have another glass of wine. We will be literally be elbowing each other out of the way to get into the kitchen to start the next meal.

The most sustainable tip I learnt as a child was that every meal was designed with left overs in mind. The ham would be a number of meals. A roasted chicken will be in the pasta on day two and chicken soup by day three. We made fritters out of anything and then there were the chooks down the back who picked over the last of the scraps.

A left-over recipe for you:

Make a pie. A New Zealand Pie.

Pies are the best way to use up left over ingredients. In New Zealand our pies are savory and generally pastry on the top and the bottom. You can put anything in a dinner pie.

For me - pies are all about the pastry. I love home made pastry. So I took over making the pies very early on. Here is my go to pastry recipe.

• 1 1/4 cup of flour (from the wheat in my fields)

• 1/2 tsp salt

• 112 g (1 stick) of butter (made from local cream) (cubed and cold from the freezer)

• 4 tablespoons iced well water (or filtered water)

Nowadays, I make my pastry in my little food processor.

Mum taught me to cut the pastry with two knives. Fast. Because RULE NUMBER ONE about pastry is don’t let the butter get cold. And RULE NUMBER TWO is chop the butter into the flour until not much smaller than a pea.

Throw everything into the food processor but the water. Blend fast. Then add water until the mixture looks like fresh breadcrumbs then wrap in baking paper and back into the fridge to rest for at least 30 minutes.

Blind-bake the bottom layer of pastry. Then add the filling.

You can make a chicken pie using the last of the chicken, with a chicken stock gravy and apricots. Or a steak pie. Or a pumpkin and potato pie. Leek. Let your mind run free. For a bacon and egg pie, which reigned supreme in my summer holiday memories, go here: Bacon and egg pie. Bacon and egg pie is easy and quintessential NZ beach food.

If we are being clever we will make the pastry the day before in anticipation of the leftovers. Having a roll of pastry in the fridge is gold.

While the pie was baking we would often sling a batch of biscuits (cookies) or scones into the oven as well. My Grandma was adamant that once the oven has heated up, bake more than one dish in it. I think this came back to her cooking being done on a coal range with fire. It took fuel to get the oven hot, so don’t waste the heat.

I know all the best chefs say they were taught by their mothers and grannies - well my Grandma was a wartime cook and my Mum was a cook at war with the kitchen. She simply did not want to be in the kitchen. Grandma wrote all her recipes down and Mum never followed a recipe, not once in her life and I know how people brag about that but in my mothers case it would have been a blessing. But Mum’s pastry (and by default her scones also mixed with knives because they are a very similar in method) and her cakes were her thing. Divine. Everything else was pretty hit and miss. But her fridge was full of food.

In the 60’s there was no such thing as tupperware or plastic containers in New Zealand, no ziplock bags or glass storage containers with lose-able lids, so to store food in the fridge it was wrapped in damp tea-towels, or waxed paper, bowls were stored with a plate on top, soups were poured into Agee jars with a lid, cheese was wrapped in wax paper or folded back into its rind. We kept our fridges clean, there were no endless jars of half used condiments, so there was no fridgy smell.

You can make your own waxed wrappings - maybe another day!

So we come to the end of this Sundays Letter from the Kitchens Garden Farm.

I have loved chatting with you so don’t forget to leave a comment. I will answer.

All these tips have a common theme. Waste. Cut down on the waste during the holidays. Mum looked into the fridge and wondered what to make with what was in there. Others might decide what to make then look into the fridge to see if they have the ingredients. But we were trained to eat everything before going shopping for more.

Waste Not, Want Not, remember that saying?

They should start a TV program where the contestants are given left overs and told to make something. Now, THAT would be fun to watch.

What were your childhood holidays like? Do you have lessons to teach us too?

Don’t listen to me or anyone else. Sit down in the quiet of a TKG Take Ten and think about what is important to you.

As you read my words, how did your list go. Did you start the design for your own sustainable holidays? Make sure your list is do-able. That it is in your control to do. Then put your list in order of priority and action Number One.

Design is the operative word there.

Actioning it during the holidays is the challenge. But I’ve got you. Ask me anything.

See you next week. (or if you have upgraded already I will see you Monday!)

Be who you are - don’t be pressured.

Love Celi

PS I always make extra macaroni cheese (my recipe, not out of that nasty box) and then refry it for my dinner the next day. Fried macaroni cheese in butter is divine. Try it! I am not lying.