The majority keep one fire in winter. This is in the kitchen, which with nice housekeepers is the abode of neatness, with its rag carpet and brightly polished stove. An adjoining room or building is the wash-house, where butchering, soap-making, etc., are done by the help of a great kettle hung in the fireplace, not set in brick-work.
Adjoining the kitchen, on another side, is a state apartment, also rag-carpeted, and called “the room.” The stove-pipe from the kitchen sometimes passes through the ceiling, and tempers the sleeping-room of the parents. These arrangements are not very favorable to bathing in cold weather; indeed, to wash the whole person is not very common, in summer or in winter.
Will you go up-stairs in a neat Dutch farm-house? Here are rag carpets again. Gay quilts are on the best beds, where green and red calico, perhaps in the form of a basket, are displayed on a white ground; or the beds bear brilliant coverlets of red, white, and blue, as if to “make the rash gazer wipe his eye.” The common pillow-cases are sometimes of blue check, or of calico. In winter, people often sleep under feather-covers, not so heavy as a feather-bed. In the spring there is a great washing of bedclothes, and then the blankets are washed, which during winter supplied the place of sheets.
HOLIDAYS.
I was sitting alone, one Christmas time, when the door opened and there entered some half-dozen youths or men, who frightened me so that I slipped out at the door. They, being thus alone, and not intending any harm, at once left. These, I suppose, were Christmas mummers, though I heard them called “bell-schnickel.”
At another time, as I was sitting with my little boy, Aunt Sally came in smiling and mysterious, and took her place by the stove. Immediately after, there entered a man in disguise, who very much alarmed my little Dan.
The stranger threw down nuts and cakes, and, when some one offered to pick them up, struck at him with a rod. This was the real bell-schnickel, personated by the farmer.
It will hardly be supposed that Bell-schnickel and Santa Claus are the same; but the former is Peltz-nickel[5] or Nicholas dressed in fur. St. Nicholas’ day, the 6th of December, is in Advent.
On Christmas morning the cry is, “Christmas-gift!” and not, as elsewhere, “A merry Christmas!” Christmas is a day when people do not work, but go to meeting, when roast turkey and mince-pie are in order, and when the “Dutch” housewife has store of cakes on hand to give to the little folks.