Christmas cards. Every year just after Thanksgiving, they start arriving in your mailbox. Unless you’re by misfortune friendless or by bad nature a Scrooge, you send them out yourself to your Mom and Dad, Aunt Rita, Uncle Vinnie, your boss, the guys in your carpool, your paperboy with a five-dollar tip, and all the other people who play or have played a part in your life. They’re the seasonal greetings of joy and goodwill that give mail carriers bent spines while cranking up their disgruntlement meters. Five will get you 20 that a goodly portion of those Christmas cards bear images of Vermont.
Vermont isn’t a big place. It ranks 45th in size among U.S. states, and its population of 620,000 is just a bit larger than that of the single city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin and only three-quarters of the number of people employed by the U.S. postal service, bent-spined or otherwise. Yet, despite these limitations, if you shuffle through your Christmas cards, you’ll come up with more than a couple based upon something a Vermonter can see when he looks out his window. Things like snow-blanketed villages with white, pointy-steepled churches, covered bridges, and snowbound farmhouses with windows yellow with warm light. There are kids making snowmen, pausing occasionally for ruthless snowball wars, other kids accompanying their fathers on tree-fetching expeditions, and still other kids sliding down hills or skating. There are even one-horse sleighs making cameo appearances. Sure, there are plenty of non-Vermonty Christmas-card images, icons from the first Christmas–the angels, Wise Men, stable, star, and infant Christ–and there are lots of cards bearing abstract designs or cute animals or humorous depictions of Santa and reindeer or illustrations of Dickensian Christmases. And some might argue that Vermontish images might be linked to other New England states or to other regions of America that are snowbound in December. These reservations have some justification, but no other region incorporates all the images and mythology of an American Christmas so completely as does Vermont. Being a Vermonter and cognizant of Vermont attitudes, I believe this isn’t because of an exceptionally Christmasy outlook. No more sugar plums dance in our heads than in the skulls of Hawaiians, for instance. I attribute the Vermont/Christmas association to hard luck.
Vermont’s first settlers were subsistence farmers, producing little surplus to trade. The land, strewn with stones and boulders left behind by Ice Age glaciers, isn’t the best crop land, something compounded by a short growing season. It wasn’t till the 19th century that farming techniques improved enough for Vermont farmers to begin selling butter and cheese to out-of-state markets. The mid-19th century brought a fad for sheep raising that stripped much of Vermont’s hills bald of trees. As the sheep market faded, Vermont got a little industrial development, with mills that exploited the water power of its streams. Its marble quarries sold stone for the skyscrapers and official buildings of New York and other cities far away. Its forests provided lumber and pulp for paper mills. The state developed a small, but strong, tool-and-die industry that would help the North win the Civil War and would remain important to American industry till the mid-20th century. Industrial development, however, didn’t employ the bulk of Vermonters. Farming remained the predominant occupation. The coming of the railroads and refrigerated cars spurred agriculture by allowing Vermont dairies to supply cities to the south. By the mid-20th century, every town was surrounded by dozens of farms, and there were more cows in Vermont than people, a fact well in keeping with the state’s official seal. Taken from a design on a beer mug in the Catamount Tavern where the Green Mountain Boys established the Republic of Vermont, the seal is emblazoned with a cow where other, more archaic nations display rampant lions or two-headed eagles.
Cows are pleasant creatures, and dairy farming has its attractions as an occupation, but it is definitely not a way to become wealthy. The consequence of little industry and a reliance on small-scale, low-return farming meant that Vermont remained rustic, rural and poor. It was said that for many Vermonters the Depression went largely unnoticed because they didn’t have enough to lose anything.
The New Deal brought some rural development to Vermont. Electricity reached the back woods. How many Vermonters did it take in 1937 to screw in a light bulb? 500. 499 to form a rural electric co-op, and one to go to the store to buy a bulb. The majority of Vermont’s roads went unpaved till federal make-work projects made work in Vermont by laying asphalt over the state’s winding dirt roads. Vermont began to open to tourists who utilized the new roads to explore a place that was, due to its hard economic history, quaintly stuck in the 19th century. Hence, the Christmas card connection. The rest of America discovered that Vermont was still a place you might see in a Currier & Ives engraving.
Vermont became a rich source of Christmas imagery for artists like Norman Rockwell and made some noise in Hollywood with the 1954 Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye film White Christmas, albeit the “Vermont” scenes were shot on California sound stages (the station wagon that picks up Crosby and Kaye at the “Vermont” train depot has black and yellow California license plates). Television has also mined Vermont Christmas iconography, favoring it as background for musical specials featuring performers like Andy Williams, who sang “Moonlight in Vermont” for one Christmas effort.
But though Vermont has carved out a nice little niche in Christmas, one must wonder if this will continue. Vermont went through some major changes in the 1960s. The state was crisscrossed with interstate highways. IBM opened a computer chip factory in Colchester. The University of Vermont attracted thousands of baby boomers and many stayed, establishing countless counter culture enterprises with the most successful the hyper-politically correct Ben & Jerry’s ice cream corporation. Newcomers, called “flatlanders” by natives, began to dominate the state’s institutions in which natives had little time to invest. Soon, the once solidly Republican state had a Democrat for governor, then actually elected a socialist to the U.S. Congress.
The Vermont of Norman Rockwell could have survived these changes, but there were more sinister creatures infiltrating the state than computer nerds, hippies, self-righteous New Agers, and trust-fund socialists. These more menacing creatures were Holstein cows.
Holstein cows are very large black and white cows who produce incredible quantities of milk. This is a good thing for a farmer, who can keep fewer cows and milk more milk, but a terrible thing for farmer-kind, who winds up drowning in a sea of low-priced milk. As Holsteins became the predominant breed of cow, replacing daintier, less-productive Jerseys and Guernseys, fewer farms were needed. In just a few decades, most of Vermont’s dairy farms had disappeared. As the industry that had given the state its characteristic, agricultural countryside faded, that scenery also changed. Pastures went back to woods, and empty, neglected barns slumped under winter snow loads, eventually collapsing.
Efforts were made to replace farm jobs with industrial or service area jobs, but new residents had brought an all-conquering concern for the environment with them. Often not needing to work in Vermont’s traditional occupations, they saw no need for development and fought it fanatically. A hardware chain, for example, spent ten years trying to build one of their warehouse stores in Burlington. A highway needed by IBM to reduce congestion for its commuting workers and for its trucks was stalled even longer by legal action from environmental groups opposed to any and all growth. They delayed it so long that they argued the environmental impact statements that had been filed at the project’s initiation were outdated and had to be redone. Utilizing this temporal Catch-22, they will attempt to delay the roadway till the new statements are also outdated. Unsurprisingly, IBM has expanded its operations in New York rather than Vermont, costing the state hundreds of jobs.
During the 1990s, as governor, Howard Dean happily went along with environmental anti-growth efforts. He did his best to return the state to its Depression level of development through environmental restrictions and high taxation. He dramatically expanded social-welfare programs, undermining Vermont’s traditional independent character. By the time he left office to pursue the U.S. Presidency, thousands of jobs had left the state to be replaced by public-sector jobs and state subsidies. Vermont has become a supplicant state to the federal government, receiving more federal money than it pays in federal taxes.
Wealthy new Vermont residents are buying up real estate and building elaborate second homes that old residents are unable to afford. Some hope that “estate” farms will keep the cow fields open, but those who play at farming don’t need much land for their hobby, and the unused land is reverting to woodland. Many environmentalists welcome, this and some are eager to replace farmland with a new wilderness. They back restrictions on farming, logging and hunting that further erode traditional Vermont life.
Past hard times created Vermont’s Christmas imagery, but the new hard times are destroying it. Having lived in these Christmas-card scenes, I don’t enjoy the changes. Fields without cows to animate and cheer them up seem empty. Sway-backed barns depress me the same way a derelict ship abandoned on a reef does. The Christmas card pictures are more and more a record of a bygone era that exists only in memory. Perhaps this is fitting, for Christmas is a holiday of memories. We recall old times and remember family members who are no longer here to join in our festivities. It’s sad to think of things lost, but it helps us value those things we have. We should try to fill the present with holiday cheer, creating new Christmas images and memories while heeding the old song’s injunction to “have yourself a merry little Christmas, now.”
–Edward Morrow is the author and illustrator of numerous books, including The Halloween Handbook.