Minnesota poet and author Bill Holm comments on a number of winter topics, from the sense of poverty on the farm, to the meaning behind lutefisk.  

Transcript:

(00:00:00) I grew up on a farm north of Minnesota before central heat and indoor plumbing were omnipresent. Our old drafty Farmhouse had only one oil stove doing its feeble best to blow heat upstairs through an iron grate. The great did not lead to my bedroom. The barn was even colder only warm enough with animal body heat to have thought the old manure or half freeze the fresh when I went to the cities and saw relatives with furnaces and toilets. I thought them Rich that meant we were poor. Or at least not quite comfortable enough to be Real Americans like the triumphant ones
(00:00:34) pictured in newsreels and look magazine. We were surely not rich or fancy enough for honored guests
(00:00:41) yet. The old Christmas songs. We sang in Sunday school and
(00:00:44) had programs were full of images of a God so poor they wouldn't take him at the holiday and
(00:00:50) but instead sent him off to be born in a
(00:00:52) smelly drafty Barn no better than my father's surrounded by manure
(00:00:57) piles old
(00:00:57) straw in Dumb cows. And snorting whenever
(00:01:02) children showed Bad Manners or some failure of Civility or intelligence. Someone always hollered. What's a matter with you? Were you born in a barn? Well, God was and he turned out. Alright,
(00:01:12) so maybe we would too such is the power of metaphor in forming the human ego.
(00:01:19) The barn was alright for chores, but no place for company even north of many OTA
(00:01:24) we would know enough to put God in the back room with clean sheets in a good quilt
(00:01:28) feed him a little hot dish and Pie and turn up the stove.
(00:01:32) We weren't really born in the barn after all
(00:01:36) we make part of our metaphorical peace with poverty in Minnesota at Christmas by eating bad
(00:01:41) food and making jokes about it
(00:01:44) lutefisk is not strictly considered human food. It is cod fish dried 2 fencepost hardness and then brined and poisonous lie the ingredient in soap. It keeps in this form for years for centuries, Maybe. Starvation requires it you can soak the LIE out of the fish carefully and then boil it and eat it. It has some peripheral food value that survives its drying and brining and will not harm you though like so much food. The poor are compelled to eat. It will not much. Please
(00:02:15) you unless you deceive yourself be honest on
(00:02:19) Christmas Eve the descendants of immigrant Norwegians eat lutefisk as a metaphor to honor and remember the poverty and misery of their ancestors, Norway. Like many other places was
(00:02:31) decimated by poverty in the 19th century and lost
(00:02:34) half its
(00:02:34) population much of it to Minnesota.
(00:02:38) Those ancestors were failed bags of half-starved
(00:02:41) Bones kept mostly Alive by the cheapest and vilest food, they could get
(00:02:47) they survived and hatched us and now we are rich in
(00:02:51) smug and joke about lutefisk, eat it and eat it with joy, but keep the
(00:02:56) picture always in your mind of the last unlucky fellow. In you
(00:03:00) disapproved of and walked past giving a wide berth.