The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
By Dawne Belloise
In these busy times of massive consumerism, the holidays have taken on a new form, somewhat like a hungry, anxious animal. Not so long ago, especially here in bygone days of Crested Butte, it was joyous in its simplicity and spiritually renewing in its original essence. It brought us together. The celebrations were about family, sharing, camaraderie, life and gratitude. It’s been lamented and hashed many times… the holidays have lost their real meaning for many. Most Buttians barely get the day off, let alone have time to travel to be with family and friends.
Traditions fall by the wayside. Childhood experiences become only a memory of a far different world. In Crested Butte’s mining days, everyone was poor, but as one old-timer aptly put it, “We didn’t know we were poor because everyone was.” But what they had was community, and maybe deeper snow. It was a harder way of life for mining and ranching. Just daily routines and survival at this elevation, somewhat isolated and without all the modern comforts that we have now, was far more arduous.
Still, those early days and the families who brought their old-world traditions were glad to be here. And we can also be glad for the place we’ve chosen to live, here in paradise among friends and a special sort of family called Crested Butte.
Born in CB during the 1940s, Trudy Yaklich grew up in simpler times when we were still a mining town and her Christmas memories are the stuff from which movies are made. “We always had a big Christmas tree in the middle of Elk Avenue,” she says and notes that the old-timers just called it Main Street back then. “People didn’t drive around so the tree could be in the middle of the street. There were lights on it, the town would do that. Church was always real important. We went to midnight mass and that was a really special thing. In CB at that time, everybody was poor and so you didn’t have a lot of clothes, but you always got a new outfit at Christmas.”
Trudy also recalls the prominent role that the elementary school Christmas program played. “The Christmas play was huge and everybody in every class was in it. Since our school was so small you had to have two and three parts,” she laughs. “It was usually some touching Christmas story or more humorous,” she says.
“The high school kids did the Christmas concert. Everybody played something. CB kids had to do everything whether you wanted or not. If you weren’t in band, there wouldn’t be a band. Everybody was in everything,” Trudy says of the 1950s classes. “After the play, Santa came and brought us stockings filled with hard candy, oranges and nuts. In those days that was very special because we didn’t have sugar candy or processed sweets very much, we had home-canned fruit.”
Food, the glue that holds traditions and memories, was a big part of the holiday celebrations and Trudy recalls baking a lot of cookies and the Slavic dessert staple of potica, a sweet baked bread rolled with nuts, spices and sugar. “On Christmas Eve we had a very simple dinner, usually vegetable soup, the best in the world, and homemade bread,” Trudy remembers. “Christmas was the big day. We’d have the feast consisting of turkey or sometimes ham with sweet and white potatoes with gravy, peas, Parkerhouse rolls and sweet fruit salads with whipped cream. We didn’t have veggie salads in the winter ever because that was for summer when you had your own lettuce. Christmas morning we always had potica and Kielbasa, which was typical for most of the CB Slavic community. It was very good because it was simple and then the ladies could then get to their cooking and you could go open presents after breakfast.”
Trudy also recalls that as kids, there were presents under the tree from both Santa and from family. “On Christmas day, you got up at first light.
The Santa presents were not wrapped and appeared magically in the middle of the night, the ones you wrote the letters for. The wrapped gifts were from family. In my time, there were no toy stores in town,” she recalls the time when there were no shops downtown except for Tony’s and Stefanic’s. “Everything came from Monkey Wards catalogs (Montgomery Wards). That’s where we got our babies from, too,” she laughs at the explanation their parents gave as to where babies came from. “Catalog ordering created havoc because sometimes they were out of those items the kids wanted or it arrived broken and by that time it was too late to do anything about it,” she notes of the pre-Amazon days of overnight shipping. “What that meant was that mom and dad were up very, very late putting those things together because nothing came assembled.”
On Christmas Day, the town kids would visit every house in town, according to old-time locals, making sure they’d get to the older people’s homes to wish them Merry Christmas. “They’d give us a quarter or cookies and that was a Crested Butte tradition,” Trudy reflects on when the town was much smaller. “We were a very close community. It was an honorable thing for kids to do and it kept that connection between the old people and the young people,” she says of the tradition of the young visiting the elders.
Other town-wide Christmas Day traditions for kids revolved around snow, of course – sled rides and skiing – back before a ski area was even a thought. “We would climb Chocolate Peak, up the old Kebler Road and ski or sled down because there weren’t any cars,” she says. “We’d also ski down from the top of Maroon Avenue,” which was the mound now commonly known as Hippie Hill or Prospect Point overlooking town.
Eva Yetzbacher Kochevar was born in Crested Butte. Her father Charles owned the mountain (Crested Butte Mountain) from the late 1800s and sold it for a whopping $500. Eva, who turns 93 on December 22, grew up in the 1930s here, the oldest of four kids, and remembers that when CB was a mining town, there was much cultural diversity with all the various immigrants and it was tremendously friendly. One of her favorite Christmas memories was when her parents loaded all four of the kids onto the sled and pulled them over to Sophie and Felix Ruggerio’s house where they got homemade sweets on Christmas Eve. When they arrived home, Santa had already been there to deliver their gifts.
Local Cindy Czarnick grew up in a more recent generation of Buttians. “My fondest memories are of the complete amazement that Santa made it down our chimney every year in spite of the fact my grandparents refused to put out the coal stove fires on Christmas Eve! I was so upset they didn’t care if Santa caught fire,” Cindy laughs.
She recalls some of the harder financial times after the mines closed. “Everyone helped my family to give me a special Christmas even on a tight budget. I never felt we were poor because we always had homemade Yugoslavian baked goods like potica and plenty of food thanks to our fruitful gardens, and elk and deer meat or fresh caught trout shared with my grandparents. I still remember the ribbon candy they sold at Stefanic’s store. I would walk there daily for a piece of Christmas ribbon candy!”
After the ski area opened in 1962, a new wave of residents moved to Crested Butte who were labeled as hippies and ski bums, which was certainly a realistic definition. One of those new free spirit pioneers was Glo Cunningham who, back in 1975, started a Christmas brunch for the wayward and orphans of holidays. “I didn’t want anyone to spend Christmas alone,” she says, having spent her first one in town by herself. Her first party crammed 29 people into a 430-square-foot house, where everyone was served eggs. Later, it moved to the Eldo, to the Grubstake, to the Elk Mountain Lodge, to the Talk of Town (which was known as The Plum). “I did most of food for the first five years and people brought champagne and a grab bag gift,” she tells, but when it got to the point that she never left the kitchen, she decided to make it a potluck.
One of Glo’s longstanding traditions was the Christmas grab bag gift and she laughs about how some gifts returned yearly. “It’s cool because we saw the same gift come back over and over again through the years. One particular gift was a plastic hamburger and another one was this really ugly angel. People would save it for the year and give it back at the party,” and Glo points out that everyone, yes, the entire town, was invited. Alas, the 40th anniversary of this tradition in 2014 was the last for the notorious Christmas brunch at Glo’s.
Christmases in Crested Butte have always been a time of gathering and laughter from the mining families who founded our town to the current visitors who bring their families to experience the real deal storybook holiday. Before your children grow old, before your parents pass on in their journey, take time to celebrate and if you don’t have traditions, create them anew. Most Buttians know it’s not about the gifts, it’s about the time carved out from a busy life to be with each other, to celebrate this valley we live in and our community. Most importantly, it’s about the love and gratitude for all of this. Happy Christmas, Merry Yule.
