ARIZONA RANCH CHRISTMAS

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Editor’s Note: A few weeks ago, we lost our dear friend Jo Baeza. She was 87. By any measure, she had a wonderful life, and for most of it, we were privileged to have her in our family. Her first story appeared in June 1956. Sixty-one years later, when we published her final essay in July 2017, she became the longest-tenured writer in the history of Arizona Highways. Among the many beautiful pieces in between was this story from December 1987. As you’ll see, her words are as wonderful today as the day she first penned them.

Christmas morning on this northern Arizona ranch dawns quiet and cold. A thin pad of snow covers the plains, and frost stuccos the buildings and steel storage tank. The world is white and clean. The air hangs still between late fall storms and early spring gales; the wind has quieted down like a fresh horse after a good workout.

The old windmill with the missing blades greets first light with a toothless grin, its rotor tied off. No need to pump water now. The tanks are full. A pair of wild mallards is wintering with the ranch ducks on the cattle pond. Their paddlings keep a circle of water open.

The saddle horses nicker softly as they come in for a drink of water and a flake of hay. Frost clings to their shaggy bodies, and steam puffs from their nostrils.

This morning begins like any other — with chores. A fire is built in the wood cookstove, the pitchy breath of piñon warming the kitchen to life.

Cold nips at you like a playful pup as you grab work gloves and step out into the Holy Day. At first you think: Christmas is like every other day on a ranch. Then you think: it is the other way around. Every day is like Christ­mas on a ranch — full of timeless wonder and new life.

You break the layer of ice formed during the night and clear the drinking troughs so the horses can water. Above the sharp crack of the axe comes the warbling of coyotes. A mother and two pups with high-pitched voices sound like a whole legion.

You start the cold engine of the four-wheel-drive pick­up and go inside for a cup of coffee while it warms up. The ice must be broken on all the dirt tanks so cattle can drink. Snow tires break fresh patterns on the trail. Coming up over a ridge, you confront the coyotes. Mama looks you in the eye before trotting off. A piñion jay screams and flies away. Perched on a fence post, a red­tailed hawk searches with sharp eyes. He is humped up against the cold, waiting for the sun to warm his flight.

Frost fades and dark patches appear under the junipers. The day is changing color. The white rumps of pronghorn antelope shift against the pale yellow grass of a swale. The herd turns, then runs on some unspoken cue. You stop to open a gate and wish you had a dollar for every time you've opened it. Small round bobcat tracks overlay rabbit prints along the fence.

A few head of cattle are drifting in to the tank, melting a path through the snow. As you get out of the truck, snow­birds rise from the fence line like a spray of buckshot, then settle back down to watch you work. The sound of the axe echoes back and forth through the draw.

In a season of quiet, Christmas is a day quieter than the rest. The sun, round and bright, climbs steadily higher. You pause, look around, inhale deeply. By noon you will be home. Company's coming to spend Christmas at the ranch. You can't tell them, but the real Christmas, for you, has already come and gone.

Christmas on an Arizona ranch in 1987 may contain more material blessings than it once did, but the spirit is the same. Ask Ione "Babe" Whipple of Show Low. She grew up on a Linden ranch; it was in the time of the Great Depression, but she never knew the difference. For ranch kids, hard times were a way of life.

In the early 1930s her widowed mother — also named Ione — was left with nine children and a tiny monthly insurance check. Myrna, the oldest, was married. The other girls helped their mother with the housekeeping and took care of their baby brother, Joy. Lowell "Rog" Pearce, 16, took over the ranch and cattle. Ione worked the farm, getting up before daylight in the spring to plow before she went off to teach school.

In spite of endless work, Ione Pearce provided more than food and shelter for her children. She took the time to read to them, pray with them, and teach them how to work. Her own labor was occasionally lightened by tran­sients, who would stop at the ranch and work until they had money to go on. "Mama was a cheerful person," said Babe. "She was thankful she had a teaching degree, when a lot of people didn't have a job."

Even in those harsh days, Christmas was a time of wonderment for the Pearce children. In the close family circle, gifts were not very important. "We drew names," said Babe. "Most of the time, we ordered from a catalog. We'd sit and study these 'wish books' for days. Mama would usually help us pick out our gifts. We had a limit on what we could spend. The present I liked best was a pair of white snow boots with fur trim. I prayed for snow so I could wear them."

The big job on Christmas Eve was preparing chickens or turkeys for the holiday meal. Then Ione would heat water on the wood stove, and the children would bathe in a galvanized tub beside the warm stove to get ready for the big day.

"We always had a piñon tree with candles. We made our own decorations with construction paper and popcorn. Christmas dinner consisted of roast fowl, homemade egg noodles, mashed potatoes and gravy, and home-canned vegetables. Mother made a delicious suet pudding she called 'Brown Dog,' with a vinegar sauce."

Fruit was a special treat, saved for the Christmas stock­ings. "Grandpa would come up from the Salt River Valley and bring grapes, oranges, and grapefruit. Mama would let us eat the grapes; but she'd ration the citrus fruit."

In addition to fruit, there was homemade candy: fon­dant, fudge, and taffy. And there were balloons. Ione saw to it that each child had one. "We played with them until they all burst. Then we would sit on the floor and play Rook or other card games."

If there were visiting aunts and uncles, the Pearce children would go for a sleigh ride. "We'd hitch up the work team and go off into the forest and see who could push each other off into the snow." Today, Babe and her sisters still get together during the holidays to recount old times. "Sometimes we even play Rook, again."

Times were hard, too, for the Sid Earl family, living on an isolated ranch in the White Mountains; but Sid's wife, Viola, made the magic of Christmas seem real to their children.

Sid was a cowboy and wild horse breaker. In 1921 he took a job as Stockman for the White Mountain Apaches and moved his wife and chil­dren from Vernon to Chino Springs on the Fort Apache reservation.

"We moved in a wagon with all our belongings," recalled Nola Poer of Pinetop. "There were six of us kids — Nelma, Mervin, Randall, Eula Jean, Charles, and me. My dad had a good job for those days, but it was still hard to make ends meet."

The Earls lived in a little white ranch house with a screen porch. The first year, Sid planted an orchard, and his wife put in a garden. The ranch kids had two years of blissful freedom before they had to move into Whiteriver to go to school.

"Mom was a Christmas person," said Nola. We had a big tree with candles and popcorn strings. I still remember the thrill of it all. Mom would tell us about Santa Claus, and I didn't see any problem with his getting around to take toys to all the children in the world. The reservation was the whole world to me."

That first Christmas morning at Chino Springs, Nola ran outdoors at daylight to see if Santa Claus had been there. To her delight, she found "reindeer" tracks in the fresh snow. (Years later she realized they were simply deer tracks.) Nothing has ever been able to erase the magic of that Christmas for Nola — the Christmas that proved Santa Claus came to ranch kids, too.

Another Arizona ranch family that rode out the Depres­sion was the Reeds, who bought the Rocking Chair Ranch west of Snowflake in the '20s. Tom, his wife, Olive, and four daughters lived in a three-room adobe house with­out indoor plumbing, running water, or electricity. Paper stuffed between ceiling beams served as insulation.

For lack of brothers, the girls had to be cowboys as well as mother's helpers. Dorothy (Dody), Tamme, Carol, and Peg learned to ride, brand, fix fence, and milk cows.

"Our Christmases weren't much different from other days ," said Dody. "I don't remember having a tree, but we had stockings filled with apples, oranges, and nuts. We usually got one Christmas present each."

She was only two years old when she got the present she will always remember — a baby sister. On Christmas Eve, several families from the little settlement of Zeniff came to the Reed ranch to celebrate. They brought food and musical instruments and danced late into the eve­ning. "Peg was born after everyone went home, about five o'clock on Christmas morning."

When the girls were old enough, they rode double on horseback to the one-room schoolhouse in Zeniff. If the weather was stormy, they stayed all night in the settle­ment with friends.

The family had little mon­ey, "but we weren't the only ones," she said. "We had plenty to eat, even a car; so we were lucky. Mom went to town once a month and had to make everything last in between.

"One Christmas, Peg and I got our presents — a doll and a toy dog — early because we needed them for a pageant at the school. We made costumes out of crepe paper. I had to hold the doll and recite a piece I learned. Peg held the toy dog and recited a poem, 'Little Boy Blue.' When she got through, there wasn't a dry eye in the place."

For Dody, every day was a new learning experience. "I just wish I'd asked more questions, " she said. "Those were tough old times, but I'm grateful for them. We learned how to work and how to utilize what we had."

Tough old times. But, in many ways, good old times. And actually not so different from life today on Arizona's remote ranches. Christmas still begins and ends with the chores, like every other day. The work reminds you that you are relied upon. That you are part of the season and part of the earth, part of the endless cycle of life. That you count. And, of course, that's the message of Christmas, too.