Wanda Gag's Bohemian Christmas tree

By KURT NESBITT

Journal Staff Writer

NEW ULM -- Wanda Gag didn't go to church at all when she lived in New Ulm, but she celebrated Christmas anyway.

And it's in that spirit that Mary Ann Zins decorates two small trees in the parlor and dining room of the Gag family's house on Washington Street every year.

Zins is on the board for the Wanda Gag House Association, the private organization that staffs and maintains the place where the famous artist and children's book author grew up. She took visitors on tours of the house and explained it room by room Saturday afternoon.

Visitors on those tours learned the Gag family was quite poor during the time they were living in New Ulm. The patriarch, Anton, made his living with a photography studio in the second story of the house and also painted houses and churches. It was just enough to afford the house but left little room for lots of Christmas presents.

Instead, Christmas was the time for the Gag family's creativity to shine, said Zins. All seven children would make presents for each other in the attic near their father's studio with a sign on the door marked "Keep Out." Quite often, the gifts were as simple as a bookmark or some stamps or drawing paper or pencils.

"Drawing paper was the ultimate for them," Zins explained.

So was the family Christmas tree. Wanda's diaries recall how the tree was decorated: apples, homemade candles and gingerbread cookies hung with black thread, said Zins. And it's that description Zins follows every year when making her annual holiday display inside the house. She said Wanda in particular was fascinated by Christmas trees because they caused her to dream.

"They looked at it as a canvas and that's how they decorated it," she said.

Except this tree has one twist -- it also hold ornaments made from copies of black and white photos of Wanda and Flavia when they were children. Zins even has a larger black and white of Wanda as a toddler beneath the tree described in her diary. The Gag family celebrated Christmas in the house until Wanda moved the rest of her family to Minneapolis in 1916. They eventually joined her in New York once she was established as an illustrator and an author.

There's another tree sitting in a far corner of the parlor, where the family used to greet relatives and dignitaries. It is the same size as the tree in the dining room but it carries a different theme.

For the past three years, it's been decorated to represent one of Wanda Gag's books.

This year's tree is decorated to look like the pages of "ABC Bunny," a children's picture book Gag wrote and illustrated in 1933. The book was intended to help children learn the alphabet by showing them an object or an action that started with the same letter.

The story is told from the top of the tree to its bottom. Ornaments with the letters hang beside the objects that the represent, along with some garland and electric tree lights. A copy of the actual book sits at its foot.

Zins said she plans to decorate a different tree each year to tell the stories of all six of Wanda's books.

So far, she's tackled "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" and "Tales from Grimm" and is already gathering ornaments of mice and cats for Snippy and Snappy, a book about.....you guessed it, a cat and a mouse.