Two Saturdays before Christmas, the Wood County Park District held an Old Fashioned Christmas Open House. There were 2 locations (very close together).
One of them was the Carter Loomis Farm Park. They just received the property and buildings as a gift and are in the process of restoring it to a working 1930's farm. So when we walked in there, there was this lovely lady dressed in a 30's style dress and high healed shoes making cut out cookies. A tree sat in the corner decorated in Depression Era style decorations with a cast iron toy stove and a toy fire wagon with horses underneath it. My kids wanted to know why we no longer had cool toys like that :)
So more about the cookies. Each of the kids got to cut a few out. They had a little nutmeg in them and were super soft when they came warm out of the oven. Maryn was really enjoying them and wanted to copy the recipe down. She commented to the woman she liked them and asked what kind they were.
Nice lady: "You like them? They're lard cookies."
Maryn: "Whats lard?"
Me: "Maybe you should finish it before I tell you."
What I should have taken a picture of is Maryn's face when I told lard was animal fat.
As you can see from the pictures, they were really trying to use all period materials for the baking. I love how the ingredients are in those big jars.
They had old fashioned games as well. The boys (Paul especially) was fascinated with the marbles and asked for some for Christmas. The girls and I tried to master tiddlywinks with very little success. We flipped a few pretty far and had to go find them.
One of my favorite things was a story they told kind of on the side. We mentioned we had already been to the schoolhouse and she said that the lady who left them them the farm, Lucy, grew up in that home and used to go to the one room schoolhouse. She would ice skate down the ditch during the winter to get there. One day, she fell through and needed up spending the day at a neighbors house getting warm and never went to school. Her mom had no idea until the teacher stopped by to find out where Lucy had been all day.
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