16-year-old Helena Muffly wrote exactly 100 years ago today:
Friday, December 1, 1911:
The dying year around us a glory sheds
December with her pleasures breaks upon the scene,
Around our hearts a happy gladness lies
Christmas is coming with her laurels of green.
Didn’t have school today. Had a notion to go a visiting, but then didn’t, as I had some particular work, which I wanted done. Well, as Thanksgiving is over, I am looking forward to Christmas, hoping some pleasant surprises awaits me. Vice versa of Jan. 31.
Her middle-aged granddaughter’s comments 100 years later:
I wonder if Grandma was planning to make any gifts for family or friends. If she wanted to make aprons, she could have ordered patterns from Ladies Home Journal.
According to a December, 1911 article called the “The Pretty Christmas Apron:”
Odds and ends of the piece-bag and remnants from the bargain counter may be utilized to make these pretty aprons.
A Hundred Years Ago 
Do you think your grandmother wrote the poem? What pretty aprons – I recently bought an apron because I’m getting to be such a messy cook, but it is definitely not as pretty as the ones above! My aunt, who is now 96, used to ask for an apron whenever she was cooking in our kitchen and we always used to dig up an old shirt of Tim’s to accommodate her. Lately I see the sense in using one!
I don’t know whether Grandma copied the poem from some source or whether she wrote them herself. She included a poem in her diary entry on the first day of each month. And, every month I wonder about them. Poems were more popular a hundred years ago than they are now so maybe she copied them from a book or magazine.
Maybe people once wore aprons more frequently than they do now because it was more difficult to wash and iron clothes back then.
This year I am making aprons for Christmas gifts. My aprons will not be as pretty as these.
It’s amazing how fancy some of the aprons were. I’m impressed that you are making gifts. I should be, but somehow time always seems to slip away before I get anything made.
You made a good point Sheryl, perhaps aprons were more popular then because clothes were more expensive, often hand made and they probably had fewer clothes as well. I’m not much of an apron person I admit, though I have some in the kitchen drawer still.