16-year-old Helena Muffly wrote exactly 100 years ago today:
Wednesday, December 6, 1911: Have my part of the dialogue well under way. You may think I’m smart, but I haven’t much to say. I’m commencing to get streaks of thinking what I’ll buy for Xmas presents. My pocketbook is limited so I’ll have to make a careful list beforehand.
Her middle-aged granddaughter’s comments 100 years later:
Grandma was memorizing a dialogue for a school “entertainment” that was to be held before the Christmas break.
Let’s see—Grandma probably needed to buy gifts for at least seven people: her mother, her father, her sister Ruth, her little brother Jimmie, her married sister Besse, her brother-in-law Curt, and her best friend Carrie Stout. Whew, I can see how that it could be expensive.
In many ways the young woman who wrote the diary seems very different from the elderly grandmother that I remember—but this is one place where I can really recognize my grandmother. She always worried about money and I can picture her carefully planning what she would purchase before she went shopping.
A Hundred Years Ago 