THE DEWALD STREET BAKING SISTERS

JEREMY WALTNER

– EDITOR & PUBLISHER

When it comes to holiday seasons that lend themselves to traditions, few deliver quite like Christmas. From singing carols to stuffing stockings to attending Christmas Eve programs at church, it feels like the Christian celebration of the birth of Jesus and all that goes with it is perfectly suited for spirited to-dos that come around every year.

For childhood friends Kathy Haar, Marlene Pidde, Nancy Schmidt and Julianne Stahl, that tradition can be seen, smelled, and tasted on the day they set aside to bake Christmas goodies for family and friends.

They were at it again on Wednesday, Nov. 28 in the kitchen of Nancy’s Freeman home — an occasion that marked 20 years since the baking extravaganza began. The result was a dozen different kinds of treats totaling an estimated 500 pieces, from lime wedding cakes made by Nancy to peanut clusters made by Julianne to cutout frosted cookies made by Marlene. And standing by is Kathy, the group’s official taste-tester and dishwasher.

“We have a really good system and I don’t know what it is,” said Julianne.

“I don’t either,” responds Nancy. “We have done it for so many years that we work really well together.”

Adds Kathy: “It just clicks.”

While the gathering two decades in the perfecting is in and of itself special, it’s the rest of the story that really sets it apart. Not only did the four women grow up together, they were neighbors on Dewald Street¬.

• Nancy’s parents, Florene and Lewis Kleinsasser, lived in the house at 712 S. Dewald Street currently occupied by Russ and Jan Becker. (Lewis owned the laundromat and water softener business in Freeman.)
• Kathy and Marlene’s parents, Esther and Elton Haar, lived one house to the south, at 720 S. Dewald, which is currently the home of Murial Kaufman. (Elton owned the Phillips 66 station on Main Street).
• And one house to the south of that was the childhood home of Julianne, the daughter of Ione and Kenny Weiland (who owned the local Jack & Jill).

Nancy, Kathy, Marlene and Julianne grew up in the 1950s, a time in which Freeman was enjoying a boom in terms of business and population growth. The Freeman Public School District, from where all four ladies would graduate in the late 1960s and early 1970s, was less than two decades away from its largest class sizes ever, and the ladies remember their neighborhood being packed with kids — as many as 25 or 30, they say. Maybe more.

This was a type of Middle Americana fit for the silver screen, where men worked and children played while their mothers enjoyed coffee together. Nancy, Kathy, Marlene and Julianne say that was certainly true in the case of their own families, and they remember those coffee parties well.

That no doubt planted a seed that germinated in their mid-adult years, when they began gathering for birthday parties whenever possible.

Kathy says it all started in 2002, when in July of that year she moved back to South Dakota after spending 13 years in Florida.

“That first year back we got together for all our birthdays,” says Kathy, who as a 1967 graduate calls herself the ‘matriarch’ of the foursome. “The next year at one of the parties we decided, ‘Hey, let’s do some Christmas baking,’ because our mothers, every Christmas and Easter, would have coffee parties, and they would take turns …”

And so it began, that Christmas season of 2003, that a new holiday tradition was born.

“We’re just grown-up neighbors,” said Julianne, who graduated from Freeman High School in 1971 and today lives in Dell Rapids. “We do this in memory of that time; we talk about those days.”

“We laugh, we giggle, we eat,” says Kathy. “We are the Dewald Street Baking Sisters.”

Nancy, also a 1971 FHS graduate, is most often the host of the day-long event, says the conversation is always fun.

“We avoid politics,” she says. “And religion — we all know who we are.”

And when it comes to remembering those days lost to time, Nancy offers a nod to the ‘patriarch.’

“If we don’t know or remember something,” she says, “we ask Kathy.”

“I love it,” said Marlene, a 1973 graduate who is the youngest of the four and, like Nancy, continues to live in Freeman. “It’s good to come together.”

As for the day-of event, it’s a full eight-hour-work-day-plus.

Almost all the prep work is done ahead of time and there’s little if any preplanning involved.

“If we tried to do all of that here,” says Julianne, “we’d never get done.”

This year, the women started around 9:30 a.m. and were still going strong mid-afternoon, with another one-third of their goodies still to bake. They broke for lunch — ham sandwiches and a German potato salad to cut the sweetness of treats courtesy of Julianne in lieu of the more traditional soup — and had plenty in the tank to carry them to the finish line.

While it’s not about what they bake but that they bake, all four do have their favorite traditional Christmas goodies (even if they didn’t bake them this year).

For Julianne, it’s a triple batch of caramels and her homemade fudge using her grandmother’s recipe that says, in her own handwriting, “stir on the fire.”

Nancy’s favorite is also a recipe that comes from her grandmother — a recipe for pfeffernüsse.

And for Marlene and Kathy, it’s straightforward: Sugar cookies and gingersnaps.

This year’s spread — in addition to the aforementioned — included coconut clusters and cranberry chocolate biscotti (gluten free), peanut butter blossoms and pinwheels, straight-up sugar cookies and anything else the ladies had yet to bake.

“We’re still playing,” said Nancy, who was wearing her grandmother’s apron. “We’re just goofy people.”

This year’s iteration wasn’t perfect.

Kathy forgot the dates for the date bars and two of the four chose to make peanut butter blossoms — and for whatever reason they didn’t make the traditional pfeffernüsse — but year No. 20 was as Americana as it gets, all these years later.

“Not many people can say that they do this — and are still able to do this,” says Julianne, who notes that she can’t remember a single major malfunction.

“I don’t think we’ve ever burned a cookie,” she says. “Maybe we’ve dropped them on the floor, but I don’t think we’ve ever had a complete failure.”

There’s still time.

“Hopefully,” says Nancy, “we have many more years to come.”