Readers now have the chance to visit the Willa Cather Childhood Home following an extensive fifteen month restoration. In celebration of Cather’s 150th birthday, holiday tours of National Willa Cather Center historic sites will be offered in December. The festively decorated sites, restored and maintained by the National Willa Cather Center, include the Willa Cather Childhood Home, St. Juliana Falconieri Catholic Church, Grace Episcopal Church, and the Farmers and Merchants Bank.
Guests can register at willacather.org/events in advance for tours offered every Saturday in December — on December 2, 9, 16, 23, & 30 — as well as on Willa Cather’s 150th birthday on Thursday, December 7. Saturday tours are at 11:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m., with two additional tours offered at 9:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m. on December 7 only.
Tour tickets include seasonal readings at each site from Cather’s life, writings, and letters. Cookies, cider, and hot chocolate will be served at the conclusion of the tour. Visitors will also receive a copy of Cather’s A Lost Lady, her 1923 novel about a woman that captivates a once bustling railroad town, inspired by prominent early Nebraska citizens, Silas and Lyra Garber, of Red Cloud.
In addition to guided holiday tours on December 7, visitors can also attend a live viewing at 7:00 p.m. of Benjamin Taylor’s book launch for Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather. Birthday cupcakes will be served, and the National Willa Cather Bookstore will have an extensive offering of gifts and books at 15% off on Cather’s birthday.
Visitors are also invited to view the permanent exhibit, American Bittersweet, on the life and world of Willa Cather, and Imprinting the West: Manifest Destiny, Real, and Imagined. This traveling exhibit from ExhibitsUSA is showing in the Red Cloud Opera House Gallery through January 6, 2024. The exhibits and a short-film of Cather’s work and its connections to Red Cloud are freely available for viewing.
Bringing a group or book club? Contact Rachel Olsen at rolsen@willacather.org for group pricing options or call (402) 746-2653.
About the Exhibit
Imprinting the West: Manifest Destiny, Real and Imagined
Westward expansion was one of the most transformational elements in American life throughout the 19th century. Printed imagery played an important role in the dissemination of knowledge and understanding about the West and those who inhabited it. Forty-eight hand-colored engravings and lithographs explore these depictions and the influence artists had on the perception of the wild west. In this fascinating exhibition, curated by Dr. Randall Griffe at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, visitors can consider the ways that the work of the artist intersects with the goals of an ambitious republic and the older cultures of the continent’s indigenous people.
Support for this exhibit at the National Willa Cather Center was made possible with a grant from the Nebraska State Historical Society Foundation and the Claire M. Hubbard Foundation.
Cather and the Holiday Season
Feel free to use excerpts from this Christmas-related section of My Ántonia — seasonal excerpts from Willa Cather’s letters and writings will be shared during tours:
“We decided to have a country Christmas, without any help from town…Grandmother took me into the ice-cold storeroom, where she had some bolts of gingham and sheeting. She cut squares of cotton cloth and we sewed them together into a book. We bound it between pasteboards, which I covered with brilliant calico, representing scenes from a circus…Fuchs got out the old candle-moulds and made tallow candles. Grandmother hunted up her fancy cake-cutters and baked gingerbread men and roosters, which we decorated with burnt sugar and red cinnamon drops.
On the day before Christmas, Jake packed the things we were sending to the Shimerdas in his saddle-bags and set off on grandfather’s grey gelding. When he mounted his horse at the door, I saw that he had a hatchet slung to his belt, and he gave grandmother a meaning look which told me he was planning a surprise for me. That afternoon I watched long and eagerly from the sitting-room window. At last I saw a dark spot moving on the west hill, beside the half-buried cornfield, where the sky was taking on a coppery flush from the sun that did not quite break through. I put on my cap and ran out to meet Jake. When I got to the pond, I could see that he was bringing in a little cedar tree across his pommel. He used to help my father cut Christmas trees for me in Virginia, and he had not forgotten how much I liked them.
By the time we had placed the cold, fresh-smelling little tree in a corner of the sitting-room, it was already Christmas Eve. After supper we all gathered there, and even grandfather, reading his paper by the table, looked up with friendly interest now and then. The cedar was about five feet high and very shapely. We hung it with the gingerbread animals, strings of popcorn, and bits of candle which Fuchs had fitted into pasteboard sockets. Its real splendours, however, came from the most unlikely place in the world—from Otto’s cowboy trunk. I had never seen anything in that trunk but old boots and spurs and pistols, and a fascinating mixture of yellow leather thongs, cartridges, and shoemaker’s wax. From under the lining he now produced a collection of brilliantly coloured paper figures, several inches high and stiff enough to stand alone. They had been sent to him year after year, by his old mother in Austria. There was a bleeding heart, in tufts of paper lace; there were the three kings, gorgeously apparelled, and the ox and the ass and the shepherds; there was the Baby in the manger, and a group of angels, singing; there were camels and leopards, held by the black slaves of the three kings. Our tree became the talking tree of the fairy tale; legends and stories nestled like birds in its branches. Grandmother said it reminded her of the Tree of Knowledge. We put sheets of cotton wool under it for a snow-field, and Jake’s pocket-mirror for a frozen lake.”
The National Willa Cather Center
The National Willa Cather Center is an archive, museum, and study center that works to advance Willa Cather’s legacy through education, preservation, and the arts. Located in Cather’s hometown of Red Cloud, Nebraska, the Center’s programs include guided historic site tours, conservation of the 612-acre Willa Cather Memorial Prairie, and cultural programs and exhibits at the restored Red Cloud Opera House. The Center houses the earliest Cather collections and preserves ten properties that make up the largest collection of nationally-designated historic sites related to an American author. Additional programs include conferences, seminars, scholarships, an author series, teacher institute, and artist residency. The Center also publishes the Willa Cather Review, a leading source for Cather-related news, features, and scholarship. In 2023, the Center is celebrating the author’s 150th birthday with events around the country. For more information visit www.WillaCather.org and follow the organization on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter [@WillaCatherFdn], and on YouTube [@ NationalWillaCatherCenter].