Poverty was a constant companion to Paul Kleffner as he grew up on a ranch outside of Belt, but he never knew it.

Raised on a dryland wheat farm in the early 1900s, with cows, chickens, pigs, geese and a good garden -- when the rains came -- the 10 children in the Kleffner clan fared well food-wise.

But they didn't have much else to spare, so when Christmas came around it was a special event.

"We mostly got practical gifts," Kleffner recalled on a recent winter afternoon in his Helena home. "We were poor, and didn't have many ornaments, but our Christmas tree was the most beautiful tree in the world."

Kleffner was born in 1916 in Belt, the fifth of 10 children in the Kleffner household. He's best known locally for the ranch he and his wife, Thelma, ran near East Helena with their six girls and one son.

"We had some good Christmases out there," he said. The round home was built for parties, with four fireplaces on the main floor and a ballroom with maple flooring upstairs.

But it was his fourth Christmas, back in 1920, that sticks in Kleffner's mind.

A few days before Christmas, his father would load a horse-drawn wagon with wheat and go into town, then come back with coal and a Christmas tree.

The family typically would drive into town in their Model T on Christmas for midnight Mass; they'd take a sled or wagon if there was too much snow for the car and walk beside the sled to stay warm.

Kleffner recalls his father had a buffalo robe that he'd put over the car's engine during the church service to keep it from freezing, but one time the service lasted too long and the car limped back home with a frozen radiator.

"We didn't know about antifreeze," he said.

When they arrived home, the Christmas tree would be standing, undecorated, waiting for Santa to arrive.

Kleffner said the children would go to bed at about 1:30 a.m. Somehow, during the magic of the night, the tree was outfitted with about a dozen colored candles with clips to attach them to the tree, and a handful of ornaments. Underneath the tree were brown-paper packages.

"We got things like socks, shirts and dresses for the girls. Not many toys," he said. "We got oranges sometimes, and quite a bit of Christmas candy -- the curled candy, like ribbons."

And on this fourth Christmas of his life, underneath the tree were the warm leather mittens that he so desperately wanted.

"We slept in our underwear -- those kind with the trap doors -- and my mother would tell me that on that morning, I was outside in the snow in my underwear trying to make snowballs with those leather mittens," he said, laughing at the memory. "I was out there standing with my trap door down, and the snow just wasn't cooperating."

After the presents were opened, the everyday routine set in -- cows were milked, chickens were fed and children ate a breakfast of "wheat mush."

"My dad would wash the wheat, put it in the oven in a big pan to dry, and the top kernels would get a little scorched. Then he'd grind it into wheat mush, and we'd eat it with thick cream and sugar," Kleffner said. "It was so good."

Meanwhile, their mother was stoking the wood stove to make the Christmas feast of roasted goose, mashed potatoes and gravy and pumpkin pie. Sometimes the family would gather around the tree, their father would light the candles and they would sing "Silent Night" and other songs, Kleffner recalled.

"We worked hard and ate good," he said. "My parents made a lot of sacrifices. ... We were poor, but we didn't know it.

"What a wonderful home life and family life we had."

Reporter Eve Byron: 447-4076 or eve.byron@helenair.com

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