BILLINGS — Harriet Dusenberry was a world away from Montana when she hired an artist to illustrate an album of Christmas memories from her childhood.

This fall, Dusenberry’s granddaughter, Dru Robidou of Martinsdale, published those memories of Christmas on a ranch at Lavina.

The story starts with a grandmother knitting while she tells her granddaughter what Christmas was like when she was a girl. The nostalgic illustrations show children reciting Christmas poems at school, dressing as shepherds for the church Nativity play and snuggling under quilts warmed by flat irons.

It’s titled “Yes, I Remember Well — A Montana Christmas When I Was a Little Girl.”

While those childhood memories may seem familiar to many Montanans from stories told by their own grandparents, the real-life story of how the paintings became a book is far from common.

Dusenberry wrote the text in the late 1950s while living in Katmandu, Nepal, where her husband worked on agricultural development projects. She planned to give the album as a gift to Robidou, who was 3 years old at the time.

The Nepalese artist, Chaitanya Muni Bajracharya, had never been anywhere near Montana. Dusenberry showed him a Christmas story from a magazine and asked him to paint the pictures and hand-letter the text, which Dusenberry rewrote to fit her own recollections of life on the Trask Ranch at Lavina.

Instead, of returning with a rough sketch and a cost estimate, the artist turned up with the finished paintings and presented her with a shockingly high billing.

“Her intention was just to give it to me as a Christmas gift,” Robidou said.

But, instead of giving such an expensive present to a 3-year-old, Dusenberry entrusted it to Robidou’s parents for safe-keeping.

For 15 years, Dusenberry and her husband, Harold, took two-year assignments overseas.

The couple had never been out of Montana when they left for Nepal in 1952. After seven years in Nepal, other assignments took them to the African countries of Ghana and Uganda. During those years, the couple toured nearly 50 countries, returning to Montana for about a month out of every two years.

During their stay in Nepal, they dined with the nation’s king and greeted Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay after the celebrated pair successfully climbed Mount Everest in 1953.

“My grandma wrote a letter every week to us, and my mom kept all those letters. And I have copies of all those,” Robidou said.

She describes her grandmother as having a particularly adventuresome spirit, a trait she may have inherited from her grandfather, Daniel Webster Slayton, who left Virginia at the age of 22 with the dream of owning a Montana ranch.

Slayton got off the train in Livingston in July of 1884 and walked 80 miles to White Sulphur Springs, where his brother had settled a few months before.

A few years later, Slayton and his bride, Lizzie, moved to a homestead cabin north of Lavina, and, in 1901, Slayton bought the Trask Ranch, along the Musselshell River on the outskirts of Lavina.

At Christmas, six stockings hung from the mantle at the Trask Ranch. One year, the stocking stuffers included a 2-inch-tall copy of Webster’s Dictionary, which Dusenberry took with her overseas. Robidou eventually inherited the keepsake.

Her book pictures the Nativity play at the Lavina Methodist Church, a horse-drawn sleigh ride to chop down the Christmas tree and the family gathering for dinner. Robidou has a faded picture of her grandma as an infant, cradled in her mother’s arms as her parents sit in a horse-drawn sleigh.

“They were headed off to going off to grandma and grandpa’s for her first Christmas,” Robidou said.

D.W. Slayton, a sheep and cattle rancher who became a state senator, opened the Slayton Mercantile, in Lavina, in 1908 and the Lavina Bank. At one point, he also owned property in California and Washington state.

Their home at the ranch was an imposing two-story, which grew as the family grew. Dusenberry, the oldest of six children, was born in 1911.

In 1929, as Dusenberry graduated from high school, the world teetered on the brink of the Great Depression. Soon afterward, the family lost the Trask Ranch.

“My grandma and all of her siblings said what a great childhood they had. What a wonderful life they had,” Robidou said.

“In reading Grandpa Slayton’s journals, times were tough, crops failing, grasshoppers, drought, banks failing and eventually he went bankrupt. … Grandma said she never realized they were in such financial trouble.”

Dusenberry got a teaching degree from the Billings Normal School, which eventually became Montana State University Billings. In 1932, after a short time teaching at Musselshell, she met and married Harold Dusenberry, a teacher and coach at Musselshell.

Later, Harold worked as a county agent in Forsyth and for the extension service in Bozeman.

The couple returned to Bozeman after they retired. Harold died in 1991. Harriet died in 2005, at the age of 93.

Traveling overseas may have made Dusenberry more conscious of the ways Montana was changing in the 1950s.

“It’s almost too bad we can’t go back in a lot of ways to the way it was back then, when the big thing was your family getting together and just having the time together,” Robidou said.

“That’s really what Christmas should be about. It’s not getting lots and lots of presents. But it’s kids making cards or making gifts for people in their family and learning about sharing themselves.”

The album turned into a book after Robidou got involved in scrapbooking as a hobby three years ago.

At first, she created two memory books for her family, using copies of the illustrations. So many people said they would love to have a copy that she decided to publish the book.

Her own family includes six grown children, four of whom still live in Montana, and nine grandchildren.

For 25 years, she and her husband, John, ran a hunting and fishing outfitting business north of Gardiner, Buffalo Creek Outfitters. Later, they ran a summer and fall outfitting business in British Columbia, which they sold in 2005 to buy a ranch north of Martinsdale.

Robidou’s next project involves putting together a heritage photo album for her family. She shares her grandmother’s interest in genealogy and has become the caretaker for the family’s old photos.