Russ' Vintage Iron

Christmas cards were always something I looked forward to in the weeks leading up to the holiday. When I was kid, my parents would receive many cards in the mail, some with interesting family photos and/or newsletters.

Not to be Grinch-ish here, but I never quite understood sending out a detailed account of what occurred in your family during the course of the last year. Call me crazy, I can tolerate a few paragraphs about your year, but certainly not two pages of single-spaced type.

I care about what is going on in your life, but not THAT much.

Anyway, the photos were, to me, always the most entertaining part of the Christmas cards. Usually there were formal family photos, some informal shots and even some pictures of kids and pets.

We were boring, for as much as I can remember, my folks never sent out photos of my two sisters and me with our various dogs/cats/birds.

Since many of my parents' friends and family were fellow farmers, we would sometimes get photos of the family in some sort of farming setting. Once a while there was shot of the family with the farm place in the background or maybe even individual photos of various "action" farm activities.

Even vintage iron was occasionally used in the family photo. I can think of a couple different families who featured tractors in their Christmas card photos over the years.

I know the one family had just restored their dad/grandpa's old 1940s Farmall H and they all had their photo taken around it and they used this photo as their Christmas card picture that year. Another farm family had a similar photo, but this time they were posing in front of a much newer Case/International tractor.

I am sure you have seen various versions of this type of Christmas card over the years. My parents never took any photos with our vintage iron, probably because we were still using them and they were still in their "work" clothes.

Now that I have my own family, we too have yet to be this creative. We have used a couple photos taken at Thanksgiving, especially the years when our children were born. I guess we did have one Christmas card photo of the four of us (our daughter wasn't born yet) with us sitting on the steps of our John Deere 4440 during corn harvest that fall.

I always wanted to take a family photo with the family vintage iron. Of course, we would have to use our 1957 John Deere 620, my grandpa's last tractor, which we still use on our farm.

We also would have to incorporate the vintage John Deere steel-wheeled dump rake and the old pull-type road grader (also on steel) which were my great-grandpa's equipment that we have. These implements are not all painted up shiny like the tractor would be, but they do represent a couple pieces of our family's agricultural heritage.

The 620 and the road grader have a connected history. Among my dad's first tractor-driving chores was to drive the 620 pulling the grader while my grandpa operated the controls of the grader, all while standing on the back of it. They did this on their farm lane to plow snow in the wintertime and in the springtime to level the ruts for many years.

Our Christmas card did not feature a photo of us this year. We send out a few cards and we get a few cards in return, but it is not like the amount my folks used to get when I was kid.

I don't know if we don't know as many people as they did or if modern technology such as texting and social media is eroding the Christmas card-sending tradition. Maybe it is a little of both.

My family (wife Tracie; son Kyle, 10 years old; son Burke, 5; and daughter Ella, 3) wishes you a very Merry Christmas and a wonderful New Year!

Russ Quinn can be reached at russ.quinn@dtn.com

(CZ)

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