Welcome! I'm Sara Ramsey, a novelist and former tech worker. I recently moved back to my 430-person town in rural Iowa after two decades in San Francisco. I write about the wild and weird magic of my rural life, as well as anything else that strikes my fancy. Thank you for joining me!
On Christmas Eve, my mother and I went to a candlelight service. It felt like all the other Christmas Eve services I attended as a kid — but the church is no longer a church, and the town where the church sits is no longer a town.
Iowa has had the same unseasonably warm December as most of the country — all the coal that bad kids used to get in their stockings has eliminated snow for the rest of us, I guess. Christmas Eve was an especially grim night for driving. It was forty degrees and raining steadily as night fell, which turned unpaved roads to mud and the grassy parking area around the old church into a squelching morass.
My mom and I went despite these dangers. Mud season lasts for months here. If you let bad roads keep you from leaving the house, you’ll never see anyone from November to April. We left my dad at home to monitor the ham balls (a rural Iowa specialty — more on that later), and I successfully drove to the service without getting sucked into a ditch by the endless mud.
The route covered six miles of gravel roads and four miles of pavement. I can’t tell you the official names of those roads without referring to Google Maps. Roads were given names in the 1990s for 911 purposes; before that, they were known by who lived on them. Only four houses remain on that six miles of gravel, so it’s a good thing we don’t use people as markers anymore.
Despite stereotypes of rural Iowa’s religiosity, my family rarely went to church when I was growing up. The bulk of my dad’s line immigrated to America in the 1700s, and religious disputes were a driving factor. Subsequent generations have argued and fallen out with church elders, school boards, and government agents with such regularity that it seems to be a functioning part of my DNA. I’ve never thrown a preacher out of town like some of my ancestors (in the 20th century!!) did. But any former coworkers who’ve seen me go incandescent with rage over a perceived workplace injustice would probably not be surprised to know that it’s in my blood.
My grandparents managed to remain Methodists despite the family’s preacher-tossing proclivities. I always went to Christmas Eve candlelight services with them. In the 1980s, before the evangelical movement really caught hold in rural Iowa, churches felt more like community centers than political powerhouses. People went to each other’s churches more regularly, crossing ecumenical lines to share meals and celebrations.
The “church” that hosted this year’s Christmas Eve service officially closed in the early 2000s. It sits in what used to be a town, but the town is also defunct. A few families still live in a loose cluster of houses along the railroad tracks, proudly maintaining the community center together despite the lack of an elected city government. The commercial buildings are gone. The post office was shuttered forty years ago. Even the last couple of streets were renamed to fit the county’s naming conventions for rural areas. Their addresses officially state that they are part of a town ten miles away.
The church held on longer than the town did. But eventually the parish disappeared — the congregants literally dying, or swapping mainline Protestantism for evangelicalism, or decamping to other Methodist churches in the county. Inevitably, one of the last families in town acquired the building.
The current owners, Shelda and Warren, have maintained the church despite the missing congregation. They organized the Christmas Eve service and opened it to the public. They decorated the church beautifully — at least a dozen Christmas trees of varying sizes and themes, along with nativity scenes, lights, garlands, gift bags full of candy, etc. Someone told me that Shelda had decorated the church for Christmas last year and didn’t bother to put the trees away afterward, since the Christmas Eve service is the only celebration the church is still used for.
Even though I had never been inside that church before, I knew half the people who showed up on Christmas Eve. My mom and I sat near a couple of her cousins. The pianist was my friend’s mom (and also a cousin, if you’re keeping track). Other friends and neighbors were sprinkled through the crowd, which grew to at least eighty people.
Math: eighty people = 1.2% of the county’s population, braving the mud to spend Christmas Eve at a ghost church.
We sang a few Christmas songs together. We then heard four special performances: a small group who accompanied themselves with backing music played on someone’s cell phone; a little girl who belted out something vaguely familiar in a completely different key than her mother’s piano accompaniment, to great applause; a trio of Amish girls who eschewed the microphones and unexpectedly sang in English (this tidbit courtesy of Warren, who had been told they would sing in German and seemed disappointed that they didn’t); and my town’s city clerk, who gave a soaring solo of “Ave Maria.”
After the songs, a retired Presbyterian minister read the Christmas story. As he spoke, someone passed out little white candles nestled in plastic wax-catchers. The lights dimmed. When the minister finished his reading, a few candles were lit around the room. Friends and neighbors touched lit candles to darkened ones, spreading light across the pews, until the former sanctuary was brightened once again by eighty tiny flames.
I felt, briefly, like I was eight again, mesmerized by the flickering magic of candlelight at my grandparents’ church on Christmas Eve.
But that church, miles away from the one I attended this year, has also disbanded. The building sits, comatose, in a different almost-ghost-town where only 67 people still live.
We sang “Silent Night.” Then we blew out our candles, said our goodbyes, and headed out into the rain.
When my mom and I got home, we discovered that the oven had misfired and the ham balls weren’t even close to done. Luckily, like any good Iowan, I’d made a backup batch of ham balls, which were already fully cooked and sitting at my house in town. We retrieved them, heated them up, and enjoyed them alongside sweet potatoes, layered lettuce, and apricot salad (vocab lesson: “layered lettuce” is salad; “apricot salad” is jello; surprisingly, both are topped with shredded cheddar).
I grew up eating ham balls all the time — they were one of my grandma’s go-tos. As far as I can tell, ham balls are unique to the Midwest and perhaps unique to Iowa. I have never met anyone outside of Iowa who has heard of them. Why ham balls exist here and nowhere else, I don’t know. They are delicious and deserve more acclaim than they get.
Many (inferior) ham ball recipes call for ketchup or tomato paste, creating something more like meatloaf. My grandma’s ham balls are tomato-free. They are cooked partially-submerged in a sauce made out of vinegar, brown sugar, and dry mustard powder. It’s essentially a distant cousin to sweet-and-sour pork, but we eat our ham balls with potatoes instead of rice. If you’re inclined to try them, you can find the recipe on my website.
I don’t think my newsletter audience is big enough to spread the gospel of ham balls to the world. Ham balls may stay in Iowa until the recipes are lost — prepared only in ghost towns, eaten by the last survivors of these forgotten places.
Still, I feel weirdly hopeful about the future of rural areas despite all the evidence arrayed against my optimism. The church where we met for Christmas Eve is silent again — but we did meet. The candles are snuffed again — but it only took one person, and one flame, to light them.
Shelda’s Christmas Eve service won’t bring back a town. But for one night, it brought together a community and reminded us of the joy that comes from gathering.
One night is not much.
One flame is not much.
But even my cynical heart can still appreciate the message of that candlelight service: one flame is tiny. But when it’s shared, it can light up an entire world.
Cheers,
Sara
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this post, I would love to hear from you - please leave a comment, or drop me an email at dearsara@sararamsey.com. If you haven’t subscribed yet, please do - it’s a free and easy way to support my work.
If you missed last week’s post, you can catch up with my thoughts on the food deserts that sit in the middle of farmland. Or, go back to the archives and refresh yourself on the rules of rural driving (hint: drive straight down the middle of the road and wave at everyone you meet).
Even though I drive 40 minutes to go to church (I still go to my home church), the small churches around my house are slowly growing again. They may only have 20 people, but it was still nice to go there for Christmas Eve and enjoy the close community. Especially since one of the local Pastor lost 4 of his step children the week before in a car accident. It was a very meaningful service this year.
Ham balls are definitely being made in 2024!!