116 3rd St SE
Cedar Rapids, Iowa 52401
Christmas in the Amanas
Take a tour of High Amana home that will be on the Amana Arts Guild’s Holiday Haus Walk Dec. 2 and 3
Touring Gordon Kellenberger’s High Amana home will not only put visitors in the mood to celebrate Christmas, but it is also likely to spur their artistic creativity or a deep dive into family roots.
The home at 704 12th Ave., High Amana, is just one stop on the Amana Arts Guild's Holiday Haus Walk set for Dec. 2 and 3. The Kellenberger roomy corner lot is adjacent to the Amana Arts Guild Center.
“Every year, we try to open three historic homes, one newer home, and then some kind of special visitation. This year, we’re going to have our tinsmith/blacksmith shop open in West Amana. There will be a blacksmith in there working,” Kellenberger, 81, said, adding that the stop is an opportunity to visit an often-ignored Amana town.
His home’s traditional weathered exterior may lead visitors to expect the typical, sparse interior of a 160-year-old Amana home. The Kellenberger home is at once a typical historic, late 1800s Amana communal kitchen and house and a home that is uniquely, well, Kellenberger.
If you go
What: Amana Arts Guild’s annual Holiday Haus Walk
When: 10 a.m. Dec. 2 to 4 p.m. Dec. 3
Where: Tour four homes and an active Blacksmith shop
Cost: $15
Details: The Aaron and Shana Schaefer home, East Amana; The Tyler Stockman and Allison Momany home, Middle Amana; Gordon Kellenberger home, High Amana; and Dr. David Fox home, West Amana. The Blacksmith Shop, in West Amana will have classes going on during the tour.
Every nook and cranny blends Gordon’s generations-deep local roots and pride in Amana craftsmanship in furniture, furnishings and decor with his ancestral family portraits and cherished keepsakes with and his late wife DeAnna’s original art, much of it created on-site. DeAnna died February 2022. The effect is a home that is comfortable, warm, and above all, interesting.
Enter his yard from 12th Avenue, walking under a cheerful white trellis and down the sidewalk to the home’s enclosed porch. A variety of plants taking advantage of the porch’s wall of windows seem comfortable under four large panels, parables created by DeAnna Kellenberger who made all the tiles from scratch.
Straight ahead, look through the window to where what was once a communal kitchen had been modernized when Kellenberger bought and remodeled the home in 1988.
“It took a year to remodel it. It had no bathrooms. They were still using the outhouse and it had one little water heater under the kitchen sink,” Kellenberger said.
This building was built in 1863. Amana residents outgrew the communal rooms, so the space was repurposed as a harness shop, a leather shop, and a shoemaker’s shop.
“It was more than a house,” Kellenberger said. “This used to be a community kitchen. This was the kitchen area here,” he said first pointing to his remodeled kitchen, then turning to the parlor “and this used to be the dining room.”
A cupboard in what is now a parlor hosts a collection of early Amana pottery, most of it made in the 1850s and 1860s. A friend of Kellenberger, artist Bill Kupka, created the colorful gourd Christmas tree Kellenberger purchased from a tag sale a year ago. It stands proudly near the tall windows that let in the winter sun. On a nearby piece of Amana furniture gourd versions of Mr. and Mrs. Claus, also made by Kupka, wear dazed expressions and bright red costumes.
However, the centerpiece of the parlor’s holiday ornamentation is most definitely a massive pyramid built by Kellenberger’s father Alfred Kellenbenger, a talented carpenter by trade who taught pyramid-building classes.
Several smaller, unique pyramids are found throughout the home during the holidays. Germans are known for their Christmas pyramids which, rather than cutting down evergreen trees, took center stage during the holiday season.
Christmas decorations are tastefully displayed among the many heirlooms, antiques, and one-of-a-kind art pieces in every room. In the adjacent kitchen, cookie ornaments baked and decorated by DeAnna Kellenberger from several years ago hang from ribbons above the kitchen sink.
On a mantel in the kitchen, there’s a tin cookie cutter — “Cookie cutters are a big deal in Amana” — leaning against a large tin bucket. Amana residents ate in communal dining rooms, but if they had a sick child or elderly relative at home, they would use such a bucket to carry home a meal. Above the doorway there’s an Amana tin wedding cake pan, a unique type of double heart.
“We have a lot of unique things that were made here. I’m one of them,” Kellenberger quipped.
The dining room table is set with Christmas linens and decorations featuring red linens, ready for guests to sit down to a traditional German Christmas feast. Gordon Kellenberger's holiday favorites include his wife’s creamed spinach, his family’s ham baked in pastry, and his own honey cookies.
Cheerful red and green crocheted garland adorns the portraits of his parents, grandparents and great-grandparents.
“This is the main structure of almost every Amana historic home, having a hallway down the middle with rooms off to the side, almost like a dormitory,” Kellenberger said.
A tour of Gordon Kellenberger's sunny, main floor in-home studio is a rare treat for Amana Arts Guild's Holiday Haus Walk visitors. Well-known for his stylized scenes of the Amana countryside in vibrant pastels, oranges and blues, Kellenberger also works in oil and watercolor. The home’s hallways have become a gallery of sorts for a series of Amana scenes in watercolor and another series of small oil paintings.
“I used to go out Thursday morning and paint. I gave myself two hours. And so they’re more like a painted sketch rather than a really finished piece,” Kellenberger said of the oil paintings.
UPSTAIRS
Usually, the kitchen boss lived in such a kitchen house with her family as well as other families, each assigned a parlor and a bedroom — or additional bedrooms if they had several children.
Up the narrow but sturdy stairs are several bedrooms. One open to visitors is furnished in typical Amana style: two Amana-made single beds — never double beds —
A cheerful purple tinsel mini Christmas tree stands out as decidedly not-Amish in a room with so many authentic local items, from hand-knit mittens in typical deer and snowflake patterns on a chest to House Blessings adorning the walls.
The twin beds are tidily covered with hand-stitched quilts featuring a pattern of flowers, grapes, or other nature-inspired patterns.
“They made stencils and chalked it on,” he said.
Pointing to the two pristine, bright greenish-blue quilts that his wife had picked up at an auction he said, “These were a wedding gift, never used. Maybe they didn’t like the color. I don’t know.”
For those who understand Amana customs, it’s easy to imagine that the color didn’t set well with the newlyweds. The interiors of every Amana home and workplace were typically a certain type of blue so no favoritism was shown through color selection.
The floor of the bedroom features a locally woven rug. A weaver — always a man — would use leftover end pieces from the woolen mill or scraps of old clothes.
“I had a bed like this at home. I had a floor covered with an Amana carpet … and a rocker was in every room practically. They’d make these little footstools and needlepoint them,” he said.
Another upstairs room is furnished with a typical Amana sofa, a small German pyramid with bells decorating a coffee table. On a nearby wall is a cuckoo clock given to his grandparents in 1912.
“It was in their bedroom and we as kids used to love to lay on the floor in the bedroom and wait ‘til the first (cuckoo),” he said. “(Some overnight guests) don’t like this tick tock, tick tock but to me, I fall asleep to it.”
FAMILY HISTORY
The Amanas in Eastern Iowa were founded by a group of religious separatists who had created various estates in Germany in which to live as a group, Kellenberger said. Visitors to his home will be able to view an image of one of those estates, “a real treasure,” he said.
His mother’s side of the family arrived with the first Amana people to reach Iowa in 1855. His father’s family’s side came later with a different Amana group from Germany.
His late wife DeAnna was not an Amana native, but, rather, an “Army brat,” the daughter of a German father and Greek mother. The couple met at a watercolor workshop held at the Amana Arts Guild.
“She had lived in Germany. She had lived in Denmark. She had lived in Boston. She had lived in San Diego. Then ended up in Highland Park near Chicago,” he said.
“I was born and raised in South Amana, Upper South, actually. I spent all my life here. Just got away to graduate from college, then taught art here for 38 years,” said Kellenberger who taught art K-12 in the Amana schools.
HOLIDAY CELEBRATION
Kellenberger keeps a basket of oranges in his dining room to remind him of the Christmases of his childhood.
“That was one of the big things you got for Christmas, was an orange. They were so special,” he said. “The big things were oranges and shirts. And whatever pants they could get. Some of it was homemade, some of it was purchased at the general stores.”
Before The Great Change of 1932 when the Amanas switched from living as a communal society to becoming a capitalistic society, Amana residents didn’t get paid for their labors, he explained. Instead, there was a type of allowance that was tracked by storekeepers in large ledgers. His mother’s Christmas purchases would have been recorded in such ledgers. Visitors to Kellenberger’s home might be able to peek at a 1912 general store ledger from West Amana.
“Normally, you had a Christmas room and Grandma or Mom would either make things or purchase things at the general stores. They’d have a big table, and (presents) wouldn’t have any tags but they’d have what you were going to get set at the table all the way around. And that room would be locked up until Christmas Eve,” Kellenberger said.
There was no secret unwrapping of gifts or shaking of boxes. Kids had to wait until the family’s designated gift opening celebration.
“You would go to church Christmas Eve. Some people waited until the next day, some people did it in the evening. We did it in the evening,” he said.
He has already planned the treats he wants most at Christmas: the Amana creamed spinach recipe that his wife had made for years and his go-to baked good, German Lebkuchen or honey cookies.
“I can almost taste the honey cookies. Here’s the thing: dissolve a little bit of whiskey. That goes in (the recipe),” he said, chuckling. “That’s the recipe I use.”
Recipe
Lebkuchen (Honey Cookies)
Yields 5 to 10 dozen, depending on size of cut pieces
1 tablespoon baking soda
3 tablespoons whiskey
2 cups honey (If honey is granulated or hard, heat slowly in a saucepan until fluid before combining with other ingredients)
1/2 pound (1 cup and one tablespoon) sugar
2 eggs
1 1/2 pounds (5 1/2 cups) flour
Vanilla frosting
Dissolve soda in whiskey.
In a very large bowl, stir together dissolved baking soda and whiskey, honey, and sugar. Stir until foamy. Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each. Then slowly add flour. A soft dough will form.
Cover and set bowl in a cool place or refrigerator overnight.
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Turn out a portion of the dough on a floured board. Kneading the dough is very important to the quality of the finished product, so take your time to knead dough until the dough feels springy and light, but not dry.
Roll dough into 1 to 2-inch thick ropes. Cut ropes into 2- to 3-inch long pieces and place on greased baking sheet.
Bake 10 minutes. Cookies should be golden brown, oval shaped, and about one-third to one-half inch thick.
When cool, frost with vanilla frosting.
Source: Adapted from a recipe for "Seasons of Plenty: Amana Communal Cooking," by Emilie Hoppe (Author), Rachel Ehrman (Illustrator), 1998
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