Every December, I imagine missionaries breaking river ice below a midnight moon in Switzerland, making space in the frozen current for my great-great-grandmother to push her fully clothed body into the water before immersing it entirely. The baptism happened at night because Swiss culture was “vigorously anti-Mormon” and viewed the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints as a “grotesque religious conglomerate” (Swiss Mission Manuscript). 

Unfortunately, performing the baptismal ritual under cover of a dark winter night did not protect her and her family from the severe persecution that followed. My great-great-grandmother Emma, abandoned by friends, and her husband, fired from his prestigious career at the cement factory, were forced from their country. Emma left her mother’s grave, siblings she promised to raise, and her ancestral home when she journeyed, pregnant and with five young children, from her Swiss Alps to the deserts of Rexburg, Idaho. 

My great-great-grandmother Emma is largely lost to me. She never learned to speak English and never kept a written record. All I have are a few sentences her son wrote in a language she never spoke. There is a sentence about Swiss Christmases celebrated in an old log cabin; Emma carried her family’s traditions to a foreign land and brought familiar Christmas moments to her children during a difficult transition in Idaho. However, those traditions died a few years later when persecution forced Emma to bury her “German customs” and conform to the strict Puritan traditions of her neighbors. The sentence eludes to rich traditions but ends abruptly.

As Christmas draws near, I long for the traditions of my great-great-grandmother and her Swiss-German family and ache for the stories I’ll never know. Did she believe in those whimsical faeries that hid in the forests of Europe? Did she dress as a Tschäggättä with a wooden mask, animal skins covering her small body, and a bell tied around her waist as she chased her children, hugging them in the snow? Did she know that when she relinquished her Mother’s traditions, she buried pieces of herself as well? 

Little by little, this woman gave up everything she was for the traditions of Mormonism.

She stepped into a freezing river that tore her away from her country’s beliefs and language until there was nothing left except Mormonism. The precious traditions of my Mothers were never passed down to me. I imagine Emma cutting pieces of herself off every time they asked – her Swissness, her stories, her feminine rhythms, her magic, her opinions – and then dropping those pieces of herself in the graves with the babies she buried. 

I feel my great-great-grandmother’s wounds in my body and her longing for home in my blood. 

I long to know her traditions because my own are changing, grasping for anything feminine and natural and ancient. Maybe she held the magic that I am looking for; maybe knowing her traditions would explain the whispering trees, crackling fire, and silent snow that call for me to dance in a world that glares at dancing. Is this the magic that pulled her into the frozen river over a hundred years ago?

Recently, I read that Pythagoras, the Greek Philosopher, believed that “the solar system emitted perfectly harmonious sounds that are the origins of the rhythms of life.” This is one of the most beautiful things I have ever heard. It suggests that life and death are songs emitted from the solar system. I love to imagine my great-great-grandmother as a note in a harmonious sound created by the universe, one I can still feel the vibrations of. This means that her life matters still; her death harmonizes with my life. 

Maybe that’s why I feel the rhythms of my great-great-grandmother’s life pulling me toward her silence. I notice that this silence has something in it, something substantial that makes me long for her traditions; after all, traditions unite us in rhythm with the universe. Maybe that’s why a woman’s life cycle ebbs and flows – like an orbit – coming and going, dancing and swelling like the sound waves of a symphony. And maybe this music runs so deep through time and space that not even death can take it away. 

The tragedy of neighbors persecuting Emma and her family everywhere she went, forcing her to choose between conforming and abandoning her traditions cannot be overstated. But maybe the unrecorded traditions still dance inside of me, in my blood. Emma amputated herself from her culture and history, transplanting her family into Mormonism, but she couldn’t cut herself out of the rhythms of life that dance timelessly through my flesh.

I will always grieve for Emma’s suffering and wonder what she gave up to be Mormon, but each December, I will think of her, and this Christmas, I will dance in time with the perfectly harmonious sounds of the solar system and recognize how my great-great-grandmother’s life and death miraculously created the rhythms of my life.

Photo by Mike Kotsch on Unsplash

Photo by Tevin Trinh on Unsplash