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12/17/2011: The North Dakota Milk Stabilization Board voted to give North Dakotans an early Christmas present on this date in 1975. The five-member Board, charged with enforcing federal milk marketing orders and regulating the costs of production and consumption, voted unanimously to freeze the price of milk through February.

12/18/2011: An act of holiday kindness was reported from Arkansas on this date in 1934, when a Bismarck mother was reunited with her ill son in Little Rock.

12/20/2011: Five hundred quarts of nine-year-old whiskey were carried from the jailhouse to the Stutsman County Courthouse on this date in 1922. Sheriff Dana Wright had seized the liquor from smugglers in 1921, during the first year of Prohibition, and the whiskey had been stored in the jail as evidence. At the orders of the court, Sheriff Wright smashed every whiskey bottle at the courthouse window, in full view of an audience gathered on the grounds below. This spectacle warned rum-runners that any liquor smuggled through North Dakota would not make it out.

12/22/2011: The annual Community Christmas Tree Program was held in Fargo on this date in 1922. Three thousand children filled the Fargo Civic Auditorium, creating an enormous Christmas children’s choir for the evening.

12/23/2011: Fargo’s postmaster, J. P. Hardy, announced a record amount of Christmas mail on this date in 1922. The post office processed twenty-five percent more holiday mail during the week of December 15th to December 22nd than any other year. Hardy attributed this massive increase to the Great War, citing the tendency for friends and relatives to mail packages to absent soldiers overseas who were not able to return home for the holiday. This, he said, was despite the increase in postage during the war – up from two to three cents.

12/24/2011: The Fargo Forum reported on an admirable decision made by the Enderlin community on this date in 1934. Members of the executive committee of the Community Welfare Board and representatives of the American Legion and Kiwanis Club voted to sacrifice the annual community Christmas tree in order to help the city’s struggling families instead.

12/25/2011: North Dakotans celebrated their fourth consecutive wartime Christmas on this date in 1944. Many families gathered to hear President Roosevelt’s address to the nation, broadcast as a prayer for peace.

12/27/2011: Do you know where Ray, North Dakota, is? This Great Northern Railroad townsite was founded in 1901 in Williams County. It was incorporated as a city in 1914, and had its peak population of 1,049 in 1960, resultant of the 1950s oil boom in the Williston basin. Population has picked up again, as so many areas in North Dakota have, with the recent oil activity.

12/28/2011: Searchers in Batesville, Arkansas, spent the day looking for a missing Cessna on this date in 1975. The plane, carrying five North Dakota residents, left from Fargo the previous day. Scheduled to fly to the Bahamas, ground control lost contact with the plane that evening, and search crews were sent out on the morning of the 28th.

12/30/2011: A heartwarming story was reported by the Cass County Juvenile Court Commissioner in his annual report on this day in 1922. Too often, the Commissioner’s reports were filled with heartbreak rather than happy endings. However, for one small boy, the Christmas of 1922 proved to be the happiest in his young memory, as he reunited with his lost family. The story of “Billy” became known in Fargo as early as 1919. Although Billy was not the boy’s real name, it became the pseudonym that the papers chose to call him.