Keeping Purdue’s ‘pink mitten’ holiday tradition alive
The Purdue Memorial Union’s tiny pink mitten tradition started in the early 1980s when PMU hostess Ruth Krauch began sharing the mitten’s story with holiday tour groups. (Purdue University photo/Kelsey Lefever)
The PMU pink mitten is more than a Christmas tree ornament for Susan Hayhurst. It’s a treasured memory of her mom, Ruth Krauch.
As legend has it, a celebrated Purdue holiday tradition — the fable of the pink mitten — originated in the most innocent of ways.
As she had done so many times before, Ruth Krauch was showing the Purdue Memorial Union Christmas tree to a group of schoolchildren, a favorite assignment in her role as the Union’s chief hostess. But during this particular visit sometime in the early 1980s, a young girl discovered a decoration that Krauch had never noticed on any previous tour.
A small pink mitten was hanging from the branches of the enormous tree.
“Why is that mitten on the tree?” the girl inquired. “Where did it come from?”
Krauch didn’t know, but she felt an immediate spark of inspiration to create her own origin story for the tiny ornament. The CliffsNotes version: A little girl visiting the Union’s Christmas tree with her father decided to contribute a special decoration for the tree by leaving her pink mitten hanging from its branches.
For years to come, Krauch would enthusiastically share the story of the pink mitten to every day care group, class of grade schoolers, church youth group and Scout troop who joined her on a holiday tour at the Union.
“Thousands of local children and families who came to see the tree at the Union would have heard that,” says Krauch’s daughter, Susan Hayhurst, a 1982 Purdue graduate. “In any given Christmas season, it would have been hundreds of children.”
More than 40 years later, Krauch’s story remains a treasured part of Purdue’s Holidays at PMU tradition. Each year when the Purdue Student Union Board’s members decorate the tree, they hang a pink mitten decoration (insider secret: they actually have two in case one goes missing) about two-thirds of the way up the tree — visible, but high enough to remain out of reach for any mitten enthusiast who might be tempted to take it home.
Those in the know make it their mission to locate the mitten each year when they visit the Union to see the tree. It’s an annual part of many families’ holiday festivities — and that’s what makes it especially meaningful for Hayhurst.
The story will always provide a treasured memory of her mother, who passed away in 2020 at age 94. But it’s also a special piece of the holiday season that she shares with the community where she grew up and with all of her fellow Boilermakers.
“This story means a lot to our family,” she says. “But as alumni, it means the world, too.”
Boilermaker roots
To put it mildly, Purdue and the Greater Lafayette area are a big part of Hayhurst’s identity.
The West Lafayette native attended Klondike Middle School and Harrison High School while both of her parents worked at the university.
Her dad, Herbert, was the Extension wildlife specialist for the state of Indiana and an assistant professor at Purdue. And her mom worked at the front desk for the Union Club Hotel and as chief hostess for Purdue Memorial Union and Stewart Center.
“After she died, I was incredibly touched at the cards I got from West Lafayette, and they said Ruth was hospitality personified at Purdue,” Hayhurst says. “She was just a hostess with the mostest.”
Hayhurst recalls her mother being specifically requested by university leaders like Arthur Hansen and Steven Beering to hostess Purdue President’s Council events.
“Dad and I got to know quite a few of them, and we were invited to different things because they wanted Ruth’s family there,” Hayhurst says. “It was because of Mom. She would make sure that their event at the Union went on as scheduled. That was commonplace for her.”
Hayhurst also worked at Purdue, both as a student and in the years after graduation. As a Boilermaker undergrad, she wrote for the Exponent student newspaper and Purdue Alumnus magazine. She later returned to the Alumnus to serve as assistant editor under her mentor, Gay Totten, before fate intervened.
She was training to succeed Totten as the magazine’s editor when she met her future husband, Terry, on a blind date. Four months later, they were engaged. They’ve been operating a family farm 10 miles south of Terre Haute ever since, producing corn, soybeans, wheat, hay and raising beef cattle.
“As Gay used to say, he swept me away to the farm,” Hayhurst jokes. “The city girl who married the farm boy knew nothing about farm life.”
But trips back to her hometown are still a regular thing for Hayhurst — she calls them “Purdue mental health days” — especially during the Christmas holiday season that is so important to her family.
“It’s a recharge for me when I go up there,” she says. “It’s my old haunts, and I can walk through campus, and I smile the entire day.”
Sharing with a new generation
A couple years ago, after her mother had passed, Hayhurst was walking through a grocery store parking lot in Terre Haute when she noticed an unusual object lying on the ground. She interpreted it as a sign from above.
“I looked down at the ground and there was this little pink mitten,” she recalls. “And I just immediately started crying and thought, ‘Gosh, that was dropped by a child for me.’ So I picked it up and brought it home. It’s hanging over a picture of my mom on my desk. This is all really near and dear to me.”
It also motivated her to share the pink mitten story with an even wider audience of Boilermakers, more than four decades after her mother created it for the local schoolchildren she hosted at the Union. With encouragement from friends and family, she plans to turn the story into a children’s book that Purdue families can share for many years to come.
The tradition of Purdue is in the hearts of hundreds of thousands of people. And I love that Mom’s story of the pink mitten is part of that tradition for so many people. For me, it’s almost like a living, breathing gift that Mom gave.
Susan Hayhurst
BS interdisciplinary consumer and family science ’82
She knows it’s an idea her mom would love, not only because new generations of children would be exposed to its message about the importance of giving, but also because it would help the story remain part of the Purdue holiday tradition that Krauch loved so dearly.
“It means the world to me that Mom developed this story as the result of a young child calling her attention to this pink mitten in the Great Hall Christmas tree. Mom always had an eye and heart for young children — in our neighborhood, with friends, everywhere. To me that really personifies how much she enjoyed children and she felt led to make a story like this,” Hayhurst says.
“The tradition of Purdue is in the hearts of hundreds of thousands of people. And I love that Mom’s story of the pink mitten is part of that tradition for so many people. For me, it’s almost like a living, breathing gift that Mom gave,” she adds. “When the little girl pointed out the mitten and then Mom wanted to make it into a tour story and share it, that’s what Mom was all about. She loved to share and show affection and love.”
