By Rosemary N. Killam
(Reprinted from the December 1996 M-Aura, the newsletter of North Texas Mensa)
In the books I read as a kid, plump little goldenhaired girls spent Christmas with their loving grandparents, who were elegantly formal. I was embarrassed, because we didn't live up to that pattern. My grandparents were loving, but my grandpa was a country doctor and granny tended his patients, her family and cooking with much joy but little elegance, and I was thin and brown haired.
Even if we were below proper standards, Christmas was interestingly different than daily life. My young parents, starved off the Ozark farm into college and teaching, headed home for as much of the holidays as possible. My two unmarried uncles still lived at home, as did the hired hand who worked the farm when grandpa was doctoring. Grandpa was a doctor by calling and a farmer by necessity. Few of his patients could pay him in cash money, but they would pay him in chickens or with a shoat when the pig farrowed. One memorable time he brought home a couple of rambunctious and unhousebroken baby goats in the family Ford; any raisin eaten in the car was carefully inspected for several months after. I remember with awe the time two patients struggled to the kitchen door with a washtub full of honey from a bee tree, full of honeycomb and delicious as we ate carefully around a few remaining dead bees and tree bark. I think granny canned the remainder.
She canned a lot of stuff: homemade hominy made with lye from white oak ash, washed and then fried in the fat rendered from the hog butchered after the first freeze, deer (in season or out) that managed to be foolish enough to wander into my UUs' (unmarried uncles) gunsights, and of course everything from the garden she had raised all summer. Christmas offered lots of interesting possibilities for a quiet preschooler. I was allowed to gather eggs from granny's precious white leghorn hens, putting them into the handwoven basket that nestled the eggs without allowing them to break. The leghorns would eat as much corn as I cared to shell; they were excitedly grateful for whatever I threw in the chicken yard.
If my UUs had time at milking, they might let me go along, to stand behind the circle of barn cats who expectantly ringed evening milkings. The cats would tighten the circle until the milking UU expertly squirted milk all over the face of the closest cat. That cat would retire with its bounty of warm frothy milk to clean its face contentedly as the next awaited the privilege. There were more kittens than any preschooler could possibly play with and spoil properly.
Supper was hurried, produced miraculously by granny on a massive woodburning stove with no thermostat. (But the biscuits were never burned.) As soon as supper was over, grandpa's patients started arriving, to sit with us all around the stove, awaiting their turn in his office that opened off the living room. As soon as I could hold the big Sears catalog, I was allowed to sit in a sofa corner and look at the pictures, so long as I didn't tear the pages. (Old catalogs were recycled as toilet paper in the outhouse.)
Invisible behind the catalog, I learned neat things from patient-family conversations: women could have babies without getting married; when men and women who weren't married slept together (and who didn't sleep at least two to a bed for warmth?) sometimes the people they were married to got angry and grandpa had gunshot or knife wounds to tend. But if I forgot and moved, someone would glance in my direction and say, "Little pitchers have big ears," and everybody would talk about how cold it had been.
At some point before Christmas Eve, a UU would cut a table-sized cedar, we'd wedge it on the table with the battery-powered radio and granny would pull out ornaments and icicles from a cedar chest. A floor-sized tree was impractical, what with grandchildren, grandchildren's kittens, the UU's hunting dogs that managed to sneak in occasionally to enjoy the heat, grandpa's patients and whatever children they brought along.
Christmas supper was varied: if a UU had had the time to hunt between going to school and farming, there might be raccoon or squirrel. If all else failed, granny could sacrifice a beloved leghorn for chicken and dumplings. And of course there were always the many kinds of pickles made and canned all summer, along with the canned green beans and corn and peas and maybe topped off with a blackberry pie or cobbler from the previous summer's gathering and canning. When the last patient had left we hauled out our gifts, and waited while granny wrapped the last of hers in last year's paper stored in a cedar chest. Grandpa was easy to shop for; he got a big long box of Star plug tobacco, without which he couldn't survive. Granny was equally easy; whatever she was given was much too valuable to be used, so she put it away in a cedar chest. Gifts were opened one at a time and suitably admired, with the recipient very carefully smoothing out the paper and giving it to granny for her collection.
Granny might play a few carols on the out-of-tune upright and we'd sing along, just as out of tune. The youngest UU would play "Silent Night" on his trumpet. By that time it was nearly midnight. Granny put the sadd irons on the living room woodstove for a good warming, wrapped them in old towels and we all hurried to bed with nice warm irons at our feet. We went to bed by twos and threes. We were better off than most and kept two coal oil lanterns burning-one for the living room, the other for grandpa's office, or kitchen meals, or lighting some group to bed.
Those early childhood Christmases blend together in my mind, but
no formal rituals stand out, as they did in the books I read: of the little
girls who came down the stairs to find that Santa had always left lots
of presents under the huge tree, followed by meals of turkey and all the
fixings. Christmases were just "catch-as- catch-can", to use the
standard Ozark phrase. The only constant I remember seems to be family
and love.