A Christmas Memory

I've been transcribing childhood memories that my mother recorded at my request in 1994, as described in this blip, and thought that her description of Christmas in 1924 might make interesting reading for you. I don't have any photos of my mother's family at Christmas, but the one I posted was taken in summer 1924. She's with her younger brother, and her two older brothers are off camera. They're dressed up because relatives were visiting from California, but clearly being clean and dressed up didn't last long!

Her father, having been pressured to become a lawyer like his father and hating it, had moved his family across Virginia to an old, run-down farm a few years earlier. He wanted to be a farmer, and this was his chance. Her mother had grown up on a prosperous farm where hired help did the heavy work. Now she and her husband -- college graduates -- and four small children were living in a house built before the Revolutionary War and working on their farm with little or no help. 

Here are my mother's words:
There was a Christmas in that house when we did not have anything. That land maybe never had been farmed, or if it had, not for years. It was rocky, and lots of work had to be done to get it into cultivable condition. Mother and Dad didn't have any income, or at least any income of consequence. So Christmas would come, and the Tazewell relatives [my mother's grandparents] would just go all out to send things to us, particularly for us children.

I remember Mother telling me that the mailman would leave two or three canvas bags of mail and packages at our mailbox about half a mile from the house. One time Uncle Morrison sent huge boxes of beautiful Christmas tree decorations. Another year my Grandmother W made me a pretty hat, and put it in a lard bucket to protect it, so it wouldn't get mashed [in the mail].

One year they [the grandparents] sent a big Victrola, a big stand-up model, mahogany I think, and you lifted the lid up, and there was the RCA and the picture of the dog, the emblem. Another year, they sent a record that was Santy Claus talking, so on Christmas morning, before we came down, before daylight, our parents said "Nobody comes down until Dad gets the fire in the sitting room stove lit!"

As we started down the stairs, we could hear Santy Claus talking on the Victrola, and I do remember being scared to death. I can see myself about a quarter of the way down that staircase, and scared.

I wish you could hear these stories in my mother's soft Virginia accent, as I do. I've felt very close to her this Christmas, 18 years after her death, working on this project.

Blip 1430