A Foxfire Christmas

Appalachian Memories and Traditions

Eliot Wigginton, Eliot Wigginton

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780807899045
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Customs & Traditions
• Index: Social Sciences

New in paperback
This captivating book of recollections celebrates the holiday traditions of Appalachian families as passed from one generation to the next. Based on Foxfire students' interviews with neighbors and family members, the memories shared here are from a simpler time, when gifts were fewer but perhaps more precious, and holiday tables were laden with traditional favorites. More than just reminiscences, however, A Foxfire Christmas includes instructions for recreating many of the ornaments, toys, and recipes that make up so many family traditions, from Chicken and Dumplings to Black Walnut Cake, and from candy pulls to corn husk dolls and hand-whittled toy cars.

Chapter One
Preparations and Decorations

Edited by Scott Cannon

Every year, starting as early as the first of December, wreaths, ribbons, and those bothersome blinking lights go up outside our homes to help exemplify the Christmas spirit. These are just a few examples of decorations people might see as they travel down a highway at Christmastime. But of course these are not all. In the houses they will also see candles glowing on an oak-stained mantel, sparkling silver and gold tinsel ropes draped around a Christmas tree, and of course, hanging above the fireplace, the stockings just waiting to be filled by Ole Saint Nick.

These decorations are what we go to the store and burn our hard-earned cash on. But in this chapter most of the decorations described either are homemade, or are things one can find nestled in the woods.

Most of the people we interviewed gathered mistletoe and holly and pine. Most of them decorated their trees with chains made of homegrown popcorn, cranberries, and strips of paper cut from a Sears Roebuck catalog. This chapter also reveals, however, how ingenious some families were in making unique decorations for the home and tree: pine cones wrapped in the foil from a cigarette package, tiny wooden crosses carved of wood, and sycamore balls dipped in flour and water to turn them white. I wonder if our Christmas would be as meaningful if we used again the homemade traditions that preceded the age of colored electric lights and tinsel.—Scott Cannon

John and Margaret Bulgin are well suited for each other. Mr. Bulgin, with his impish grin, is like a mischievous little boy (he is in his early eighties) and Mrs. Bulgin, in her early seventies, is just the person to keep him out of trouble!

Margaret: My father was one of the fortunate people during the Depression years—before my teen years. I don’t mean we were wealthy or anything like that, but we did have a regular income. We knew the money was coming. He had a job as a fire warden in this district for the North Carolina Forest Service.

We had the same dolls—my sister and I—year after year, but Mother made new clothes for them at Christmas. Another thing that contributed to our Christmas was the fact that my mother had a sister who never married. She took it as her Christian duty to provide packages at Christmas for all her nieces and nephews. The first yo-yo I ever saw came in a package from Aunt Louise at Christmas. She always included clothes, dresses, scarves, gloves, and things like that, but there’d be some foolishness, too. And always peanut brittle. She always sent peanut brittle. But not everybody had an Aunt Louise, and we knew we were very fortunate to have her.

When I was eleven or twelve years old, I wanted a suitcase worse than anything in the world. I had no intention of ever going anywhere. I didn’t have any notion of traveling, but I wanted a suitcase, and I got one for Christmas that year. It was a nice little suitcase—black cardboard and a green lining, looked like taffeta. I bet that thing cost at least three or four dollars! That was what I wanted, and it was there! I just loved it! I put it up in my closet and I guess I eventually used it.

Course we didn’t have any electric lights, so our Christmas trees didn’t look like they do now. We were never allowed to use candles. They’re just so tricky. And Father, being in the fire-fighting business, wasn’t about to let us do that anyway Aunt Louise provided ornaments, maybe sent some in packages to us, but we made a lot of them at home out of craft paper—mostly chains. Mother would bake gingerbread men. I remember very well a little sheep, a cookie cutout, that she made of gingerbread. We hung those on the tree. We made everything except for a few store-bought ornaments that Aunt Louise sent us. We’d make a star to go on top of the tree in school. Always before Christmas holidays, we were doing these things in school and bringing them home. I can remember when the first tin foil came out. We cut a star out of cardboard and covered it in tin foil. It still makes a pretty star. That was the first one I remember. We used that star for years.

We’d kill a hog usually between Thanksgiving and Christmas—after the weather got cold and the meat wouldn’t be as likely to spoil. They would save the bladders out of the hogs and blow them up like balloons and let them dry. They’d make an explosion when we jumped on them and popped them. We’d usually do that on Christmas Eve. It would be louder than the burst of a balloon. Made a noise kind of like a gunshot.

Margaret Bulgin making a wreath of fresh greenery

We always drew names and exchanged gifts at school. These were usually handmade gifts. I remember, though, my mother getting a Kewpie doll once. She and Al together dressed it, and that was the gift I gave to the girl whose name I drew at school. The same Christmas I got (and I still have it) a little black tin box with a lid. I got that little box full of fudge that [the mother of the girl who drew my name] had made.

My father’s favorite dish was a pork roast. Usually about that time of year, we were killing hogs, so Mother would cook a pork loin roast for Christmas. I’d still rather have it than turkey. When I was growing up, we almost always had Christmas dinner at my grandmother’s. She lived within walking distance from our house. Mother would cook the pork roast and bring it and all the baking she’d done, and we’d go to Grandmother’s. One of my aunts lived up the road with her big family, and they would come down to Grandmother’s, so it was bedlam there! Just a big family Christmas was really just a time for everybody getting together.

Seeing what we got from Santa Claus [was my favorite part of Christmas]. I had a team of goats. One year [my daddy] made me a wagon and a harness for the goats. We got a sled he made, too. It’d snow and we’d go out and sleigh ride! I remember one time when I was pretty small we got a little red wagon. It was about [the same size] as wagons little children have now. I guess that was my favorite gift.

Mother used to start baking two weeks or more before Christmas. Pound cakes. Layer cakes. Fruit cakes. We didn’t dare come in the house and stomp the floor when she had a pound cake in the oven! My favorite uncle, Noah Randolph, was a good cook! He’d always bring a cake or something when we’d get together. It would be just the family, and Grandmother and Grandfather. We’d go to their house for dinner in a buggy or a covered wagon, and we’d have a heated stone in the wagon to keep our feet warm.

John: When I was working for the power company I’d go over there at night and I made my son a kiddie cart. Then two or three years later, after our kids got big enough, we bought three used bicycles from a friend. (This was when we just had two boys and a girl.) I worked on those bikes night after night up at the power company shop and put on new seats and sheepskin seat covers and new handle grips. I painted them and put a new tire on one of them. I was up there just about every other night working on those darned things!

I brought them home Christmas Eve and put them in one of the bedrooms. On Christmas morning there wasn’t a whole lot for the kids, but when everybody was getting a little discouraged and kind of disappointed, I opened that door and told them to come in there. You never saw three kids go crazier! If they’d been brand new bicycles, they couldn’t have been happier.

Aunt Lola Cannon: One thing that we enjoyed as youngsters—we always had a Christmas tree at the church during the Christmas season. Most times we’d meet a day or two before Christmas to decorate the [church] house. We’d cut holly, white pine, and anything that was green, and decorate each window and each corner. To keep it from looking bare, we stood greenery up all the way to the ceiling. That took a day in our lives. But we stretched out a day. Oh, we thought we were really living it up when we could spend a whole day decorating the church for Christmas. And then we felt we must go back and clean it up afterward, and that took another whole day. Oh, we were just as busy as youngsters are now who work.

Leona Carver: At Bible school we would make candles. We always kept everything we ever made that way. We didn’t make any at home. We’d melt wax at Bible school and color the wax. They’d be great big candles; I believe we would color them with food coloring. Back then, people didn’t have no electricity. There were just lamps and candles.

Clyde English: When I was real little, I can’t remember us having Christmas trees much. I remember the first real Christmas I went to. I was five years old, and it was at the old Tiger School. We went to that Christmas tree over there and everybody there got a sack with a stick of candy in it. I don’t remember much else, but I remember that we got a stick of candy and that was the first Christmas tree I had ever seen.

Later, the kids decorated the trees at school. We would prepare from one Christmas to the next, and you thought it would never get here. We didn’t have events all year long like you do now.

[When we started decorating] at home, we put the decorations up on Christmas Eve and left them up until New Year’s Day. It was a tradition, when I was little, to leave them up until New Year’s. We’d always have plenty of holly My mother would go out with us and get holly and put it over the mantelpiece, or over pictures in the house. We strung popcorn and made chains to put on our tree, once we started having one. And we used to make those paper chains, you know, where you take paper and make cutouts. I can fold paper and make pretty cutouts to go on trees. I can still make those paper dolls and angels where you cut folded paper one time, and then you can open it up.

And I made a lot of candles. The reason I’ve made so many candles is to teach other people how to make them. You can make sand candles by taking your sand and melting your wax and pouring it down in there, and that makes sand candles. You can also take honeycomb paper and roll it up and make a candle. I saw some honeycomb paper the other day.

Janie P. Taylor (Clyde English’s daughter): We were aware of the ecology of our mountains, and I recall my elders saying not to hunt the perfect tree. So we’d find a tree that had a peculiar or odd shape. One side could be kind of flat to be put up against the wall. We didn’t cut the perfect tree. Those trees were saved for timber.

We would string popcorn, but it was more of a family recreation than a necessity. We used native greenery such as holly, and we always had special holly trees located that had branches filled with berries. We used the holly and mistletoe and, a lot of times, cedar. Then the galax leaves were a source of green. They are shiny, green, and almost heart-shaped. They stay green all winter under the leaves where they are protected from the cold mountain weather. Before I was born, when there was a death in the community, the neighbors would go to the nearest area where they could find galax and make wreaths out of the leaves. There were no florists, and so it was a gift of love because you had to go get the leaves and then make a beautiful wreath. So it was a meaningful source of decoration for Christmastime. My grandmother always used it.

Mary McDaries: My dad, with my elder brother Tom, would go into the forest behind our small home in the hills of Appala-chia to look for the biggest and best tree.

Meanwhile, the others shelled, cleaned, and popped the popcorn we had grown in the summer just for this occasion. After it was popped, the smaller children were given the duty of stringing the simulated garland.

Now it was time to make the ornaments. Take some flour, yeast, milk, and various food coloring, all in direct proportion to one another. Shape your dough to the desired figure, then paint with food coloring for effect. Stick in the oven until desired hardness. You have made your beautiful tree ornaments without even leaving home.

Now it was time to make the bows. These came from scrap material saved when my mother had made the three girls’ dresses over the year. We all helped make the tree-end bows.

Finally, after quite a while (Daddy was choosy about our Christmas trees), Daddy and Tom returned with what every year seemed like the best tree ever. Soon, my daddy and all my brothers had the tree stable and standing straight, tall, and almost at attention to us kids.

Now it was finally time to decorate the tree.

First, being the littlest, I held the popcorn string at the bottom. This caught a great deal of temptation to bite into the string while the others wound it around and up to the top of the tree.

Next came our new dough ornaments, along with some which had been saved from Christmases gone by. Then some finishing touches were made, such as our newly finished bows.

The tree trimming was a special part of our Christmas when I was a little girl. It’s still special to me today, but back then, it was untainted. Sometimes I wish things could be that simple today.

Hubert Hooper: Everybody in the family would go and help look for the Christmas tree each year. That was one of the big events at Christmastime. We’d get an ax, go in the woods, and cut a regular pine tree down. Then we brought it back and put it in the corner.

We made our own decorations. For example, we made popcorn balls, and we’d hang those up in the tree. My mother also usually made cookies of some kind, and she’d hang those on the tree, too. We’d go around and eat stuff off the tree. That was one of the best parts of Christmas.

We also usually decorated the house. We had pine cones, pine burrs, and white pine boughs that we broke off from the trees and put around the house. They made the house smell like pine. We didn’t use anything that was artificial; it all came out of the forest.

And we put mistletoe over the door, and so everybody that came in the door would get kissed. This was the old-fashioned way of greeting people at Christmastime.

Louise Hooper: All we had was a tree, but we never did make our own popcorn decorations or anything like that because my mother kept a really clean house, and she didn’t want us messing around in the kitchen much! We didn’t have any lights, either. We had things that we made out of crepe paper.

Edith Cannon: Sometimes, to add a little bit more decoration to our Christmas tree, we would take Sears Roebuck catalogs and cut some strips of paper, and take flour and water and mix it up to make a paste. That’s the only kind of glue we had. We’d cut those strips and glue them, and make chains.

Icie Rickman: You can take crepe paper and make a bow. We’d just make a bunch of these bows and hang them on the tree.

We’d also get all colors of crepe paper like, say, green, red, blue, and plait it. Plaiting is the same as braiding. That would make a pretty decoration for your tree. We would loop the plaited crepe paper through the tree like you do tinsel now.

Clyde Runion: Sometimes we’d take pine cones and wrap them in aluminum foil and make balls out of them. Make a rope out of popcorn. Wasn’t no factory-made stuff on the trees yet. Everything they put on the tree they made it. Put little dolls and stuff on the trees. Little stars made of tin.

Rosa Bell Griffin: We would go find a cedar and Dad would cut it down. We would spend all day trying to decorate it. My mom would make all kinds of stuff to put on it. She would make flowers out of yarn. My father would carve wood ornaments. My mother would keep my decorations from one year to the next. She would always take good care of them. She would store them in the old washhouse.

Eula Parker: We always had decorations for Christmas. There is a little black snail that lives on rocks in a creek. We picked them up and they had a little shell on them, and you could string them up and make beads out of them. We would string them and hang them up in the trees if we didn’t have nothing else. We would find the empty hulls stuck on logs. I guess the little thing had moved on out of it. Then we had broom corn. It had a little thing growed over that looked like beads. It was a seed. You push your needle through it and string it up just like beads.

Lela Maud Dean: As a family, we found a tree together. The decorations were made and popcorn was popped and strung. Chains were made from colored paper and placed on the tree. The star was made from cardboard covered with chewing gum paper that was saved by all the children because there was no aluminum foil at that time. Other ornaments were made, cut out, and placed on the tree. The first “bought” decorations were small candle holders which slipped on a tree branch. A small candle was placed in the holder on Christmas Eve, and they were lit. Dangerous to be sure, but I do not recall much thought given to that.

Stacy Barron: My grandmother [Vadie Barron] said the Christmas tree, which was a cedar tree, was cut by her father, James Mink. Mamaw said they took sycamore balls and dipped them in water. Then they rolled them in flour to make the tree look like snow.

Lucille Ponder: You ever notice the syca...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• A Foxfire Christmas
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Kelly’s Introduction
• Jenny’s Introduction
• Chapter One Preparations and Decorations
• Chapter Two Serenading
• Chapter Three Gifts and Santa
• Chapter Four Food and Menus
• Chapter Five Other Traditions
• Chapter Six Stories
• Student Authors and Interviewees