While many families speak of their Christmas traditions, I can only report that we had few of them. Being a very practical minded person Mama did not believe in creating unnecessary work or confusion to life's routines. She viewed her daily routines as necessary activities to getting a day's chores completed. She varied her schedule little on holidays or weekends.
We were not necessarily a religious family. Like everyone else in Hancock County we had been saved, baptized, and attended a Baptist church, but that was the end of the story. There were no plays about the Nativity, no special music, no visits with Santa, or annual celebrations around Christmas. The only tradition I remember coming close to Christmas was the annual winter revival at many of the Baptist churches. Our family in particular was pretty soured on religion, period.
This attitude resulted from Uncle Chester, Aunt Ruby's preacher husband, who traveled around to lots of churches helping with revival meetings during the winter. While I have no knowledge about when his womanizer reputation developed, by the time I came along this reputation was well established. The whole family shared gossip about his latest affairs at different church revivals. The stories about his escapades came from a variety of sources including neighbors, distant relatives, and friends who had been witness to some of his behavior. It seems he would preach a fiery sermon and get some of the women all worked up in a shouting frenzy, then he would praise and charm the women who did it, and after several nights he would move in with his seduction techniques. Somehow he managed to spend two or three winter months mostly away from home. By June the gossip had traveled back to Mama and other relatives who spent the next several months clattering among themselves about his behavior and how Aunt Ruby should not put up with it.
One of the end results from Uncle Chester's behavior was a total disdain of religion or preachers in particular. This seemed to transform eventually into a blanketed disrespect for most religions and events associated with religion. Mama never trusted a preacher and seldom showed up for worship at any church. When this disdain was combined with a lack of other religious activities during the winter, few traditions were established surrounding Christmas. We did not worship baby Jesus; we did not sing Christmas carols, and there was no midnight worship on Christmas Eve. In fact we never talked about it.
For our family, Christmas was about the food, family gatherings and storytelling. Our only traditional food was Apple Stack Cake. With Mama's nine brothers and sisters and Daddy's eight, we had plenty of people who arrived for the food and fellowship. In fact, we often had more people at our house than any church in our part of the county. The focus was on who could share the best family story after the meal. No presents were given. We were our gift to each other.
I remember some years having a cedar Christmas tree which Mama chose, chopped down, drug to house, set up, and decorated herself because Daddy was busy hauling freight from Knoxville. As she aged these trees became fewer and eventually it stopped entirely. She said it was too much trouble because she had to do all the work. This ended the one random, and only Christmas style tradition I ever knew. Later after I started my own family we added some of the Christmas traditions of trees, music, events, and even a nativity scene, but now that I'm older I've become Mama and can't bear the thoughts of any of this. It's simply 'too much trouble' now.
No comments:
Post a Comment