Dashing through the snow

I am thinking about Christmas celebrations in early American life. This morning, I was reading about the old custom of sleigh-riding at this time of year in the northeastern part of America. One of the prevalent practices at Christmas time in the eighteenth and nineteenth century was for young people to hitch up a horse to a sleigh and ride through the countryside from tavern to tavern. Apparently, the tavern owners would have musicians and they would provide a place to dance and celebrate, including strong drink and food.

In the book "Winter's Tale" by Mark Helperin, the author describes life in New York during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. At one point in the book, he describes driving sleighs across the ice and snow from New York City to country homes and taverns north of the city for parties and dancing. The description is very quaint like a Currier & Ives print and sentimentally captures the heart. It make me wish I could travel through the snow and ice to a party in the country with food and drink and music. Spending the evening in a country home, dancing and drinking and eating at the parties, and racing over the ice on ice-boats during the day. It would be quite a lot of fun.

Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way! That's where the song comes from.

In the South, the season traditionally included hunting, dances and visiting in peoples' homes. Christmas day often included a morning of hunting. I know in my family, a hunt for the men on Thanksgiving Day was the beginning of the festivities. I remember Frank and Dad and I hunted one Thanksgiving morning when I was about thirteen. I was wearing a red hunting coat and hat, which made me look like one of Robin Hood's merry men. We tromped across the fallow fields, crunching our boots over the hard brown earth.

There were several typical places to find birds and rabbits on the farm. My grandfather ordinarily left cover on the fields after the harvest, which allowed the birds and rabbits a habitat in the late Fall and Winter. In those days, my dad rarely got shut out on a hunt, particularly in this little low section where a farm road headed back towards the woods from the back barn. For some reason there always seemed to be game back in that low spot below the pond and the back barn.

If we didn't find anything, or if we scared the game away from that spot, we might head into the woods and see if we could find some squirrels in the trees. Several times that morning we even crossed the fences on the south side of the farm and walked a bit through the adjoining fields. I know we had some success that morning. I distinctly remember walking across one of the front fields and the three of us getting three rabbits that morning. I remember one rabbit hopped up behind us and my dad wheeled around and took him apart with his Browning Sweet Sixteen shotgun. Later Frank and I got two or three quail. The flurry of wings and the sudden whirr of their flight caught your heart and almost distracted you from taking aim at the cause of the commotion and the reason for the walk.

When the hunters finally came home from the fields, Thanksgiving dinner was almost ready. We had our pictures taken with the game we had brought to the house, then we removed our heavy jackets and hats and hung them on the coat-rack in the hall which led between the dining room and the kitchen. Our noses were immediately captivated by the wonderful smells coming from the kitchen.

Around noon, the whole family, including mom and dad and Frank, Susan and myself, sat down with Grandmommie and Granddaddy and Great Aunt Mamie and Great Aunt Ease at the large rectangular table in the dining room. The room always reminded me of some miniature antique dining hall, with tongue and groove flooring and ceiling and the great sideboard loaded with food. We bowed our heads and thanked God for all of the blessings we had been given that year, then we all got up from the table and headed for the sideboard.

At the front of the line would be the appetizers: the celery stuffed with blue cheese, the sweet watermelon pickles, the gherkins and the olives. Next in line would be the slices of turkey meat piled on pile with the partially cleaned carcass behind it. Then would be a porcelain platter covered with the little pones of cornbread dressing, for which my grandmother should be considered for sainthood. The spices, the onions, the cornbread and biscuits, the turkey gravy, all lovingly molded into little pones for placement on our plates and doused with gravy. And there were the vegetables: the sweet potato souffle all covered with little marshmallows, the green beans, the butterpeas and crowder peas. Finally, a crown of little biscuits, loaded with butter and oddly flattened.

My grandmother never placed biscuits on the sideboard or the dining room table without apologizing for their size. But the biscuits were perfection: buttery little morsels of flour and shortening. Everyone passed the bread platter to the next family member in line, with the admonition to 'take two, they're small." In retrospect, I don't think I ever took less than three or four throughout any meal at the farm.

As we ate in the dark wooden dining room, the grey gloom of the day which filtered to us through the paned windows was dispelled by the bonhomie and kinship within. Oft-repeated stories were told, family members and friends were remembered, their conditions and recent ailments considered. The bounty of the hunt, or lack thereof, and the coming football games on television were weighed and debated by the men. My grandfather sat at one head of the table, his back to the windows, drinking his ever present glass of lemonade. Grandmommie sat at the other end, near to the hallway to the kitchen, so she could bring more biscuits if necessary. And they were always necessary.

Finally, the regular meal was ended and the partakers of the feast left the dining room table. The women went to the kitchen to put away the leavings from the dinner and to prepare for the offered desserts. The men left into the hall and sat heavily in the chairs in front of the television. There would be a football game which would hold the attention of the men for a short time. But ultimately, the workings of the meal, the morning's exercise and the warmth of the farmhouse would send everyone off to slumber.

Thereafter, the women would exit over the out-stretched legs of the men cluttering the hallway to the front parlor where further discussion of family and friends and the condition of everyone of concern would be rolled around the room. The front parlor was ordinarily empty during most of the year, but at Thanksgiving and Christmas a scuttle of coal would be brought in, a fire stoked up and the room would be warm and inviting, albeit somewhat more formal than the regular hall where the television and the comfortable chairs were kept.

By the end of the afternoon, one of the great aunts might be convinced to sit down and tell stories of family adventures at the beginning of the century or speak of travels in Europe or Asia or South America. The wisdom and experiences and stories of old were there for the plucking, if one simply asked. The length and breadth of the family and their wanderings and the roads upon which they had travelled were brought home into the comfort of the family farmhouse, opening a great expanse of time and space to the ears of a little boy.

Only plates of pies and cakes, washed down with glasses of cold boiled custard and the dying of the day's sweet light could break us free from the stories and the kinship we felt in those days. As the day finally ended, the great aunts bundled up and headed back to Hopkinsville and Franklin Street in Clarksville. Meanwhile, the rest of us settled in for a long, cold evening, snuggling in our beds together in the old white clapboard farmhouse. There would be more times for hunts and adventures out in the fields and woods and on into the stables and up in the loft on the farm. Tonight the peace of Thanksgiving would find us in our dreams.

We were so fortunate.