Growing up in the mountains of western North Carolina, Pat Shelton recalled his family “didn’t really have anything” — and it showed at Christmas. Yet some might say they had more.
“There wasn’t any work much, we did logging, and you couldn’t get work,” he said of the region around Glenville, nowadays a lakeside vacation village north of Cashiers. “We lived in a house that was just two bedrooms on Cullowhee Mountain off Pine Creek, and there was seven of us. Me and my brother slept together, and all my sisters slept together.”
Christmastime then was simpler.
“Daddy went out and cut a tree in the dead of winter,” Pat told a group gathered recently for a holiday dinner near Carters Lake. “We didn’t have any lights or ornaments to put on it, so we got green and red paper from school and cut little strips down, and stapled them together to make a chain and put that around the Christmas tree. Momma popped popcorn, and we took a needle and string and put popcorn around it.”
Their only heat was a fireplace.
“We hung our socks up around it, and we got an apple, an orange and a piece of chocolate with cream in the middle of it in our stocking,” he remembered. “Then Momma fixed breakfast — somebody had given us a flat of eggs — and she made mill gravy that was just corn mill and water, and we had fried potatoes. We didn’t drink milk or eat any kind of dairy products. Momma cooked everything with water — flour and water — and she’d make some of the prettiest brown gravy you’ve ever seen in your life just using water.”
Farming was essential in those days, and the backbreaking labor without machines was made easier with song.
“We used to work in the fields together making a garden, and we’d all sing — and my daddy had one of the prettiest voices that’s ever been,” said Pat. “My daddy got the guitar out and we sang on Christmas Day; I was maybe 10 years old. That was one of my favorite Christmases because the family was together.”
Pat’s story reminded me of the Christmases my parents used to depict — or those retold by the late regional author and naturalist Lawrence L. Stanley — when a peppermint candy cane and/or an orange was a special treat and no toy was expected. Perhaps an inventive parent might carve a wooden-stick figure for a boy or create a stuffed doll for a little girl. As for my mother, she would take cloves and push the sharp end into oranges and place them on the fireplace mantel, an aroma that breaks through my reverie as I pen these words.
My, times have changed.
“I think it has gotten too commercialized, and people expect too much,” acknowledged Pat, now 60. “They’ve forgot what the spirit of Christmas is about. We heard the story of Christmas; Daddy told us the story of Christmas and I didn’t know he knew the Bible. If people could get back to that kind of Christmas, just having nothing but enjoying the family and having food to eat and a roof over your head. That was a blessing right there!”
In a letter to her child penned on the grownandflown.com website titled “All That I Loved About Christmas as a Child is Even Better Now,” Elizabeth Spencer wrote, “As a child I loved the anticipation and expectation of Christmas … counting down to the big day. But now, I love the excitement and hope of spending extra time with you — a rare and valuable treat.”
Pat Shelton amplifies the sentiment.
“People need to realize — and this is the sad part about Christmas — is that nothing matters but family,” he said. “If people would just forget about the presents … today, it still doesn’t take much to make my family happy except to be together and eat a good meal at Christmas.”
A case might be made that our commercialized yuletide seasons may never get “rebranded” that innocently, but if they do, time spent with family and retelling the Nativity would certainly be a good start. Regardless, Merry Christmas — my fondest wish and prayer is that you might come to know the Greatest Gift ever given!