Back in 2011 The Rome News printed a series of Christmas memories from some of its readers. My mother was one. This is the part of that article written by my mother. This is our second Christmas season without my mother.
From the December 25, 2011 edition of the Rome News-Tribune:
Ruth Baird Shaw, Rome:
My first holiday memories go back to Christmas 1929. People keep asking me about growing up in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Specifically, they ask “how was Christmas celebrated during those Great Depression years in North Georgia?”
Today we see Christmas decorations in stores before Labor Day. When I was a child in the 1920s and ’30s, we did not start decorating for Christmas in September. Neither we nor our neighbors had the time or the money to decorate for Christmas until Christmas week. Usually it was done on Christmas Eve.
Our Christmas tree was a cedar or a pine tree brought in from a nearby wooded area in the woods near our house. In my earliest memories of our Christmas trees, (late 1920s) we decorated the tree with strings of popped corn, red and green roping bought from the General Store and saved from year to year. We also had “homemade” roping made of colored paper rings.
At Christmas we had red and green roping stretched from corner to corner across the ceiling, coming down into a swag with a large Christmas red paper bell attached in the center! It was the kind of bell that folded up and made a round bell when spread open.
I remember as a child, lying in bed on Christmas Eve, excitedly trying to go to sleep so it would be Christmas when I woke up.
One might think children in my day did not have as much reason to be excited about Christmas presents as children do today? Or perhaps they had more reason?
When I woke up, there would be a stocking (one of my knee stockings left on a chair beside my bed) filled with candy and raisins (dried on the stems), a large red apple and an orange. There would also be some stick candy and chocolate drops, walnuts, pecans and large Brazil nuts.
I might also receive a pair of warm gloves, a scarf or cap and a pair of roller skates. I loved skating and skating up and down the paved sidewalks was a common activity for children and youth. We had paved walkways in my town as everyone walked. The first paved roads are in my memory bank as the South began to recover enough to prepare roads for the few cars that were appearing in the mid 1930s.
We did not have bowls of fresh fruit and/or nuts on the table or in the fridge all the time as now. Of course, we had peaches, pears and country apples in season. But not large red “store bought” apples. Not oranges.
Oranges had to be shipped from Florida so were expensive and rare in the late ’20s and early ’30s. My mother told me how she and her little sisters would sit and eat their once-a-year orange and excitedly swap slices with one another.
Bishop Arthur Moore, a prominent Methodist bishop of my mother’s generation told “if one fell madly in love with a girl, he might share one piece of his Christmas orange with her.”
Cooking and sharing cakes was one of the Christmas traditions in our area. Mama always cooked a Japanese Fruit Cake. I do not have the recipe but the three cake layers would be put together with two fruit and nut layers.
Mama’s chocolate cake (still the best chocolate cake I have ever tasted) with her homemade fudge icing was my favorite. She made favorites for family members and friends including a coconut layer cake, an applesauce raisin cake, and several other kinds. Cakes were ready to be served when neighbors and friend dropped by for a Christmas visit.
Mama always cooked a hen with dressing and a ham for the Christmas Day dinner. Mama also cooked one turkey that I can remember. She bought the turkey alive (chickens were also bought alive in those days.)
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