Remembering a Christmas

Christmas was always special at our house. My Mother would bake different kinds of cakes: fresh coconut, chocolate, and one year one of the eight she baked and had on display was a white cake with white icing and a design of red hots for us children on top of the icing. Those red hots burned as we ate, but we loved it. She would make divinity candy for Daddy to give his school pupils, and Christmas Day we had boiled custard with floating beaten egg whites. To this day when I look at a blue sky with floating white clouds I am reminded of the floating meringue in her boiled custard. She would beat the egg whites to a soft stand and sweeten and add vanilla, and fold into the custard.

One year the Gibson County school system decided a Junior High School was needed between Bradford and Trenton, so they built a new ninth and tenth grade school and named it "Oak Grove" as the school was on a campus of many old, beautiful oak trees. They offered Daddy a substantial raise in salary to transfer from Bradford School to be principal of Oak Grove. He drove the five miles from our home in Bradford each day. Soon after the new school opened he let me go visit one day. The pupils took me in hand and asked me to sit with them, which meant I was changing seats much of the day, but I remember feeling so important that these older kids wanted me to sit with them. That afternoon a sudden hush fell on the room and the sound of an automobile cutting off its engine drew looks outside. The little "run about coupe" was bringing the county health nurse to the school for immunizations. This meant ALL the pupils would line up and each receive immunization. She had on a dark blue, white collar uniform, a satchel in her hand and soon the Bunsen burner and its alcohol aroma was over the room. All at once there was a commotion and one of the high school students had fainted. It looked like she was dead to me. The health nurse waved some cotton with spirits under her nose and she opened her eyes and color came back to her skin.

Christmas came and the school planned a big program. They had a full grown cedar tree on the stage for the Christmas tree. The pupils learned speeches and songs and skits. Daddy promised my brother and me we could go to the program but we both had to be on the program. I don't remember Edmund agreeing, but I of course didn't know I could escape so
I memorized the poem "The Night Before Christmas". The day of the program was festive. The students strung popcorn and cranberries and tied presents on the big tree. There were crepe paper bells hanging from the ceiling and stockings filled with fruit and candy. Santa Claus was there and there was standing room only when the program started. I remember as I recited my poem looking straight into the face of a large man in the community known as "Fatty Ketchum" as I said the lines, "And his little round belly shook like a bowl full of jelly" to see if his stomach shook as he laughed. It did, and I got tickled. I don't remember what my present was, but I remember Edmund's was a pocket watch that he wanted. Daddy saw to it that we had a nice present on the tree. His pupils showered him with presents. Our arms were full helping him carry his presents home. He got numerous packages of white handkerchiefs, common men's presents then, neckties, socks, fountain pens, books and homemade goodies. There was so much happiness and love and Christmas spirit at the school that day. Everything had meaning.

Edmund and I couldn't stop talking about the fun day as we drove home, then we had to repeat everything, including "Fatty Ketchum's belly shaking like a bowl full of jelly" to Mamma when we got home. We went to bed that night with "visions of sugarplums dancing in our heads", a wonderful beginning for our Christmas season at home, 1926.

The following November our father joined the Memphis Methodist Conference and became a full time Methodist minister. His first assignment was Dancyville Circuit. He had four wonderful churches, giving one Sunday a month to each church. One of the churches was "Taylor's Chapel". The 35 membership was made up of the Taylor families. There was only one family who was not a Taylor connection, and he was the local groceryman who had migrated to the community and been taken into this family church. The Taylors were all rich planters with thousand-acre plantations, antebellum homes and lifestyles of the past century very much intact. The little church was a one room structure made of bricks that slaves had made in the 1790's. Windows provided cross ventilation. The podium held a huge Bible that the ministers were required to read the scriptures from to maintain the original tradition of the founders. They had a pump organ that had been well preserved. All ceremonies were with style and dignity. The members all came dressed in their best and they held their minister in high esteem and with much reverence. They were well educated and world travelers and each home was staffed with servants, cooks, helpers to the cooks, a house boy and a man in a white coat to serve the meals. One of the families was an elderly maiden woman, who never found a suitor her parents found her equal, and as a result she lived alone in the family estate and carried on all the family tradition. She was "Miss Sue Alexander". The home set at the end of several acres of beautiful old trees and this entrance was called the woods lot. A winding road led to a beautiful two story white house with green shutters and a big porch with swings, rockers, cushions surrounded by jasmine, lilac, magnolia, roses on trellises, holly trees, oaks, and yard swings. The whole outside was filled with Romance of the Old South. Inside, the house was furnished just as papa and mamma had left it: a square baby grand piano, velvet love seats, marble top tables, gold leaf paintings, prints and fancy mirrors. The upstairs bedrooms, six of them, had tester beds, armoires, wash stands, fancy rugs and fireplaces and Victorian wallpaper, but the dining room was Miss Sue's pride and joy. The long cherry table, the matching sideboards and servers and needlepoint chairs and velvet and lace draperies were total splendor. The sets of imported china were displayed and silver serving pieces, even silver rests for silverware were awesome. She put her minister on a pedestal and couldn't ever seem to do enough for him and his family. At Christmas she would, with the help of her cook and cook's helper (usually a younger black girl training to be a full time cook some day), bake eight to ten cakes for our family. She had secret family recipes, all kinds of flavoring and decorations, and one cake would always have "favors" baked inside, as a ring (which signified the one getting the piece of cake with the ring would be the next one to marry), or a good luck charm meant you would come into money. She would fill one cake with these symbols.

On Christmas Eve we would hear the strain of the engine of her very old Model T car she had inherited from papa, pulling the hill by our house, then a soft knock at our back door and there would stand her black chauffeur, "Dood". He would tip his hat and bow and announce "Miss Sue" "out in the car". Daddy would go with him out to the car and there ensconced in the back seat of the Model T sat this tall regal spinster in her broad brimmed hat and black coat and cape, black kid gloves, waiting to be helped out of the car by Dood. Daddy would walk her inside while Dood spent the next fifteen minutes bringing in the boxes of elegant cakes, and they were picture perfect and absolutely wonderful. She used the best and choice ingredients and took no shortcuts. The fruitcakes had been made in October and soaked in imported wine. The flowers on the cake were done by her, not the cooks. There was a built-in china cabinet in the parsonage and she would have Dood put the cakes in that china cabinet and see to their best arrangement. Our mother was relieved of Christmas cake baking the years we lived at Dancyville. Her visits would be short. Daddy would escort her back to the T Model and Dood who had waited outside would jump out and help her back into her seat in the back seat and off they would go. It was never too cold or the weather too bad for her to make this one trip at Christmas. She would tuck in jars of homemade jams and jellies, flavors we had never heard of and usually some little special elegant present. She was a dear woman who lived a lonely life but never wavered in the lifestyle of elegance she had grown up in and had the legacy to maintain. We certainly enjoyed her sharing parts of her "rich and famous lifestyle" with us.

There was an unexplained connection between the Taylors and my father. They were each scholars who never seemed to tire of visiting together. It was not until seventy years later, when our daughter, Stephanie, devoted tireless research to our genealogy that she uncovered my father and the Taylors had the same ancestors who were cultured, educated and religious people. I wish they had known this, but in their unawareness of their common ancestors they felt a kinship reflected in their instant acceptance, love and enjoyment of each other.