Rural Heritage December 2025/January 2026

Christmas Gifts TALES FROM CARTER COUNTY

Not what was in the boxes or the stockings. The earliest Christmas I can remember, after opening a box containing a cowboy outfit, complete with vest, sheriff's badge, cap pistols and cap rifle, my cousin, Philip, and I spent the rest of the day chasing each other around his basement, taking turns being the bad guy, and snapping off caps at each other. Those were the days when more and more trees where silver in color and could be popped up much like an umbrella. Artificial was just coming into its own, and everyone had to have one. The next Christmas that comes to mind, I must have been about 6. It was the year I learned that it was important to think of others. I was enrolled at the school on Clark Hill in the Head Start program, sort of a kindergarten for poor kids, but we learned a lot and had a lot of fun just the same. Class was held in the same one-room school building that my grandparents attended in their school days. My grandparents did a lot of volunteer work with Head Start, and I remember my Mammaw being adamant that there should be fundraising for Christmas. She wanted every student there to get a present because she knew, as did others I'm sure, that many of the kids would not get any presents for Christmas at home. She and my grandpa spent many nights at the school with other parents, piecing a quilt that they raffled off to raise money. I know there must have been other fundraising projects, but the quilt is the one that stuck with me. It was a pattern called Cathedral Windows and has since become my favorite pattern. When I see one of the quilts I always think of mammaw. I don't recall how long it took to piece and quilt, but I remember Aunt Mary watching us kids at home while the grandparents went to the school to quilt with the other parents. The proceeds then went to buy Christmas gifts for

by Jerry Hicks I 've been thinking about Christmas as it draws closer, whether I'm ready or not. I think we all, at some point or another start saying that “it just don't feel like Christmas anymore.” Why is that? On the one hand, it's easy to say no one keeps any sort of tradition anymore and lay the blame at others. It's easy to say it's the marketing folks’ fault. They start advertising Christmas earlier and earlier every year until we have Santa hiding eggs with the Easter bunny. And by the time the Yule tide rolls around, we're sick of the whole shebang. A lot of folks like to point fingers and say it's because we've forgotten the “reason for the season,” and maybe we have, if we ever knew. Maybe as we get older there are fewer and fewer of the faces we shared past Christmases with. I don't know, and I'm probably a poor one to ask. I was born waxing nostalgic and tend to be the first to say that nothing is what it used to be and rather than go forward we should leave well enough alone. As a self-professed Luddite and free-lance curmudgeon, the past holds most of the answers I need, not to mention the feeling of familiarity and security. Maybe that's so and maybe it's not. Maybe as we age, we just become cynical and jaded and forget the wonder of not knowing what's in those odd-shaped boxes under the tree or just how Santa visits every house in the world by midnight using only an old sleigh and an eight-up hitch of reindeer. Maybe we've explained away all the miracles by adulthood, and therein lies the problem. I can't say, but I, like everyone else, can sit back and recall Christmases from long ago. I remember favored presents and time spent with favored people. The older I get, the more I realize it was the time spent with people, family and friends, that was important.

Rural Heritage

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