People sometimes look at me in disbelief when I describe Christmas in the 1950s at my grandmother's house. My maternal grandparents were farmers, and nearly everything on our Christmas table was grown, cured and canned on their 50 acres. We did not have, for example, oranges or celery, two holiday staples that were scarce and expensive back then, at least in our little town.
Holiday decorations were primarily gathered from the woods and the garden. Holly for the mantelpiece, mistletoe for the door frame and an eastern red cedar Christmas tree seemed in bountiful supply to a small boy. My uncle, who was blind in one eye, nevertheless could aim a .22 rifle with sufficient accuracy to bring down a clump of mistletoe from the crown of a towering oak tree, typically with one shot. American holly, now somewhat rare, provided evergreen boughs and bright red berries.
We made popcorn strings for the tree, decked it out with blown glass ornaments--some once belonging to my great grandmother--suspended from the branches, and topped it with a star cut from plywood and painted by my grandfather.
Our holiday feast consisted of country ham, cornbread dressing, deviled eggs, baked sweet potatoes in their jackets, home canned green beans cooked with ham hock, turnip greens, canned Silver Queen corn, biscuits, red-eye gravy, and a plain yellow cake with my grandmother's caramel frosting. All the butter, eggs and milk came from our cows and chickens.
In these days of trendy, farm-to-table restaurants selling fried chicken for twenty dollars a plate, it is worth remembering that once all food was farm-to-table, and that time was not so long ago. No matter which holiday you celebrate at this time of year, recall for a moment how things used to be, and be humbled by the idea that our ancestors once depended upon their own hands for survival itself.
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