Christmas Kitchens By Sarah C. Brown Someone's In The Kitchen With Mama
Mama baked Daddy an orange cake. I have never found a recipe for the icing, but I am sure if I could locate one the concoction would be too much trouble for me. It was a two layer white cake frosted with an orange glaze that I recall taking much time and effort. I've often watched her peel the oranges, grate the zest, and squeeze the juice, prior to beginning the cooking of the glaze on the stovetop. For Fred, Mama would make an old-fashioned amalgamation cake which required grinding nuts and raisins in a hand-turned food grinder and then cooking sugar and eggs with the mixture to just the right consistency to be spread on three layers of white cake. Mama baked Wayne a fresh grated coconut cake. It also had three layers of white cake frosted with divinity icing and then covered with coconut. I remember that Mama would put the coconut in the oven and then poke an ice pick in its eye to drain the milk. Then she used a hammer to crack the shell. She spent about thirty minutes hand grating the coconut. James would always have a German chocolate cake baked from scratch. Again, more nuts had to be chopped, and the icing with an egg and sugar base had to be cooked on the stovetop. Some Baker’s coconut went in with vanilla and butter just prior to icing the cake. For me, Mama would make a white amalgamation icing, which is similar to a Lane cake, and that just happened to be Grandmother Carter’s favorite. We always had Jubilee Jumbles, which are cake-like cookies with burnt butter icing. Of course, Mama had to have a couple of pecan pies to round out the desserts. Mama would put the cakes in an unheated bedroom until Christmas Day. We knew to give them a wide berth because no one could touch the finished products until Mama, herself, cut the cakes. I can conjure images of Mama making a piecrust or measuring cake batter into pans. She would drop the pans of batter onto the countertop to remove the air bubbles. I had forgotten the reaction of one of my friends the first time she saw Mama bang the pan on the countertop until Felicia came home from college to tell me how her friends thought she had lost her mind when she did that. When we were still in school, Sarah and Phil Todd often sampled Mama’s cooking while they were visiting from down the street. Tony Austin would come by with Wayne, and Mama loved to feed him. In my adult years, Pat Fannin or Dianne Nix Simmons and I would sit at the kitchen table with cups of coffee laughing and talking with Mama while she cooked. My friends knew that if Mama let them in the kitchen, she really loved them. It was at Mama’s kitchen table that I heard the story of her life over and over. I never tired of hearing about her Papa and how much she loved him. I still cry when I remember her telling what she went through when he died and how life was never the same. When the story got too emotional, Mama would dry her tears and talk about how Papa loved Christmas. Papa was a big man, and he loved to eat. Mama Nona would fill the pie safe with cakes and pies. Every Christmas morning Papa would find that Santa had sampled huge slices of each item, much to Papa’s consternation. Mama and Aunt Jo would laugh about the time Aunt Jo, as a young teenager, got in the eggnog, which had been liberally spiked with Christmas cheer, with no idea what she was getting into. Mama would get really tickled telling how Aunt Jo would hang her stocking by the chimney with care and then put a box under it so that she would get more than a stocking full. I foolishly thought that Mama would live much longer, perhaps because she cheated death a few times before. I thought I would have years and years to spend around her table at Christmas. It is hard for me to realize that this is our seventeenth Christmas without Mama. When aggravated with our teasing, Mama would get skinny in the nose, frozen around the mouth and say in retort, "You’re gonna miss me when I’m gone." Now, I know what she meant about missing Papa and Mama Nona, not just at Christmas, but all through the year. Because cooking was so important to Mama, I surmise that is why I spend an inordinate amount of time in my own kitchen going overboard at Christmas trying to make memories for my own children. I cook for family and friends, hoping that they will remember that, like Mama, I only cook for people I love. I try to tell the old stories to my children, but it is not the same. My children laugh about Aunt Jo’s box trick, but they wonder why Mama and Aunt Teen did not get smart and pull the same stunt so they could get more from Santa. Felicia says it is no wonder we received so little from Santa because Mama spent all the money on food. I have learned to remind her that Daddy had a grocery store. Although I am not the cook Mama was, I like to visit with good friends and family members in my kitchen. Even when I am home alone, I sit in the kitchen with a good book and a cup of coffee. Cooking in my kitchen for Christmas somehow brings Mama back in memory. I can almost feel the same warmth and security I found in her kitchen. By Sarah Carter Brown – Pontotoc, MS
Christmas Sights Pontotoc & Littleville, AL Pontotoc sets the first Monday night in December for the annual Christmas Parade through downtown. It’s about the only event I can think of that brings almost as big a crowd of folks to downtown as might have been drawn by any given Saturday in the mid 1950s. Folks will line the streets to see a parade, especially a parade that caters to children. I’m so thankful my children are grown, and I don’t have to take them to the parade, anymore. It also helps that my youngest grandchildren live too far away to want to see Pontotoc’s Christmas Parade. My oldest grandchild, Anna Butler, lives in Pontotoc, but she wasn’t in the parade, so there was no real incentive for me to go this year. Sarah ate supper with us and afterwards accepted our invitation to ride around town to see some Christmas sights, particularly the decorated lawns and houses in various streets and subdivisions. Knowing the parade was still in progress, we sought to avoid Main Street by working our way south and into the subdivisions along Eighth Street then down Hwy. 41 to see the Williams spread not far outside of the city limit. It would be the most luminous of the displays we would see that evening. Returning from the southern leg of our trek, we drove down Inzer Street. Inzer Street was once a tightly knit neighborhood that took pride in their lawn and curbside decorations at Christmas, but time has taken a toll. Many of its residents who organized and participated in promoting the Christmas Holiday have moved or died, and while several homes still tried to live up to their glory days of the seventies, there were sections notable with no exterior illumination. Shortly after touring Inzer Street, we were ready to check out some of the older neighborhoods near North Main Street. Turning off Oxford Street onto North Main, we noted vehicles parked past the city cemetery. My thoughts were something along the lines of "There’s not ever been a parade I wanted to see bad enough that I’d park almost a mile away from the downtown area." We drove across to North Brooks Street then to another nearby subdivision and enjoyed seeing a number of houses lit up for Christmas. Getting back home, though, was a different matter. Back at the intersection of North Main and Oxford, we realized the parade had ended and folks were leaving. A city policeman was directing traffic as best he could, but it seemed as though we were stuck in one spot for a good fifteen minutes. Thinking it would be futile to drive through downtown, we headed west on Oxford Street then cut across College Street to Reynolds Street, where we waited a few more minutes before we could get onto Reynolds. We had one more cut-across to negotiate before getting to Coffee Street and finally to Highland. The traffic along Coffee was as bad as or worse than that of Reynolds, and the guy in front of me wanted to turn left into the oncoming traffic. He finally gave up and turned right, allowing us to finally get home. Rayanne talked us into visiting her last Saturday night, offering us supper and the opportunity to see a Christmas display in Littleville, AL. "Tell Daddy, I’ll fix hot dogs and chili, and after supper we’ll drive over to Alabama and see this place that everyone says is something to see." "Dinner and entertainment, now that’s an offer that’s hard to turn down," I remember thinking. When we got to Belmont Saturday afternoon, Anna and her present beau, Shane Crausby, were there also. Anson’s parents, Charles and Beckie Adams, along with Anson’s sister and niece joined us for supper. Rayanne arranged for all of us to load into two vans for the forty-five minute drive to Littleville. It was a mostly uneventful drive, until Rayanne got wound up talking on her cell phone and driving on a narrow, Alabama county road. I could picture us careening down one of the hillsides, so I asked Anson to get his wife off the phone. If readers of this newsletter have also seen the movie, "Field Of Dreams," which is about a guy who built a lighted baseball field in the middle of his Iowa cornfield, for dead baseball players to play on, and if said readers remember the end of the movie and the line of cars stretching as far as the eye could see on the horizon, then one gets an idea of how the traffic looked driving up to the Wright’s place for a look at their Christmas lights. I won’t hazard a guess as to how many vehicles we were in the middle of by the time we turned into the driveway, but I’d estimate there were at least ten acres of property absolutely packed with Christmas lights, luminaries, and spotlighted props. There seemed to be an order to it all, but I didn’t dwell on what the order was. I kept busy just trying to catch a glimpse of everything there was to see as we crept up the driveway to the house and circled back to the main road. The lighted figures included hundreds of snowmen, Santas, reindeer, lampposts, and candy canes. Strings of lights spelled out greetings such as Merry Christmas, and one huge display of lights outlined a train and boxcars on billboard sized structures standing side by side on one hill. For my tastes, it was completely overdone and both extravagant and outrageous, but I can honestly say, I’ve never seen anything to compare with it. Like ‘twas said of the ball field venture in Field Of Dreams, "If you build it…people will come." Barbara and I might have gotten back to Pontotoc a lot earlier had there not been a Wal Mart in Russellville which everyone just had to visit. Everyone except me, but then I didn’t need to answer Nature’s call or buy anything. Would I care to go back to Littleville again? No, at least not this year. Anyway, there’s plenty of sights to enjoy, right here in Pontotoc.
Christmas Santas By Kay Grafe Of course there's a Santa Yes, I do believe in Santa Claus. And it’s not because of Virginia O’Hanlon’s letter to the New York Sun in 1897 asking, "Is there a Santa Claus?" Francis Church answered her in an editorial. His last sentence read, "Thank God he lives forever and will continue to make glad the heart of childhood." My mother answered me in her way. "When you stop believing in Santa Claus he’ll stop leaving you gifts," she said. After all these years it still works for me. I call my husband Santa Baby the entire month of December. He gives me a tin of hard candy. If you’re wondering why I really believe, it’s because the idea of Santa came from two religious men: St. Nikcholas, a gift bringer, and Christkindlein, the Christ child. When the wise men gave Jesus gifts a tradition began, and Christ gave the greatest gift of all, his life. What’s not to believe? We celebrate Christ by associating him with a jolly white-bearded man. It took from 1804 until 1931 to get him all duded up as he looks today. The 1931 Coca-Cola illustration by Haddon Sundblom is credited for the modern, happy, fat man holding bottles of Coke, drinking Coke and giving them for gifts. In earlier years he was tall and wore multicolored long robes. He was a jolly elf in the story by Clement Clark Moore, "The Night Before Christmas." It’s interesting to hear about families’ Christmas traditions and how parents explain Santa to their children. Please send me your traditions. I’m writing a book called "Grin ‘n’ Bare It" and would like to include Mississippians’ Christmas traditions. Now, get that cup of cocoa and let’s talk. In Forest, our family tradition was simple. My daddy’s family, the Jeff Fountains, opened presents on Christmas Eve. My mother’s family, the Tom Tyners, waited until Christmas morning. Most years the Tyner cousins spent the night together and watched out the window, hoping to get a glance at Santa and the reindeers. Jo Ferrell, the next-to-the-oldest girl cousin, and I would tie our feet to one another when we went to bed on Christmas Eve. That way she couldn’t get up to see what Santa brought without waking me. A friend told me his Christmas story: "I informed my son Jimmy when he was very young there was no Santa. He just couldn’t accept it. In stores he’d point to Santa and say, ‘Look, Dad! There’s Santa Claus.’ "‘No, Jimmy, he’s dressed up and working here; I told you, Santa’s your mother and me.’ "He wouldn’t stop pointing to pictures and commercials to prove me wrong. "On Christmas night we heard a loud noise outside. The whole family ran out to find imprints of a sleigh and reindeer hoofs in the front yard. "‘See Dad, I told you!’ he boasted. "We never knew how the prints came to be. Now I’m a believer." I truly believe in Santa Claus; I believe in miracles and signs; I believe nothing is a coincidence. And I appreciate you Mississippians—for reading my columns. Merry Christmas! Sources: Search: Virginia O’Hanlon; www.snopes.com/cokelore/santa.asp. Write Kay at 2142 Fig Farm Rd., Lucedale, MS 39452 or e-mail [email protected].
Bodock Beau Holiday Humor Here's a few seasonal laughs found on the Internet..
Who delievers cat's Christmas presents?
What do elephants sing at Christmas?
Santa rides in a sleigh. What do elves ride in? What's red and white and gives presents to gazelles? Santelope! What do reindeer always say before telling you a joke? This one will "sleigh" you!
What do reindeer hang on their Christmas trees?
How do elves greet each other?
What happens if you eat the Christmas decorations?
What do vampires put on their turkey at Christmas?
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Some of my best memories center
around Mama’s kitchen. Mama spent most of her time in the kitchen, so
it followed that if you wanted to be with Mama, you had to be in the kitchen.
Mama loved to cook, especially at Christmas. Traditional baking included
making the favorite cake of each of us because Mama specialized in desserts.
