We had home-made candy not infrequently, but Christmas was the only time of year when it snowed candy. There were no chocolates, as I recollect—just a mixture of lemon drops and an assortment of variously shaped hunks of sugar, both hard and gummy, variously colored, alloyed, and flavored, with peppermint being dominant.
Christmas was also distinguished by apples, oranges, raisins (on stems), almonds, walnuts, pecans, and a coconut or two. We ate some of the coconut as broken out of the shells, but its main function was to be grated and mixed with sliced oranges and sugar into ambrosia—as inevitable for Christmas dinner as turkey is for Thanksgiving. Nobody then dreamed of having fruit every morning for breakfast. Oranges, apples, raisins, and nuts were put into stockings and hung on Christmas trees. They were a rare treat.
These fruits and nuts left a stronger impression on my mind than all other gifts associated with childhood Christmases except books, firecrackers, Roman candles—and my first new saddle. There were tin bugles, toy trains, and dolls for the girls, but we—the boys, at least—had so much fun making our own toys that no bought toy has left any impression on my memory. Christmas was the time for new pocket knives, and very useful they were. My father taught us to whittle water-wheels, which could be run only when an occasional rain made Long Hollow run. The axle for the wheel might be a piece of wood or a section of dried cornstalk, less durable but much more easily fitted with paddles than hard wood. The toy bugles would not split the air as brightly as cane whistles whittled out of an old fishing pole.
We may have had colored balloons at some Christmas, but I recollect only the ones made from bladders. Hog-killing time is cold weather. The chief prize for us from every hog and every calf, cow, or steer butchered was the bladder. A human mouth was the only air-pump for blowing up this home-contrived balloon. Held, air-expanded, near a fire, it would keep on expanding until the material was very thin and dry. Then came the climax—an explosion. Nobody wanted to part with his bladder-balloon, but that grand explosion could not be resisted.
I never heard of Fourth of July fireworks until I was nearly grown. Firecrackers and Roman candles were as much a part of Christmas as ambrosia. The firecrackers could be set off by day, but the Roman candles were for darkness, when everybody watched the pyrotechnics. They vanished all too quickly, like most other beautiful things—but not from the great reality called memory.
There were toy pistols and airguns, but a new pair of rubbers for a nigger-shooter gave just as much satisfaction. At one time we got more satisfaction from lead bullets gouged out of live oak trees than from any other form of shooting. Our house was on the edge of a grove of scores of live oak trees, some of them very large and old. When Uncle Ed Dubose, my mother’s half brother, came in the fall to hunt and again at Christmas time with all the family, he freely spent ammunition perfecting his marksmanship. His targets were tree trunks. He was an indefatigable treasure-hunter also, but he never found a bonanza comparable to that he left us children in the form of lead.
From it, from solder melted off tin cans, and from now and then a haul of babbitt found in wornout windmills, we minted dollars. We melted our metal in a large iron spoon over an outdoor fire and poured the liquid into a round wooden bluing box, wherein it quickly cooled and solidified. (Bluing for laundry in those days came in powdered form, for dissolving in water—in wooden boxes, with tops that screwed on, about the diameter of a dollar.) This free coinage was limited only by the supply of crude metal. The more canned goods we consumed and the more old bullets we could find, the higher the rate of coinage. The two principal uses the dollars had were for pitching—into holes in the ground—and for buying cattle, horses, sheep, and goats from each other.
Each of us had a play ranch enclosed by miniature fences—twine (our barbed wire) strung on sticks stuck into the ground like posts. Our cattle were tips of horns that had been sawed off cattle at the chute in the big picket cowpens about a hundred yards from the house. Our horses were spools from which my mother and neighbors had used the thread in endless sewing; our goats were empty snail shells; our sheep were oak galls. Sheep and goats were very plentiful and, therefore, had a low value; cattle and horses were harder to come by.
With running irons made of baling wire and heated red hot in a fire, we branded the cattle, sheep, and horses, but could not brand the snail-shell goats. We made long trains of flat rectangular sardine cans, coupled together by pieces of wire, to haul the stock from ranch to ranch. Our dog, Old Joe—named after Beautiful Joe, the wonderful hero of a favorite book—made a very unsatisfactory engine to pull the freight train. We hitched green lizards, snared with the hair of horsetail, to a single sardine can or to a cardboard matchbox that served as a wagon. Lizards never make tractable teams.