VIII YULETIDE
It was Christmas Eve at Holiday's Point and, in accordance with the custom of generations, the children and grandchildren were gathered in an unbroken circle around the old hearthstone.
In my grandfather's day the neighbors called the old home Holiday's Point because of the numerous holidays given to the servants. The community held that if my grandfather had framed the almanac he would have put into it twice as many days as did the Arabs and Romans, that he might have more holidays to bestow upon his slaves.
The old-fashioned house on the Nansemond River, between Suffolk to the right and Norfolk to the left, was built of brick imported from England. In shape like an L, the four rooms on the first floor were divided by a passage fifteen feet wide; dining-room and library on one side, parlor and chamber on the other. Four large open fireplaces gave warmth and cheerfulness to the corridor. On the first floor of the L was the nursery and above it the children's room, the name of which was never changed because, in relation to the household, its occupants remained children to the end of the chapter, however the years might age them in the view of the outside world.
The house fronted the river, which was concealed by a heavy growth of trees until the door was reached through long lanes of cypress lined with rows of cedar, when a full view of the water for miles was presented. Hidden in the woods was one of the stables, in which old Starlight had her home near enough to the cabin to answer "Ung' Bosun's" whistle.
My mother, as usual, had permitted me to come to Holiday's Point the day before Christmas, the lighting of the Yule Log being one of my greatest joys. Away back in the early dawn of my infantile mind lurked a hazy memory of the time when my little hand had held the candle that lit the old log at the back of the great fireplace. That privilege was no longer mine. Other children had since entered the family circle, and the youngest child on the plantation, whether white or black, was the one always selected to touch off the Yule Log.
Another delightful sensation preliminary to Christmas day at Holiday's Point was the sight of "Uncle Charles" driving up from the river waving a paper above the load of Christmas things and warning us that it contained instructions from Santa Claus that all the contents of the cart should be put away in the storehouse until he should come on Christmas eve, and if anyone should touch any of the boxes or ask questions about what was inside of them all the good things would turn to ashes and sawdust and there would be nothing left when Christmas came, adding, "'Member what Santa Claus did to Miss Cinderelly when she didn't mind him, stayin' out late at night."
Though the awesome paper was only a bill of lading, which Uncle Charles knew very well, believing him we shrank before it in terror. I watched the unloading curiously, and the colored children, huddled together on the quarter-kitchen doorsteps, pulled down each other's heads and whispered mysteriously as the boxes and barrels were taken out and their contents announced. There was the hogshead of New Orleans molasses, with its thick layer of sugar at the bottom, the long peaked loaves of white sugar under their thin blue "fool's-caps," the cases of raisins, dates, figs and tamarinds, barrels of nuts, oranges and crackers, boxes of cheese and, slyly pushed behind them, hampers mysteriously marked "sundries," which we at once associated with the coming visit of Santa Claus himself.
When the rays of the sun were long in the west the cheerful note of the Yule Log was heard. The great hickory log, which had lain on its forked branch support through months of golden sunshine and mellowing rain, was carried in on the shoulder of the strongest negro on the plantation, followed by a rollicking troop of Christmas revelers, white and black, and next year's log was put on the Yule Log fork, which was never left empty.