but I know my mother felt it.
She came near saying it when I told her at the breakfast-table that I fell asleep, saying to myself:
“He’ll go into the barn and keep himself warm
And hide his head under his wing.”
“I could think of nothing, whenever I awoke, but the mother sheep with her lambs all with her in the fold,” was her answer. “And of ‘the hollow of His hand.’ We have much to make us thankful this Christmas.”
“To make us thankful!” She was ever on the watch for that. Like Martin Luther’s little bird, she “sat on her twig, content, and let God take care.”
A bright sun left little of what had promised to be a deep snow, by Christmas Day. Four Christmas-guns were fired at midnight of Christmas Eve in four different quarters of the village. That is, holes were drilled with a big auger into the heart of a stout oak or hickory, and stuffed with powder. At twelve o’clock a torch was applied by a fast runner, who took to his heels on the instant to escape the explosion. The detonation was that of a big cannon. Sometimes, the tree was rent apart. That was a matter of small moment in a region where acres of forest-lands were cleared for tobacco fields by the primitive barbarism of girdling giant trees that had struck their roots into the virgin soil and lifted strong arms to heaven for centuries. From midnight to sunrise the sound of “pop-crackers” and pistol-shots was hardly intermitted by a minute’s silence. With the awakening of quieter, because older folk, the air rang with shouts of “Christmas gift!” addressed impartially to young and old, white and black.
The salutation was a grievous puzzle and positive annoyance to our New-England grandmother, the first Christmas she passed with us. By the time she was ready for breakfast she had emptied her pocket of loose coins, and bestowed small articles of dress and ornament upon three or four of the (to her apprehension) importunate claimants. When she made known the grievance—which she did in her usual imperious fashion—my father shouted with laughter. With difficulty he drilled into her mind that the greeting was not a petition, still less a demand. From that day he forbade any of us to say “Christmas gift!” to “Old Mistis,” as the servants called her. We children wished her, “A merry Christmas.” The servants never learned the unaccustomed form. The old lady did not enter into the real significance of the words that offended her. Nor, for that matter, did one out of a hundred of those who had used it all their lives, as each Christmas rolled around. It never dawned upon me until I heard how Russian peasants and Russian nobility alike greet every one they meet on Easter morning with—“The Lord is risen,” receiving the answer, “He is risen indeed!” The exultant cry of “Christmas gift!” was a proclamation of the best thing that ever came into the world. The exchange of holiday offerings at the festal season commemorates the same. All over Christendom it is an act of grateful, if too often blind, obedience to the command—“Freely ye have received, freely give.”
There were twelve servants in our family—eight adults and four children. Not one was overlooked in the distribution of presents that followed breakfast and family prayers. The servants were called in to morning and evening prayers as regularly as the white members were assembled for the service. The custom was universal in town and country, and was, without doubt, borrowed from English country life—the model for Virginian descendants. Men and women took time to pray, and made haste to do nothing. We prate long and loudly now of deep breathing. We practised it in that earlier generation.
On Christmas night we had a “molasses stew.” We have learned to say “candy-pull” since then. A huge cauldron of molasses was boiled in the kitchen—a detached building of a story-and-a-half, standing about fifty feet from “the house.” Gilbert—the dining-room servant, who would be “a butler” now—brought it into the dining-room when it was done to a turn, and poured it into great buttered platters arranged around the long table. All of us, girls and boys, had pinned aprons or towels over our festive garments, and put back our cuffs from our wrists. My mother set the pace in the pulling. She had a reputation for making the whitest and most spongy candy in the county, and she did it in the daintiest way imaginable. Buttering the tips of her fingers lightly, she drew carefully from the surface of the platter enough of the cooling mixture for a good “pull.” In two minutes she had an amber ribbon, glossy and elastic, that bleached fast to cream-color under her rapid, weaving motion, until she coiled or braided completed candy—brittle, dry, and porous—upon a dish lined with paper. She never let anybody take the other end of the rope; she did not butter her fingers a second time, and used the taper tips alone in the work, and she had the candy on the dish before any of the others had the sticky, scalding mass in working order. We dipped our fingers again and again in butter and, when hard bestead, into flour, which last resort my mother scorned as unprofessional, and each girl had a boy at the other end of her rope. It was graceful work when done secundum artem. The fast play of hands; the dexterous toss and exchange of the ends of shining strands that stiffened too soon if not handled aright; the strain upon bared wrists and strong shoulders as the great ropes hardened; the laughing faces bent over the task; the cries of feigned distress as the immature confectionery became sticky, or parted into strings, under careless manipulation; the merry peals of laughter at defeat or success—made the Christmas frolic picturesque and gay. I wondered then, and I have often asked since, why no painter has ever chosen as a subject this one of our national pastimes.