Memory of a Large Christmas

by Lillian E. Smith

As a young child in the early 1900s, writer and civil rights crusader Lillian Smith lived an idyllic, small-town life. Of the many customs by which her and her eight brothers' and sisters' days were ordered, none are so fondly remembered by Smith as those of the Christmas season.

With a lighthearted touch, she recalls such times as when the family hosted forty-eight chain-gang convicts, along with their guards, to a holiday feast and the time her older brothers almost bought an elegant coffin for their parents' gift. Of far greater meaning to Smith, however, are the remembered rituals, the year-after-year sights, sounds, smells, and first the hog killings and the shaking of the pecan trees just around the time Big Granny, Little Granny, and a cousin or two began to arrive; then making gifts and hanging stockings; and finally the big day, filled with presents, shooting firecrackers, and too much homemade candy, six-layered coconut cake, and "sweet potato pone, fancied up."

These and many more memories are here for our enjoyment. All are related against the joyful noise of children, imaginations unbridled, as they run through a house and yard that never quite ends and always offers new places to hide and new opportunities for adventure and mischief.

Genres: Christmas, Nonfiction, Holiday, Family, Memoir

88 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1980

About the author

Lillian Smith was a writer and social critic of the Southern United States, known best for her best-selling novel Strange Fruit (1944). A white woman who openly embraced controversial positions on matters of race and gender equality, she was a southern liberal unafraid to criticize segregation and work toward the dismantling of Jim Crow laws, at a time when such actions almost guaranteed social ostracism.

Lillian Eugenia Smith was born on December 12, 1897 in the America before women's suffrage to a prominent family in Jasper, Florida, the eighth of ten children. Her life as the daughter of a middle class civic and business leader took an abrupt turn in 1915 when her father lost his turpentine mills. The family was not without resources however, and decided to relocate to their summer residence in the mountains of Clayton, Georgia, where her father had previously purchased property and operated the Laurel Falls Camp for Girls.

Now a young adult financially on her own, she was free to pursue her love of music and teaching for the next five years. She spent a year studying at Piedmont College in Demorest (1915–1916). She also had two stints at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore in 1917 and 1919. She returned home and helped her parents manage a hotel and taught in two mountain schools before accepting a position to be director of music at a Methodist school for girls in Huzhou, (now Wuxing, Zhejiang), China. While she was not a churchgoer and did not consider herself religious, it follows that her youthful Christian principals were challenged by the oppression and injustice she would witness there, and that this laid the foundation of her later awareness as a social critic.

Her time in China was limited however by problems back home. Her father's health was declining and she was forced to return home to the States in 1925. Back in Georgia, she assumed the role of heading the Laurel Falls Camp, a position she would hold for the next twenty three years (1925–1948). Laurel Falls Camp soon became very popular as innovative educational institution known for its instruction in the arts, music, drama, and modern psychology. Her father died in 1930, and she was left with responsibility for the family business and the care of her ill mother. It was this period of creative control over the camp, her ability to use it as a place to discuss modern social issues, combined with the pressures of caring for her ailing parents that made her turn to writing as an emotional escape.

Lillian Smith soon formed a lifelong relationship with one of the camp's school counselors, Paula Snelling, of Pinehurst, Georgia, and the two began publishing a small, quarterly literary magazine, Pseudopodia, in 1936. The magazine encouraged writers, black or white, to offer honest assessments of modern southern life, to challenge for social and economic reform, and it criticized those who ignored the Old South's poverty and injustices. It quickly gained regional fame as a forum for liberal thought, undergoing two name changes to reflect its expanding scope. In 1937 it became the North Georgia Review, and in 1942 finally settling with South Today.

In 1949, she kept up her personal assault on racism with Killers of the Dream, a collection of essays that attempted to identify, challenge and dismantle the Old South's racist traditions, customs and beliefs, warning that segregation corrupted the soul. She also emphasized the negative implications on the minds of women and children. Written in a confessional and autobiographical style that was highly critical of southern moderates, it met with something of a cruel silence from book critics and the literary community.

In 1955, the civil rights movement grabbed the entire nation's attention with the Montgomery bus boycott. By this time she had been meeting or corresponding with many southern blacks and liberal whites for years and was well aware of blacks concerns. In response to Brown v. Board of Ed

Reviews

[Jennifer ~ TarHeelReader · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you, Diane and Cheri, for bringing this one to my attention. I am grateful I bought a hardcopy because I imagine I’ll read this every Christmas.

Lillian Smith’s memories brought back my own of large family gatherings at each of my late grandmothers and all the traditions that come along with Christmas. My maternal grandmother had a pecan tree, and I remember how all the grandchildren would run around with a paper sack picking them up for shelling.

I was not the biggest fan of the hog parts, perhaps because my grandparents lived in Smithfield, Virginia, and my uncle owned a farm with pigs and also worked at Smithfield Foods. I befriended the pigs and became a vegetarian early in life. It’s true!

That said, I understand the importance of customs, and while my family always accommodated me, a ham was served at every big meal.

When I wasn’t sensing out connections to my family’s traditions, I was enjoying the dynamics amongst the siblings and between the children and their parents and grandparents. It also had me thinking about my great grandparents who could have been part of this southern family 100 years ago.

A lovely, heartfelt nostalgic read, and one that has me eager to pick up Strange Fruit and learn more about Lillian E. Smith.

Many of my reviews can also be found on my blog: www.Jennifer tarheelreader.com and instagram: www.instagram.com/tarheelreader

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Everything about our family was big: there were nine of us and our mother and father and a cousin or two, and Little Grandma when it was her turn to stay with us, and Big Grandma when it was hers, and there were three bird dogs and four cats and their kittens and once a small alligator and a pet coon."

So begins Lillian Smith's appealing Memory of a Large Christmas, a collection of vignettes through years of family Christmases in the South in the early 1900's. Not a large volume, but one with a large heart.

“ 'My sister said softly, 'It was a large Christmas.'
'Which one?'
'All of them,' she whispered.”

Publication 1980

[Diane Barnes · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was so delightful, it would be my idea of heaven to be a part of this family at Christmas. Raised in a large family (9 kids, plus cousins and grandmas) at the turn of the last century in Jupiter, Florida, we read about hog-killin', cooking, eating, stockings, presents received and given, inevitable chaos, a saintly mother who cooked like an angel and a generous and loving father. A very slim (80 pages) book that can be read in an hour or two. It made a great read for December 2nd to set the mood.

I had no idea when I got this book at the library that it was written by the author of "Strange Fruit". I wish I had bought a copy, because it may have to become a Christmas tradition.

[Cheri · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a lovely memoir shared in 78 pages, with a few of those pages sharing recipes. Set in Georgia, she was born into a large family, between the parents, cousins and nine children.

This is set in the years before World War I, when Christmas presents were purchased in the local store, where choices were more limited than we are accustomed to, or were handmade gifts. Their traditions were somewhat different than our more current ones, but are lovely, just the same. Simple gestures of kindness extended to others. A poet in their town, knowing a woman needed a way to earn money for food, suggests that she ’dress Santa’s dolls…And ever afterward, she dressed Santas dolls and some for birthdays, too. And it was not long before little girls began to feel Santa hadn’t treated them right if their dolls were not dressed by Miss Ada–although they didn’t know it was Miss Ada,’ they only half guessed it was; and the mystery, the doubt, rimming their faith gave ambience ti the delicate garments. A lovely gesture by the poet that brought happiness to those young girls, and helped Miss Ada, not only financially, but undoubtedly gave her the feeling that she still had purpose.

’Five o’ clock, next morning, the little ones were scrambling round the fireplace, feeling in the dark for theirs. Mother, in her bed, did not stir. Father, in the adjoining room, turned over, muttered ‘my, my, my.’ The rule was, you tiptoed and you whispered and you looked through your stocking but you couldn’t touch the big presents lying right there before you until you had dressed.
So you took down your knobby stocking and in the light from the fire which someone had thrown kindling on, you dug in. And all the time there — on a fine new doll rocker — sat the beautiful doll Miss Ada (well, maybe) had dressed but you dared not touch it until you had washed your face and put on your clothes…the suspense was almost unendurable.’

Included are moments that are not currently part of most families Christmas traditions - hog killing for one. There are moments of struggling over how to financially make ends meet, but they take it in stride.

Also included are several recipes, which makes me happy that I finally was able to get my oven fixed!

Overall, a charming read and a look back at how much more simple life used to be - in, at least, some ways.

[Jameson · Rating 5 out of 5]

My sister liked my blog about my memories of Thanksgiving and sent me a copy of a slim and magical volume, Memory of a Large Christmas, by Lillian Smith. I think my sister intended it as a sort of appreciative gift, but I choose to think of it as payment for the blog, because looked at it that light, it makes me the highest paid writer in the world.
I had never heard of Lillian Smith, and from what I can tell, she seems to have fallen out of fashion with today’s readers. She was a Southern lady, a social activist, fighting and writing against segregation in the Jim Crow South, and her fiction is apparently all written with that theme running through it. With segregation no longer an issue in America, she appears not to be read as much as she once was. I hope that is not the case with Memory of a Large Christmas, and if the rest of her work is as charming and evocative and beautifully written as this little volume, Lillian Smith needs to be rediscovered in a big way.
Let’s begin with beginnings. When it comes to Christmas memories, Tolstoy’s famous first line, “All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” is only true to the extent that a certain spirit of love and joy runs through all Christmases, but—to paraphrase Betjeman—many changes can be rung on the bells of love and joy and Christ’s spirit, especially when those things and that time are seen, as they should always be seen, through a child’s eyes.
Some leap right into the eggnog and holly and festivities: “One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.”
Some begin in fruitcake weather with the sweet anticipations and preparations that make all looked for events so special: “Imagine a morning in late November. A coming of winter morning more than twenty years ago. Consider the kitchen of a spreading old house in a country town. A great black stove is its main feature; but there is also a big round table and a fireplace with two rocking chairs placed in front of it. Just today the fireplace commenced its seasonal roar.”
Even the movie, A Christmas Story begins with a slow, loving look back through Ralphie’s eyes at a drab working-class neighborhood in Cleveland made beautiful by snow and love and memory.
Lillian Smith’s affectionate, bitter-sweet look back begins with the essence of her home seen through her very young eyes, which is to say the essence of every home and every Christmas: “Everything about our family was big: there were nine of us and our mother and father and a cousin or two, and Little Grandma when it was her turn to stay with us, and Big Grandma when it was hers, and there were three bird dogs and four cats and their kittens and once a small alligator and a pet coon. And the house took them all in. And still there were empty corners and stairways and pantries, and maybe the winter parlor would have nobody in it, but if it did you could go to the summer parlor, or if you felt too crowded you could slip in the closet under the stairs and crawl on and on until it grew small and low, then you could get down on your stomach and crawl way back where things were quiet and dim, and sometimes you liked that.”
Her Christmas memories, unlike Dylan Thomas’s or Truman Capote’s or Jean Shepherd’s do not look back at a specific Christmas, nor do they look back through a specific, first-person-singular voice. She utilizes a style quite unique, shifting from the second-person singular to a third-person singular identified as Miss Curiosity to first-person plural, shifting too from various pre-World War One Christmases in the vast, rambling house in the opening quote, to a smaller cottage in the mountains of northern Georgia, shifting also in age and clarity of memory, much like Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, mixing and melding times and people and events into an impressionistic pastiche of celebrations and activities that are now as irrevocably vanished as the people themselves. Consider her description, seen through very young eyes, of the aftermath of the terrifying and upsetting but vital ritual of a hog-butchering:
“And now, in an instant, ALL THE WORLD turned into a Good Place with a Good Father and Good Mother and a Good Granny who made good sausage, and a Good Jaspers who said, Little Sister, come here, Old Jaspers will show you how to cut a pork chop.
“You went to him: and the big black hand covered the small white hand, and holding firmly to the long steel knife, the two together pressed down on something, then Jaspers whispered, Hold tight! and you did, and he lifted your hand and his and the knife and came down hard—and lo, the two of you had cut a pork chop. And he was saying softly, I sho do like pork chops, don’t you, Little Sister? and you whispered back, I sho do, Jaspers. And the two words had changed the whole world.”
It is not fashionable in today’s world to write or speak about such things, things that were common in an older time, relationships that were common in that older time between old black men or women and young white children. The time has rightly and deservedly gone, just as hog-butchering has gone as a seasonal ritual, but I too remember those relationships and black hands and the past cannot nor should not be revised, but rather seen for what it was, both good and bad. Snooty young people who know better than you how the modern world should be run will reduce the object of that love to “a mere domestic,” as if a child’s love had anything to do with social standing or job or race or sex or age or anything other the mysterious synchronized beating of two separate hearts.
And it is that beating heart that runs through this Christmas memory, a child’s heart in a child’s time, until, in that final north-Georgia Christmas she evokes the essence of Christ’s spirit in what must be the most extraordinary Christmas dinner in the history of man.
Lillian Smith’s father, aging, in financial difficulties, with all his children out on their own, saving Lillian and her younger sister who have come back from their own lives in other places to be with their parents, has invited the prisoners on a local chain-gang to have Christmas dinner with them:
“When Mother said she was ready, our father asked ‘Son,’ who was one of the killers, to go help ‘my wife, won’t you, with the heavy things.’ And the young man said he’d be mighty glad to. The one in for raping and another for robbing a bank said they’d be pleased to help, too, and they went in. My sister and I followed, not feeling as casual as we hoped we looked. But when two guards moved toward the door my father peremptorily stopped them with, ‘The boys will be all right.’ And ‘the boys’ were. They came back in a few minutes bearing great pots and pans to a serving table we had set up on the porch. My sister and I served the plates. The murderer and his two friends passed them to the men. Afterward, the rapist and two bank robbers and the arsonist said they’d be real pleased to wash up the dishes. But we told them nobody should wash dishes on Christmas—just have a good time.”
It is axiomatic that if you write about a specific person or a specific event or emotion it becomes universal; the reverse, obviously, simply becomes a mess. It may seem strange that a very specific and somewhat eccentric family in a very specific house in a specific part of America in a very specific time so long ago, a time that ended with the coming of World War One, should be so completely accessible and understandable to today’s readers, so that there are those magic moments where you think, Yes, that’s just how it is, but that’s the magic of great writing. This little memoir deserves a special place on your shelf of Christmas classics: The Night Before Christmas; A Child’s Christmas in Wales; A Christmas Memory; Tasha Tudor’s A Time to Keep; whatever others you know of that sing to you. It’s one of those books you’ll want to go back to over and over again with the coming of “fruitcake weather.”

[Tatevik]

It’s good I didn’t buy this.

[Irma · Rating 5 out of 5]

10 stars. I will definitely read this little book every Christmas.

[Ruth · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a step back in Time- a long step back. Ms. Smith relates memories of family, and a much simpler time. There is a great deal of humor. At the very end, a selection of family recipes was added by the author.

[Megan Stevens · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have a huge stack of Christmas books that I never seem to get to. Well, this one was from that pile, it was so old. I do not recommend 😆 The only thing I enjoyed were the descriptions of Christmas food.

[Madelynn Bolton · Rating 5 out of 5]

My father reads this every year at Christmas. Its one of my most cherished memories.

[LeAnne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Found this at a used bookstore. It was a charming read.

[Leta Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fast read that reminds you of your family holiday memories.

[Eleni · Rating 3 out of 5]

A sweet, nostalgic read, especially the Christmas kitchen part!

[Ana Santos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Capta alguma magia de Natal, do Sul dos Estados Unidos, o que é interessante por ser tão diferente do que posso estar habituada.
Termina com (impossíveis) receitas.

[Julie Barrett · Rating 4 out of 5]

Memory of a large Christmas by Lillian Smith
Enjoyed this read because of the details in years gone by when you had to make your own gifts.
Even when road crew is invited to dinner and you'd think it'd be a bit scary and it was the total opposite.
I received this book from National Library Service for my BARD (Braille Audio Reading Device).

[Joanna Crawford · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful short book with much wisdom. Everyone should add it to their holiday collection!

[Jim Booth · Rating 3 out of 5]

See my review at www.newsoutherngentleman.wordpress.com - link available at my author page. Thanks for stopping by!