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I Christmas in Dixie This page intentionally left blank The hunting experience was part and parcel of the holiday season at Hampton, and the quest rightly holds preeminence in the contents of this anthology. Nonetheless Rutledge was closely attuned to the wider meaning of the season. He delighted in the simple joys of sharing and giving, not merely with his immediate family but with neighbors and, especially, the black residents on the plantation. A great lover of tradition, Old Flintlock looked back with longing to Christmases past, and in the selections offered here the reader gets a solid feel for the manner in which he cherished the way the Rutledge clan had celebrated the season over the generations. The opening selection, a chapter from the little book in which he paid warm tribute to his parents, My Colonel and His Lady, especially evokes an easygoing world of gentility and graciousness we have largely lost. Indeed the same can be said of much that Rutledge wrote, and for me at least, therein lies much of the enduring appeal of his work. He vicariously takes his reader to old plantation days and longlost ways with an unerring compass pointing straight to the human heart. At no time of the year does life hold more romance, more meaning, and a greater sense of spirituality than at Yuletide. Rutledge knew this, and better still, he was able to capture in words what most of us feel but find difficult to express. Sixty years after the fact, his youngest son, Irvine, captured much of the excitement and sense of anticipation that underlay the family’s return to Hampton Plantation in a short piece he wrote entitled “My Father Takes the Whole Family to Hampton for Christmas.” It comes from a little booklet, Tales of Hampton, he selfpublished in 1987 and presented to family members and a few others. His recollections merit sharing in full as an introduction to the Christmas in Dixie that was an integral and important part of the family’s existence for so many years. My earliest memory of going to Hampton goes back to the time when I was five, which puts it in December of 1917. My brother Arch was nine and my brother Mid was seven. Early in October my father, who was teaching at Mercersburg Academy in southern Pennsylvania, announced that he was taking the whole family to his old home for the Christmas holidays. It was before the family had a car and the trip was no minor undertaking. Carolina Christmas  4 The excitement of the announcement increased in November, and by December we could hardly wait for the day of departure. For at least a week beforehand Mother and Dad had worked every minute to get ready. The three-week trip for five people required all of the advance planning that my parents could give to it. The day of departure arrived and the five of us, with considerable luggage, boarded the train in Mercersburg. In twenty minutes we changed trains in Marion, Pennsylvania, and in another twenty minutes we were in Hagerstown, Maryland. There we boarded a Baltimore and Ohio train that took us through Weverton on the Potomac River and into the Union Station in Washington, which was, I felt sure, the biggest building in the world. The great high ceiling echoed every sound in it, especially when a train caller began to call the trains. He was a large man with a large voice. His “call” lasted for five minutes or more and he ended with a dramatic flourish, his voice growing especially melodious with “Atlantic Coast Line going South.” We boarded our fourth train, the Atlantic Coast Line, and my father soon herded us into the dining car where shining white table cloths and waiters in white uniforms made an impressive appearance. We sat down to a sumptuous meal, the train got under way, and soon the lights outside began to zip by faster and faster. My father’s spirits were rising each mile of the way. After dinner we were permitted to stay up until after we had passed Richmond, the strategic point at which my father was at last certain that we were safely on our way. The phrase, “South of Richmond,” was a poem in itself for my father. A book of poems he wrote that was published in 1923 was called South of Richmond. In it he wrote: South of Richmond roars the train; Subtly o’er my...

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