Christmas in the Mountains

CHRISTMAS IN THE MOUNTAINS Christmas in eastern Kentucky and Knott County is celebrated now pretty much as it is in other parts of the country with Christmas trees and blinking lights and "fotched-on" gifts. It was not always that way. When May Stone and Katharine Pettit came up from the Bluegrass in 1902 to found the Hindman Settlement School they learned of two Christmasses—New Christmas and Old Christmas. New Christmas (Dec. 25) was celebrated rather wildly with the drinking of "moonshine" and shooting of guns—and partying. Old Christmas was "rael" (real) Christmas (Jan. 6) and a solemn and holy time. But for neither occasion was there Christmas tree, Santa Claus, or regular giving of gifts although anyone enjoyed being the first to "holler out": Christmas gift! Although some superstitions and beliefs about Christmas survived and some ancient carols were discovered among the older folk, (the shooting of guns may have been a survival , no longer recognized, of the custom of frightening off evil spirits), many older customs had disappeared, perhaps because of the isolation, the Civil War, and the old Baptist religion. The Ladies of the Hindman Settlement School introduced the practice of the Christmas tree, the giving of gifts, the hanging of Christmas stockings, and the Christmas play. Ann Cobb wrote many of the Christmas plays. Lucy Furman introduced carol singing to Hindman and Knott County by teaching her "boys" carols and leading them around the Settlement and town of Hindman (with stockings pulled over their shoes to muffle the sound) to sing before daylight on Christmas morning. The selections for the first half of this issue were chosen to show some aspects of that earlier time. The pieces in "Christmas at the Hindman Settlement in Knott County" and Ann Cobb's "An English Christmas" came from the files of the early days of the Hindman Settlement School. The Christmas poems by Ann Cobb appeared in her book Kinfolks published in 1922, and "Christmas Anticipations" is a section from Lucy Furman's Mothering on Perilous published in 1913. "Old Christmas Morning" appeared in Louis Untermeyer's Modern American Poetry copyrighted in 1930, reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. A mountain girl in North Carolina sang "I Wonder As I Wander" to John Jacob Niles in 1935. A number of versions of "The Cherry Tree Carol" have been collected in the area. John Fox, Jr. 's "The Passing of Abraham Shivers" was collected in his volume of short stories A Purple Rhodedendron and Other Stories. 8 9 ...