Appalachian Christmases

MEMOIR Appalachian Christmases Bo Ball A BATTERY PHILCO TOLD US OF REINDEER TAME AS MILK COWS, of sleigh bells muffled on a silent night, but Christmas in my Appalachia roared with the blasts of shotguns, with the yells and whoops that might elsewhere announce Halloween. In the early 1940s we were frozen in time and place. We had heard of electric lights, butwe would have to move away to see them. Telephones were black-crooked squash women held to their ears in magazines. Yet soldiers were bringing home signs of the world: unexploded shells, parachutes, satin pillowcases that spelled out Okinawa just below Mother. Their winter uniforms seemed to last as long as Roosevelt. After the real soldiers wore the green wool slick, it became the dream-wear of younger brothers. We children thumbed the pages of a calendar for the only day redlettered and wreathed: December 25. It was surrounded by Black Draught, Wine of Cardui, or the Dionnes stretching a year's growth. Yet there was contention about that date, for on Old Christmas (Jan. 6), a few Hard-shell Baptists rested and shook lapsarian heads at those of us who labored. ("Messing with God's time," they warned, against the calendar Pope Gregory changed, back in 1582.) New Christmas was not a particularly religious time—not like revivals and wakes/ funerals. Religion was likely to run dry in winter. Apotbellied stove could not heat a shack-church warping toward zero. Only the Freewills had enough hot blood (and members) to risk a Christmas celebration—a pageant, a Sunday or two before the 25th. Often there was no audience, for everyone was "on stage." Jesus mightbe a chewed doll from last year's Christmas or a realbaby. Mary could be the doll's owner or the baby's sister, in awkward and cold kneel by the orange crate (a manger). In pageants, as in life and Bethlehem, the male was Pet: Joseph, three shepherds, three wise men, sometimes an un-jolly innkeeper who shook his head for NO ROOM—all splendid in women's bathrobes and turbans made of towels. To find seven or eight "born-again" boys was not easy, in December. Blackbuards had to be enlisted for the roles, but they 78 couldn't—or wouldn't—sing of gold and "mur" and "frank in sense." Until she eloped with a watermelon peddler, Bethel Duty did that. As Angel of the Lord, she told and then sang the story, her underlings uselessly humming through clenched teeth, for the voice of Bethel ran through the rafters to scatter owls out in the pines. After a wispy though loving prayer from the spinster who ran the church, we were released to Bethel and the open road—a contrast as baffling as any in theology. Between puffs on cigarette ducks, Bethel sang of hot corn, cold corn, bring along ye demijohn; of poor Ellen Smith ("Where was she found? Shot through the putt, lying cold on the ground."). Without Bethel's voice, the walk held few surprises: Little Hen Ratliff's heifer butting her first calf, a new mud pock in the middle of the road. But we had more Christmases to look forward to: at school, at the Store and Post Office, and at home. The one at The Presley School actually started the day after Thanksgiving, when we drew names— the primer through the third grades in The Little Room; the fourth through the seventh, in The Big, where we would all gather for the handing out of gifts. Those who were destitute (and sensitive enough to know it) would not participate. But the Krauses—plentiful as the lice that ate at them—denied deprivation and threw their many names into the drawing box. In both rooms, we prayed that our paper strips would crawl from the Krauses' grimy fingers, but for a month we'd hear: "Nadine Krause" (or Elmer, Fonnie, Hazel, Pearl...) "done drawed your name and got ye a poke of rotten apples"—precisely the gift the Krauses made due with. They themselves never told what name they drew. (Some said poverty had sledge-hammered them into silence, though Nadine talked, after puberty.) For...