A Christmas Party

When I was fourteen, I was going down the road on a Christmas Eve morning, and I met Miss Brighton, one of the teachers down at the missionary school. She was from up North and talked kind of funny it seemed to me. She stopped me and said, “Are you coming down to the school tonight for our Christmas Eve party? We’re going to have a play and Bible reading and candy and presents.” She added, “And we’re going to sing carols.”

I said, “Well, I don’t know. Grandpa said that we might go hunting tonight and catch a fat coon for Christmas dinner.”

She looked at me for long time, looking troubled and unhappy, and then she said, “You know, that’s why we are having the party, to teach you people how to celebrate Christmas. It seems to me that people here don’t know how, like they don’t know what the significance of Christmas is. There’s ignorance here. That’s why we built the school. I want you to come. You ought not to be out hunting on Christmas Eve.”

She lifted her nose and sailed on down the road, dodging the mud holes, while I stood there more troubled than she was. I was thinking about her word—“Ignorance.” I’d never used that word about anybody, even if he knew nigh to nothing.

Daddy and Mama had moved up to Detroit to find work, and I was living with Grandma and Grandpa then because I was set against going up North. I was so rankled, I decided to go back and tell Grandpa and Grandma about what Miss Brighton had said. Grandpa was the smartest man I knew. He was an Old Regular Baptist preacher, but he’d gone to the normal school and had been a school teacher, too. He had lots of books, a set of encyclopedias, and he subscribed to the daily newspaper and a journal called The Old Faith Contender from the Primitive Baptist Library down in North Carolina. Grandpa’s Redbone coonhound greeted me in the yard, but he was not allowed in the house. Grandma and Grandpa were sitting by the fire when I went in. Grandma was piecing a quilt, and Grandpa was reading. I liked living with them.

“Hey, Bud,” Grandpa said, “Where you been?”

“I was going to the post office, but I met old Miss Brighton from the mission school, and she said something that made me mad.”

“What did she say?”

“She said we are ignorant.”

“Just who was she talking about?”

“The people who live around here.”

“How so?’

“Well, she invited me to come to their Christmas party tonight, said the reason they had the party was to teach us the proper way to celebrate Christmas, said we didn’t seem to know how important Christmas is. Then she said there is a lot of ignorance around here.”

Grandpa smiled, and said, “Well, ‘we’re all ignorant about some thing,’ Mark Twain once said. My opinion, she doesn’t know much about us. Different people deal with religious matters in different ways. We old Baptists call ourselves a peculiar people, ‘cause St. Paul said in his letter to Titus that Jesus “gave himself unto us, that he might redeem us from all iniquity and purify unto himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works.” We do things the way we were taught, and other people may do it different.

“My understanding of history is that we don’t know the day or the hour that Jesus was born. They say that Christmas was based on an old pagan holiday. The actual day of Jesus’ birth is lost in the mists of history.

“But let’s get back to what Miss Brighton said to you. Some people have a hard time dealing with other people’s differences. They think that when people don’t accept their notion of things, they’re ignorant or just stubborn. She comes from up North somewhere, and she learned different ways from us in her church, no doubt. I’m sure us old Baptists...