V I R G I N I A L I V I N G 3V I R G I N I A L I V I N G2

by Caroline Kettlewellillustrations by Robert Meganck

We sentimentalize the

holidays even as we re-gift the

fruitcake, buy toys on Christmas

Eve and chortle (over

eggnog ) about Uncle

Harry’s latest girlfriend. To

truly pay homage to Virginia’s

seasonal traditions,

we’d have to do

some carousing,

belsnickeling

and drinking of

Blackberry Shrub, as

folks did long ago.

O h , t ’ wa s a v e r y m e r r y t i m e .

,most would agree, is a long-run-ning spectacle. It begins coloring re-tail shelves in red and green in ear-ly autumn, builds momentum with an elbows-out, post-Thanksgiving shopping binge, reaches a sustained crescendo of lights, decorations, food and festivities between mid-December and New Year’s, then peters out into January gym specials and displays of deeply discounted wrapping paper and apple-cinnamon-scented potpourri. That’s the way it is—a carnival mash-up of the sentimental, sacred and profane. But if you’re more than 10 years old and celebrate Christmas, the memories are somewhat different.

Even in the recent foaming at the mouth over whether your Wal-Mart greeter wishes you a merry Christmas or happy holidays, the holly-and-the-ivy season in Virginia is 400 years of converging customs, cultures, prohibi-tions, fashions and controversies. Truth be told, there’s no such thing as a tra-ditional Virginia Christmas, and there never really was, the season having come over from England as an already rather murky mélange of pagan satur-nalia and the Christian nativity, with some agrarian-society harvest festival thrown in.

Take, for example, the Christmas tree. O tannenbaum, O tannenbaum, more than a million of you are cut down and sold every year from Virginia farms these days, but you arrived in Virginia from Germany and didn’t achieve wide-spread adoption until late in the 19th century. Eric Bryan, Deputy Director of the Frontier Culture Museum of Virginia, in the Shenandoah Valley, notes that holiday season visitors have often been surprised, and sometimes incensed, that no Christmas tree stands

in the museum’s American Farm ex-hibit, which is interpreted for the year 1820. A Staunton newspaper from the 1850s still considered the Christmas tree such a novelty that it reported on a resident who put one up and then opened his house for everyone to come and marvel at the wonder. In an oral history looking back on her childhood in early-20th-century Patrick County, Pearl Witt Kendrick recalled, “People just didn’t put up trees when I was a child.”

What did happen on Christmas day, Kendrick said, was

her father and brother going outside and firing the shotgun in the air. Apparently nothing said

“peace on earth” like a hail of gunfire; the tradition of “shooting in Christmas,” or its variant, “shooting in the New Year” (sometimes with fireworks rather than firearms), was remarked upon by a visitor to Virginia at least as far back as the 1700s. Back in Patrick County, Kendrick worried, “After hearing Mama tell the story of Christ’s birth, the Lord seemed so real and close to me that I was afraid Dad might accidental-ly shoot him.”

For those who think the 21st-cen-tury Christmas season has gone adrift, lost its spiritual moorings, you’d have found company among the Scots-Irish Presbyterians who settled in western Virginia. But they eschewed the holiday entirely, frowning upon it as un-Chris-tian and a transparent excuse for pagan revelry. As was dolefully recorded in the diary of one Philip Fithian, a vis-iting missionary, Christmas morning was “like other Days every Way calm & temperate,” absent even a single merry shout or gunshot.

Elsewhere across Virginia there

was certainly plenty of church-going. There were three churches—Baptist, Episcopal, and Methodist—in the Surry of Anne Rowell Worell’s child-hood in the 1930s, and as “it took everyone in the village to fill each church,” she recalled in a memoir of her childhood Christmases, “we attended all of them.” Nevertheless, nearly every family held an open house on Christmas Eve, serving

“their special eggnog and fruit-cake.” It was the only time alcohol appeared in Worell’s household, occasioning her mother to break out “her favorite Christmas drink, Blackberry Shrub,” as well. “I’ve never known what it was exact-ly but I thought it was wicked for sure.” Worell’s Christmas day was breakfast, lunch and dinner at a dif-ferent relative’s household each meal, crowned by the wine Jello—“very grown-up”—at supper.

Holy Cross Abbey in Berryville produces about 25,000 fruitcakes annually and ships them worldwide. Each week-ly batch of 700 cakes includes 2,000 pounds of (sherry-soaked) fruit and nuts, 1000 pounds of batter, and one shot of brandy for every cake. M o n a s t e r y Fr u i t c a ke .o rg

FEASTING, MERRYMAKING, DANCING AND VISITING - if there is one sustained theme across four centuries of Virginia Christmases, that would be it, and it started early. While the Virginia Company’s first Christmas in Jamestown seems to have gone unremarked, possibly

because the colonists were otherwise engaged fighting for their lives, by the second Christmas, John Smith was already setting a precedent for visiting with his neighbors and filling his belly. Smith and a small party of men, out seeking provisions for the gang back at the fort, were forced by a spell of bad weather “to keep Christmas among the Salvages,” in a Kecoughtan

village, Smith would write, where a jolly time—including a quantity of “Oysters, Fish, Flesh, Wild-foule, and good bread”—was had by all.

Later in the 1600s, a French visitor to Virginia noted “a great deal of carous-ing” at the home of William Fitzhugh. At Mt. Vernon, Martha Washington liked to have her favorite “Great Cake” served at Christmas; it’s recipe began, “Take 40 eggs

… .” In Patrick County, said Pearl Witt Kendrick, the first neighbor stopping by on Christmas morning with a shout of “Christmas gift!” was given a drink of whiskey, apple brandy or a hot whiskey beverage called ginger stew, brewed up by her father.

On the Virginia frontier in the Shenandoah Valley, notes the Frontier Culture Museum’s Bryan, German settlers in the 18th century brought along a prac-tice known as “belsnickeling,” which in-volved “going from house to house dressed up in bizarre costumes,” he says. “If you guessed who the people were, they had to take off their masks. If you didn’t, you had to give them a treat—sometimes alcohol.” Also sometimes known as “Kris Kringling” or “shanghaiing,” it persisted as late as the 1960s in the valley. Another prankish cus-tom was carried on by the young scholars of Virginia: “Barring out the schoolmas-ter” meant literally locking him out of the school until he promised his pupils a holi-day, a treat or possibly both.

In Richmond’s Church Hill in the ear-ly 1900s, Maggie Alease Taylor Jackson Howard’s mother would lay out a table with “every kind of cake on there you could think of,” including fruitcake, plain cake, pound cake and layer cake, as well as sweet potato, coconut, pumpkin and apple pies. When the neighbors dropped by, Mrs. Howard’s oral history recounts, she would encourage them to help them-

selves, saying, “Won’t you have some Christmas?” After one visitor took her rather too literally and consumed half the fruitcake in one sitting, she vowed never to put whole fruitcake on the table again and adopted a firm policy of setting out 10 slices at a time.

Others found occasion for charitable gestures. In the ever-expanding and exhausting frenzy of mod-ern holiday gifting, in which no acquaintance, no matter how slight, is considered unworthy of being recognized with a thoughtfully selected present, we might do well to recall that Colonial Virginians seemed to have been content with bestowing a few modest trifles and small coins upon children and underlings. A publication from the Virginia Baptist Historical Society notes how the “faithful and ear-nest pastor” in many congregations was remembered with a Christmas “pounding.” While the name seems to have derived from the measure of the butter, flour, sugar, preserves, hams and more that might be giv-en to fill up the minister’s pantry—or possibly from the increase in the pastor’s waistline thereafter—a pounding might also include clothing, even a load of coal, or, in the case of a congregation in White Stone, “the month of August to return to Culpeper County to visit the scenes of his childhood and rest under the spreading tree by the old oaken bucket.”

History does not tell us whether he was really hoping for an iPhone.

THE HOLIDAY SEASON,

V I R G I N I A L I V I N G 5V I R G I N I A L I V I N G4

Among some of the deeply musical Appalachian communities along the

Virginia/North Carolina line, “breaking up Christmas” was a traveling house party of music, dancing and food that started on Christmas day and lasted through Epiph-any. Paul Brown, a National Public Radio newscaster and reporter as well as a lifelong banjo player and music and folklore col-lector, says the tradition dates back at least to the beginning of the 20th century, if not before. “The party used to travel from cabin to cabin, from farm to farm, over this period

of two weeks.” The participants—children, adults, “everyone from the youngest to the oldest”—moved right along with the party.

“Breaking Up Christmas” was a song as well as a party, a simple, joyful tune that made the rounds with the celebrants, Brown says, first played just with fiddle and banjo but later by full string bands that included guitar, mandolin and bass. “‘Breaking up’ seems to be a rural term in that area for celebrating,” he explains.

By the late 1970s or early 1980s, break-ing up Christmas parties were rare, lost

to the changing economy and lifestyles of the region. But in recent years, says Brown, there have been some signs of a quiet revival. In 1996, Brown was producer and host for an NPR music special, Breaking Up Christmas: A Blue Ridge Mountain Holiday, available on CD from County Sales music in Floyd.

Every year, visitors from all 50 states and some 20 different countries, including hundreds from Germany

and the United Kingdom, make their way to the Walton’s Mountain Museum in Schuyler, south of Charlottesville, where Earl Hamner Jr., creator of the Walton family, grew up. When I confessed to museum PR coordinator Patrick O’Brian my long-burning passion for the oldest of the Walton siblings, his amused snort suggested I might need to take a number.

This year, fan the flames of your own Waltons mania at the museum’s Christmas Open House, December 1 and 2, when you can have your photo taken inside the three replicas of rooms from the television series set: the living room, the kitchen and—get this!—John-Boy’s bedroom.

Except for the occasional visitor who has confused Daddy, Mama and the Waltons clan with Ma, Pa and the Ingalls girls out in that Little House on the Prairie, O’Brian

A WALTONS OPEN HOUSE

says, “These Waltons fans are unique. Everything in Schuyler is like a shrine.”

( 4 3 4 ) 8 3 1 -2 0 0 0 o r Wa l t o n M u s e u m .o rg

FA N Y O U R F L A M E FOR THE TV FAMILY WITH A MOMENT IN JOHN-BOY’S BEDROOM

BREAKING UP CHRISTMASROVING PICKIN’ PARTIES

CountySales.com

The Hotel Roanoke opened on December 23, 1882. At the 125th anniversary open house on December 23, 2007, the hotel will bury a time capsule that

192

2

160

7

17

40

The BigTimesFo r s l a v e s , t h e y u l e l o g s y m b o l i z e d a r e s p i t e

The Staunton Kiwanis Club was chartered in 1922 and in its first year managed to muster up $200 to raise a public Christmas tree for “destitute children of the city and county,” says a Staunton Kiwanis Club history. In 1937, “In order to make possible a Christmas party for 215 under-privileged children, the club met twice without luncheon … .”1

81

1

18

82

The Elks National Home in Bedford has held an annual Christmas display every year since 1953, when most of the original painted scenery was made by resident Tom Sidonia, a former Barnum & Bailey Circus artist. Today, the display includes more than 50,000 lights and will welcome some 100,000 visitors. 19

66

E l k s H o m e .o rg1

95

3

V I R G I N I A L I V I N G 7V I R G I N I A L I V I N G6

Christmas a t L i g h t S p e e dBristol Speedway’s millions of lights raise millions for children’s charities

The Richmond Theatre caught fire on December 26, 1811, during a packed performance; the fire’s victims included the Virginia governor. The Monumental Church, now a National Historic Landmark, was built on the site as a memorial.

The house where the young George Washington and his family were living burned down on Christ-mas Eve of 1740.

John Smith spent his first Virginia Christmas season a captive of the Powhatan; the fateful and much mythologized encounter between Smith and Pocahontas took place on December 29, 1607.

Boat parades, tacky lights tours, illuminations, tours by candle and

lantern—this time of year, Virginia is lit up like, well, a Christmas tree. At Bristol Motor Speedway’s “Speedway in Lights”—yes, it’s just across the state line in Tennessee, but don’t quibble—something like four million lights (“You kind of lose track,” says Vice President of Public Affairs Kevin Triplett) cover a 4.5-mile route that begins with the Sea of Illumination (sharks, jellyfish, the usual sort of Christmas thing) and ends on the infield for hot cocoa, marshmallow

To the wistful nostalgia that casts Christmases past in soft focus,

history can be a bracing corrective. According to Tim Sinclair, park ranger at the Booker T. Washington National Monument in Franklin County, the Christmas season was often a bitter-sweet one for slaves.

At that time of year, on the farm where the monument now stands, slaves would traditionally receive their yearly allotment of clothing. Washing-ton, the future orator and leader of Tuskegee Institute, was born there in 1856. In 1864, Washington was given his very first pair of shoes—wooden soles with a leather strap tacked on, more like a crude pair of sandals, Sin-clair notes. That was not an insignifi-cant thing at a time when some Con-federate soldiers were going barefoot.

The season, called “the big times” by the slaves, offered a rare respite from labor, thanks to the common practice among many landowners of honoring the tradition of the Yule log: The thickest, knottiest log was cut and then immersed in water from one Christmas to the next, to prolong its burning time. Then, at Christmas, it was retrieved and laid in the fireplace. “It was understood that as long as the Yule log was burning, the slaves would

not work,” says Sinclair. “You would let the people look forwaard to that tiame to let off steam.”

During the big times, joyful reunions would also take place as those who had been leased out were allowed to return home and reunite with their families. But it was also the time of year when owners would an-nounce who would be leased out in the following year—and who would be sold.

It’s a sobering story, says Sinclair, but during the Washington Monument’s “Christmas In Old Virgin-ia” open house (this year on December 1), the interpre-tive staff also tries to point out the moments of levity and hope that prevailed. For example, visitors are invited to make a wish on a sprig of holly tossed into a fire, re-calling a tradition that held that such a wish would come true.

Then there’s that South-ern ingenuity for letting no part of the pig go unutilized.

In 1966, Coleman Garden Nursery in Portsmouth set out a Christmas scene featuring a mechanized, sleeping Santa snoring in his bed. When the nursery closed in 2003, Santa got an indoor bedroom with a portrait of Rudolph on the wall, as he, his elves, his toy factory—and some hundred other figures added over the 39 years of the nursery’s Yuletide display, all lovingly and painstakingly refurbished—took up annual holiday-season resi-dence in Portsmouth’s Courthouse Galleries.

A BRIEF TIMELINE

Consider, if you will, the pig-ear candleholders, as well as the “crackers” tossed into the fire for an entertainingly loud bang. In lieu of the hog bladder traditionally inflated for this purpose, the staff will provide you with a balloon.

( 5 4 0 ) 72 1 -2 0 94 o r N P S . g ov/ B o Wa

Co u r t h o u s e G a l l e r i e s . c o m

roasting and an ice skating rink under a tent. En route, pass the dinosaur village with fire-spewing volcano, the snowman-making machine and a reindeer wheeling Santa into the hospital after he falls off the roof (fear not for Santa—he comes out the other side doing cartwheels).

Admission is by the car-, van- or busload, and the proceeds benefit area children’s charities. In 10 years, the event has given away more than $2.5 million. Says Triplett, “Once we pay the light bill, all the rest goes to the charities.” ( 42 3 ) 9 8 9 - 6933 o r B r i s to lMoto rSpeedway.com