<\/p>\n
For the thirtieth consecutive year this program today’s devoted to Christmas. There isn’t much new we can say about it because about every aspect of the observance has received some comment in one or another of our annual Christmas programs.<\/p>\n
Forty-two years ago in 1935, the famous Maine author, Robert Tristram Coffin wrote a delightful account of Christmas on his boyhood saltwater farm on the Maine coast in the last decade of the 19th century. The article was first published in the magazine American Girl under the title Christmas in Paradise, and was later put into the form of an attractive booklet of 24 pages printed in a limited edition. While many libraries, public or private, have most of Coffin’s works, especially his volumes Of poetry entitled Saltwater Farm and Strange Holiness, as well as such prose writings as Maine Doings and Kennebec, Cradle of America, this precious little Christmas volume is not so easily available.<\/p>\n
The little book tells us what Christmas was like on a Maine coastal farm more than 75 years ago. This is what he says about the Christmas tree: “The tree will have a top so high that it will have to be bent over and run along the ceiling of the sitting room. It will be the best fir from the nearby woods, selected from 1000 perfect trees, and every bough will be like an old-fashioned fan opened wide. It will have been brought to the house on a handsled.”<\/p>\n
On that saltwater farm the tree was not put up and decorated beforehand, but actually brought in on Christmas morning and the decorating waited until most of the relatives had assembled; then everyone took a hand in adorning the tree. In fact the long strings of cranberry and popcorn were not made until all the folks were there.<\/p>\n
Who were those folks? Besides the immediate family, Coffin says there were a lot of aunts, and that leads me to a comment on the pronunciation of that word designating a certain female relative. Middle Westerners scoff at our pronunciation of aunt and tell us we ought to say ant, well I disagree. Coffin’s sentence reads, “There are a lot of aunts in the house.” Now read that aloud with the Middle West pronunciation: “There are a lot of ants in the house.” Hearing, not reading, that sentence, how would any ordinary listener interpret it with the Western pronunciation, wouldn’t he naturally assume that the house was full of those pesky insects, the ants?<\/p>\n
Coffin says one of the aunts made wreaths, another made rock candy, and another bossed the trimming of the tree. Of course there were also uncles, useful to hold one end of molasses taffy while a kid held the other end, watching it turn into cornsilk as the two twisted it again and again. Of course the uncles smoked, but not cigarettes. They had pipes made either of clay or corn cobs and occasionally one fastidious uncle would light a big, fat cigar. Their smoking, says Coffin, was a help to the youngsters who had been trying out an acorn pipe or a sweet fern cigarette out in the woodshed. The uncles smoke smothered and quite concealed any sign of the boys’ smoking. Uncles were useful too to save the boys some future work. They could be coaxed into sawing and splitting enough stove wood to last for at least a couple of weeks,<\/p>\n
Along with the aunts and uncles there was a host of cousins – own cousins, second cousins, cousins once removed and kissing cousins, he ones and she ones, the size you could sit on and the size that could sit on you.<\/p>\n
“Every Christmas”, says Coffin, my father’s house was the gathering place of an Anglo-Saxon clan. Father wanted people in squads, men with wide moustaches, with flowing beards, men with smooth faces, and men with bald heads. Always present were the hired men, treated as special guests, as befitted the hired man on a saltwater farm. They got the best of everything and boys were warned not to criticize them or say anything to rile them, as we could do with the uncles. If the hired man smacked you for spilling coffee in his lap, you must take it meekly. “Finally there were always lots of babies, everywhere under foot and in full cry.”<\/p>\n
Naturally Coffin devotes much space to the feast of the day, the. Christmas dinner. The piece de resistance – roasted goose – no one goose was ever big enough to serve that crowd. Whole geese disappeared right beforeyour eyes. Let Coffin tell us about it. “It took a mighty big table – indeed more than one – to seat that mob. The usual dining table had to be enlarged by standing a row of barrels upright at each end and putting bread boards and ironing boards on top of them, It was the length of a house from where father set at one end to mother at the other.<\/p>\n
“The largest of the geese was always given a name like Oliver Cromwell or Old Ironsides. When father pulled out the snow-white wishbone, we all applauded. By the time some of the dishes got down to mother, I fear she got the leavings, but there was always enough for all. Anyhow, mother said the best of Christmas for her was watching other people eat\u00b7.”<\/p>\n
The significance of the white wishbone was the age-old superstition that accompanied it. If it was white, not brownish, that meant lots of snow until April, and of course that meant good sliding for the kids. Sometimes goose was not the only Christmas meat. Coffin tells us:”If Uncle Tom came, he always brought a racoon to be roasted and surrounded by sweet potatoes. Both goose and coon were accompanied by all sorts of winter vegetables raised on that saltwater farm.<\/p>\n
“Then came the dessert – mince pies, pumpkin pies, apple pies, tarts filled with mother’s wild strawberry jam sparkling like rubies. A huge fruit cake left to mature for a full month became a narrow isthmus when it got down to mother’s end of the table. But the prize dessert of all was the immense apple pudding steamed in a big pail, and served with a covering of orange and lemon sauce. We always cut that pudding with a string, then let the sauce make a delicious ocean around it.”<\/p>\n
It seems that on that saltwateT farm the actual decorating of the tree did, not take place until after dinner. In fact, by established household ritual, it was the immediate post-pran~ial event. “The best thing about Christmas:’ writes Coffin, “was everybody doing the same thing at the same time. All fell to and strung cranberries and popcorn. Everybody had a needle and thread in his mouth, and all got in each, others way.”<\/p>\n
Finally the tree was trimmed, presents hung on it or placed around it, then all went for a hayride over the snow. The farm hayrack had been put on runners and a comfortable bed of hay placed within it. All piled in, no matter how crowded. Small cousins fell out over the sides and nobody noticed.<\/p>\n
After the ride it was time to distribute the presents. This is how Coffin tells it. “When the sun had dipped down into the spruces and all were back in the sittingroom, the small boys became anxious for the passing out of the gifts. There was a lot of nonsense of tiptoeing up and edging a package when no one was looking, but most of the folks knew what they were going to get anyway. Aunt Ellie has been making dinahs for Christmas everyone of the past 40 years, and she doesn’t care who knows it. They are all the same except for the little kids, whose undergarments had forked red-flannel pants instead of petticoats. There would be a few boughten presents – a turtle of cardboard in a dainty glass box, hung on springs and swimming for dear life with all four feet. There would be pop guns streaked with red and yellow lines. Somebody will get a Swiss music box that would squeak out a ghostly “Last Rose of Summer” if tenderly cranked. There would be little bottles of perfume, candies with real syrup in them, for which I used to live through the year in anticipation. And there would be a German doll for every girl who was there, with yellow hair and pink puffy cheeks looking as if she was always blowing bubbles. And we mustn’t forget the socks and mittens and wristers made by the more practical of the aunts, nor must we fail to mention Aunt Louise’s candied peel that she won’t tell anyone how she makes. Every child gets a sled with a bluebird or a robin painted on it. You will never have a present to match that, though you grow to be as rich as Midas. Of course, everyone got a cornball as big as a melon, with the resulting molasses allover your fingers.”<\/p>\n
Then Coffin tells us: “The peak of the party is reached when the whole tribe sits down in rocking chairs or lie on their bellies in front of the fireplace. The presents have been tucked away. The last lamp is out. Shadows from the fireplace dance on the ceiling, light up the steel engravings of General Grant, and another of Major McCullough escaping from Kentucky into Ohio with 10,000 yelling redskins at his heels. All the babies have been hushed and put to bed. The time has now come to push the cat out of father’s favorite chair, and let father talk. He doesn’t recount Dicken’s Christmas Carol, not in this house. He will tell about the brilliant young ladies of Philadelphia who had a piano so big they kept it on the front porch and let the music come in through the window. Then he would work his way to the Caliph of Bagdad, who had a daughter so homely that he kept a sock over her head when young men came to call. One day she fell down a well, came up a beauty and found a handsome husband. You won’t put that story in the Arabian Nights but then father was not Sherherazade. Without a hitch, father then moves from Bagdad to Big Bethel in our Civil War, and tells how the campfires looked like the Milky Way all night long before the battle. And before he gets through you will be so sleepy it will take two uncles to carry you to bed.”<\/p>\n
Robert Coffin and I were contemporaries, both born in the 1890s. My inland Maine boyhood Christmases were somewhat different from his. We never saw a roast goose; we trimmed our tree well before Christmas eve; we had no houseful of relatives with us Christmas was an intimate own family day. It was at Thanksgiving, not Christmas, that we gathered in one place. But, since I had many relatives living in the same Maine village, we usually did see them all at one time or another on Christmas Day.<\/p>\n
But whether beside a Maine inland lake in a woolen mill village or on a saltwater farm beside the turbulent Atlantic, for children Christmas was in both places the great day of days. And with that we bid you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.<\/p>\n
Year: 1978<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Read the script for “Little Talks” program #1145, Broadcast on December 25, 1977<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":405,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27136,35296],"tags":[],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9764"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/405"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9764"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9764\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}