THROUGH
MOUNTAIN MISTS
Early Settlers of
Their
Descendants...Their Stories...Their Achievements
Lifting the
Mists of History on Their Way of Life
By: Ethelene Dyer Jones
We
didn’t have firecrackers and fireworks popping off that Christmas. In fact, I doubt if we had ever had the
spectacular fireworks that some people see and marvel at on certain
holidays
like the Fourth of July and Christmas.
But we did have fireworks of a
frightening sort that year, and they did not come from detonation of
firecrackers or sparklers.
This is how the true story goes as I
remember it and as it was told to me.
My father had loaded up his family in
our farm wagon, with our two trusty mules pulling our rig.
We had feed for the animals for overnight,
and, because the weather was very cold, we children were well-clad in
warm wool
clothing with blankets wrapped about us to ward off the cold. Old black flat irons had been warmed, wrapped
in towels and placed at our feet in the wagon to add warmth as we
journeyed
four miles over the country road to Grandma’s house to spend Christmas
Eve and
Christmas Day.
Mother and Daddy sat “up front” in the
wagon on the bench especially made to be placed in the wagon for the
driver and
one passenger. We children rode behind
them, in the bed of the wagon, softened by the hay for the mules, our
blankets
to keep us warm, and the meager presents we were able to take to
Grandmother
and others who would be at her house.
The time of this trip was about 1936 and the Great Depression
was still
bringing economic hardships to everyone.
We country people were fortunate.
We had plenty to eat we had grown on the farm, and we had
shelter and
clothing, although the clothing was much-worn and hand-me-downs.
A sense of excitement swept over us,
for, although we went to see Grandma fairly often, going at
Christmastime was
special. Some of my cousins my same age
would be there from
Grandma’s house was built in 1850 by
her father, so it was an old structure.
It started out as a log cabin.
The original cabin was somewhere beneath the added rooms and
lumber that
had seen the cabin grow from its former one-room and lean-to kitchen to
three
large rooms across the front, an ell added-on dining room and kitchen,
two
large porches, front and back, and an attic that held all sorts of
mysteries
and delights for curious children who played hide-and-seek there and
found
plenty of treasures to entertain us in old storage trunks.
There were three fireplaces and chimneys in
the house, one in Grandma’s front room, one in Uncle Hedden’s front
room, and
one in the kitchen. All fireplaces were
burning large logs on that particularly cold Christmas Eve.
Arriving at Grandma’s house well
before dark, we played outside some even in the cold before supper
(that’s what
we called the evening meal then.) Then
Aunt Dora, my Uncle Hedden’s wife who, because Grandma was so elderly
at this
time, was the “lady of the house,” called us in to wash up and eat the
steaming
meat stew she had prepared for her large family and all the guests
present for
that Christmas Eve feast. With dark
coming early, there was no more playing outside after supper. How we managed to settle down enough to go to
bed that night, I’ll never quite know.
Exhaustion probably had overtaken us.
Because there were not enough beds, several of us children had
the
delight of sleeping on “pallets” made with our warm blankets on the
floor in
front of the fire. The sandman finally
took over and we drifted off to sleep.
Then, sometime after falling asleep,
we were roused with the excited shouts of “Fire! Fire!
Get up!
Get outside as quickly as possible!”
We instantaneously changed from
sleeping to leaping, heading for the closest door to the outside,
somehow
remembering to take our blankets with us to guard us from the cold. The adults urged us children across the road
and into the barn, where we watched from the barn hall with wide-eyed
fright.
The adults formed a bucket brigade
from the spring near the house and began a frantic movement of water to
fight
the fire. With a tall ladder propped
against the roof, the water was lifted by climbers and poured on the
blaze
shooting from one chimney.
From our safety in the barn, we
children could see that the fire was leaping from the chimney on the
north side
of the house, the one from the fireplace in “Grandma’s room.” The men and women worked swiftly, and
soon
the blaze was under control. Grandma’s
house had been saved and everyone in it.
“What happened?” we children wanted to
know as we left the barn and went back to the house that had seemed to
be in
such great danger but was saved from destruction. “The
soot caught fire in the chimney,”
someone explained to us. “We built up
the fires too large and we had not properly cleaned out the chimneys,”
someone
else said.
Despite the
Whether it was in my sleep and dreams
or whether I actually saw Santa descend, fill our stockings with candy,
an
apple, an orange, some nuts and one hand-made toy for each child, I
learned a
few great principles about the season.
Love of parents and family is better than a warm blanket anytime. When an emergency arises, it takes
level-headedness and doing what has to be done to meet the challenge. And, indeed, if a child is good, obeys his
parents, and does his best, Santa will come on Christmas Eve despite
the
frightening fireworks in the chimney and the failed economic times.
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