Memory of a Large Christmas (Norton Paperback)

Lillian Smith has here painted an enchanting portrait of Christmas as she knew it in childhood.

There were nine of the Smith children, and the grandmothers and cousins, and there was a big house that never quite ended, and there were the smokehouse and hog-killing and the shaking of the pecan trees, and all the delicious doings that went on in a nineteenth-century kitchen, which lingered into the early decades of the twentieth century. But above all, there was a father who, as impresario and ritual maker, polished family events so that, as the author says,” Even today, a half century later, they blind the eyes with their shine.” She goes on to day, “But perhaps what holds it so fresh in my memory is the fact that along with all our physical play and work we lived a wild life of imagination: it was hard to keep it from spilling over into reality and painful when reality would step up and prune our flowering. That is why in this memory of Christmas in a small southern town there are sudden excursions to Versailles and the Hall of Mirrors and to the small-town Opera House and the jail in search of a Christmas gift for the parents; and it is why an elegant coffin could figure so prominently in the festivities. And why, one year, forty-eight ‘real’ convicts ate Christmas dinner with us.”

As a young child in the early 1900s, writer and civil rights crusader Lillian Smith lived an idyllic, small-town life. Of the many customs by which her and her eight brothers' and sisters's days were ordered, none are so fondly remembered by Smith as those of the Christmas season. With a lighthearted touch, she recalls such times as when the family hosted forty-eight chain-gang convicts, along with their guards, to a holiday feast and the time her older brothers almost bought an elegant coffin for their parents's gift. Of far greater meaning to Smith, however, are the remembered rituals, the year-after-year sights, sounds, smells, and tastes: first the hog killings and the shaking of the pecan trees just around the time Big Granny, Little Granny, and a cousin or two began to arrive; then making gifts and hanging stockings; and finally the big day, filled with presents, shooting firecrackers, and too much homemade candy, six-layered coconut cake, and "sweet potato pone, fancied up".