XVI Home at Christmas — A Candy-Pull and Hog-Killing
We went home at Christmas!
Twenty years were to elapse before I should spend another Christmas week in the country. We did not know this then. Not a hitch impeded the smooth unrolling of the weeks of expectation and the days of preparation for the holidays. We were to set out on Monday. On Friday, Spotswood drove up to our door, and Mary Anne, my mother’s own maid, alighted. That evening James Ivey reported for escort duty. Even elderly women seldom travelled alone at that date. About young girls were thrown protective parallels that would widen our college-woman’s mouth with laughter and her eyes with amazement. There were no footpads on the stage-road from Richmond to Powhatan, and had these gentry abounded in the forests running down to the wheel-tracks, stalwart Spotswood and a shot-gun would have kept them at bay. Maid and outrider were the outward sign of unspoken and unwritten conventions rooted in love of womankind. The physical weakness of the sex was their strength; their dependence upon stronger arms and tender hearts their warrant for any and every demand they chose to make upon their natural protectors.
We had none of these things in mind that joyful Monday morning when Uncle Carus, on one hand, and James Ivey on the other, helped us into the carriage. Carriage-steps were folded up, accordion-wise, and doubled back and down upon the floor of the vehicle when not in use. The clatter, as the coach-door was opened and the steps let down, was the familiar accompaniment of successive arrivals of guests at hospitable homes, and worshippers at country churches.
The trim flight fell with a merry rattle for the two happiest girls in the State, and we sprang in, followed by Mary Anne. We were wedged snugly in place by parcels that filled every corner and almost touched the roof. Presents we had been buying for a month with our own pocket-money and making in our few spare hours, were bound into bundles and packed in boxes. The wells under the cushioned seats were crammed with fragiles and confectionery, the like of which our lesser sisters and brothers had never tasted.
Uncle Carus prophesied a snow-storm. My mother used to say that he was a wise weather-prophet. We stubbornly discredited the prediction until we had left the city spires five miles behind us, and James Ivey’s overcoat and leggings (some called them “spatter-dashes”) were dotted with feathery flakes. Whereupon we discovered that there was nothing in the world jollier than travelling in a snow-storm, and grew wildly hilarious in the prospect. The snow fell steadily and in grim earnest. By the time we got to Flat Rock, where we were to have the horses and ourselves fed, the wheels churned up, at every revolution, mud that was crushed strawberry in color, topped with whiteness that might have been whipped cream; for the roads were heavy by reason of an open winter. This was Christmas snow. We exulted in it as if we had had a hand in the making. Our gallant outrider, albeit a staid youth of three-and-twenty, fell in with our humor. He made feeble fun of his own appearance as each wrinkle in his garments became a drift, and his dark hair was like a horsehair wig such as we had seen in pictures of English barristers. His bay horse was a match to our iron-grays, and the twelve hoofs were ploughing through a level fall of six inches before we espied the tremulous sparks we recognized as village windows.
Our throats ached with laughing and our hearts with great swelling waves of happiness, as we tumbled out of our seats—and our bundles after us—at the gate of the long, low house that might have been mean in eyes accustomed to rows of three-storied brick “residences” on city streets. Every door was flung wide; every window was red with fire and lamp light.
We had fried chicken and waffles, hot rolls, ham, beaten biscuits, honey, three kinds of preserves, and, by special petition of all the children, a mighty bowl of snow and cream, abundantly sweetened, for supper. This dispatched, and at full length, the journey having made us hungry, and the sight of us having quickened the appetites of the rest, we sat about the fire in the great “chamber” on the first floor, that was the throbbing heart of the home, and talked until ten o’clock. The faithful clock that hung above the mantel did not vary five minutes from the truth in that number of years; but it was dumbly discreet, never obtruding an audible reminder of the flight of hours. I saw one of the same pattern in a curio shop last week. The salesman asked fifty dollars for it.
The chimney in “the chamber” drew better than any other in the house. A fire was kindled on that hearth, night and morning, for nine months in the year. My mother maintained that the excellent health of her young family was due in part to that fact. A little blaze dispelled the lingering dampness of the morning and the gathering fogs of night. She knew nothing of germs, benevolent and malevolent, but she appreciated the leading fact that cold and humidity signify danger, heat and dryness go with health.
I coveted no girl’s home and apparel, as Mea and I snuggled down under our blankets on the mattress my father was so far in advance of his times as to insist should be substituted for a feather-bed in each bedroom occupied by a child. The “whim” was one of the “notions” that earned for him the reputation of eccentricity with conservative neighbors.
Our windows were casements, and rattled sharply in blasts that had thrashed the snow-storm into a tempest. The wind pounded, as with hammers, upon the sloping roof over our happy heads. Longfellow had not yet written
“My little ones are folded like the flocks,”
but I know my mother felt it.
She came near saying it when I told her at the breakfast-table that I fell asleep, saying to myself:
“He’ll go into the barn and keep himself warm
And hide his head under his wing.”
“I could think of nothing, whenever I awoke, but the mother sheep with her lambs all with her in the fold,” was her answer. “And of ‘the hollow of His hand.’ We have much to make us thankful this Christmas.”
“To make us thankful!” She was ever on the watch for that. Like Martin Luther’s little bird, she “sat on her twig, content, and let God take care.”
A bright sun left little of what had promised to be a deep snow, by Christmas Day. Four Christmas-guns were fired at midnight of Christmas Eve in four different quarters of the village. That is, holes were drilled with a big auger into the heart of a stout oak or hickory, and stuffed with powder. At twelve o’clock a torch was applied by a fast runner, who took to his heels on the instant to escape the explosion. The detonation was that of a big cannon. Sometimes, the tree was rent apart. That was a matter of small moment in a region where acres of forest-lands were cleared for tobacco fields by the primitive barbarism of girdling giant trees that had struck their roots into the virgin soil and lifted strong arms to heaven for centuries. From midnight to sunrise the sound of “pop-crackers” and pistol-shots was hardly intermitted by a minute’s silence. With the awakening of quieter, because older folk, the air rang with shouts of “Christmas gift!” addressed impartially to young and old, white and black.
The salutation was a grievous puzzle and positive annoyance to our New-England grandmother, the first Christmas she passed with us. By the time she was ready for breakfast she had emptied her pocket of loose coins, and bestowed small articles of dress and ornament upon three or four of the (to her apprehension) importunate claimants. When she made known the grievance—which she did in her usual imperious fashion—my father shouted with laughter. With difficulty he drilled into her mind that the greeting was not a petition, still less a demand. From that day he forbade any of us to say “Christmas gift!” to “Old Mistis,” as the servants called her. We children wished her, “A merry Christmas.” The servants never learned the unaccustomed form. The old lady did not enter into the real significance of the words that offended her. Nor, for that matter, did one out of a hundred of those who had used it all their lives, as each Christmas rolled around. It never dawned upon me until I heard how Russian peasants and Russian nobility alike greet every one they meet on Easter morning with—“The Lord is risen,” receiving the answer, “He is risen indeed!” The exultant cry of “Christmas gift!” was a proclamation of the best thing that ever came into the world. The exchange of holiday offerings at the festal season commemorates the same. All over Christendom it is an act of grateful, if too often blind, obedience to the command—“Freely ye have received, freely give.”
There were twelve servants in our family—eight adults and four children. Not one was overlooked in the distribution of presents that followed breakfast and family prayers. The servants were called in to morning and evening prayers as regularly as the white members were assembled for the service. The custom was universal in town and country, and was, without doubt, borrowed from English country life—the model for Virginian descendants. Men and women took time to pray, and made haste to do nothing. We prate long and loudly now of deep breathing. We practised it in that earlier generation.
On Christmas night we had a “molasses stew.” We have learned to say “candy-pull” since then. A huge cauldron of molasses was boiled in the kitchen—a detached building of a story-and-a-half, standing about fifty feet from “the house.” Gilbert—the dining-room servant, who would be “a butler” now—brought it into the dining-room when it was done to a turn, and poured it into great buttered platters arranged around the long table. All of us, girls and boys, had pinned aprons or towels over our festive garments, and put back our cuffs from our wrists. My mother set the pace in the pulling. She had a reputation for making the whitest and most spongy candy in the county, and she did it in the daintiest way imaginable. Buttering the tips of her fingers lightly, she drew carefully from the surface of the platter enough of the cooling mixture for a good “pull.” In two minutes she had an amber ribbon, glossy and elastic, that bleached fast to cream-color under her rapid, weaving motion, until she coiled or braided completed candy—brittle, dry, and porous—upon a dish lined with paper. She never let anybody take the other end of the rope; she did not butter her fingers a second time, and used the taper tips alone in the work, and she had the candy on the dish before any of the others had the sticky, scalding mass in working order. We dipped our fingers again and again in butter and, when hard bestead, into flour, which last resort my mother scorned as unprofessional, and each girl had a boy at the other end of her rope. It was graceful work when done secundum artem. The fast play of hands; the dexterous toss and exchange of the ends of shining strands that stiffened too soon if not handled aright; the strain upon bared wrists and strong shoulders as the great ropes hardened; the laughing faces bent over the task; the cries of feigned distress as the immature confectionery became sticky, or parted into strings, under careless manipulation; the merry peals of laughter at defeat or success—made the Christmas frolic picturesque and gay. I wondered then, and I have often asked since, why no painter has ever chosen as a subject this one of our national pastimes.
A homelier, but as characteristic an incident of that Christmas—the last we were to have in the country home—was hog-killing.
The “hog and hominy,” supposed by an ignorant reading-public to have formed the main sustenance of the Virginian planter and his big family, are as popularly believed to have been raised upon his own farm or farms. Large herds of pigs were born and brought up on Virginia lands. Perhaps one-half of the pork cured into bacon by country and by village folk, was bought from Kentucky drovers. Early in the winter—before the roads became impassable—immense droves of full-grown hogs crowded the routes leading over mountain and valley into the sister State. We had notice of the approach of one of these to our little town before it appeared at the far end of the main street, by the hoarse grunting that swelled into hideous volume—unmistakable and indescribable—a continuous rush of dissonance, across which were projected occasional squeals.
A drove had entered the village a week before Christmas, and rested for the night in the wide “old field” back of the Bell Tavern. Citizens of the Court House and from the vicinity had bought freely from the drovers. More than twenty big-boned grunters were enclosed in a large pen at the foot of our garden, and fed lavishly for ten days, to recover them from the fatigue of the journey that left them leaner than suited the fancy of the purchaser. On the morning of the cold day appointed for the “killing,” they were driven to a near-by “horse-branch” and washed. At noon they were slaughtered at a spot so distant from the house that no sound indicative of the deed reached our ears. Next day the carcasses were duly cut up into hams, shoulders, middlings (or sides of bacon), chines, and spareribs.
Lean leavings from the dissection were apportioned for sausage-meat; the heads and feet would be made into souse (headcheese); even the tails, when roasted in the embers, were juicy tidbits devoured relishfully by children, white and black.
Not an edible atom of the genial porker went to waste in the household of the notable housewife. The entrails, cleaned and scalded into “chitterlings,” were accounted a luscious delicacy in the kitchen. They rarely appeared upon the table of “white folks.” I never saw them dished for ourselves, or our friends. Yet I have heard my father tell of meeting John Marshall, then Chief Justice of the United States, in the Richmond streets one morning, as the great man was on his way home from the Old Market. He had a brace of ducks over one arm, and a string of chitterlings swung jauntily from the other.
And why not? Judge Marshall had “Hudibras” at his tongue’s end, and could have quoted:
“His warped ear hung o’er the strings,
Which was but souse to chitterlings.”
The Virginia house-mother had classic precedent for the utilization of what her granddaughter accounts but offal. I once heard a celebrated divine say, unctuously:
“‘Hog-killing time’ is to me the feast of the year.”
And nobody stared, or smiled, or said him “Nay.” Chine, sparerib, and sausage, such as titillated our palates in the first half of the nineteenth century, are not to be had now for love or money. The base imitations sold to us in the shambles are the output of “contract work.”