Eliot Wigginton - A Foxfire Christmas

First published by The University of North Carolina Press in 1996

1989 by The Foxfire Fund, Inc.

New Preface 1996 by
The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America

Design by April Leidig-Higgins

Library of Congress
Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A foxfire Christmas / edited by Eliot
Wigginton and his students; with a new
preface by Bobby Ann Starnes.1st ed.
p. cm. Originally published: New York:
Doubleday, 1990.

ISBN 0-80784618-X (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. ChristmasAppalachian Region.
2. Appalachian RegionSocial life and
customs. I. Wigginton, Eliot.
GT4986.A77 F68 1996 96-20343
394.26630974dc20 CIP

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

00 99 98 97 96 5 4 3 2 1

A Foxfire Christmas

Christmas Day, 1915. A new snow has fallen overnight outside a one-room hand-built log cabin tucked into a valley somewhere in the hills of the Appalachian Mountains. Roosters crow as the rising sun slowly spreads its light across the white ground, and the family inside begins to stir. The six children in the loft have been awake for hours whispering about Santa Claus and quietly laughing over the tricks they played on their neighbors while serenading the night before. They can hardly contain their excitement as they anxiously await the sound of their father grinding the morning coffeetheir cue to get up. Below, their simple stockings dangle from the fireplace mantel, each heavy with the weight of three apples, two oranges, stick candy, and the traditional Brazil nut wedged in the toe. Santa Claus has been good to them this year. When these treasures have been found and the morning chores done, the children will spend their morning outside playing in the snow while their mother and father prepare for the traditional Christmas dinner. The salted pork that has been in the smokehouse since October will finally be brought out, and the sorghum that was put up in stoneware jars late last summer will come off the shelf to flavor the cakes for dessert.

After dinner, the family will gather around the fireplace to talk, laugh, and pray The younger ones will silently fall asleep as their father pulls out his old wooden fiddle. Night falls as the music drifts out of the house, and Christmas is over.

There are almost as many traditions in the mountains as there are people. This typical Christmas scene is only one of the many we came across this spring after Diana Klemin asked us to create Doubledays 1985 Christmas card. Diana was the art director at Doubleday who supervised the design of the covers of the first Foxfire books, and she has been a longtime friend of Foxfire.

When her request was received, many of the students were busy trying to meet the deadline for the next issue of Foxfire magazine, and others were finishing Foxfire 9. Still, the sound of A Foxfire Christmas sparked our interest, and the class voted unanimously to go ahead.

Faced with the task of going on completely new interviews to find answers to Dianas request for stories about the small, pleasant delights of Christmasthe simple gift for each child or the one gift for the entire family, the hymns sung, the Christmas dinner, the going to church, the events of the day (tending the farm animals, completion of the usual round of chores, etc.), we got busy immediately In less than two weeks, we went on almost twenty interviews and transcribed and edited close to forty-five hours of tape. In the process, we discovered Christmas traditions and stories. Some told us jokes that were played on neighbors and friends during the season while others described family dinners and favorite gifts. But few neglected to mention the simplicity of their earlier Christmases. Talking to these people helped us discover a little more about ourselves and the meaning of the season.