Christmas in Plains

Memories

Jimmy Carter, Amy Carter

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2001
• ISBN:
  9780743225649
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Biographies politiques

Jimmy Carter remembers Christmas in Plains, Georgia, the source of spiritual strength, respite, friendship, and vacation fun in this charming portrait. In a beautifully rendered portrait, Jimmy Carter remembers the Christmas days of his Plains boyhood—the simplicity of family and community gift-giving, his father's eggnog, the children's house decorations, the school Nativity pageant, the fireworks, Luke's story of the birth of Christ, and the poignancy of his black neighbors' poverty.Later, away at Annapolis, he always went home to Plains, and during his Navy years, when he and Rosalynn were raising their young family, they spent their Christmases together recreating for their children the holiday festivities of their youth.Since the Carters returned home to Plains for good, they have always been there on Christmas Day, with only one exception in forty-eight years: In 1980, with Americans held hostage in Iran, Jimmy, Rosalynn, and Amy went by themselves to Camp David, where they felt lonely. Amy suggested that they invite the White House staff and their families to join them and to celebrate.Nowadays the Carters' large family is still together at Christmastime, offering each other the gifts and the lifelong rituals that mark this day for them.With the novelist's eye that enchanted readers of his memoir An Hour Before Daylight, Jimmy Carter has written another American classic, in the tradition of Truman Capote's A Christmas Memory and Dylan Thomas's A Child's Christmas in Wales.

1

Christmas as a Child

To understand what Christmases were like when I was a child, one has to know a little about where I lived and, of course, the times. I grew up on a farm in Southwest Georgia during the days of the Great Depression. In An Hour Before Daylight, I described my life in the rural community of Archery, about three miles west of town. Our family moved from Plains to the farm in 1928, when I was four years old. U.S. Highway 280, then a narrow dirt road, was fifty feet in front of our house, a modest structure whose plans had been provided by Sears, Roebuck and Company. Paralleling the road was the Seaboard Airline Railway, heavily traveled in those days by both passenger and freight trains.

But now everything has changed. There is usually only one train a day, and most of the people have moved away. With the coming of modern transportation and the legal end of racial segregation, people have gone their separate ways, and the intimacy between black and white folks has disappeared. But Christmas is still as important as ever, both in its religious meaning and as a time for friends and relatives to get together.

•  •  •

In those earlier days, all my close neighbors were black families. Johnny and Milton Raven, Edmund Hollis, and A. D. Davis were the intimate friends with whom I played, fought, fished, hunted, slept, ate, and worked in the cotton and peanut fields that were owned by my father. The other boys lived down the road a half a mile, but A.D. stayed on our farm with his uncle and aunt, and he was an inseparable companion. In a way, the adults had given us to each other.

When I was five years old, Daddy arranged for me to begin selling peanuts during the summer months, as soon as the crop began to mature. I would go into one of the fields, pull up a small wagonload of vines out of the ground, haul them to our yard, pick off the nuts, wash them carefully, soak them overnight in salty water, boil them early the next morning, and put a half-pound in each of about twenty paper bags. Then I would walk down the railroad track to town and sell the boiled peanuts on the street for a total of about a dollar, usually finishing this task by noon. But even with this daily routine and my time in school, I always felt that I was in an alien environment when I was in Plains, away from my black friends and with the “town folks,” the white children who were my age, and in the unfamiliar places where we sometimes played together.

In my earliest memories of Christmas, beginning about 1930 and including my childhood and formative years, I was closely encapsulated with just a few others: my parents, my older sister, Gloria, and our baby sister, Ruth. (My brother, Billy, came along much later.) My father was a landowner and also had a small commissary store adjacent to our house, so our relatively prosperous family life was similar to those of our relatives and friends who lived in Plains, and the quality of the gifts we exchanged was also equal to theirs. Compared to those of our black neighbors, with whom I spent most of my time, Christmas days for us white folks were isolated islands of affluence.

The Great Depression was a time of almost incredible poverty, not only in Southwest Georgia but all over the country. Although my father was a landowner, cash money was scarce for us and for everyone else. Land seemed to have the only permanent economic value, and hard work was the key to survival. The celebration of Christmas during these times was quite different from what we know today: much more frugal, but with a degree of personal intimacy that brings back warm recollections.

2

My Family

My father, Earl Carter, was a successful farmer and businessman who—like everyone else in the community and, indeed, the nation—abided by the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that “separate but equal” treatment of the races was the law of the land. So far as I knew, this premise was never questioned in those days by either white liberals or black activists. Daddy was known as someone who cared for his land, made good crops, was honest, and treated people fairly. He was an outstanding baseball player, a good diver, hunter, and fisherman, and the best tennis player in the community. My father was my idol, and my highest goal in life was to please him and to enhance my value as a worker on the farm.

When I was a baby he began calling me Hot Shot, and for the rest of his life I was “Hot.” I always knew I was in trouble when he shifted to the more formal “Jimmy.”

My mother, Lillian, was a registered nurse, who served almost as a doctor in our remote Archery community. Both by temperament and as a member of the medical profession, Mama ignored the racial distinctions that were the bedrock of our Southern rural society. On most days, neither of our parents was at home during daylight hours, and at work or play we children were immersed in the culture of our black neighbors.

Mama and Daddy were avid baseball fans, and usually took a summer vacation to see games in a different major-league city each year. When they were away on these weeklong excursions or just for one or two nights, I stayed with Rachel and Jack Clark, whose house was the one nearest ours. It was a tiny shack, with a small bedroom, a larger space with a fireplace, and a shed in back for a kitchen. Rachel fixed me a pallet stuffed with corn shucks on the floor, and would let me move it so I could sleep close to the fire on cold nights. I was perfectly at home there. I knew, of course, that Jack was almost coal-black and Rachel was light tan, but in those boyhood days I never gave a thought to differences between them and me because of color.

Jack Clark was the only person on the place who was employed every day of the year. He was in charge of the barn and livestock, and he joined with Daddy in teaching me how to perform my duties on the farm. His wife, Rachel, took me to pick blackberries and plums, helped me in the cotton and peanut fields, and taught me moral values, respect for God’s natural world, and how to catch fish in the local creeks. The Clarks were surrogate parents for me.

•  •  •

Other than my mother and father, black people mostly shaped my life. Although my father was a prominent landowner, the person who gave me a vision of fame and fortune was Bishop William Decker Johnson, the richest and most prominent citizen of our community. He was successful in every way, being responsible for churches in five Midwestern states and the founder and proprietor of a small college and an insurance company in Archery. It was news for the whole area when the bishop came home, riding regally in his chauffeured Cadillac or Packard.

Bishop Johnson was a friend of my father’s, and on special occasions he would invite our family to hear his powerful sermons in St. Mark’s church, just across the railroad tracks from the Johnson Home and Industrial College. My friends told me about their great Christmas celebrations at the church and school.

3

Christmas Events

There were a lot of cycles that affected our lives. The seasons of the year controlled priorities on our farm. The cold winter months were devoted to working in the woodlands, repairing fences and buildings, slaughtering hogs, curing meat, harrowing land for shallow burying of last year’s crops, and terracing fields to control erosion.

Springtime was for planting, beginning with corn, then cotton, and finally peanuts. After that came a frantic struggle with grass and weeds, in which hoes and plows were employed almost constantly until the growing crops were so near maturity that the movement of mules and people up and down the rows did more damage than good. The only fieldwork during the resulting lay-by time was the reaping of winter wheat. Next came the major harvest season, when corn, cotton, and peanuts were started on their way to the barn or market. Daddy always did his best to ensure that all the slack intervals were filled with caring for beef cattle, milk, chickens, sheep, sweet potatoes, sugarcane, watermelons, tomatoes, and garden crops.

One very important division of the year for me was between wearing shoes and going barefoot. This was the difference between personal restriction and liberty, and I used every ploy to stretch the time of freedom between early spring and late autumn. When I reached school age, there was another separation of the year, with 180 days in the classroom and the other, slight majority of days divided up among weekends, three months of vacation in the summer, and ten more days in the heart of winter.

I was always aware of these various and overlapping parts of my calendar, but they faded into relative insignificance when compared with Christmas. This all-too-brief holiday brought a relaxation of duties, the peak of excitement, the maximum concentration of love and affection, the epitome of familial integration, and the realization or frustration of hopes and expectations. This was also the time when we were most likely to consider how well our daily lives and customs measured up to the heavenly standards that we were supposed to absorb in church, at school, and from our more devout relatives and friends. During this time of rest and contemplation, the success or failure of our crops and even the personal joys or sorrows that had befallen us were judged to be God’s will, and we wondered how much our own behavior had affected the results.

Throughout the year, Daddy and I were on the lookout in our woods for a relatively rare wild red cedar that would make a good Christmas tree, one that was perfect in size and shape. It was something of a ceremony when we went out a few days before Christmas to bring it home. My father was meticulous about its quality, and if there were unsightly gaps anywhere in the foliage we would drill a small hole into the tree trunk and insert an extra limb or two. During our hunt for a tree, there was time to cut enough broom sedge that grew wild in the fields to make Christmas gifts for our kinfolks in town and to use for sweeping around our own fireplaces. Daddy taught me how to use a dull knife to strip away the slender leaves, beat a bundle of the remaining stalks to get rid of all the fluffy seedpods, and then bind them tightly together to make straw brooms.

Decorating our house for Christmas added to the excitement of the season. We children would paint different-colored magnolia leaves at school, and these were mixed with the green leaves and red berries of holly to decorate our mantelpiece, tabletops, and around the base of the tree. There was an enormous American holly tree in the middle of one of our fields, and since we and interlopers had long ago removed the lower leaves and berries, I would climb high enough with a hatchet or machete to send what we needed down to my waiting sisters and parents. My favorite way to get mistletoe, usually at the top of oak or pecan trees and on the ends of slender limbs, was to shoot into the clump and let the bullets or buckshot cut off some sprigs.

We made Christmas-tree decorations in our classrooms at school, and proudly presented them to our parents. The most common were long chains of circled and glued paper strips of different colors to be draped over the tree limbs, and these were supplemented with ropes of popcorn or cranberries strung on long slender threads. We contrived all kinds of dangling ornaments, either flat or three-dimensional, and affixed them to the limbs with small strings or hay wire. There was tinfoil in each package of cigarettes (my father smoked several packs a day), which we painstakingly cut into very narrow strips to use as tinsel, or “icicles.”

All of us were proud to learn how to make a perfect five-pointed star with one scissor snip if the heavy paper was folded correctly, and then we covered it with tinfoil. Either this or an angel was mounted on top of our tree as the crowning ornament. Much later, when Rosalynn and I had a family of our own, someone gave us a really fancy store-bought star, and our children insisted on suspending it from the ceiling, to be raised or lowered each Christmas to match the exact height of succeeding trees. (We still leave the ornament hanging there all year, as a great reminder of past and future holidays.)

Even without electricity, the decorations could be beautiful. I believe the most admired tree we ever saw in Plains was a small holly cut by the family of one of my friends, perfectly shaped, covered with red berries, and strung just with threaded popcorn.

4

Fireworks

One highlight of Christmas in Plains, now long forbidden by state law, was fireworks. Even in those early days, an ordinance prevented their sale inside the city limits, but temporary stands were within a few feet of all four entrances to town during the holidays, and they did a thriving business. A pack of twenty firecrackers cost a nickel, and we took great delight in finding different ways to explode them. One small firecracker under an empty tin can would propel it high into the air—the smaller the can, the farther it would go. We made a much longer-ranged projectile by placing a small rubber ball on top of a three-quarter-inch pipe after we dropped a firecracker inside. A shovelful of hot coals would serve to light the explosives for an hour or so, or sometimes slender sticks of slow-burning “punk” would come with a quantity of fireworks.

Cherry bombs or extra-large firecrackers, which cost a nickel each, were much more powerful, and their singular detonations could be heard all over town. They would blow a tin can to smithereens and dig a hole in the ground. Despite the stern warnings of our parents, we would light both regular firecrackers and cherry bombs and then throw them on the ground, often at each other’s feet. Just once did I have one explode about two inches from my hand, and I had to suspend my arm in a sling for a few days, the broken skin on my purple fingers dressed with an antiseptic and bandages.

Roman candles were loaded with a dozen flaming projectiles, and were almost perfect for boys to twirl around and then shoot at each other. The girls and little children were usually satisfied with harmless sparklers. We might have one or two skyrockets, which were treated with great care because their flight was sometimes erratic and they could set fires where they landed.

There were explosions all around Plains on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, but there was no equivalent New Year’s celebration. Since we all went to bed every night shortly after dark, it would have been unthinkable to stay awake six more hours just to see midnight come. Later, when I was a teenager, my sisters and I spent a New Year’s Eve night with my grandmother, and we decided to see why some people considered this to be a big event. Grandma agreed to wake us at midnight, and we went out on the front steps to see the years change. We were very disappointed.

All our “uptown” fireworks celebrations with our white friends in Plains faded into insignificance when compared with the importance of my black friends’ fireball parties in Archery. Adults and children s...