More Blessed to Give: How not getting a rifle made Christmas special

Christmas “back in the day” was observed quite differently than we celebrate the birth of the baby Jesus today. In the 19th century, the Alabama frontier was flooded with European emigrants who migrated down from Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia. They brought with them many traditions of the “old country.” Some of these traditions are celebrated today in very different ways, but we seem to always want to remember the Christmas stories of our youth, the “old time Christmas.”

For me, it was the Christmases of the early 1950s. For my parents, it was the Christmases of the 1920s and the great depression era, and for their parents, the Christmases of the 1800s and on and on. Christmas is grounded in memories.