A Foxfire Christmas by Eliot Wigginton

Author:Eliot Wigginton [Wigginton, Eliot]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Google: J_aRtAEACAAJ
Publisher: Doubleday
Published: 1989-01-15T02:41:38+00:00

Then he brought a fifteen-year-old girl in as his wife, and he kept her back in there, and over about ten years, four sons was born. One day in the fall of the year when her husband was gone, the lady of the family decided she’d had it. She marched out of there with a little pack on her back and left those four kids. The youngest one was about six and the oldest was ten.

Well, when he came back and seen that she was gone, he gathered his stuff and left, too. Left them four kids back there by themselves. Very few people went back in there, but later on a few of his old drinking buddies went back to his moonshine still and found the kids back in there still living in that tarpaper shack. They weren’t starved to death—they had some chickens and so they’d had a few eggs, and they had some potatoes, and the oldest boy could milk the cow—but they were pretty well distressed. Their clothes weren’t much good anyhow, and they were getting ragged and it was about wintertime. Fact is, it was almost Christmas.

So they brought them four boys out. They had never went to school, and they had seen very few people before. And this Christmas the community knew about those boys and they made a special Christmas. It was the first Christmas that these boys had ever known anything about. All of us chipped in and got them some clothes and different things. They had never tasted an orange or a banana or candy or anything like that, and they’d never seen Santa Claus—it was all way beyond those boys’ imaginations. And they just couldn’t imagine all those people. There must have been seventy-five or maybe a hundred in the church for this special program; and during the program when they was bringing in the live donkey into the manger they had set up in there, the ten-year-old boy jumped up in the church and yelled, “My God, I didn’t know that there was this many people in the whole world!”

But the boys enjoyed it all. The little one got scared and cried when Santa Claus came out. That scared him because he didn’t know there was such a thing as Christmas.

When spring came, the oldest boy run off and disappeared, but the three other boys stayed, and the next fall they got them in school and they stayed there in the community for years.

My daddy always gave me a dollar on Christmas. We’d put up our stockings the night before, and the next morning it would be in there along with some stick candy and an orange. That was a lot of money. And there was no restrictions on that dollar. I could give it to somebody if I wanted to, or spend it however I wanted to. My sister liked pretty things, so she always bought pretty things for herself with her dollar; but with my dollar, I’d keep it and buy candy and chewing gum and give treats to the kids.

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