The Indifferent Stars Above by Daniel James Brown

Author:Daniel James Brown
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3, pdf
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-09-10T07:00:00+00:00

I hope good Santa Claus will fill Rob’s stockings tonight, that Mildred’s, Agnes’s, and [Annie’s] may break down with good things. I do not know what he may have for you and Mary, but if he only leaves for you one half of what I wish, you will want for nothing.

Later that day, even in a tent in Mexico, Lee sat down to a feast of roast turkey and chickens and eggnog at a table decorated with oranges and pine boughs.

For most Americans of a mind to celebrate the holiday that year, though—in towns and villages like those that the Reeds and Graveses had come from—the Christmas observations had a more homespun flavor. Women baked cakes and other treats and slipped them into their children’s caps and stockings that night. Men gathered and drank whiskey and hard cider and brandy. Sometimes they fired off guns or set off firecrackers and exploded water-filled hogs’ bladders as they did on the Glorious Fourth. Children attended socials or performed plays. Family members exchanged gifts—often homemade treasures like quilts that they had labored on throughout the year. Many of them sat down to a turkey dinner, lending an American twist to the English tradition of roast goose. And almost always they attended church, for in the end Christmas was above all a religious occasion for most of them, an occasion on which to contemplate the light that their faith brought to the darkest time of the year.

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