One of the big things in the homes of Plains families was the preparation of special food for the Christmas holidays. Daddy's sister, Ethel, would bake several kinds of cakes, including pound cake, carrot, caramel, chocolate, angel food, coconut, pineapple upside down, and our favorite, Japanese fruitcake. Aunt Ethel always made sure that we had an adequate supply of desserts, and I presume now that Daddy paid her for them.

My mother wasn't much of a cook, although when she was not on nursing duty she was perfectly capable of providing our regular meals of fried chicken, fish, quail, cornbread, biscuits, and all kinds of meats and vegetables from our fields and garden. One dessert that Mama did make was ambrosia, and we children looked forward each year to punching nail holes in the "eyes" of coconuts, drinking the juice, and then bursting them open and grating the extracted chunks of meat.

I guess it would be more accurate to say that Mama never liked to cook, and welcomed my father into the kitchen whenever he was willing. He was always the one who prepared battercakes or waffles for breakfast, and he would even make a couple of Lane cakes for Christmas. Since this cake recipe required a strong dose of bourbon, it was just for the adult relatives, doctors, nurses, and other friends who would be invited to our house for eggnog.

Daddy gave the same enthusiasm and dedication to his food preparation as he did to the operation of our entire farm, and his preparation of eggnog was really a big deal. He produced a very large bowl of it each Christmas, which required an enormous amount of carefully coordinated work. Daddy made us children feel important by inviting us to help him in this great endeavor.

Dozens of egg whites and quarts of cream had to be whipped into simultaneous stiffness, with sugar and whiskey being added slowly and carefully. As the time approached for guests to arrive, all of them warned to be punctual, we would be madly beating the ingredients in smaller bowls while Daddy orchestrated the proper mixing, to assure that the eggnog was as stiff and erect as possible when served. His goal was a minimum amount of loose liquid in the bottom of the special glasses. This delicious mixture was served with a sprinkling of ground nutmeg on top of each drink. A small amount, without the whiskey, was set aside for us children, and Daddy always saved a small pitcherful for Jack and Rachel Clark. Not being included in the party, they would either drink it in the kitchen or, most of the time, take it down to their house to enjoy.

Ingredients, for each quart of whiskey or rum:

3 dozen eggs
3 cups of sugar
3 pints of cream
ground nutmeg

Separate the eggs, and beat the yolks until stiff, adding sugar and whiskey. Keep everything cool while you beat the egg whites and cream. Then carefully blend all together and serve, with a sprinkling of nutmeg on top.

Serves 32

Church congregations dominated the superficial rules of politics of our region, so ours was officially a completely dry county, but this didn't interfere in any way with the serving of spirituous libations to those who wanted them. Daddy had inherited winemaking paraphernalia from his father, and each year produced several gallons from grapes, black cherries, peaches, or apples. Anyone could buy Atlantic ale at the plant where ice was made near Muckalee Creek, and the county bootlegger lived just west of there, on the outskirts of Americus, and only nine miles from Plains. Identifiable customers would drive into his yard, stop under a wooden canopy that seemed to be a carport, purchase almost any kind of bonded whiskey, and circle around behind his house to return to the main road. They would then proceed to their homes or to a regular evening of entertainment in Americus at the American Legion, VFW, Elks Club, or, for a few wealthier and socially elite families, the Country Club.

In addition, there were a number of moonshiners in the area, jackleg operators with small, easily concealed stills on wooded streams. These were most often poor farmers who were attempting to supplement their sparse income by turning some of their corn crop into alcohol. The quality of their 'shine was doubtful, and some of them saved money by using lead pipes instead of copper tubing in the distillation process. There were frequent articles in the state newspapers about lead-poisoning epidemics that would break out, often with several fatalities blamed on the bad whiskey. I remember two times when we boys found a still in some of my father's most remote swamps, and he reported them to the revenuers for destruction.

The most common source of "good" spirits was a small group of elite distillers who were well known to produce alcohol of high quality. One of them lived about a mile from our house. Many citizens who were not teetotalers highly regarded these responsible moonshiners, perhaps because they were willing to be jailed every now and then, when the sheriff or revenue agents moved in to make a symbolic arrest. The prearranged sentences were fairly brief, and we could tell from our front porch when our neighbor was back home from the penitentiary because we could see a steady stream of headlights going to his home, on what everyone in Archery called Moonshine Road. Almost invariably, my parents and their friends drank bonded whiskey from the county bootlegger, but as a friendly gesture they would accept a quart of our neighbor's product when he came by with an exceptionally fine sample.

My father was also an expert at preparing the special holiday meats that used up the aftermath of hog-killing time. One of his favorites was what we called sousemeat, a conglomeration of feet, ears, faces, and other parts that were cleaned thoroughly, boiled into a homogeneous glutinous consistency, seasoned heavily, and then formed into a large loaf. Daddy was very proud of this, and took pleasure in presenting it to friends and relatives who came to see us. We children rather suspected that it reduced the number of our holiday visitors. Predictably, Daddy would repeat the old joke, "There are two things you never want to see being made: sousemeat and laws."

As the big day approached, we children went through a gamut of imagined gifts that might be ours on Christmas morning, finally honing our lists down to a reasonable balance between high expectations and the cautionary responses of our parents, designed to deflate our hopes. Then we would mail our letters to Santa Claus at the North Pole, hoping that he would be more generous than we were being led to expect. Not quite understanding the interrelationships, we nevertheless used maximum propaganda around the house.

"Mama, if I just had one of those little Red Racer wagons in the Sears catalogue, I could haul wood to the house, water to the field hands, and vegetables from the garden. During peanut season, it would make it easy to bring some peanuts home from the field so I could boil them to sell." My real visions were of A.D. and me pulling each other back and forth around the farm, and flying down a steep hill together.

There was no chance that we might intimidate our parents, or beg successfully for particular gifts. The process of our expressing hopes and their dashing them was strangely routine and impersonal, our goal being to obtain as much as possible for ourselves and theirs to minimize disappointment when we didn't get what we wanted. At least for us children, Baby Jesus was not involved in this important dialogue.

It didn't seem right -- at least to her -- for Mama to have to cook a complete breakfast on Christmas morning, so we always had just sausage, biscuits, and jelly -- a custom that we Carters have maintained for seventy years. This menu could be prepared the afternoon or evening before, kept in either the icebox or the warming compartment of the woodstove, and heated up quickly. In fact, we rarely even built a fire in the big cooking stove on Christmas Day. When we didn't eat dinner with some of our kinfolks, Mama would warm up leftover fried chicken or we would eat country-ham, pimiento-cheese, or peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. What served as our "microwave" in those days was the kerosene stove, which could be lit instantly and provided either an oven or two grills.

One of the great crises of our childhood was when our baby sister, Ruth, found a way to open a valve and suck out some of the kerosene. I remember that she turned a dark color before Mama could induce her to vomit by sticking a finger down her throat while Daddy held her upside down.

Since our house was always cold in the winter, the fireplace in the front room controlled the official beginning of Christmas morning. We were absolutely prohibited from entering this sacrosanct place until after Daddy had gotten up and built a good fire. Several times during the night, one of us would go into our parents' bedroom, to be met with a stern "Go back to bed! It's just two o'clock." Finally, about an hour before daylight, we would hear Daddy get up and replenish the fire in the round woodstove in their room, and we'd rush in there and put on our clothes as the chill slowly dissipated. In the meantime, Daddy would go to the front room and build a good blaze in the fireplace, which we had carefully let die down the previous night so Santa could come in without burning his britches.

After an excruciating wait, we would be given permission to dash into the front room. The cookies and milk we had left out for our distinguished guest would be gone, and his presents would be in our assigned places in front of the hearth. Our parents were experts at convincing us that we would get "some fruit and maybe some clothes that you've been needing." What we dreaded most was underwear (BVDs) and socks, so our reaction was genuine pleasure when one or two toys or some books were also there. My sisters would almost always get a "Bi-Low" doll. Once, after a good crop year, Gloria and I both got bicycles.

I don't remember much about gifts to my parents, who never seemed to expect anything and usually insisted that "Christmas is for children." Except one year, after Mama had nursed members of a black family and refused to charge them for her services, they delivered what turned out to be her favorite gift of the Christmas season. It was made by Felton Shelton, who lived on our farm and wove baskets of white-oak strips.

The present was what Felton called, for some unexplained reason, a "sky mop" (scour mop?). He drilled nine holes in a block of wood about eighteen inches long, the center one at an angle for inserting a long handle. Then he twisted corn shucks and wedged them into the other holes, making an almost indestructible scrubber that could be used to apply the caustic Red Devil lye to our floors. Mama did this at least a couple of times a year to keep bedbugs and other insidious vermin out of our house.

My most common request to Santa Claus was for two or three books, and I would prepare my choices very carefully. Sometimes I had suggestions from my mother or our school superintendent, Miss Julia Coleman, but most of the time I would search through the book section of the Sears, Roebuck catalogue and make my choices. Above all my other requests, this was the one that was most certain to be honored, because Mama was always encouraging me to read as much as possible.

The year I was eight years old, I was amazed to find a large cardboard box under the Christmas tree with a tag on it that said, "Love from Miss Abrams." She was the same head nurse who brought us the marble "snowball" from Cleveland. When I opened the gift, I found twenty-six leather-bound books, including the complete works of Victor Hugo and a twenty-volume set of The Outline of Knowledge. Mama eased my concern by telling me that I could take a few years to read through the entire collection.

The next year, we had our usual Christmas morning, and once again my most cherished gifts were some books that I had wanted. During the day, however, both my sister Gloria and I developed red spots on our faces, began to cough, and had itching eyes and runny noses. It took Mama only a brief glance to announce that we had measles, which we all knew was making the rounds of the Plains community. We listened to her stern admonition about going blind if we strained our eyes or exposed them to bright light. Her prescription was like a prison sentence: in addition to the aspirin and cough syrup, we had to stay in bed in a darkened room.

I wanted to obey Mama, but the new books on the table were too much of a temptation to resist. After an hour or so, I eased up a window shade, got one of my new books, and lay on the floor by the window to read, hidden behind the bed. It was almost inevitable that Mama would catch me, and then she searched the room, removed all the reading material, and gave me a stern warning that Daddy would administer a fearsome punishment if I disobeyed her again.

My most memorable Christmas morning was when I found, as had been predicted dismally by my parents, just two oranges, some English walnuts, dried raisins, and a pair of trousers. Trying not to appear frantic or disappointed, I searched all around the tree, and attempted to control my trembling lips and to hold back tears. I considered myself too old to cry. After a few moments, Daddy said, "Sometimes I think old Santa might leave something out in the yard." I looked out of the living-room window and didn't see anything, and then ran back to my room. There, outside, with her reins tied to a tree limb, was a Shetland pony! I dashed out of the house, and ten minutes later A.D. and I were taking turns in the saddle. I named her Lady, and for the next ten years she was a most wonderful companion.

Our family usually exchanged and relished our gifts early in the morning, and then traveled around to visit some of the other members of our family, either in nearby Plains or among my mother's folks in Richland, eighteen miles to the west, finally arriving at the place chosen that year for our big noon meal. After that, we would return home for a remarkable afternoon of total leisure, similar to what we usually enjoyed on Sundays but without any restraints against things like shooting guns or playing cards. The farm would be almost completely devoid of black neighbors, who would be visiting friends or relatives. Their travels by foot or on wagons took longer, of course, than ours by automobile. Except for the unavoidable chores of caring for animals and toting in water, firewood, and stove wood, no one was expected to have any duties.

The separation from my black friends on Christmas Day felt somewhat strange. For this one occasion, blood kinship and economic circumstances controlled our family's activities. When we did encounter someone on the farm early in the morning, there was a great competition to be the first to claim a present from the other person by shouting, "Christmas gift!" This was often done at a great distance, to avoid the obligation that fell on the one who didn't cry out first. Whenever I sneaked up and got ahead of A.D. or one of my other playmates, though, they would reply, "Well, gimme it," in an effort to turn the tables. Another response was, "I' sejes fixin t'say it!" In fact, though, it was just a game. We realized that they had nothing to give, and Mama always had a small present for each child on the farm.

We Carter children expected and usually received some nice presents on Christmas, and sometimes it was embarrassing to compare mine with those of my black playmates. There was no doubt they also believed in Santa Claus, but their expectations were much lower. With annual incomes of just three hundred dollars or so to buy food, clothing, medical care, and all the other necessities of life for an entire family, their Christmases lacked any such luxuries as store-bought toys or presents. But it wasn't long before we were all sharing whatever toys we had, with A.D. asserting his completely equal rights, "All right, Jimmy, now it's my turn!"

Usually, the black children had individual shoeboxes labeled with their names, carefully saved from one season to another. These would be placed side by side near the fireplace, and an outstanding Christmas morning would bring an orange or an apple and some raisins, dried on the stems and with seeds intact. (Even for many of my white classmates, this gift of fruit was all they could expect.) A little boy might get a toy made by his father, and a girl usually expected a homemade doll, with corn shucks or wheat straw making up its main structure. Whether Christmas or not, each boy had his own gallon syrup can with a small hole punched in each end and a piece of hay wire running through the holes and formed into a pulling loop. Filled with sand, these little "automobiles" or "wagons" could be pulled behind us for hours. It was rare that joy from a store-bought toy could exceed the long-term pleasure from those we contrived on the farm.

When I was big enough to make a sale and keep records in an account book, I worked as a clerk in Uncle Buddy's Plains Mercantile Company on Saturdays and for a few days before Christmas, so I often knew what presents some of the other children would get from Santa. One of my most poignant experiences each holiday season was to watch a few of the poor parents search through a long table that was covered with special toys, none of which cost more than a dime. After they had bought the cheapest food and other necessities of life, with perhaps a piece of fruit for each of their children, they would come to the front of the store to spend a few cents on frivolous things.

I would help them choose between the tiny tin or celluloid figurines, coloring books, small boxes of crayons, cloth bags containing a few marbles, wooden tops, or artificial watches, both of whose hands would rotate together as the winding stem was turned. The table also held a few of the more expensive toys that were defective or damaged. In these families without money, the religious aspects of the season had little competition from the material world, except for the special pleasure of a day or so on which there was no work in the fields or woodlands and family visits might be possible.

One of my childhood Archery friends, Addie Wright, remembers receiving an unusually nice store-bought doll once, with a white face of course, but with a porcelain head that was already cracked. Almost seventy years later, she surmises that her mother bought it at Plains Mercantile Company at a discount, and she still recalls how, although she kept it in its box and nursed it with extreme tenderness and care, the doll's head shattered the first time it received a slight bump. After some long discussions with her sisters, they finally decided to bury the remains with an appropriate funeral service. She told me, "I can still take you to the gravesite."

One gift from Santa Claus that was almost inevitable for a farm boy like me was a Daisy air rifle. This was the first step toward ultimate manhood: to master the necessary skills and safety rules of using firearms for hunting. I don't even remember when I received my first Red Rider model, but it seems that it was mine even before I was strong enough to cock the lever by myself. After Daddy was certain that I was thoroughly familiar with the weapon and knew the safety rules and basic courtesies expected among hunters, I was free -- even encouraged -- to use my gun when and where I chose.

In the process of growing up, I graduated to higher-powered air guns, a .22-caliber rifle, and then a bolt-action .410-gauge shotgun. It was natural that, both in town and on the farms, I listened attentively when the grown men were talking about hunting. White folks almost invariably discussed birds, and black men concentrated on raccoons, opossums, rabbits, and squirrels. The two birds sought in those days were mourning doves, shot while flying into fields to feed on grain or peanuts left over from the harvest, and bobwhite quail, which were always called "pottages" (partridges) or merely "birds." If someone said, "I'm going bird-hunting," it meant quail. This was a sport of great sophistication, involving enough nuances about game, dogs, shotguns, hunting techniques, marksmanship, habitats, and favorite recipes to sustain long conversations during all twelve months of the year.

Since shooting a gun on Sunday was inconceivable, the hunters in our area cherished Christmas (sometimes stretched to three days) as a prime time to shoot bobwhite quail. One of the things I wanted even more than Santa Claus's gifts was an invitation from Daddy to accompany him on at least one of these adventures. We always had two or three good bird dogs, and Jack Clark helped with the training of these pointers and setters. When I was too small to carry my own shotgun, I was sometimes permitted to tag along with Jack Clark, observing how he handled the dogs and listening to his running commentaries.

Quail-hunting with my father would be an acknowledgment of responsibility and maturity that I knew would not come lightly. Daddy began taking me with him on dove shoots when I was about six years old, to spot incoming flights and to mark and pick up those he had killed. But he resisted my entreaties to accompany him to hunt quail. This was considered to be a man's sport, highly sophisticated and potentially dangerous, with hunters close together, quick movements, and unpredictable shooting.

Between the middle of November and February, my father tried to go out for a hunt whenever possible, but he worked very hard every day, harder than most other men I knew, and the times were rare when Daddy could spend an entire afternoon with his gun and dogs. It was a special event when this did happen and he went hunting with one of his friends who shared his love of the sport. A third hunter was considered to be a danger during the excitement, when a covey of about a dozen birds erupted from their hiding place with an explosive sound. Children or any onlookers were excluded, because they were in the way and also uneducated in the ancient niceties and customs.

One Christmas, when I was about ten years old, we had returned home after having dinner with our kinfolks, and I saw Daddy putting on his leather snake-proof leggings and his hunting jacket. "Lillian," he called, "I'm going hunting in the fields behind the house, maybe with Mr. Watson." He looked down at my imploring eyes, hesitated a few moments, and added, "Hot, do you want to go with me, if Mr. Watson can't go?" I almost fainted with excitement and forgot all about Santa Claus and gifts. Mama and I scurried around until I was as well dressed as possible for protection against snakes and briars. By then, it turned out that our neighbor was free to hunt, but Daddy decided to bend his rules and let me tag along, although not carrying a gun.

Throughout that memorable Christmas afternoon, I observed with great attention each order given the dogs, every safety precaution taken by the men with guns, and listened intently to their conversation about the habits of quail, the character of dogs, and the benefits of the hedgerows and fields through which we walked. I tried from my relatively low perspective to watch the dogs at every moment, and once or twice I was the first to notice when one of them froze into immobility, and shouted with a piping voice, "A point! A point!" Then I followed as closely as permitted behind my father and Mr. Watson as they hurried to the rear of the dog and walked forward with shotguns ready to fire, calling quietly to one dog, "Careful, Sport, careful," and at the same time making sure that our other dog, still dashing about in its own search for game, didn't inadvertently run into the site and flush the birds prematurely.

I knew to stay clear of any possible direction in which the guns might be fired, and to mark carefully where the first dead bird fell, often not noted exactly by the hunters when they whirled to follow later rising quail. Only after action at a particular place was over could the game be retrieved, and this was always the responsibility of the dogs.

I would report excitedly, "Daddy, the first bird is right over here, between the little dogwood and that bunch of broom sage." We would then approach the site but not walk into it, and Daddy would guide the dogs by calling, "Close in here, dead bird, dead, dead," until either Sue or Sport picked up the quail and carried it to him. When the hunt was over, we returned home at the end of an absolutely perfect Christmas Day -- of gifts, family love, good food, and a total binding of myself to my father.

A completely different form of hunting that came every year during Christmastime was with the black men who lived in our community. For 365 days a year, Jack Clark had to care for the livestock and milk the cows, but during the few brief holidays even he would join other men on the farm in staying up all night and trying to grab some sleep during daylight hours. With no work in the fields or woods, this was a perfect time to hunt raccoons and opossums, and I was always eager to accept an invitation to join the men and their hounds. These were enjoyable expeditions because of the challenge and companionship involved, but quite serious in their purpose. The prospect of fresh meat to supplement the families' minimal diet was an attraction that warranted the relatively expensive feeding of a hound dog during the rest of the year. Daddy was not interested in this kind of sport, and we never owned a 'coon dog, but the workers on our place wanted me along because I was an accomplished and fearless tree-climber.

After the hunters assembled shortly before dark, there would be an extended discussion among the dog owners about which woodlands and swamps would be our destination, and then we would head in that direction, with the straining dogs held in check by ropes tied to their collars. When the dogs were finally released and dashed off into the woods, we usually squatted on our haunches or sat on a fallen log to listen to them. Every man recognized, without question, the voice of each dog, and understood the meaning of the yelps and howls as clearly as if the hounds were communicating in the English language over wireless radios. When one of the dogs "struck a trail," everyone knew immediately which one was in the lead, and understood that the owner of that dog had first choice of whatever game was captured.

We would usually wait where we were until the dogs were becoming too distant and we needed to follow, or until the quarry had been treed, at which time there would be a cacophony of frantic barking among all the dogs at the site. Carrying lanterns and one long multibattery flashlight, unlit to save batteries, we dashed through the limbs, briars, and brush and waded through water until we could join the dogs. Only then was the beam of our powerful flashlight focused on the high reaches of the tree, and we searched until the 'coon or 'possum finally looked down and its eyes were reflected -- with surprising brilliance -- to reveal its location.

The next task was to bring the animal to the ground, using a series of tactics, beginning with climbing the tree and shaking limbs and, if that was unsuccessful, reluctantly and as a last resort using a .22-caliber rifle bullet. For a smaller tree, we might just cut it down and depend on the dogs to catch whatever came down with it. Here again, circumstances could be quite different. A 'coon was a meticulously clean animal, and could often whip the dogs and escape to another tree. 'Possums were scavengers and needed to be fed clean food for a week or two before they were good to eat, and would often just curl up when they hit the ground and pretend to be dead.

The game was distributed as evenly as possible after the hunt was over, with the owner of the most successful dog getting first choice but sharing with the others, so that as many families as possible would have something special during the Christmas season. If someone came up short on this night, he would have privileged status for the next outing. Competition among the men and their hounds was intense, and there were hours of mostly good-natured arguments and debates during the night hunts and even in the fields throughout the year about such vital issues as which were the best breeds -- walkers, blueticks, redbones, or black-and-tans. There were other interminable discussions about such things as how they should be trained and how vocal the best dogs should be.