CRESTVIEW — In North Okaloosa County's early days, Christmastime would have just been getting underway on Dec. 25.
Christmas meant visits with family and neighbors, siblings and cousins playing while school was out, and activities at church.
And Christmas music playing and store decorations going up before Halloween? Unheard of!
“Christmas was Christmas, Thanksgiving was Thanksgiving,” Laurel Hill resident Martha Rogers said. “Each was its own holiday. They didn’t blur together like now.”
Senior citizens recall relaxing and enjoying Christmas in all its Depression era, pre-World War II simplicity.
SIMPLE GIFTS
“We didn’t have Christmas stockings," said Laurel Hill native Margaret Neal, now retired to Tallahassee. "We used Mother’s old stockings that we hung by the fireplace. We’d always receive an apple and an orange, and sometimes raisins."
With money tight, gifts were limited.
"You got one gift," she said. "You didn’t have half the room filled with gifts.”
“It would be like checkers or dolls,” Rogers said. “But when girls got to be a certain age, you got clothes. I remember the year I first got clothes. I was so disappointed! And of course, nothing fit. They were passed down. Everybody was poor.”
“Nobody had much money,” Baker resident Jeannette Henderson said. “Maybe we received one toy each.”
“Gifts were a rarity; folks didn’t have much and we traded in barter to get along,” Holt resident Annis Hinote Wilkins said. “It didn’t bother us; folks in our community didn’t know any other way.
“The one Christmas I remember most was the time my Daddy surprised me. He bought a tiny glass tea set and put it under the tree, for me, at the church. I loved that set.”
O TANNENBAUM
Christmas trees were cut down on the farm or from the nearest woods.
“You’d get your tree from the woods,” Crestview resident Jean Campbell said. “You didn’t go buy it. You might have some bought stuff to decorate it with, but you had a lot of stuff you made in school. You had balls and tinsel. None of this fancy stuff.”
“Everybody had a Christmas tree,” Neal said. “Daddy would cut down a big cedar that touched the ceiling.”
“We’d make homemade decorations like paper chains and you saved icicles (tinsel) from year to year,” Rogers said. “Now people just throw it away if they use it at all.”
“We used holly trees for Christmas trees, and if we were lucky enough, someone in the neighborhood would have popcorn we could pop and make popcorn strings for it,” Henderson said.
CHRISTMAS DINNER
Throughout the area, pork was a staple and often a smoked ham was the main course at Christmas dinner.
“After the first frost was hog-killing time,” said Danny Campbell, Neal’s brother and Jean’s husband. “Grandpa would kill five or six hogs.”
If families didn’t have a ham, wild turkeys were popular, though some families made do with a roasted chicken.
“We had chicken and dressing, unless somebody could catch a turkey,” James Cain, of Milligan, said. “That was more special than a chicken. In fact, we’d put the turkey in the chicken pen for a few weeks to fatten him up for the Christmas meal.”
“What we had to eat we had to grow on the farm. There was always plenty of food,” Henderson said. “We always canned our vegetables and fruit, and made jelly. Then you had your corn and sweet potatoes for your meals.”
Rogers said her family made a variation of Brunswick stew.
“You’d chop up the small game in a big boiler in the backyard: squirrels, possums, whatever you had, with the vegetables, corn and what-all,” she said. “There’s as many recipes for Brunswick stew as there are people in the South.”
“And you always had fruitcake, because you had your nuts and you had your eggs and flour,” Henderson said. “They had the spices from a store. Fruitcake probably was what my mom spent the most money for. Otherwise we would have chocolate layer cake. And always chicken and dumplings and dressing.”
North Okaloosa County’s cane fields provided cane syrup in the cool autumn weather.
“Sometimes when you’d make syrup you’d have candy pullings later in the fall,” Henderson said. “Sometimes this was done at Christmas, because we didn’t have a lot of entertainment available, especially on the farm.”
HELPING NEIGHBORS
People, especially those with farms, helped less fortunate neighbors, Neal said.
“My father shared with the family that lived across the railroad tracks, she said. “We had a garden and some cows, so we always had food.
“Years later I met a lady who said, ‘You’re Palmer Campbell’s daughter, aren’t you? We would’ve starved to death in the Depression except for your daddy.’”
“Folks didn’t have much,” Danny Campbell said. “We fared better than lots of folks. We always had something to eat, and we always had something to wear from Campbell Company,” a Laurel Hill business owned by his grandfather, Ernest Campbell, and an uncle.
“He was furnishing (poor) people groceries and charging it to himself in the big ledger,” Neal said of her grandfather.
“If you could help somebody else, you helped them,” Rogers said. “That’s the way we did it in the South.”
Some of these Christmas reflections come from “Northwest Florida Christmas," published by the Baker Block Museum and used with permission.
Email News Bulletin Staff Writer Brian Hughes, follow him on Twitter or call 850-682-6524.
This article originally appeared on Crestview News Bulletin: Christmas in the county: Simple gifts, helping neighbors, home-grown food
