Christmas in Plains : Memories

by Jimmy Carter

• ISBN13: 9780743224963
• ISBN10: 0743224965
• Edition: Large
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-11-06
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Summary

In a beautifully rendered portrait, Jimmy Carter remembers the Christmas days of his Plains boyhood -- the simplicity of family and community gift-giving, his father's eggnog, the children's house decorations, the school Nativity pageant, the fireworks, Luke's story of the birth of Christ, and the poignancy of his black neighbors' poverty. Later, away at Annapolis, he always went home to Plains, and during his Navy years, when he and Rosalynn were raising their young family, they spent their Christmases together re-creating for their children the holiday festivities of their youth. Since the Carters returned home to Plains for good, they have always been there on Christmas Day, with only one exception in forty-eight years: In 1980, with Americans held hostage in Iran, Jimmy, Rosalynn, and Amy went by themselves to Camp David, where they felt lonely. Amy suggested that they invite the White House staff and their families to join them and to celebrate. Nowadays the Carters' large family is still together at Christmastime, offering each other the gifts and the lifelong rituals that mark this day for them. With the novelist's eye that enchanted readers of his memoir An Hour Before Daylight, Jimmy Carter has written another American classic, in the tradition of Truman Capote's A Christmas Memory and Dylan Thomas's A Child's Christmas in Wales.

Author Biography

Jimmy Carter who served as thirty-ninth president of the United States, was born in Plains, Georgia, in 1924. After leaving the White House, he and his wife, Rosalynn, founded the Atlanta-based Carter Center, a nonprofit organization that works to prevent and resolve conflicts, enhance freedom and democracy, and improve health around the world.

Table of Contents

Introduction	11	(4)
Christmas as a Child	15	(4)
My Family	19	(4)
Christmas Events	23	(6)
Fireworks	29	(12)
Religion	41	(10)
Christmas at Our House	51	(30)
To a Broader World	81	(4)
College Years	85	(10)
Christmas in the Navy	95	(8)
Back Home in Georgia	103	(12)
Christmas as the First Family	115	(42)
1977	116	(7)
1978	123	(6)
1979	129	(14)
1980	143	(14)
Christmas During Recent Years	157	(6)
Best Christmas of All?	163

Excerpts

from Chapter 6 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