Originally  posted 12/06/2011

As I said earlier, a life which is split between Alaska and Kentucky often involves sharp differences in experiences. Those sometimes show up in our annual Christmas letters, which don’t usually focus on what we’ve done (won the Nobel prize, walked on the moon, are the parents of not one, but three little geniuses, etc), but on what happens to us. With Christmas approaching, I’ve been rereading past letters, and thought posting one of those a week would be a nice lead-up to the holidays. The past two I posted were about Christmas in Alaska, so I thought it might make a change to tell you about Christmas in Kentucky, particularly Old Christmas, a tradition still alive in the area. That letter follows:

"Christmas is rushing down on us, and we seem to be in contention for the “Least-Prepared” Award this year.  We’re both fine so we can’t excuse ourselves by blaming health problems.  We just haven’t gotten to it.   I’ve bought a present
for exactly one person so far, and have 8 days to remedy that.  By necessity, this year Dean and I may switch our celebration to Old Christmas and exchange our gifts on January 6th.  

 Old Christmas is still a remembered tradition here in Eastern Kentucky.  I don’t know many other places where that is so, but here traditions are slow to die.  When Dean was growing up, they received presents on Old Christmas as well as December 25th – not as many, but otherwise just like Christmas.  Furthermore,
Christmas and Old Christmas each had their own traditions.  

Modern Christmas in this area was not so much a religious holiday as a festivity: it was was more closely associated with alcohol than with religion.  In fact, Christmas was a real boon for moonshiners, because businesses bought moonshine  and passed it out to employees.   On Christmas Day, the men in the
house drank moonshine all day long, and expected every visitor (or at least every male visitor) to partake.  Then and now, everybody shot off guns to mark the occasion.  Dean says that along Mill Branch, where his grandparents lived, gun shots echoed all day long on Christmas.  

One  of the big Christmas traditions was to make carbide cannons, which made
wonderful and very loud fireworks.  Dean remembers walking past one house that had shot off so many carbide cannons that the valley was filled with smoke.  You don’t see carbide cannons anymore, at least to my knowledge, but I suspect the fading of that custom has more to do with the advance in underground mining technology than with anything else.  In the old days, miners had carbide lights in their hardhats, so carbide was readily available.  Today it is not.

There were other traditions.  One was to write notes to Santa Claus and send them up the chimney.  The scientific explanation may be that the draft carried them up, but the traditional lore was that it was fairies.  

Christmas dinner was different, too.  Few kept geese, and most were not that crazy about turkey, so Christmas dinner was always chicken or ham.  Everybody had chicken and pigs.  In fact, in Appalachia, pork was the staple meat.  People might have a milk cow, but very few raised cattle for meat.  Steak to Appalachians was cubed steak, floured and fried like chicken.  I was an adult before I ate what most people think of as steak.

People around this area of Kentucky ate black-eyed peas on New Years, something we never did where I grew up in West Virginia.  I think of black-eyed peas as a southern tradition.  But of course this county in Eastern Kentucky was a Confederate-leaning county (Kentucky was a very divided place in the Civil War), whereas West Virginia was determinedly Union, which may explain that difference.  Civil War memories and attitudes linger as long as other traditions
here.

On Old Christmas, Dean’s grandmother always baked a big flat cookie that she produced only on that day and that verybody shared.  And there is of course a legend that animals are gifted with speech on Old Christmas.  There’s a song that goes, “On Christmas Day, The Animals Pray, On Christmas Day, So They Say.”  That "Christmas" is Old Christmas, of course.  I’ve heard that saying all my life, but never been in a barn or manger at midnight to test it for myself.  Dean says he once tried when he was little but fell asleep before Old Christmas arrived.  On Old Christmas eve, instead of hanging stockings as you did for Christmas, you put your shoes beside your bed the night before and woke up on Old Christmas to find  them holding candy or other goodies.

Another Christmas tradition was  “Christmas Gifting.” If you encountered another person, you tried to yell “Christmas  Gift” before they did. If you struck first, they had to give you something –  nothing very big, but something. Although I grew up in Southern Appalachia only about 120 miles away from Dean’s home, I had never heard of that. I learned fast, though, out of necessity. I particularly learned to answer the phone on Christmas with “Christmas Gift” instead of “Hello,” because if I didn’t I would hear “Christmas Gift” barreling down the phone line at me from Dean’s brother or one of his sisters on the heels of my hello. In the days before caller ID, it caused me  some embarrassment to find that I’d greeted a total stranger with “Christmas Gift,” but that was better than being caught myself, especially because I felt so triumphant at having got in first. Dean’s sister Martha is particularly good at “Christmas Gifting” people. Over the years she’s caught me so many times and I am so far in arrears that there’s no hope of ever catching up.

We don’t observe Old Christmas any more, unless it happens by default this year, but, whatever your customs, tradition, and religion, we want to wish you wonderful holidays.  We also fervently wish that our servicemen and servicewoman on deployment have as good a Christmas as one can away from home, and one and all get back from their deployment safely.

Happy Holidays,
Dean and Nina"

Update: I thought it might be  helpful to explain Old Christmas to those to whom it is an enigma. In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII issued a decree switching the Christian world from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calender to bring the calendar more in line with the
actual length of the year. Some countries adopted the new calendar immediately, but not all. Since the decree was issued after the Protestant Reformation of roughly sixty years before, and around 50 years after Henry VIII had had his little contretemps with the Pope and the Catholic Church, Great Britain was one of the laggards. It didn't adopt the Gregorian calendar until 1752, almost 200 years after Gregory's edict.  Since most Appalachians came to America (then still part of Britain) well before that 1752 change, they had always used the Julian calendar. By the time the change was made from the Julian to the Gregorian way of counting, the calendar difference was twelve days. So, in 1752, twelve days "disappeared" during the adjustment. That disappearance made Christmas leap twelve days forward from its accustomed place, and shift two days of the week. Not everyone accepted that, so they simply added twelve days to the new December 25th, and celebrated Christmas on the day it would have been celebrated before the "disappearance" of those twelve days, and that day, of course, was January 6th. 

An interesting sidelight of this calendar change was that Alaska was still part of Russia when Great Britain and English America made the change. Russia, like many eastern orthodox churches, was one of the laggards and had not adopted the Gregorian calendar before the sale of Alaska,  so Alaska didn't make that adjustment until Seward bought it from Russia.  That was in 1867, at which point Alaska "lost" even more days than the twelve lost in 1752. When I
mull over the fact that for 300 years, countries that were cheek and jowl with each other observed calendars that were roughly two weeks apart, I wonder how those who went to, or did business with, other countries, coped with that problem. It must have led to a lot of arithmetic and a lot of headaches.