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Preserving Appalachia, American Chestnut, and other thoughts

1/11/2014

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Dean and I got an email today expressing appreciation for our documentary on the demise of the American Chestnut. The writer, Gail, was from New York, was scheduled to give a speech to a gardening club, and apparently had run onto the video on youtube as she was researching for the talk. She had taken the trouble to find an email address for us and send us an email telling us she liked the video.  We are thrilled every time we get a communication like that, especially one that takes some trouble to do. It's wonderful to know that viewers appreciate the chestnut video. We reaped such pleasure and had such a great learning experience as we made it that we are always glad to know that others had the same pleasure in viewing it.

 In her email, Gail mentioned the poignancy of the oral histories. That set me to thinking about how lucky we were to get those. Lucky to locate some of those from past Appalachians, and luckier still to have some neighbors in this county who had personal memories. We particularly loved Grace Caudill's memories. Grace passed away a few months ago, and would have taken that knowledge with her had we not had the luck to capture it. Pauline Cantrell was a hundred years old when we filmed her, so her memories were on the verge of being lost as well. Besides the chestnuts, she told us wonderful stories about her family's moving up into eastern Kentucky from Tennessee when she was a young girl. They came by wagon over the most minimal of roads. It took more than a week, driving during the day and camping at night, to cover what would be much less than a day's journey now, even on the very narrow, curvy roads we still have in these mountains. Although she didn't say so, I suspect they were drawn to make that long, difficult journey by the prospect of work in the coal mines for one of the coal companies, which were just beginning to build towns and establish mines on a large scale.

My guess is that, on that journey from Tennessee, there were no bridges, and the wagon had to frequently ford creeks. Sometime, I suspect, the creek was the road. I can guess that with some comfort, because here in this county today, I have drivens roads that were creek beds. The road up Kingdom Come starts as a paved road which becomes a gravel road, and then becomes a creek bed. With water. The water wasn't deep when we drove it in a car - maybe six inches - but it wasn't dry either, and there are times when it's a lot deeper. To get to the homestead where my uncle Gene grew up, you have to take the creek a ways, as we would say in Appalachia. To an urbanite, that might seem incredible, but to me, it's a piece of Appalachia I am glad to see still exists.
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Old Christmas as Observed in Kentucky

10/31/2012

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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.
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Making Molasses and Writing

10/31/2012

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We went to a  molasses stir-off this weekend at the farm of friends. Not many
people make molasses any more, but Randy and J.P. Campbell and their cousin
Jesse Campbell hold a stir-off almost every year. J.P. grows the cane on his farm, and they all pitch in at stir-off time.  It was a two-day affair that started Friday afternoon and lasted through Saturday. We took a camera in hopes of garnering material for a short documentary.

Saturday  was the social day with a lot of non-participants attending and a lot of
good conversation - visiting, in Appalachian parlance - but from the point of view of learning about stir-offs  Friday evening was much more interesting, because it included setting up, stripping and cutting the cane, and squeezing the juice. They were using an old-fashioned cane press but had converted it to be powered from a tractor drive-shaft, which turned the grindstones a lot faster than mules could.
 
Still, it took at least two hours to feed in a quarter-acre of cane stalks and press out the juice. The end product was a little over a hundred gallons of juice, all of which was poured into a foot-deep,  4'x8' rectangular steel pan.   The second day consisted mostly of straining the juice, building the fire under the pan, and boiling the juice. It took almost nine hours to boil the juice down, which Randy said was the longest it had ever taken, and which he blamed on mostly wet wood for the fire. 

Two people skimmed foam the whole time the juice boiled, essentially while standing in a steam bath for nine hours. It was only in the last half hour that molasses seemed to come, but it came fast at the end, turning from a thin
greenish  to a more viscous light-brown liquid topped with golden amber foam.. 

Cutting the cane and skimming the juice as it boiled were the two labor-intensive and dirty jobs, although Matt Oaks, one of the party, told me what he hated worst was feeding the cane into the mill. He said it was boring and seemed to take forever. For myself, I liked that part best because of the instant gratification. As the cane stalk went in, you could immediately see the juice coming out.

Saturday was the social day. The wives brought food and set up lunch for the participants and the hangers-on like us. We contributed, of course, but we brought dessert while we ate mostly soup beans, shuckey beans, sauerkraut fried with weiners, and cornbread, all traditional Appalachian foods and all delicious. It was a good trade-off.

What started as 100 gallons of juice and many hours of labor ended as perhaps ten gallons of molasses. The whole process brought home to me the reality of how hard our ancestors toiled for their food. As I was mulling this over, it occurred to me that the only sources our Appalachian ancestors had for sweetening were honey and molasses. I'm sure a few of them could have afforded sugar, but not many would  have been able to. Their cash, when they got it, was usually reserved for salt, which was much more critical, and perhaps shoes. Thinking about the two days, it seemed to me I saw analogies to creating a
book or video. It took a  lot of  persistence and unremitting effort to start with cane seed and end up with molasses, with the product being winnowed down and skimmed all the way. That's the way it is with a book or a documentary. The tools are just different.

If you would like to attend a stir-off, there's one held every September in West
Liberty, Ky, web site h
ttp://www.cityofwestliberty.com/sorghumfestival.htm.

Let  me hear from you if any of you have been to a stir-off. If  so, did you see any relationship to other projects you are involved in?
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    Author

    Nina Cornett is  presently at work on a memoir, is pulling together a concept for a mystery novel  set in Alaska, and is keeping a log of the Cornetts' efforts to bring  attention to timber theft in Kentucky with the thought that it might be the germ  of a future book.

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