Ruralite Cafe: Published 01/03/02

By Lynn Hotaling - Associate Editor

'Old Christmas' is not an easy tradition to find

Like "Old Christmas." Though I'd read about it in several fictional accounts of mountain life, and John Parris used to write about it from time to time, I couldn't find anyone around these parts who remembered it.

Until Rose suggested I call musician Mary Jane Queen of Johns Creek, I seemed headed straight for a different topic this week.

Only problem was, Mary Jane remembered "Old Christmas" in a different context than the books described. I expected her to tell me about people visiting back and forth on the night of Jan. 5 (Old Christmas Eve), swapping stories and sitting up late, and of legends about horses and cattle laying down at midnight, whether in a barn or outside.

"Well, I've heard that story all my life," Mary Jane said. "But I've never seen it. I never did go to the stalls to see if ours did that."

What she means by "Old Christmas," which she agreed is Jan. 6, or as she put it, "12 days from the Christmas they celebrate today," is the last of a group of what she termed "ruling days."

The weather that occurs on the 12 days between Dec. 25 and Jan. 6 rules the weather for the rest of the year, Mary Jane said, with each of those days corresponding to a month on the calendar. And "Old Christmas" is the last of those.

Mary Jane associates the ruling days with a belief in the power of the moon and planting by the signs, a practice she said she follows to this day.

"I always plant potatoes in April on the full of the moon, and I always have good potatoes," Mary Jane said. Anything else that grows beneath the ground - like onions, beets and carrots - should also be planted when the moon is full, according to Mary Jane. Corn, however, should be planted on the new of the moon, she said.

The idea of "Old Christmas" being a time when "alder buds will bust and leaf out, and bees will roar in a beegum like they're fixing to swarm, and briars will blossom and animals will speak" that Lee Smith describes in her Appalachian novel "Fair and Tender Ladies" is one Mary Jane remembers her parents talking about, but not anything she has experienced herself.

"I've wished many a time that I'd had a recorder so I'd have a record of all the things my mama and daddy told me," Mary Jane said. "I could have written it down, but I didn't."

It would appear that "Old Christmas" observances as found in the storybooks have just about disappeared from these hills. After all, Mary Jane is 87, and she doesn't have first-hand knowledge of it. Four other lifelong mountaineers I asked had never even heard the legends.

The church calendar tells us that Jan. 6 is Epiphany, the day the wise men actually arrived at the stable where Jesus lay. And the "Twelve Days of Christmas" have been immortalized in song.

To see if I could determine how these various notions of the significance of Jan. 6 were related, I traveled to cyberspace and searched for "Old Christmas." While I didn't find the connecting link, I did find a neat story from the opposite end of the Tar Heel State, a part of Hatteras called Rodanthe. People there continue to celebrate Old Christmas on the Saturday closest to Epiphany as they have for the past 100 years.

The Rodanthe celebration is thought to be a holdover from Colonial times when the English Crown in 1751 adopted the Georgian calendar - one that shortened the year by 11 days. Isolated Hatteras towns were not informed of the change until years afterward and in "true Outer Banks spirit" refused to adopt the change.

I guess the "Old Christmas spirit," like its Dec. 25 counterpart, takes a variety of forms. Do farm animals really lay down and low at midnight on "Old Christmas Eve?"

Who knows? To quote Mary Jane, "If you're around where there are any cattle, take a look and see."

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