Christmas During the Great Depression
My parents dropped by the other night for a little visit and for some reason or another, somewhere along the line, the conversation turned to the subject of lazy kids, more specifically, my lazy kids.
“I always have to remind them to do their chores,” I explained to my parents, “and even when I do, the odds are only about 1 in 10 that they will actually get done.”
“What kind of chores do you have them to do,” asked my father.
“Simple stuff,” I said, “you know, like clean up their rooms, unload the dishwasher, pull a few weeds, and maybe do a little vacuuming. But they’ve all figured out that they can do those kinds of things the next day, or the next week. So, they usually take their sweet time getting around to it. I guess I should really stay on top of them but yelling at your kids all the time gets really old.”
“Chores were different back when I was young,” explained my father. “You didn’t have much of a choice. If the cows needed miking, or if the chickens and pigs needed feeding, or the garden needed looking after, then you had better get out there and do it, because those animals and those vegetables were the difference between having food on the table and going without.”
“No one had much money back then,” explained my mother, “and Granny (her mother) made just about everything we ate from scratch at home. She made cornbread, biscuits, and homemade yeast bread, and when she put together a salad, it usually had poke greens and dandelions in it that she had gathered up from the pasture. She made all of our butter, cheese, cottage cheese and buttermilk, and every year, she canned everything she grew in the garden, including tomatoes, beans, and corn. She also canned all the fruit she could get her hands on, especially pears and peaches. All together, there’d be about 300 different canned foods under her bed at any one given time, and we ate those along with the chickens and rabbits she raised. Dad usually butchered a pig or two every year, and along with potatoes and lots and lots of beans, that pretty much made up our diet. Only rarely would we buy something from the store, and then it was usually more of a treat than something we really needed. I can still remember my father taking us all into town once a year to buy fifteen cents worth of liver, which would feed the whole family and how much everyone looked forward to that.”
“Those were definitely hard times back then,” said my father, “and if families didn’t stick together and share all the work, it wouldn’t be long before they were in big trouble.”
“What did people do for fun?” I asked.
“Well,” said my mother, “ holidays were always special, and everyone would dress up as best they could and find ways to entertain themselves.”
“On Halloween,” said my father with a smile, “me and my friends would usually get together and let the cows out of all the pastures, knock over everybody’s outhouse, and throw the rotten eggs that we had saved up all year at each other. Believe it or not, that was considered to be having a really good time back then.”
“Most of my memories from the Great Depression are actually very good ones,” said my mother, “with the possible exception of the clothes I had to wear. For years I had just two dresses, one that was orange and one that was green. My mother made them out of old cotton seed sacks and when I wore them to school every other day, the town kids would make fun of me. But other than that, we had each other, and we had our health, and we were all pretty well off compared to so many others. My parents always made sure that there was enough food to eat, and a lot of people back then weren’t that lucky.”
And then my mother said something I wish my kids had been there to hear.
“Christmas was my favorite holiday,” she said, “and although every once in awhile Mom and Dad would have enough money to give us all a store-bought gift, most years we just got a banana, apple and orange for Christmas.”
“You got fruit for your Christmas presents?” I asked in disbelief.
“Fruit was very hard to come by back then,” said my father, “especially bananas and oranges.”
As I sat there and tried to picture the looks on my kid’s faces if they were to tear into their Christmas presents only to find oranges, apples and bananas, my wife seemed to sense what I was thinking and quickly said, “Daryl, we are not getting the children fruit for Christmas this year!”
“But maybe that would actually get their attention,” I suggested. “Plus, just think of it, we could do all of our Christmas shopping with just one trip to the grocery store!"
