LITTLE ROCK — Arkansans have celebrated Christmas for more than 300 years. It is believed Jesuit priests held a Christmas Eve Mass at Arkansas Post in 1698, probably the first celebration in what is today Arkansas. In the ensuing three centuries, Christmas has brought spiritual uplift, community celebration and joy into even the most remote cabin.
In 1838 the Arkansas legislature made Christmas an official holiday, one of the early states to do so. And yet, in the early years of statehood, Christmas received little attention. A visitor to Arkansas in the early 1830s found almost no notice of Christmas among the populace, “with the exception of the Episcopalians who still adhere to the festival customs of the mother country,” according to one dispatch.
Not all early Arkansans celebrated Christmas on the same date. Some settlers recognized the old Julian calendar date for Christmas of January 5. Arkansans who did celebrate Christmas sometimes did so in ways that reflected the southern penchant for gunplay. Revolvers and rifles were fired into the air, and in 1840s Little Rock a cannon was fired on Christmas morning. Recently arrived Hannah Knight was not pleased: “The report was so heavy that it broke nearly all the glass in the windows. We tried to hunt up someone to be responsible for the damages, but it was no use. That was my first acquaintance with Christmas in the South.”
Boys and men both lit firecrackers with abandon, and Roman candles later came into popular use during Christmas revelries. A 1912 Christmas night celebration in Pine Bluff grew boisterous when streetcar employees at a Main Street tavern divided into two groups and began warring with Roman candles: “Time and again the linemen hurled fireballs from twenty-shot Roman candles into the ranks of the insurgents who held firm and returned the fire with deadly effect. Coats were spotted where the fiery balls stuck and the battlers were forced to duck and dodge to prevent facial disfiguration.”
Before the Civil War, enslaved Arkansans were often given a holiday on Christmas day. Some slave owners suspended work until the yule log in the fireplace was totally consumed, a practice that slaves exploited by cutting a green log and then soaking it in water prior to putting it on the fire. John Brown, a Camden merchant and planter, celebrated a quiet 1853 Christmas athome, but not his slaves: “It is a human as well as a wise regulation to allow them a few days as a Jubilee, and they enjoy it. All are brushing up, putting on their best rigging, and with boisterous joy hailing the approach of the Holy days, while we are in some degree relieved of the particular oversight of them. So all are happy.”
Food has always been an important part of Christmas celebrations in historic Arkansas. Slave owners often provided beef and white bread at Christmas, a welcome break from themore common and less expensive fare of pork and cornbread. Citizens of Little Rock, Helena, Fort Smith, and other larger towns had more formal parties and dinners to attend. An 1896 Christmas dinner menu from an old and popular Little Rock boarding house offered a rich repast, including oysters with brown bread and butter, roast pig with applesauce,turkey with chestnut stuffing, “old Virginia egg bread,” columbine salad, sweet bread pates with white sauce, cheese straws, olives, English plum pudding with brandy sauce, cake, bonbons, and “café noir.” And, yes, there was fruit cake.
Arkansans born before World War II often tell of community events being their main Christmas celebration. A family might have a Christmas tree at home and children would certainly hang their stocking with anticipation, but a Christmas eve social at the local school or church was warmly remembered. Fred Starr, a teacher, legislator, and writer on Ozarks topics, described a rural north Arkansas Christmas eve when the family made its way by wagon to a one room school “where the cedar tree will be decorated with holly berries, mistletoe, strung popcorn and red crepe paper . . . .” After a large dinner, Santa would appear on the scene and distribute “the sacks of candy, nuts and apples into eager little hands that seldom grasp such luxuries . . . .” -
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Tom Dillard is head of the special collections department at the University of Arkansas Libraries, Fayetteville. Email [email protected].
Editorial, Pages 83 on 12/20/2009