A Christmas to Remember

For several generations my wife’s family has passed down this Christmas story of life in before urbanization swallowed most of the state.

A Christmas to Remember

            Christmas is a time for coming together. Nowhere was this more true than in the rural communities of the last century. Those dispersed rural communities had no real town, but they coalesced around some central entity such as a school. To further strengthen those ties the school many times served as a church on Sundays. That is the way it was where they lived.

            The twenty or so large farm families that lived nearby sent their children to the little one room school and on Sunday they all met there for worship. One Sunday there might be a Baptist preacher holding services and the next it might be a Methodist, but regardless they all attended. After the crops were laid by each year the most cherished tradition they enjoyed was the annual Christmas celebration they called having a “Christmas Tree” that was held at the school. A large cedar tree was decorated, each of the children received a gift, food was enjoyed, and later some local musicians broke out their fiddles and guitars and a community dance was held. It was a joyful celebration.

            This particular year the celebration was going along fine. By the time all the food was eaten and the dance began several of the younger teen aged boys became bored. The mothers had bundled up their sleeping babies and put them in the wagons outside so they would not be awakened when the families left after the dance. The boys were admonished to keep an eye on the babies in case anything untoward happened. That pretty much aggravated their already generally peeved attitude.

            There they sat. Alone in the middle of the night with nothing in particular to do. Then one of them suggested an idea that seemed like a good one at the time. Later investigation failed to produce the exact culprit, but ultimately they all shared in the blame. Slowly and carefully they began to switch the babies from one wagon to another. By the time they had finished it was hard to say whose baby was in what wagon, but there was no doubt nobody was going home with the right offspring.

            By mid-morning the following day all that togetherness was put to the test. Some say that it took the better part of a week to straighten out the situation although one young mother always swore that she never did get her proper child back. Probably had something to do with him turning out to be such a mean little devil. Anyway, all the good citizens of Aquilla never forgot the Christmas of the great baby switch, especially that group of young boys who suffered mightily from tender bottoms for such a long while.