Christmas Memories

by Mary Adams

Christmas Memories

As the holidays approach, people tend to reflect more on memories and stories of years gone by.  As the Director of the Gordon Center I have been extremely blessed with the opportunity to listen to, record, preserve, and share memories of Thurber. Some of the memories and stories of Thurber come to us through casual conversations with museum guests, and others are collected through planned oral interviews. As the holiday season is upon us I thought it would be fun to share some of these memories.

The first comes from Mrs. Leona Roberts. Several years ago, I was privileged to meet Leona when her niece brought her to one of our Sunday afternoon programs. Mrs. Roberts was born in Thurber in 1925 and she shared the following holiday memory with us.

                “When I was 3 or 4 years old, my dad took me and my oldest brother Christmas shopping in Thurber. He had an old car with a trunk.” She explained that while “Mother kept the baby at home… Daddy sent us to look around to see if there was anything we wanted Santa Clause to bring us. I picked out a doll with a pink dress and bonnet and Grady a train on tracks that they had in the store.” She went on to recount that later, after they had gotten home from their shopping trip, she walked by the car and saw something sticking up so she unwrapped it and found a desk with chair and a chalkboard for her brother and she found a doll for her. “I carried that doll in the house and Daddy was not happy. He told me ‘you take that doll into the living room and put it on the mantle and if Santa Clause thinks you’ve been good enough he will leave it; if not he will give it to someone else.’”

                Records indicate that the toy store was a special area set up for the holiday season, though the location changed from year to year. Some records indicate it was above the General Mercantile, however, Ed Bryant, in the oral interview with Dan K. Utley, places it above the Drugstore. “But all the upstairs was storehouse. But before Christmas time, along in November, that was the toy store, and Mama would take us upstairs, and that whole top floor of that big old drugstore building was nothing but a display of toys. You talk about heaven, man. That was next to it. And we’d go there and we’d just drool over those things.”

                While these two memories conjure wonderful images of children enjoying the Christmas Toy Store, Lilly Gibson’s favorite childhood holiday memory is of the Christmas tree at home. In her oral interview with Dan K. Utley she recounts, “And I’ll never forget the first time we got to put candles on our Christmas tree. We had ‘em where you could fasten ‘em  on a limb, but it was kind of dangerous if the tree was getting old, and my dad – asked him if it would be all right if we put ‘em on, and he said, ‘I tell you what. You can put ‘em on this time and I’ll take my three gallon water bucket and stand right outside the door. If one of ‘em catches something on fire, I’ll just let the tree have water.’  So, we had a real pretty Christmas tree that year.”

                These three stories focus on Christmas, but there are many more stories about life in Thurber that have been painstakingly recorded and preserved. While there are extensive company records that detail day to day operations of the coal mines, brick plant, mercantile operations and other business related transactions, there are few that talk about the daily life of Thurberites. Therefore, the oral interviews and stories that have been recorded, provide us with a small glimpse into the lives of the people who made their home in Thurber.