This week’s Missouri Ozarker is a brief meditation on the holidays that make up the Holiday Season. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, Hillbillies!
Legend has it that old-time Ozarkers used to celebrate “Old Christmas” on January 6th. As the story is told, our Scots-Irish ancestors moved to Appalachia before Europeans made the switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, and then once in America they were so isolated that they failed to notice when the rest of America and most of Europe started celebrating Christmas on December 25th. By the time our forbearers arrived in the Ozarks, they apparently had learned of the calendar change, but they were so stubborn that they refused to give up their “Old” Christmas traditions. They were at least willing to celebrate the “New” Christmas as a sort of bonus holiday in December, but they weren’t going to give up their old ways.
I have my doubts as to just how widespread Old Christmas really was in the Ozarks, if only because none of the old-timers I grew up around ever spoke of it. The entire notion of Old Christmas is a little too on the nose for me, emphasizing, as it does, our isolation and attachment to old ways long after the rest of America and the world has moved on. It seems to be more of a caricature of the Ozarks than the reality of the Ozarks I’ve experienced. Still, no less an authority than Vance Randolph, the first and most revered academic to study our region’s people and culture, recorded multiple stories of Old Christmas during his work back in the early 20th Century. For anyone who’s interested, one of my favorite online resources about the folk history of the Ozarks, Ozark Healing Traditions, has catalogued some of Randolph’s stories from his books that are hard to find in print these days.
I’ll admit that there probably is some truth to the stories of Old Christmas in the Ozarks. Ozarkers sure do care about our old ways, even if we aren’t quite as backwards as the stereotypes would have you believe. As I’ve grown older, I’ve realized that Christmas, of all the holidays we celebrate, is the most larded up with nostalgia and tradition. Christmas is sort of like a snowball rolling downhill: it can only expand over time, never decrease, as our Ozark families grow and intertwine our various histories and practices. The result is that our Ozark Christmases are almost always “old,” whether we celebrate them on December 25th or January 6th. Christmas is just a time of looking back. There’s nothing wrong with nostalgia, provided, as with so many other dangerous indulgences, it’s used in moderation.
Christmas, whether Old or New, still gets most of the holiday attention in the Ozarks, but recently I’ve been thinking more and more about New Years. While our Christmas traditions are many and observed with zealotry, our New Years traditions are waning or plumb forgotten. How many of us still make a point to eat black-eyed peas every January 1st? How many of us pause, whether out of superstition or optimism, to consider the year ahead of us and how we can effect it? It’s so much easier to use the first day of the New Year to recover from a hangover or brace for a return to the real world of work or school than it is to look forward.
It’s high time to revive the old Ozark New Years’ traditions, or maybe make new ones, because we need to spend some of our holiday season looking forward. For too long, Ozarkers, myself included, have been so focused on looking back at Christmas that we haven’t been looking forward on New Years. This go around, I certainly indulged in looking back, but I also intend to look forward. As a region and as a culture, we’ve been blessed with considerable history to recall on Christmas, but we’ve got a great future to look forward to—in 2022 and beyond.