Despite stories like “A Christmas Memory,” the yuletide narrative tends to be a Northern one, firmly planted in Frasier firs and snow-topped chimneys. But Smith’s small, warm book recounts her early 1900s childhood Christmases in Georgia. Smith (1897-1966), a white educator, was a pioneering civil rights activist best known for searing writings that chronicled the injustices of racial inequality. But “Memory of a Large Christmas” shows Smith’s lighter side, suggesting that the best Christmases are usually just a tad bit overstuffed. Here, she describes her holiday household:
"Everything about our family was big: there were nine of us and our mother and father and a cousin or two, and Little Grandma when it was her turn to stay with us, and Big Grandma when it was hers, and there were three bird dogs and four cats and their kittens and once a small alligator and a pet coon. And the house took them all in."
Smith’s house took in others, too, one year hosting 48 chain-gang prisoners for a holiday feast. I’ll let you read the book and find out those details for yourself.
Smith’s Christmas book first appeared in 1961, but a University of Georgia Press reprint is still available.
