"Blessed are those who give for they shall receive."

Christmas 1916

The Messenger | Seventh Presbyterian

Christmas 1918

 

The Messenger | 22 Dec 1918

The minister wishes to convey his Christmas greetings to the members of the congregation. May this Christmas bring you joy. We have been thankful for victory, now with the Christmas song in our ears we think of the blessings of peace on earth and long for the reestablishment of good-will. No dream of prophet or seer ever excelled the ambition of statesmen today to establish a lasting peace and a League of Nations. One’s imagination fails to measure the possibilities of development that lie bound up with that dream—war no longer possible.

America has taken a leading part in making peace possible, her President is the leader of the other nations as they seek to realize their dreams. Let us support him as he endeavors to promote the Christian ideal in international relations.

In my interest in world politics I haven’t forgotten my parish nor you, my friends. I am grateful for the opportunity you have given me of having a part in war activity, and now with enthusiasm I look forward to this winter as one that shall mean much in the development of our church.

The Star of Bethlehem is the Star of human hope and glory. The Christian ideal has not failed; it is the only untried, program that remains, and men and nations are turning toward it and preparing to follow its rays.

In Memoriam | John R. Hubbard | 22 Dec 1918

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep,

God is not dead, nor doth He sleep!

The wrong shall fail,

The Right prevail,

With peace on earth, good-will to men!

Christmas 1953

Helen & Jesse Halsey Christmas Card | 1953

Season's Greetings | 1944

1944 Christmas Card | Westhampton

Westhampton, N.Y.

Christmas Day

1944

Dear Dad—

Merry Christmas! Wish we could all be there to wish you all that greeting. Maybe some Christmas we can all be together in the old homestead. What fun that would be. Somehow Christmas just doesn’t seem like Christmas without you and Mother, Honey, Abbie, and dear old Freck and Bill. I look back on those days in Cincinnati, what a job you and Mother must have had selecting the things for your children, trying to satisfy each and everyone of us. Then too we had a lot of Fairy God Fathers and Mothers whose Christmas gifts were usually those of untold splendor. I am using today a toolbox and a beautiful set of augur bits, given to Freck and me by Mrs. Smythe or Miss Becky many years ago. Even Freck’s old lathe that “Santa” brought him works in my shop. Somewhere in Southampton a train engine locomotor waits for future use given by Mrs. Reed. There are other things I don’t remember, but which I still have around.

Today we received a present that has been the trump of the day and the grandest gift imaginable from the swellest person I know. War Bonds for all four of us from My Dad—I can’t begin to thank you . . . I don’t know how, but any way we appreciatie them more than words can express.

Today I am lazy and nearly exhausted—for nearly a month my machines have been busy sawing, drilling, etc., making toys. Then week before last I stayed in on my work full time usually from 9 AM to after midnight. In that time I made a barn, a train, a farm wagon model with team, a doll house, and drilled several cradles, in addition to the one that went to Sophie. Each and every item was sold representing about 50 dollars worth of toys. On top of that I made a gun for Chaddie and a rocking horse for Billy. I finished the latter at 11 last night. It is a cute little horse and cuter still when its young master swings into the saddle and rides away. He can really make it go.

Abbie certainly showered Chaddie with presents, we had a box from her and in it was a machine gun, a helmet, and a periscope. He is tickled pink with the helmet as well as the other equipment.

It looks as though we might have a white Christmas. It snowed last Monday and it snowed quite a bit, although there is still quite a bit on the ground it is going fast.  Today has been above freezing and it’s a heavy fog all day and occasional rain.

THANK YOU FOR MY BOND –BILLY

Fran just plopped his majesty in my lap and I thought he better learn to write early—

Friday morning I played Santa at the school party. Charlie is not at all sure it was Santa in fact he had a darn good notion it was me. When he came home I was working in my shop when I came upstairs he looked me over very closely. I had make up on, but washed it all off. My lips however showed signs of having been actual.  He mentioned the fact that I had paint on my face and he was quite positive that I was Santa. We changed the subject so may be he has forgotten.

There has been ice in the bay for a week or so, at last maybe with this thaw we are having I will break up enough to be able to go out and make a couple of dollars. If N.Y. has a meat shortage, which is threatened by the dealers or something, maybe clams should sell at a good price.

I wish you all could have been here today to help eat our 32# turkey. Next year I will have to raise some so that you can have one for Thanksgiving day and Christmas. Maybe a goose for New Years.

Our box went express last Thursday I hope it arrived in time to greet you today. Yours will be here I guess sometime this week as you said it was sent express on Thursday.

Before I forget.

Charlie’s Birthday Aug. 5, 1936

Billy’s Birthday Nov. 3, 1943

Jean Grace Raynor May 16, 1944

Thanks again the 4 of us for your wonderful gifts.

A Merry Christmas—belated but in time to wish you a very Happy New Year.

Love from us all.

Your son,

Charles

Seasons Greetings

Helen and Jesse Halsey Christmas Card | 1950

The Christmas Driver

Abigail Fithian Halsey "Thanksgiving 1890"

49 No. Main 1833-1940

Abigail Fithian Halsey | Christmas 1940

"Angels, From the Realms of Glory"

The Messenger | 18 December 1938

Order of Worship | Seventh Presbyterian Church

"Where the hearth is warm and friends are near . . ."

Abigail Fithian Halsey | 1923 | Southampton

Jesse Halsey notes on the back of the card that: “Dr. John Withrow Pres Cin Board of Education christened her 'Happy Halsey' when she taught in Cin Univ School.”

"Seek Hundred 'Hungriest Children'" and "Foreign Mission Report Will Be Explained"

1932

"The minister dreamed that his eight-year-old Billy, who had died two years before, was hungry—hungry in the midst of plenty; and that on Thanksgiving day! The minister’s childhood was spent in New England where Thanksgiving was celebrated like our Christmas. Billy’s few Christmases had been spent in a time and in a part of the country where Christmas is Christmas. So, the next day our minister determined that Billy should have his Christmas celebration by proxy. He has that curious sort of Celtic (or is it Christian?) faith that convinces him that those who have “gone on” know what goes on here."

from "Among the Deep Sea Fishers" | April 1911

Toronto, April, 1911

Dr. Grenfell’s absence in England has meant the cessation of the “log” and there is but little information to hand of the winter doings at the hospitals. The Christmas festivities at St. Anthony seem to have been most successful. A member of the staff writes: “We are now well started on the new year and bright Christmas season when so far away from our own kith and kin. I must tell you about our employees’ dinner which we served in the waiting room on Monday following Christmas to forty-three people. I had the room cleared and picnic tables made in such form that Dr. Little and Mr. Halsey were able to sit at the two ends and carve. It gave more dignity to the occasion and was a great joy to the people. The tables we made as pretty as possible with our simple decoration of paper napkins, mottoes, pickles, cheese, berries, raisins, figs, etc. Then we served soup, venison, potatoes, cabbage, plum pudding, ice cream, etc. At the end of the meal each person received a box of candy and a gift as well. Mr. Forbes managed the phonograph throughout the meal, and before they all departed a flashlight was taken. All went quietly and smoothly and from what I have heard was evidently a great success. Dr. Little I know was pleased. The orphans’ tree followed at 4 p.m. and gave a tremendous deal of pleasure, not only to children, but to the grown people as well, for Santa Claus in the person of Mr. Halsey and his two sons, Mr. Write and Mr. Evans, came flying down the Fox Farm Hill on a komatik drawn by two reindeer. It was so very real and made it so much more impressive.”

Dr. Little writes under date of the 15^th of January: “All goes well at St. Anthony. Dr. Wakefield started yesterday for the Straits with ten fine dogs and Aleck Simms as driver. . . We have all been struggling through a grippe epidemic but it is over and all are well. There is no special news. Things are pretty well started. Night school with two classes, men and boys; club for the men; Legion of Frontiersmen; Bible class for the girls; choir, etc. etc. All are awfully good about doing anything.”

While in England the Kin honoured him [Grenfell] by giving him a long and special audience, and though he was ostensibly taking a holiday he did not by any means neglect the opportunity of arousing interest in his work. The following report of one magnificent meeting in Queen’s Hall, London, shows that his simple earnest tale of the needs of his people and his aims for their betterment has lost none of its power:

“An expectant crowd that filled Queen’s Hall from area to top gallery welcomed ‘Grenfell of Labrador’ with British enthusiasm on Monday evening. Norman Duncan has made Dr. Grenfell’s work known far and wide in this country, and although one of the journalists who interviewed the Doctor last week confessed to an absolute ignorance of the geographical situation of Labrador, probably every one in the audience could have come through an examination with better results than that. From the first row Field Marshal Lord Grenfell followed his relative’s story with keen interest, and there were many well known people in the audience.

Sir Ernest Shackleton presided with that peculiar sea-dog air of his. He told us that there were five members of his Antarctic expedition present, and not a few of us who have read his book would have dearly liked to see those men paraded on the platform. Standing in the centre of the platform, his broad shoulders on the slant and his hands clasped for all the world as if he were hauling in the slack of the mainsheet, the hero of the South Polar expedition declared, in his bluff way, that the mass of the civilized world had come to appreciate the great work done by a man who was trying to do his best for the bodies and the souls of ‘nameless men who nameless rivers travel, and in strange valleys meet strange deaths alone.’ A happy, poetical description of Dr. Grenfell’s life work!

Editorial for Presbyterian Tribune c1949

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By Jesse Halsey

“Christmas is coming . . .” and what happens will depend upon where you live. What can Christmas mean to Christians in Korea, south or north? What can Christmas mean to millions in countries like East Germany where it used to be the great day of the year and now, because of religious repressions and economic strictures, little in material ways is possible. What about Yugoslavia with a non-existent harvest and a winter of starvation ahead? How does one keep Christmas without toys for the children and food for the table? It is all very well for us who have so much to be merry at Christmas, but what about the others?

In my last talk with Dr. Robert E. Spear, he said that, the greatest mystery of Divine providence was the fact that America had so completely escaped the judgments of God, abroad in so many parts of the earth. With our superabundance of good things, we are doubly obligated as individuals to share—“We bear the Christian name and mark.” And as churches, the needs of brother Christians in many lands claim our consideration just now for the Christmas—the Christ spirit—must “get abroad” else the whole thing is a mockery!

From a national point of view, we are learning that freedom is expensive. Most of us believe it is worth all that it costs. Uncle Sam is often pictured as Santa Claus by the caricaturists. The Marshall Plan is sometimes dubbed in terms of Kris Kringle beneficence. Just the same, increasingly, the country will bear the burden of rearmament and huge military expenditure. Along with it might it not be that some gestures of hope and goodwill, might be used?

At last report, the American Commissioner in West Germany had at his disposal some $50,000 contributed by friends for the relief of refugees and the feeding and housing of those who have managed to escape from the tyrannies of East Germany. Such persons—refugees from the Bolshevik terror—aided and rehabilitated, would be worth in terms of propaganda, the equivalent of many guns.

All through Indiana and Illinois, near hundreds of rural stations, there are great metal beehives of corn. In the western states the superabundance of nature (wheat) is often rotting on the ground for want of shelter. Potatoes in excess—subsidized for destruction—have become almost a national scandal.

Would it not be the very best strategy in the face of the world situation to dispatch some of these surpluses to the Adriatic and to Yugoslavia? If potatoes will not stand the voyage, certainly grain will. The best anti-communist, pro-American propaganda at our disposal is American surplus grain in hungry countries here and there the world around. Communism thrives on starvation. Communism literally goes on its belly. In playing Santa Claus, Uncle Same might be showing good business sense. Twenty or more divisions of Serbian soldiers right on the spot are one of earth’s most dangerous points! Would it not be excellent business for our government to help in the face of Yugoslavia’s famine?

We (editorial plural) have mixed our metaphors, jumbled our idealism with prudential economics in rather characteristic American style; this I confess. But more than ever before, we are convinced that food is akin to friendship, and that gestures of help are the best propaganda. Believing in preparedness, defending right with might, I still would leave no door or help unopened, trusting that friendship is better than ferocity and that the Christmas spirit is not confined to one day in December.

From the Manse | 1937

FROM THE MANSE

Never, through the years, have we been quite so grateful as this year, for the warm security and comfort of the lovely house that the generosity of the congregation has provided for the minister and his family. Built and maintained by the Church, we are privileged to live beneath the shelter of its roof. You have been good to us. From our home, which your thought has built, each member of our household gathered here for Christmas, sends Hearty Greetings and Good Will.

THE HALSEYS

Christmas, A.D. 1937.

The East Riding of Yorkshire

By Jesse Halsey, c1938

The East Riding of Yorkshire. Thus it was called in the early days. The name has changed but the savor of the old time lingers.

Farmhouses low and sturdy with gray weathered shingles punctuate the flat countryside. Shingles three feet long, rived from red cedar that grew in the swamps, worn thin now where they have defied the east-wind-driven storms of two hundred winters and the bristling heat of as many summers, but with butts still thick enough to cast healthy shadows in endless parallel windows where the long sweeping roofs on the north side slope almost to the ground.

“Regardless of the direction of the highway those houses were set by their builders always facing the south—and the sun and the sea. Farm houses like that, gray and weathered but trim and tight against the weather, were built, some on village streets and some at the hub of the surrounding acres.

Tiny windowpanes peek out, diamond, and square and oblong, most from the days when glass came from over the water and was priced in shillings and pence and is bubble-scarred and blue streaked and is enchantingly distorting as one peers out.

Lanes there are that wind as one did the cow-paths. Lanes with names like this: Job’s Land, Gin Lane, Loylsome Lane, Hither Lane, Further Land, Middle Lane. Some lead through the woods and some across the meadows but all come at long last—or short—to some water, great or small, fresh or salt—any one of a dozen bays or ponds, or the beach banks and the Ocean.

Squat and square brick chimneys anchor the houses to the ground. Within, these chimneys are fed by fireplaces, one in each and every room. Floorboards creak when you enter, boards half as wide as puncheon head. Low ceilings, paneled woodwork, musical H and L hinges on gently squeaking doors.

Leaning barns and wood sheds where eel-spears and clam rakes and harpoons prod the latest agricultural machinery. A discarded seine is sometimes seen, used now for a net for tennis or volley ball, but a swift reminder of days when corn was grown with fish for fertilizer—“two bunkers to a hill.”

By trim white Churches, surmounted by pointing spires, one comes upon ancestral burying rounds where rhymed epitaphs quarrel with life’s adventures to attempt to perpetuate the excellence of some village worthy—or mayhem his idiosyncrasies.

Names nostalgic attach to the villages, reminiscent of Old England—Southwold, Maidstone, Southampton. The music of the Indian words echoes in geographic designations –Quoque, Quioque, Ponquogue, Kumsebog, Shinnecock, Amagansett, Montauk, as the New Yorkers say. Or as the natives say, Montawk. (I am a native.)

Hamlets, two house or a dozen, a mile apart, or two, the names come back as you flash through, remembering the days when in the springless farm wagon it took half the day to take a grist to the mill. Littleworth, Good Ground, Scuttle Hole, and Hecox. Tuckahoe, Seabonac, North Ben, or Hog Neck. Towd and Cobb and Little Cobb, Flying Point, the Sea Poose, and Wickapoque. Then there was—and is—Scuttle Hole and Wainscott, Sag and Sag Harbor, Water Hill and North Sea and Canoe Place.

Captain’s Neck is there, and Cooper’s Neck, First Neck, and Halsey’s Neck is there, and Cooper’s Neck, First Neck, and the Great and Little Plains.

Windmills, a dozen or so, some in wreck, some in good repair, one, or maybe two, still grinding! And Whalebone Landing, Sandy Hollow, and Coopers Hill, The Twelve Acres or Reeves’ Orchard. In each of these my grandfather owned parcels of woodland. They furnished fuel aplenty for his many fire-placed house. He had inherited the woodland from his father, and he from his, for seven generations since the settlement date. I own it now. It is worth little, that land, but it has furnished fuel for Halsey households for nigh on to three hundred years, one generation after another—ten of them now. A cutting of new growth, is ready, say, once each thirty years.

Some of the wood from those parental acres I heap upon the fire tonight—steady burning hickory with a back of fragrant cedar—and in its glow of memory many things come back some out of the dim past. For I have lived a long time. Sometimes I think it must be close on to two centuries. What I mean is this—in fifty years, and odd, I’ve seen in the village where I was born the change from colonial simplicity in belief, in practice, and in custom to the usages of modern mechanized today.

I can remember for example when one family in our community kept Sabbath from Saturday sundown to Sunday evening, when everyone kept Sabbath in some strict form, when many people had candle moulds and some used them. When the few cottagers were called Yorkers. When most families raised and cured their own pork and canned their own fruit and dried their own vegetables. When potatoes and turnips and cabbage were the sole and staple vegetables for nine months of the year. Salt pork, salt codfish, steady diet. Carrots were for horses, pumpkins would keep only up to Christmas and were never canned, hence the untiring profusion of “pumpkin” pie this time of year.

It is as it were, a sprightly evening in early winter and a fire is burning on the hearth. It seldom snaps; it never smokes for grandfather was a skilled mason and knew his trade. Supper is over and the dishes cleared away, from the kitchen come the sounds of cleaning up and the stirring of buckwheat cakes being “set to rise” for breakfast. A Kerosene lamp burns on the erstwhile dining table now covered with a turkey-red damask cloth. In a Boston rocker by the fire sits and old man and on a foot-stool, toasting his shins, stretches a little boy. Whether he is six or eight or ten I cannot quite tell—no it is not the smoke, grandfather was a capable mason—it must be my eyes. Against the wall, so near that the boy can lean on it, is a seaman’s chest. The old man is reading, the boy listening, when he gets drowsy he leans his head on the chest and dozes off, waking with a start as Napoleon leaves Moscow, or Alexander reaches Babylon.

We must open that chest. Its stout rope handle smell of oakum, its battered exterior betrays its history knocking ‘round the seven seas in more than one forecastle. We should like to see what’s inside. The hand-hammered strap hinges gently protest but the boy turns back the lid. I’ve read in William James that smells quicken sure remembrance—well, they are here in urgent suggestions of far Cathay, the Moluccas, of the Celebes and other spice islands. The old people call it “cassia,” though we say cinnamon; this chest must have brought home cassia on occasion: at any rate its lined with strips of red cedar and San Domingo mahogany and sandal wood. It has fragrance when opened that to me is pleasant, though pungent and pervasive.

The boy explores the contents while his father holds the lamp. A broken backed leather bound Bible, with s’s that look like f’s, an old log book, some maps and charts, a volume of town records, a bunch of yellow letters tied with a faded blue linen rag, a copy of Pilgrim’s Progress, a Bodwich’s Navigator and a box that used to hold a sextant. These and some sea shells from the south seas, (the boy holds one to his ear to hear the throbbing ocean), a few small nuggets of gold from California, more books—a lot of junk, so the boy thought—then. Now—with reverence he closes the lid realizing that the chest is empty—except for memories.

Billy’s Christmas Party: A New Englander

by Jesse Halsey

Thanksgiving night our minister dreamed a dream. Vividly it came to him. A Thanksgiving turkey, one of the perquisites of this particular parish, may have been the cause—I cannot say (not being a Freudian psychoanalyst). Not with the cause, but of the results of the dream am I to tell you.

The minister dreamed that his eight-year-old Billy, who had died two years before, was hungry—hungry in the midst of plenty; and that on Thanksgiving day! The minister’s childhood was spent in New England where Thanksgiving was celebrated like our Christmas. Billy’s few Christmases had been spent in a time and in a part of the country where Christmas is Christmas. So, the next day our minister determined that Billy should have his Christmas celebration by proxy. He has that curious sort of Celtic (or is it Christian?) faith that convinces him that those who have “gone on” know what goes on here.

So the next afternoon our minister started by making a call on Anne James, a member of the Junior League, popular with all her contemporaries, an effective executive, but for some years confined to a wheel chair. She agreed to be general manager; using the telephone and direction all our activities. The four oldest members of the congregation were made honorary patrons. “Uncle Billy” Union, eighty-seven, loved and respected throughout our city, was to act as honorary chairman (for forty years the said “Uncle Billy” has entertained a score of city waife at his own Christmas Eve table). Madam G—who spent her active life as a missionary in educational work in Egypt—loved of all; Miss A—the oldest living communicant; and the jovial Mr. M—most generous of souls; these were to act as honorary sponsors.

Within ten days the following penny postcard went out (the minister has a press and does our parish printing: The cut on the card he clipped somewhere from a church paper and had it turned into a zinc etching.):

But if a sleeping baby now lay

Within a manger filled with hay

And God’s star pointed the way,

Would I believe? Would I obey?

This is Your First Card With

MERRY CHRISTMAS

Two weeks ahead of time it practices economy,

though not stinginess; the postman will be pleased,

it is mailed early.

It comes to tell you, of a Christmas Supper for the

Hundred Hungriest Children

we can find on Christmas Eve.

Every group in the Church will have some

part. You are invited to seat a guest. It will

cost fifty cents and no one person can entertain

more than ten. Send your reservations, and

come and see the children at 3:00 p.m. on December

24. If it should grow to 200 I shall not be surprised.

The difference in postage between this card

(there are 700) and a sealed envelope will be

our contribution to the party. So you understand,

and will approve.

And remember, please, that this card brings

to you and yours the sincere Christmas Greeting

of your minister and his family.

Seventh Presbyterian Church

December Eighth, A.D. 1932

The response was immediate. Dollar bills began to come in every mail. Many brought theirs on Sunday and others brought their fifty-cent pieces. Old Mintie Bates, who is cared for by the parish, brought a quarter, as did several children. Two youngsters brought their dimes.

Organization went merrily on. The acting chairman, from her chair, directed the organization. Mrs. Jones agreed to cook and serve the meal. Twenty volunteers from the Sewing Society rushed to her support. Six men offered to send turkeys. “Uncle Billy” made a bid for all the fruit. Mrs. Haney and Miss McCine volunteered to solicit the candy. Miss Kirk, a retired teacher, her hands crippled with rheumatism, asked to make the candy bags. Mr. Breton, our leading architect, directed a group of young people, who cared for the decoration. Mike Sigler, a Jewish peddler at our corner, insisted on furnishing the Christmas tree. Mrs. Shore, her sisters, her children, and her grandchildren, dressed the tree.

Christmas Eve was purposely chosen that it might be an inconvenient time for our privileged people to show their hand and heart toward the less fortunate. The Young People’s Society, who had Christmas activities of their own and were interested in home celebrations as well, insisted on washing the dishes (and incidentally, by nine o’clock that night, had the dining room and kitchen spic-and-span). The only paid help was for additional janitor service, due to the many tables and chairs and fact that Christmas Eve was on a Saturday night. Everyone gladly accepted their assigned job as if it were a Christmas privilege.

The minister felt confident that one hundred could easily be provided for. It grew to four hundred before they had finished. Two hundred names, and then two hundred more, of the neediest children in the city came to us from the welfare director at City Hall. Each child was sent a personal invitation, under a three-cent stamp. Cars were offered, although it was a busy Christmas Eve, and, under the direction of our Boy Scouts, every child was sent for, brought to the church, and later returned. This we thought a rather severe test of the congregation’s loyalty.

At three o’clock our guests arrived. Kate Douglas Wiggin is needed to describe these Ruggles! Coats were checked by Girl Reserves and all finally seated in the big parish hall. Portable movies (or rather talkies) gave a half-hour’s varied program; then came the skillful manipulation of the marionettes by Mrs. G, an adept amateur. This gave the children unbounded delight.

Promptly at four, in step to a pealing Christmas march echoing from the whole parish house through the church organ loft, the children went downstairs for dinner. Tables were spread for three hundred in the dining room. (Our minister insisted on the best china. “No paper plates,” said he. “Fear of germs? No, not at Christmas! Scald the plates, but don’t use paper.” His word is law, so the best was used.)

The Mayor carved the first turkey; a hundred plates were ready hot in the kitchen—turkey and all that goes with it. Another hundred followed in a jiffy, a third, and then part of the fourth. (The Scouts had gone out with a bus to look for the last twenty on the city streets; and the found them. Hastily washed, they came; not dressed in their best like the others, but happy.)

The tiny tables from the church kindergarten were arranged around the brilliantly-lighted tree that stood in the big gymnasium adjoining the dining room. The sliding doors between the two rooms were up and all was festive and gay. Chairman Anne, from her wheelchair, looked on, still our executive officer. “Uncle Billy” and his three assistant patrons all came to act as hosts. The young people waited on tables and for an hour music and laughter filled the rooms.

When all were fed Santa Claus appeared. From somewhere he brought a big shopping bag for each child, with the child’s name on it (the three hundred odd who had written invitations). In the bag was an apple and an orange, a pound of candy (in one of Miss Kirk’s bags), a popcorn ball, and an age-appropriate toy (furnished by the mother and father of a little maid who went away at Christmastide). The big boys had knives; the girls, most of them, dolls; and even the late-comers found filled bags—though necessarily unnamed ones.

Three children ‘phoned in that they had missed the auto, so their dinner even to ice cream, was sent them!

Everyone worked with a will; nearly four hundred of the neediest had a gay Christmas Eve and the minister’s Billy—did he know about his party? “Why not?” says our minister. “Why not?”

GRIST FROM OUR MILL

by Jesse Halsey

Budget necessity at our house demands modest Christmas expenditures, yet there is a large circle of friends who it is a real satisfaction to remember in some simple and, if possible, unusual way.

Not of necessity, but for the sheer joy of it our household plans, through the year, its simple and [meaningful?] giving. Ingenuity rather than aggregate dictates the procedure. This is abetted by the family use of the automobile. We travel considerably. The boys, with an old car of collegiate appearance, go from the Middle West to New England [ed note: JH struck “one to Central New York”], and Father once a month has a business trip to Philadelphia. His hobbies are history and photography so he often varies the routes, coming and going.

We often buy along the road. For examples, our apples come from Western Maryland, or the Shenandoah Valley, or Northern New York depending on the most recent travel adventure of the family. When in Deerfield, Mass., some fancy onions are added to the cargo. Vermont or Northern Ohio or Western Pennsylvania furnish maple syrup. The list is long, and more or less obvious, as we visit Canada and all the North Eastern seaboard and the south highlands, Green Mountain, NC.

To be more specific, one of our most successful ventures in this ingenious friendly economic game has latterly, been with cereal products. If I were in this business I should assemble some mill producers and sell them in combinations. But we have acted as our own jobbers and this is the line.

Buckwheat comes from Western Maryland, “Friendship” mill, to be exact. The Maple Syrup that went with it last year came from “Confluence” not far from where Lieut. Washington led his troops to safety across the Great Meadows after Braddock’s defeat. This year we had Vermont Syrup, some of it from the Coolidge Farm in Plymouth.

Our corn meal comes from Nettle Carrier Creek in North Central Tennessee Mountains. Here is an old water mill where white corn is ground between mill stones. The whole corn is used with the chit or germ included. In commercial products this is often eliminated as it causes corn meal to turn rancid after a little (unless it is kept in the dark). The slow motion of the cold stones doesn’t “burn” the corn as is done in the high speed burr mills (where steel teeth at a terrific rate turn the corn into powder). When we want yellow meal—not popular in the South—we get it from a water mill on Long Island, where corn bread is known as “Johnny Cake” since Civil War days.

Whole Wheat or Graham flour (there is no difference) comes from the Nettle Carrier Mill as does our Rye flour. We go there once or twice a year to visit a Mountain School and spend some hours at the mill watching the process—and Father is always taking pictures of the mill and the old miller. We have a movie of that mill. As the water is turned on the buckets fill and the wheel begins to turn.

White flour (needed in most recipes), we have not attempted to add; the great mills of the country have perfected this process; we wonder that they don’t feature other things.

Bran we get in quantity from a country mill thirty miles from our city. There are two kinds; one fine for cooking, and another coarser and heavier such is fed to live stock. This we use for baking hams. Finally there is a cracked wheat cereal from another country mill fifty miles away on the Ohio River. This we value highly.

At Christmas, packages of some of our cereals were neatly tied up and marked. Some tested family recipes were typewritten by one of the daughter of the house and added to the collection. Pancakes of several kinds, Indian Pudding, Bran Muffins, Graham Gems, and Johnny Cake, these and others.

Our most ambitious basket was prepared for our family doctor; the others were less ambitious but similar.

NEW YEAR’S GREETINGS

To All The Mitchells

The Goose came from Felicity; The Buckwheat from Friendship.

The Maple Syrup came from the Coolidge Farm, Plymouth, Vermont.

The “Injun” Meal, for Johnny Cake, came from Nettle Carrier, Tenn.

So also did the Graham Flour.

            The Recipes were Grandmother’s.

                The Basket was made by a Shinnecock Indian.

                     The Juniper came from Cody, Wyoming.

And the Halls Add Their Good Will.

Mary Ann

by Jesse Halsey

Thanksgiving is the Great Day in New England, or was so in my boyhood. We lived on Long Island, the east end of which is pure New England, while the wet end is Dutch---with a Kriskingle. So we had, both; Thanksgiving and Christmas. Grandfather was much of a Puritan and frowned on Christmas celebrations—in theory. Being a deacon he had to agree with the Parson who never would preach a Christmas sermon at Christmas nor an Easter sermon at Easter! (“It was papish.”)

But our grandmother was different. SHE was supreme in her own domain, indoors, and knew, moreover, just how to handle grandfather who was naturally fat and jolly and, as a young man, had lived in New York where Christmas and New Years were real celebrations that centered largely in the home. This was the beginning of the Nineteenth century—our grandfather’s boyhood; while our childhood was in the years near its close.

Mary Ann Cuffee

We were lucky, I say, with a New England Thanksgiving and a Dutch-flavored Christmas. And then we were blessed with Mary Ann.

She came to help on all great occasions. Funerals, births, butchering days, Town Meeting, Thanksgiving, the Christmas week, and many other times in between. No family occasion was complete without her. The little “back chamber,” a half attic over the kitchen, was her room, never used by another so far as I know.

An Indian of the Poosepatuck tribe, she was born before Eighteen hundred, near Montauk Point, but in our time lived on the Shinnecock Reservation, where she had married. Her features were as severe, as my faded snap-shot will show, but she was the soul of goodness and withal a most excellent cook.

Snow sometimes came with Thanksgiving, and almost always by Christmas time was continuously on the ground. It was my greatest joy, as a boy, early Thanksgiving morning to drive (with some of my cronies), in the old apple-cart, or in a sleigh, to the Indian reservation, two miles away “to fetch Mary Ann.” She had a grandson just my age who always came along.

Her mind was full of old sayings—this old woman; old traditions and superstitions. She believed in ghosts “and such like;” had hard common sense, stoic discipline, but a soft spot for us boys. She remembered wigwam days and knew the nature-lore of her ancestors, could predict the weather and, as I said, she could cook.

The simplest fare became ambrosial at her touch. I mean this in a countrified sense for she knew nothing of salads and appetizers. None were needed. The odors that hung round the home for hours before a meal, though kitchen doors were closed, these were enough to set one’s appetite agog.

She had no written recipes. Like all good cooks, she just guessed, but when my oldest sister was married “Aunt Mary Ann,” as we children called her, consented to be questioned regarding her art and with Grandmother’s help the bride got some semi-recipes on paper. With the passage of the years we came to think that sister “Nynne” had caught some of the culinary secrets of Mary Ann. From her cookbook and other family sources I have tried to write down some of the old Indian’s best dishes best suited to the Holiday Season.

Historic image courtesy Abigail Fithian Halsey Files, Southampton Historical Museum Archives and Research Center.