I asked Mother and Dad to provide us with some of their memories of Christmas. Below is Mother's first installment with a promise of more to come. I have been listening to "To Kill a Mockingbird" and the Christmas described in the story sounds much like Mother's. I don't know how to do it, but I would like this to be a forum to invite other family memebers to share Christmas memories with us.

My Christmas Memories as a Little Girl
Evelyn Joy Hamberlin Grubbs born 1925
Written Dec. 2007

We lived on Holloway Hill. I had not started to school and I was probably four-years-old. Christmas was near and we had busied ourselves decorating the house for Christmas. We were all excited looking for Santa. We lived in a three-room-house with a long front porch, made from wide wood planks and a tin roof. I enjoyed hearing the pitter-patter on the roof when it rained. The heater had a long stove pipe that went up through the top of the house and I could not figure out how Santa could come down that stove pipe since he was larger than it was.
Christmas was near and we busied ourselves decorating with decorations we had made. We made chains by coloring the stripes on notebook paper with red and green Crayolas. We cut them out, pasting them together one end to the other with home-made past out of flour and water. This made rings that we connected together for chains to put on the Christmas tree and hang around the room. We also put a needle on a long, long piece of heavy thread and sewed the needle through the popcorn and pushed it along the string for popcorn chains to put on the tree. We put foil we saved from gum around sweet gum balls to hang on it. We folded a piece of paper and cut it long-ways or square and cut the edges jagged, then cut little holes in different shapes. Unfolded and we had snowflakes – little ones and all sizes to hang on the tree and from the ceiling. We went to the wood and pulled beautiful raton vines from the trees. We carried them to the house and decorated over the window and doors, also out on the porch over the door and windows.
A very special morning at our house on t Holloway Hill was waking up, jumping out of bed and seeing Santa had drank his milk and eaten his cake. Fayrene and I were so excited to see two little rocking chairs near the heater with a doll in each. Several doll clothes were spread over the bed, little dresses, panties, pajamas, and more. The clothes were so cute and we had fun dressing them. We didn’t know until later that our older sister, Vaughn, had made them. She was probably ten-years-old. Otis got a tricycle that year too.
My little rocker was so special to me. All rockers I had ever seen would turn over if you rocked too hard. This rocker was different – the rockers on it were curved down at the back and would stop it from dumping you backward. Later I learned it was over 100-years-old when my mother bought it at Lees Second-Hand Store in Gilmer. About sixteen years after that Christmas, a kerosene lamp caught fire in the house and the straw in the seat and back partly burned. I had it redone with straw just as it was.
My mother always wanted to make sure we had a really good Christmas each year. She worked in Gilmer and walked twelve miles there and back sometimes only making a quarter (25 cents) a day. Can you imagine her sacrifice and diligence to her family? Her biggest sacrifice and sorrow was to leave her children everyday to go to work. We had very little because of the depression, but we always had plenty to eat. Our parents worked very hard to provide all they could. We enjoyed each other and were a very happy family for we loved one another. We made nearly everything we played with.