Julia Sugarbaker's South...

Goodbye, Julia Sugarbaker

Southern Muse says goodbye to Dixie Carter, better known as "Julia Sugarbaker," of Designing Women. To her character is attributed one of our favorite quotes of all time:

"I'm saying this is the South. And we're proud of our crazy people. We don't hide them up in the attic. We bring 'em right down to the living room and show 'em off. See, Phyllis, no one in the South ever asks if you have crazy people in your family. They just ask what side they're on."

Ditto.

For what it's worth, nobody on earth could have delivered those lines like Dixie Carter. Thanks, Dixie! You will be sadly missed.

On the Track of a Yankee Soldier

For about a year now, I've been on the track of a little Yankee soldier. He's not an ancestor ~ just a young fellow who crossed paths with one of mine. History is so much more intriguing from a personal angle. There's nothing like the family tree to get you digging into the routine events of 150 years ago ~ give or take...

When I first got interested in my young Union soldier, he was just a name and an interesting letter in a pension file. Now, I've found myself in a study of Civil War soldiers, complicated battle campaigns, and northern regimental histories. It's amazing how much documentary evidence is out there, once you start digging. At the beginning of the War, my little Yank was full of beans, tired of drilling, itching to see some battle action, and shrugging off the colonel's scolding should he happen to "cus up eny rusticks." By the end of the War, he'd seen plenty of battle action, was permanently scarred, and had, perhaps, learned to appreciate such rustics for providing "the most tender care" that loyalists in a poor country could bestow.

My guy played a small part in a big struggle and lost a limb for his trouble. While one great-great-grandfather was busy losing a leg under the Confederate flag at Yorktown, my Unionist great-great grandfather was risking life and limb to save a young Yank. That young man went home to Michigan ~ older, wiser, and perhaps with a whole new perspective about the South.

Dreaming of a White Christmas

We in the South have been dreaming of a white Christmas since the song hit the air. We'll be waiting till the cows come home I guess. White Christmases in the South are few and far between. Maybe some places here have them. On top of Monteagle Mountain, maybe (Tennessee), or Old Grassy, here in Georgia. Even they are more prone to get their snows in March or April. Here, we have rain. It's raining buckets right now. And maybe it will actually turn cold. "We might be gonna get us a cold spell," Daddy would say. I never had a sled. I once asked Mama why I never got a sled for Christmas, and she just looked at me and laughed. I might as well've been from another planet, the way that woman looked at me.

And yet, we did once get a snow. I don't mean a snow, snow. We get those sometimes, the stray flurry. Or once in a blue moon, the actual snow that "lays." (A laying snow, around here, is one that makes maybe a half inch; or, every in awhile, that luxurious, deep, lovely layer of a foot of snow. I've seen about three of those in my lifetime. But no, I mean once we got a SNOW. A blizzard. The Blizzard of '93 crippled the South. Remind me to tell you sometime about my experience of the Blizzard of '93. I lived to tell about it. Some didn't. It was a once-in-a-lifetime thing. I remain in awe at the thought of it. But it was in March. Not December. I'm still dreaming of a white Christmas.

Need more humor about snow in the South?
An Inch of Snow and Southern Schools is my essay on our reaction to snow:
http://www.southernmuse.com/southern/snowclass.html

Christmas without Santa Claus

Poverty pervades the stories of North Georgia and of the American South. Poverty has shaped the life of Southern Muse, though in no way has my life been poor. The feeling of poverty came instead in stories that were told to us. It came to us as a fear from our parents. A fear that the Great Depression would return. The Depression, more than anything else, shaped the lives of the people of Franklin D. Roosevelt's generation. Those who were touched by The Great Depression in childhood never escaped it, quite. They passed those fears on to their children, and even their grandchildren, the child of the cellphone and big-screen TV, as hard as that might be to fathom. Here's a story that my aunt once told me.

She had been taken in. Her own parents were in dire straits, partly of their own making. Their parents took in my aunt and her two brothers. They stayed in a little lean-to in the small house, along with their cousin, Bill, who had also been taken in. That Christmas, their father came to them and told them there would be no Santa Claus that Christmas. Times were just too hard. They noticed, though, that Bill's daddy didn't tell him that. So they wondered about it. Santa Claus might, they thought ~ he might just come anyway. Christmas Eve, they waited and wondered. Would Santa Claus come? They finally fell asleep.

Christmas morning, they awoke and looked around eagerly. Sure enough, Bill's side of the lean-to had a little red wagon. It was a Radio Flyer, no doubt. Sadly, their side of the lean-to had nothing. Not a sugarplum. Not an orange. Not a shiny new penny. Nothing.

Christmas Traditions

Christmas is approaching, and I'm enjoying the Christmas carols on the radio. I am dreaming of a white Christmas, though it's highly unlikely we'll have one. We have rainy days for Christmas. This is the South. We do dream of a white Christmas each year, but it's more likely to be gray and rainy, or unseasonably warm. Once in a blue moon we have snow. There might be a dusting of snow on top of Fort Mountain or old Grassy. Those cobalt blue hills look lovely tipped in white. Our holiday is stress free, so far. That's because we no longer do the big gift exchange. We don't join the shopping-mall fray or worry about over-spending on credit cards. We had just been drawing names for many years, and doing optional stocking stuffers. Even that got to be a little much, when small gifts just became too expensive ~ or too generic. So, our family scaled back on the old spending several years ago. Most of the kids (and the kids' kids) are grown, and they don't need to be trying to keep up with the Joneses on who gave the most expensive gift. We swap simple ornaments now (Chinese auction style). We sing Christmas carols, some gospel, and even some classic rock and country songs. We also play a few silly word games ~ Christmas themed, of course: acronyms and puzzles. (I always get the most obscure or classical Christmas carols, and miss the easy ones, so they laugh at me!) And we have our big Christmas dinner: turkey or ham, cranberry salad, and my personal favorite, the 'green stuff.' (It's gelatin salad. My sister-in-law brings it and we all love it). We swap stories, and we just have a nice time hanging out with family. So I'm looking forward to the big get-together.

Front-Porch Society

Lazy-day Sundays... we used to spend them loafing in the front-porch swing. Old and young, we enjoyed swinging or swaying in an old-fashioned glider. The old people sat in big rocking chairs. We talked. The old people chewed the fat and the youngsters listened, taking it all in, to become part of the collective psyche that made up the South. Or maybe the youngun's put in their two-cents worth, and were generally smiled upon and respected and loved. If they got too chattery, they'd be told to "go out back and play." Southern culture flourished in a front-porch society. They say that television and air conditioning brought the front-porch society to an end, and that is probably so. But computers and video games surely deserve a morsel of blame, don't they? And my nieces all have cell phones permanently attached to their ears. Well, every so often, we still stroll out to the porch swing. Sometimes it's for a too-brief spell of quiet contemplation, broken by the noisy "chatter" of our own left brains. Or maybe we sit in the swing for a minute or two to entertain an energetic toddler.

Southern...

Southern is southern. These days, you could almost forget what the stereotype was all about. Boiled peanuts are hard to come by, and you're more likely to hear Dr. Dre than Dixie booming from the pick-up behind you. But what I saw today you'd only see in the South. Parked at the local 7-11 was a stretch limo ~ complete with a Confederate flag and a bumper sticker that said "Redneck." The guy climbing into it was a scuzzy-lookin' biker type sporting a greasy Dixie doo-rag. He looked more like the Harley type to me, and the limo surely had seen better days. But all the fenders matched and there wasn't a spot of primer to be seen. Not quite Dukes of Hazzard, but it did have one saving grace: a big, empty gas can sitting atop the trunk...