Rita Bumps Remembers Christmas

The following recollection is based on a series of interviews with Rita Bumps, who grew up on a typical farm in eastern Vermont during the 1920s and 1930s. We have excerpted a few passages from Richard Brown and Jay Parini's book, A Vermont Christmas.

"The best Christmases seem to be the ones a long time ago. We lived on a farm down near East Barnard, not far from Woodstock, with my mother and father, me and fourteen brothers and sisters. That was a big family, sure, and we were poor enough. But you never knew you were poor in those days, since you had all you wanted: plenty to eat, a warm bed, a house. And when Christmas came, you were so happy. You'd been waiting for that day all year long."

"Maybe a week before the big day my father took us into the woods to get a Christmas tree for the house, the whole gang of us. He was like the Pied Piper with that ax of his. the question always was, which tree was the right tree? With that kind of choice, you always had a nice-looking tree, but it drove you crazy trying to guess which tree was best. Each one had its drawbacks: short limbs, a bare spot here, a brown patch there. The perfect tree, like the perfect anything, didn't exist. And the arguments we would have! With that many kids, somebody always has a separate idea about something. But my father didn't like too much talking, so pretty soon he'd say, "Quiet yourselves!" Then he'd hack down the one he liked, ignoring what we'd all been shouting. After it was down, we'd hitch a rope to the bottom end of it and drag it to the house, a dozen kids like a locomotive, all sticky and smelly with pine tar."

Source:  Richard Brown and Jay Parini, A Vermont Christmas, Little, Brown & Company, Boston, MA: 1988.