The Christmas Letters (13 page)

And so we had a very merry Christmas 1994, and hope you did too.

Love,
Mary

LOW-COUNTRY BENNE COOKIES
(James’s new girlfriend brought these, they’re delicious)

Yield: 4 dozen cookies

½ cup (1 stick) butter or margarine, at room temperature

2 c. light brown sugar

1 egg, well beaten

1 teas. vanilla extract

1 cup self-rising flour

1 cup benne seeds (sesame)

1. Cream together butter and sugar in a large bowl. Add the egg and vanilla and mix well. Add flour and benne seed, mixing well after each addition.

2. Roll dough into 6 1-inch cylinders and freeze until ready to bake.

3. Preheat oven to 325°. Line baking sheets with aluminum foil.

4. Slice frozen dough thin and bake 8-10 min. Let the cookies cool thoroughly before removing them from the aluminum foil.

(From Adrienne Ravenel)

3. Letter from Melanie

1996

To our whole family, Bruce’s and my friends, and everyone in Mom’s Circle of Light,

Greetings, Blessings, and Hosannas! This is me, Melanie, getting an early start on my first Christmas Letter. Don’t worry—Mom is all right. In fact she’s never been better. But let me explain. Bruce and I are here house-sitting while Mom is in the Peace Corps (this way, we’re saving a lot of money, so I don’t have to work full-time and can write).

Since we’ve been house-sitting, I have noticed myself doing some interesting things: going around in Mom’s old gardening shoes, for instance . . . wearing her old plaid robe . . . putting sugar in the iced tea . . . even using her little Tupperware things! Bruce can’t believe it.

And today when I came across her old Christmas list, I decided it’s time to write a Christmas letter. We have some big news in this family, too. Claire and Don were married last May, just before Mom left, at the Tavern on the Green in New York. We were all present, naturally—Bruce even wore a tie for the occasion. More big news is the birth of a new half-sister, Susannah North-Copeland, 7 lbs. 6 oz., in Wilmington, N. C., August 18. Dad just can’t quit grinning. Andrew has a major exhibit coming up in Los Angeles in February, and James will begin Law School at Duke next fall.

I’ve started a novel. I’ve been doing some research on my grandmother’s family; luckily, Mom saved all of Grandma’s letters, and kept up with a few cousins herself. The book is set in West Virginia, where Grandma was from, a little town named Blue Gap which has all but disappeared now. Bruce and I have driven up once, and plan to go back in the spring. The most helpful person I encountered was our cousin Miss Libba Louise Long, a maiden lady who works in the elementary school library and is always in a twitter.

I was fascinated to learn that my grandmother had younger twin sisters—one of them being Miss Libba’s mother, Margaret Hodges Long, and the other being—well, Miss Libba wouldn’t even speak her name! as it appears she got pregnant by an older man, a married teacher, when she was just a girl, and then died under “tragic circumstances.” All this happened when Miss Libba herself was just a baby, so she never knew her young aunt at all, and now refuses to say what the “tragic circumstances” entailed—suicide? death in childbirth? accident? murder? Miss Libba Louise told me all this in a little blushing burst, then clammed up and absolutely refused to say another word about it, not even weeks later when I called.

When I looked for the page in Grandma’s old Bible where she wrote down all the births and deaths in the family, her whole family tree, I found it had been torn, with the
record of the twin sisters’ birth mysteriously missing. Naturally I wrote to Mom right away, who wrote back to say that Libba Louise was “never quite right in the head,” according to Grandma and everybody else, and that as far as Mom can remember, “that girl” died of the flu when she was about fifteen. Mom doesn’t think there was anything at all mysterious about it. “That girl” was always “sickly,” according to Grandma.

I’m sure I can learn her name by going through church records or courthouse records when Bruce and I go back up to Blue Gap. Maybe I can find her grave in the family “burying ground,” which I haven’t visited yet, since it’s way up in the mountains. Another cousin has promised to take us up there, and says that he also has some of our great-aunt Rachel’s papers “stuck in a drawer someplace.” So I’ll probably be able to come up with this girl’s name and date of death, if not her tragic tale.

But since I’ll never know the real story anyway, I’ve decided to write my own! This is basically where I got the idea for my novel, in which the whole business of twins is important, naturally. I’ve always wanted to write about being a twin. And though the novel is totally fiction, I’ve been learning as much as I can about mountain life in the early 1900s—the library here has an excellent folklife collection, which I’ve been poring over. So many of the customs are brand new to me—firing off guns on Christmas
Day, for instance, and celebrating “Old Christmas” on January 5th. The research is so fascinating that I have had to literally
force
myself to quit taking notes and start writing.

Every morning I put on this plaid robe of Mom’s, sit down at my computer here at the old white enamel kitchen table, and gaze out the window at the birds on the bird-feeder for a while before I begin, and then begin again, and again, still trying to get it right.

Merry Christmas,
Melanie Copeland

P.S. Whoops! I almost forgot this recipe from Mom (who said not to mention the anthropologist).

NDIWOZ ZA MPIRU WOTENDERA

2 bunches fresh greens, mustard or spinach

½ teas. salt

1 bunch green onions, chopped

½ teas. black pepper

³
/
₄
c. peanut butter

½ c. water

Cooked rice

Wash and cook greens until tender. Add onions & cook briefly. Make paste of peanut butter & water, pour over greens, cook slowly for 5 minutes. Serve over rice.

Published by
ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL
Post Office Box 2225
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

a division of
WORKMAN PUBLISHING
225 Varick Street
New York, New York 10014

© 1996 by Lee Smith.
All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents
are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
No reference to any real person is intended or should be inferred.

This novella is based on a short story with the same title that appeared
in the December 1995 issue of
Redbook
magazine.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for a previous edition of this work.

E-book ISBN 978-1-56512-858-3

Also by Lee Smith

NOVELS
The Last Day the Dogbushes Bloomed
Something in the Wind
Fancy Strut
Black Mountain Breakdown
Oral History
Family Linen
Fair and Tender Ladies
The Devil’s Dream
Saving Grace
The Last Girls
On Agate Hill

SHORT STORIES
Cakewalk
Me and My Baby View the Eclipse
News of the Spirit
Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger

Praise for
The Christmas Letters

“Bless Lee Smith’s heart! Once again, the novelist from Chapel Hill, N.C., has proved that nobody knows Southern women better. Once again, her prose is apparently effortless. . . . Once again, she has crafted a sparkling little gem of a story brimming with wit, charm, heartbreak, and even, this time, recipes.” —
Chicago Tribune

“One of our most accomplished authors scores again. . . . joys, tragedies, recipes, and reflections make an affecting narrative that ends much too soon. Highly recommended.” —
Library Journal

“All the gladness and sadness of life are found in this compact volume. . . .
[The Christmas Letters]
reminds us how often the ties that bind can stretch to the breaking point and that there’s no better time than Christmas to mend the fraying seams.”
—Southern Living

“A poignant story of public and private courage, ordinary hardship, and fragile hope; but mostly, it is a story of love.”
—Country Living

“You will devour this collection.” —
Booklist

“A perfect heart warmer for chilly winter days and a fun stocking stuffer.” —
Woman’s Day

“With her typical easy wit and down-home charm, Smith fashions an epistolary novella from that most infamous of genres, the annual family letter that often arrives in Christmas cards. . . . A delight.” —
Kirkus Reviews

“If there’s a better Southern writer writing now than Lee Smith, I don’t know who it is.”
—The Southern Pines (North Carolina) Pilot

“Miss Smith, one of the South’s treasured voices, writes plainly and touchingly of the familial triumphs, discord, heartaches, and joys that accrue to become our lives.”
—The Washington Times

“Getting to know [Smith’s] characters, laughing with them and sharing their sorrows is a rich and satisfying experience to be savored. . . . a strong oral tradition shines through her work.”
—The Charleston (West Virginia) Sunday Gazette-Mail

“In Smith’s hands [the epistolary novel] becomes a supple instrument for revealing character and inner contradictions.” —
Newsday

“[Smith’s] books bring laughter, tears, and joy, and always satisfy.” —
Richmond Times-Dispatch

“Chock-full of homespun locutions and details . . .
[The Christmas Letters]
exudes genuine charm.”
—The Raleigh (North Carolina) News & Observer

“The Christmas Letters
is a sweetheart of a little book.”
—The Columbia (South Carolina) State

“A story of personal triumph and learning to recognize what really matters.” —
Nashville Life

“[The Christmas Letters]
should stand out for its ability to find tiny, rare gems in the midst of ordinary life.”
—The Dallas Morning News

“If everyone wrote letters as rich and revealing as Lee Smith’s characters do in
The Christmas Letters,
the holiday missives that stuff people’s mailboxes would be prized works of art. . . . It’s a tribute to women, and their ability to endure.”
—The Salisbury Post

“Lee Smith has given her many fans a present in this delightful novella. . . . Smith’s genius shines through.”
—Winston-Salem Journal