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and everybody who could get there c ne out to go sleigh riding.” rhe Baylor students, most from Texas where Christmas is hardly ever white, were enchanted with the snow. The excitement was catching, even by Rappahannock youngsters who’s been tossing snowballs and building snowmen since they were big enough to fit into a snow suit.
Bom and reared in the county, Nancy Reeve recalls the evening Christmas pageants held in years past by local churches. “I can remember standing up beside Raynor Snead and reading out my lines from the back of the church. I was so scared' I was sure I was going to stumble over all those long words.
“Jesse Miller Turner, Mrs. Campbell and cousin Gates Jones (Jesse Miller’s mother) managed to come up with the perfect costumes every year for the wise men, the shepherds—everyone in the pageants," Nancy said. “And there was always a Hershey bar and an orange as a Christmas present from the church.”
When Nancy was a child, the holiday season began officially at Thanksgiving, the start of rounds of weekend feasts with relatives scattered from Washington to Linden.
Thanksgiving night also was the time for the first holiday visit to the magic toyland in the upstairs of Mr. and Mrs. M. R. Bradford’s grocery store in Flint Hill. “It was fabulous! So exciting! There were all these wonderful toys and Santa Claus too. All the kids got stockings. It was just super.”
And right after Christmas, the old theater in Washington had a special kids’ matinee. “That was neat. We’d get so excited,” Nancy remembered.
But the warmest visions of Christmas past center around her family’s traditions. “I remember Granny warning us that we’d better hurry up and go to sleep or Santa would pass us by until last and then we’d only get the left-overs,” Nancy said. “Every Christmas Eve, Mother would sit down with us before we went to bed and read The Christmas Carol. When I was little, the story was so long—it seemed to last forever—but when I grew older, that tradition meant so very much."
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