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It’s starting to look a lot like Christmas in the neighborhood. This is especially so in the village of Laurel Mills which is just down the “hill” from Viewtown.
Many homes have been decorated and the tradition of having a Christmas tree on the front porch of the Laurel Mills still survives. Mary Francis Fannon, the store operator, has been doing this since 1988 and many of those years, Pat Compton was responsible for decorating the tree.
Continuing the research on Christmas’ past, my husband Danny reports the following.
“The Christmas tree in Viewtown today, in most cases, looks very different from the Christmas tree of old. I interviewed a lady who was a child during the depression years. She told me that there was no such thing as a pre-cut tree for sale or a Christmas tree lot to make a selection.
Most individuals went out on their land to cut a tree and almost always it was a wild cedar. Remembering that cedar branch ends are weak and will not hold much weight' I asked one lady from that era what kind of lights they put on the tree.
With a slight pause, she looked at me and said, “What lights? We didn’t have electricity.”
I then asked her if she used popcorn strands to decorate the tree. She quickly answered, “ If we had popcorn we ate it.”
I found in my interviews, that a typical Viewtown cedar Christmas tree from that period would be decorated with
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