What do you want for Christmas?

Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

1 Corinthians 13:7

 

It’s that time of year again when the world starts thinking about Christmas. The neighbors across the street have their yard all decked out in lights and decorations. Stores are playing Christmas music and jamming the aisles full of stuff that we can’t live without. Or so the Christmas shoppers seem to think.

Children are making lists. Every other conversation out of their mouths starts with ‘I want…’ They have about a million things they just can’t live without that two days after Christmas they won’t care anything about.

Okay, that’s a bit extreme. I know there are exceptions. My daughter says she wants nothing for Christmas. My husband says the same thing. And my son is only asking for one relatively inexpensive item.

But those are exceptions. Most people…even adults…have lists of things they want. The majority of us can think of all sorts of stuff we’d like to have. Some of it we might even need.

As a historical author I’ve written several manuscripts that have Christmas scenes in them. When I see all the decorations, the lights, the lists and everything else that goes with Christmas as we know it I can’t help thinking of the way it used to be.

Today when we think of Christmas in the past we tend to see it as a simpler version of what we do today. In my Christmas scenes my characters have family meals, they exchange gifts. They just do it on a much smaller scale and often with handmade gifts. But was it really that way?

For some I’m sure it was. But it was different too. Christmas was more about the reason for the holiday and less about the holiday itself. Or so I want to believe. It was more about loved ones and less about what those loved ones were giving you.

One of my favorite episodes of my favorite TV show is all about the family sneaking around trying to make or get presents for each member of the family without anyone knowing what they’re giving. In doing so they make sacrifices to acquire the gifts they want to give. They work long hours, stretch what little money they have to buy the most they can, give up something they love to pay for something someone else will love.

It’s love.

It’s also simple and heartfelt.

And it’s a far cry from the trip I made into town yesterday where I walked the aisles in the stores, picking items I thought the recipient would like, then paid for it with barely a twinge at the cost.

Now I wasn’t doing big shopping. I don’t celebrate Christmas that way. I try to keep gifts to a minimum and the price low. I buy what I think they’ll truly like and that’s it. If I can make a gift instead of buying one that’s even better. I wasn’t always that way. I used to buy stuff just to see how many gifts I could pack under the tree before Christmas.

Now I make them count.

I keep it simple.

I’d give a lot to have a Christmas the way they did in the 1800’s. To celebrate love instead of stuff. To give because of love not because it’s expected.

My husband recently asked me what I want for Christmas. I stood there thinking, drawing a blank, knowing he expected and answer but unable to give him one. Because I don’t want anything. Except maybe…time.

Time together.

Time to care.

Time to just be.

And…a simpler time.

This moment is what we have. Every today is all we’re promised. For Christmas I want time with my family, time to appreciate the blessings the Lord has given me. Time to dream of what Christmas was like when materialism didn’t matter.

And maybe a few stories of what this time of year was like in days gone by.

It's in the...twang

Writing a manuscript is something like making a new friend. You have to learn all your characters quirks, their likes and dislikes, their speech patterns.

Did I mention…

Their.

Speech.

Patterns.

I’m from Texas. So I speak…Texan. Complete with the slang and abbreviated words. Not to mention I drop the g on all words ending in ing. It’s just…Texas. It’s how we talk.

I’ve read books set in Texas that were obviously written by authors that weren’t from Texas. The characters had this aggravating habit of saying things like ‘did you’, ‘do you want to’, ‘I am’, ‘we are’, and the like. That was the only clue I needed to know the author wasn’t from Texas. Because here in Texas we don’t say things like ‘we are. We say ‘we’re’. And for ‘do you want to’…we make it easy. It’s just ‘don’tcha want to’.

See easy.

Less words. Why say all those words when we can shorten it? Now this isn’t somethin’ we think about down here in Texas. It’s just the way we talk. I’d have thought everyone understood us but…I was wrong.

I had to experience this first hand to realize that what sounds natural to me, what flows naturally in my speech isn’t always understandable to others. The first time I talked to my husband he told me I sounded…like Texas. I understood what he meant.

Sort of.

It wasn’t until I spent weeks in another state that I fully understood the difference. I knew I had an accent. The concept isn’t foreign to me. And I’m rather…fond…of my accent. I like the way I talk. Even if my daughter is right when she tells me that if we were to write in our manuscripts the way people in Texas really talk we’d all sound like a bunch of outlaws.

Here’s an example: ‘I cain’t git this ta work. I’m fixin’ ta run to the store an’ git another one. ‘Cause This’ns broke.’

Yes, we really talk like that in Texas.

But it wasn’t until recently that I began picking up on just how different our speech patterns are. In one of my manuscripts…the only one not set in Texas…my heroine gets mad and starts talking. Her new husband is shocked. His thoughts… Now he’d managed to marry a woman that wore Texas like most women wore dresses. She’d hidden it well, right up until her temper had kicked in, then she’d opened her mouth and let it spew out.

I wrote that long before I fully understood the differences in our speech patterns. It was just…normal to me then. Now I can see the differences. I hear the differences on a regular basis. When my Louisiana husband says ‘what are you saying?’ or when he says something and I catch the difference in how he says it and how I do.

Not long ago we were talking about meat from wild game. Nothing special in that conversation. I said ‘it’s wild caught’. He asked me over and over what I was talking about. Wild caught…like caught in the wild. About the fifth…or tenth…time he caught on. He said ‘wild caught’. That was what I said. Then he informed me I was saying ‘wild cot’. Now I was saying ‘wild caught’ and I knew what I meant. But…

Apparently when I said it…

Texas came out.

When I tried to say wild caught as wild c-a-u-g-h-t I can’t say it. Literally. My mouth is incapable of pronouncing it as caught. It’s either cot or mumbo jumbo.

Here are a few other examples of differences I’ve noticed. In Texas we have acorns. In Louisiana they’re acerns. The o is pronounced er. In Texas we have Wednesday. In Lousianna…it’s Wednesdee.

These may sound like little differences and they are but multiplied by a few thousand words they add up to very huge differences.

I was told by a judge in a contest that western romances set in Texas are cliché. Maybe they are but since I’m from Texas I write what I know. That way I don’t have to worry about getting the speech patterns wrong.

Now all I have to do is worry about how much my Louisiana husband is gonna effect my Texas accent.

Yes, It's Research. Really.

Writers...research.

It's what we do. To tell about a time or place we've never been takes researching until we are as well acquainted with that subject as we are our own time. We must be able to see that place in our minds to write it in terms so that our readers can see it too.

That research can show up in any form, at any place. Yes, I'm really doing research when I insist on tasting every flavor of taffy when it says it was made the same way they made it in the 1800's. It's research when I need to hold that hand stitched lace because I can't describe what it feels like when my heroine's mother makes all the lace on a wedding dress if I don't know what it feels like. And it's research when I need to go to every frontier festival, living history museum, and stagecoach festival that comes within driving distance.

Oh...

And all those Christian fiction books on my bookshelf...

They're research too.

Really.

I Was That Little Girl

There it was.

In black and white.

Mocking. Taunting. Reminding me of the simple ways people used to live.

I held in my hands a children's book filled with stories of a grandmother sharing stories from her childhood. Bonnets, hoops for wearing under skirts, aprons, pumps... They were all there. Written out in simple terms that would appeal to children in the five to twelve age range. And they were holding me captive.

This isn't the first time I've experienced this. Every time I hold that book in my hands the same thing happens. I am drawn to those simple stories, to the closeness shared between the grandmother and her granddaughter. As I read the stories I am reminded of many an hour spent in my own grandmother's company, hearing stories, learning at her knee, being loved.

Only my grandmother told stories of the depression not the pioneer era. She told of riding in a car while her newborn cousin lay on a pillow beside her because it was believed in those days that to bend a newborn at the waist would cause them harm. She told of the first Christmas she ever got a present, how her mother made donuts using her wedding ring to cut the circle out of the middle, getting her fingers smashed in the sewing machine...

And while she told me those stories she taught me how to sew, how to cut patterns, how to cook.

So when I hold that children's book in my hands and read the stories it contains, I enjoy the simple days, the simple life, the closeness of the family it portrays and I picture that little girl sitting on her grandmothers knee, standing at the table leaning over a woman that never grew weary of explaining and answering questions. Because once...I was that little girl.

Drawn To a Simpler Time

For a thousand years in your sight are but as yesterday when it is past, or as a watch in the night.

Psalm 90:4

I was 11 when I discovered a world I never knew existed. Books. Books. And more...books. I'm sure I grew up with books around me. I remember visiting the library as a child. My mother read chapter books aloud to me and any friends that happened to be at our house but it wasn't until I turned 11 that I discovered the pure joy of reading.

Not only did I discover the pleasure of reading but I also learned that books could take me places I never dreamed of. I traveled west in covered wagons, experienced the depression through the eyes of a girl that 'lived' through it, traveled through time, visited foreign lands. Without warning my world opened up and I lived in a ways I could only imagine. And imagine I did. Not only did I read those stories I spent hours making them up in my head.

I did not know then that those chapter books and the daily doses of Little House on the Prairie that I watched as soon as I escaped the confines of school would mark me for life and create a fascination with a time gone by. Or that years later my life would be changed as I entered an all new world. The world of writing.

Many a day have passed where I wondered what it would have been like to live in a time when things were simpler. A time where morals and faith ruled peoples lives. A time when family and friends held more importance than things. When towns were communities of people pulling together helping each other. Sharing fellowship, sorrows, joys....life.

Those days were not without their problems. Of that I have no doubt. Then, as now, there were believers and non believers. There were law abiding citizens and outlaws. Friendly folks and people that would just as soon shoot you as look at you. 

But...Oh to see those days as they were. To walk the main streets and see the general stores, the women in long dresses, the children in bare feet, streets lined with wagons and horses tied to hitching posts. To walk into a store with .50 and buy...whatever they sold for two quarters and leave with a brown paper wrapped parcel that crinkled in your hands. To see neighbors helping neighbors. 

To live when people revered the Lord, where  often the person standing in front of you shared your beliefs. To live and laugh and love among believers that faced every day in a simpler way because it was a simpler time.  

What about those simpler days draws you to them? When you chose historical fiction over modern what is it that pulls you to those books?

Kitchens...Then and Now

One of my favorite places to place a scene is the kitchen. There's just something about the kitchen that makes the scene more...homey to me. I sit at my computer, lost in a world only I can see, and I mentally stand at the door and 'look' at the room. I turn a slow circle. Take in the scarred wooden table, made of slats of solid wood not plywood or other man made materials like today's tables are made of. I explore the wood burning cook stove, count the doors, open the warmer above the burners, check to see if it has a reservoir for warming water. I note whether or not there's a rag rug on the floor and what color it is, what kind of curtains hang on the windows and where they're placed in the room. The cast iron pots and pans grab my attention from where they sit on the dry sink.

Then I mentally step inside and smell the apple pie baking in the oven, the smoke in the air from the cook stove, feel the heat of the fire needed to do the baking.

When I come back to the present I take a good look at my kitchen. The white refrigerator that often holds so much food it threatens to overflow. The bar that is used for everything from rolling out dough to eating on. And holding a collection of junk that always seems to find its way there. I see the stove that needs no wood to get it going, the one I need only turn a knob to set the temperature. The dishes and gadgets that make my life easier. And the cast iron pots and pans.

They seem to be about the only thing that has survived the passage of time. The only things that lived in kitchens then and now. Those black pots that can take a beating and still survive have stood the test of time and many of them have been used in those wood burning stoves and our modern ones.

As I place my cast iron skillet on the burner I am reminded that my grandmother fed her family from this very pan, that her mother had one just like it. That most likely my great grandmother and great great grandmother did too.

And I make sure my heroine cooks in the exact same skillet.

The Kitchen

"I'll buy everything if you'll cook it."

That one little sentence pulled my attention from the line of people at the check out counter to the women skirting the line to get to the front door. There was nothing about either one that would have taken my attention from the groceries I was holding, the children around me, or the cashier making small talk with the woman ahead of me. Except that the younger one said that one sentence that captured my attention.

It reminded me a bit of a scene in one of my favorite pioneer shows where a young girl wants to know who is going to cook because she doesn't like cooking. This woman, who was probably in her thirties, didn't sound or look like the girl in that show but she reminded me of her anyway.

But unlike this woman, the girl in that show lived in a time when cooking was a requirement for survival. And it was considered women's work. Today we can avoid cooking if we want to. We have hundreds upon hundreds of restaurants to chose from. Many of them sell meals for less than we could cook at home. A trip to the grocery store can get us a refrigerator full of food that never needs to be heated much less cooked. If that is what we desire.

But those women got me thinking... about old time kitchens, wood burning cook stoves, slips of paper with hand written receipts (as recipes were called then), and a time when it was considered an honor for a woman to cook for her family.

Of days gone by when hours upon hours were passed in the kitchen. Days when women cooked three meals a day or their family didn't eat. When families gathered around a table that showed scars from years of daily use, and love. Where company was entertained at that same kitchen table.

A time when the kitchen was considered the heart of the home.