By this time every December growing up my hunts got more specific. All fall I had kept my eyes open for pretty cedar trees that were the right size and shape, marking their location in my mental GPS. Back then it actually worked and would hold many locations.

    But around the first of December I got serious, searching for the perfect tree. It had to be as perfect shape as a wild tree could be, and as tall as possible without being more than seven feet tall, about as high as I could reach.

    I hunted a lot on an old farm about a mile from my house. The fields were mostly overgrown with broom straw and weeds but the field edges of briar, brush and small trees gave rabbits and quail perfect places to hide. The old fields still provided a variety of food for them.

    Cedar trees grew in the field edges and in the old fields, too. Since they could get sun from all angles out in the field, they were conical shaped and full all the way around.  Trees near the woods usually had a gap on the side that did not get full sun so the ones in the open were the best.

    About a week before Christmas Day I would direct daddy to the best tree I had found.  He drove our old Chevy pickup pretty much anywhere although it did not have four-wheel drive. Since the best tree was usually in the open, it was not hard to drive to it.

    Daddy “let” me lay on the ground and saw the tree down, using a lumber saw. It’s fine teeth made the cutting slow and took a while but for a preteen or teenager, it was not too bad. I tried to get a nice smooth even cut for the tree stand we would make with 2x4s.

    We would also cut some limbs from other cedar trees that were not candidates for “The” tree, even for the future. Those limbs were used by mama to decorate the mantel where our stocking were hung, and a center piece for the table.

    Getting the tree in to the house and set up was not hard with several folks to help. Within minutes the house would smell of cedar, a wonderful smell that would be reinforced by mantel and table decorations that would last until the day after Christmas.

    We didn’t have a lot of money back then and most of our tree decorations, as well as house decorations, were homemade. I brought in sweetgum tree balls and small pinecones from the few trees that produced them. I still do not know what kind of pine tree produced those two-inch-long cones but they were rare.

    We would spray the pinecones and sweetgum balls with silver or gold paint and sprinkle glitter on them.   They were hung from the tree with short pieces of colorful yarn. We would also cut strips of colorful construction paper and make chains out of loops of it for the tree.

We did have bought lights, big bulb strings that were very colorful. The strangest “lights” for the tree were ancient small pans that clipped to the tree and had a spike for  a small candle.  We were not allowed to light the candles except for a few minutes each night while mama and daddy watched carefully.

There were some very old ball decorations that had been in the family for years and we were very careful handling them. They were beautiful, some shaped like angels, some like Santa and some like bells and balls, and all very colorful.

Store bought tinsel was made from metal, I think it was strands of tinfoil, and mama would not let us kids touch it. She hung each stand carefully, placing it just right. After Christmas she would remove it just as carefully and put it back on the cardboard backing and into a pack for next year. I felt like we were rich the year mama said throw the tree out with the tinsel on it, we would buy more next year!

Undecorating the tree was a sad time and I did not help much, I wanted to get out in the woods with my new boxes of .22 bullets and .410 shells!!

We didn’t deck the halls with boughs of holly, but we did use holly in many decorations. In the drab December outdoor colors of browns and grays, bright green holly, and duller but green cedar, green briar and even mistletoe stands out, and we collected all four for festive decorations.  

    In pictures holly always has clusters of pretty red berries everywhere. Not so much in wild holly.  If there were a few scattered red berries on a limb it was carefully cut and taken home.  Mama used the holly for mantle and table decorations, along with cedar limbs.

    One decoration always took center place on the mantle. It was an old kerosene lamp with a bulbous lower chamber for the fuel, a wide flat wick and a tall glass chimney.  We filled the fuel chamber with small colorful balls and mama put a collar of green cedar or holly around its base, arranging it so it set off the lamp.

    We had several of those old lamps and the others were kept with kerosene in them for the times the electricity went out.  Along with a few candles, they gave enough light to get by.

When I was 12 we moved into mama’s dream house, a split level brick home that had three bedrooms upstairs and a den and egg room in the lower level.  The egg room had a big walk-in cooler and an area where we “candled” the eggs.  It got a lot of use since we had 11,000 laying hens.

The house was an orangish brick, not red.  The year we moved in mama bought plastic candle sticks for each front window, eight total, and put orange bulbs in each one. Those candle sticks had five bulbs each and set off the house just right at night.

    Getting mistletoe was always my job and I loved going into the woods, finding a big clump high up in an oak tree and shooting it down with my .22.  I tried to use as few bullets as possible, hoping to clip the main branch of the mistletoe with two to three shots.

    For as long as I can remember we had a big gold bell with a music box inside. The clapper for the bell was actually a pull cord and when pulled down it slowly retracted, playing a short clip of “Jingle Bells.”  Mistletoe was put in the bow above the bell and it hung over the door going to our downstairs level den.

    That doorway got a lot of traffic and my little brother loved to pull the string and make the bell play. So much so I usually hated to hear it within a few days. I think he liked to do it to bug me.

    I could stop the irritation for a few days by unclipping the music box from the bell and hiding it. He would whine to my parents, but I think they got sick of hearing it, too, so they would not really force me to get it back out for a few days.

    An old home place a few miles from our house provided “smilax” which I learned later in life is green briar.  We would go get several long vines of it and mama used it to outline our front door. The door was covered with shiny red and green paper and a wreath was placed in the center for a pretty entryway.

    Greenbriar stays green all winter, so it is an important food for deer in the lean months as well as being pretty.  I learned to hunt patches of it in late December for deer looking for something good to eat in the mostly barren woods.

    Food was amazing.  We never made gingerbread houses, but gingerbread cookies along with Martha Washington balls, snowballs, chocolate chip and many other kinds of cookies were set out on the table to nibble on as we decorated and all during the holidays.

    The holidays meant many big meals with family.  Mama and daddy had several brothers and sisters living near us, and we had to go to every one of their houses, and they all came to our house for meals, too.  There were often a dozen adults and twenty cousins running around on a day we had meals together.

    The table was loaded with turkey and dressing, ham, fried chicken, mac and cheese, string bean casserole, squash casserole, scalloped potatoes,  devil eggs, potato salad, string beans, turnip greens with roots, rutabaga, rice, corn bread, rolls and other staples.

    There were always several kinds of jello salad, from simple orange and shredded carrots to my favorite with cherries, pecans, pineapple and cherry jello.  The desserts ranged from ambrosia made with fresh oranges, coconut and marshmallows to every kind of cake and pie imaginable.

    Most days started and ended with hunting, either quail with several uncles and cousins if daddy or one of the uncles wanted to get the dogs out to me going alone after squirrels and rabbits.  Many mornings were quail hunting with the adults, then after a big meal, me hunting alone, since the adults were too full to move.

    Presents were exchanged with all cousins and family members.  One that I got every year from an aunt and uncle that lived in South Georgia was a window envelope with a dollar bill inside!  That may not seem like much now, but it was a lot of money to a kid that spent hours collecting empty coke bottles along the road for a penny each!

    I have great Christmas memories and I hope you are making new ones this year.

   Searching for good food is a fun activity anytime I travel, and fried scallops top my list. I enjoy cooking at home but fried seafood like scallops and shrimp are not something I cook well, so I eat them whenever I go out.

    In Thomasville last week I had only one night without a set schedule and had found George and Louie’s Seafood with fried scallops on the menu. Linda had eaten there and said it was good, so we planned to go Thursday night.

    At our welcome get-together at Kevin’s Gun Room, several asked our Chamber of Commerce host about dinner. She said Jonah’s Fish and Grits was famous and only a block away. Ron Brooks asked if they had scallops – he knows me well and I think he asked for me – and she said yes, so a group of us went there.

    When our group of eight arrived at 7:30 they were busy but pulled some tables together and seated us almost immediately. The menu listed scallops, but only as an appetizer or with pasta. I asked the waitress if they would fry me a batch of them for dinner and she said “no.”

    I have made that request at dozens of places all over Alabama and Georgia, and every single one of them said yes. Sometimes it was a couple dollars more than the fried shrimp dinner on the menu but I did not mind.

    In their defense, Joanah’s closes at 8:00 – we did not realize that so our party of eight was right at closing time. I ordered fried shrimp and they were ok, a little over done, but maybe partly not as good as they would have been due to my disappointment.

    Ron got the seafood linguine and the scallops in it were tiny, so maybe it was for the best, although the menu said the scallop appetizer was “sea scallops,” which are the big ones.

    Lesson learned, I should have gone to George and Louie’s!

    Friday night we had our auction meeting and dinner at Q-Café. I wondered what the meal would be like but the outdoor pictures on the walls reassured me, and the owner was great. He even bought a painting at our auction to hang on his wall and bought one of our auction guns.

They are usually open for breakfast and dinner only but they catered our meal and it was great. It was buffet style and they kept cooking till everyone was full. The blackened shrimp were delicious and the fried chicken fingers were cooked just right and piping hot, too.

    I filled up on pastry cups with either chicken salad or pimento cheese, too. Those bite size pastries were seasoned just right. And the cold veggie platter provided my greens I want at every dinner. A couple of our members went back the next morning for breakfast and said it was fantastic.

    Our Awards banquet Saturday night was at Plaza Restaurant and Oyster bar, and we had three choices, fried shrimp, prime rib or Greek chicken.  You can guess what I ordered, and the shrimp, although there was only one waitress serving the 30 of us, were hot and not over cooked. So I did get one really good fried shrimp dinner.

    Our lunches were provided by JB Crumbs. Sandwich platters were varied and good. If you are planning a conference, or just a personal trip, there are plenty of great places to visit, help you and provide food for your group in Thomasville.

    As soon as I got home I went to Jimmy’s Steak and Seafood in Jackson for my fried scallop dinner.  This small place in a strip mall has as good fried scallops and shrimp as I have had anywhere. Fishtales here in Griffin is just as good, but Jimmy’s is open every night but Monday!

    When I got home Sunday, still thinking about seafood, one of the first emails I opened was from Taste of Home magazine. I get their recipes in about four categories every day and the first one I saw was for shrimp and grits, so I had to cook it.

The cheese grits were cooked in the cock pot so it was easy and didn’t burn, and the sauteed shrimp and sausage with bell peppers and garlic topped it just right. I had it twice last week.

At Kevin’s Gun Room for our greeting get together we had a cheese tray with different things made locally in Thomasville. The different kinds of preserves went well with the locally made cheese.

Kevins started in Tallahassee, Florida and is a big pawn shop featuring everything you would expect. Kevin did well and opened his place in Thomasville as his showcase and personal get-away. When you walk in the front door you are greeted by a full-size brown bear mount and there are mounts all around the main room.

Upstairs in the remodeled mill right downtown is the amazing part. From the polar bear rug on the floor to the red stag mounts brought from Germany, the room shouts “rich man cave!”  Kevin has spent a lifetime hunting and collecting outdoor equipment.

The walls of four rooms upstairs are lined with guns for sale. The first one I looked at, a beautiful side by side 28 gauge, had a price tag of $49,999.00! I had to back away carefully. Most of the guns were not as expensive, I saw a lever action .410 for only $5000.00. But one gun in his catalog lists for $149,999.00.

You can get a good idea of the items for sale at Kevin’s in his catalog at https://kevinsguns.com/

Kevin’s GunsTallahassee, FL (850) 386-5544 Mon-Fri 9am to 6:30pm EST Sat 9am to 6pm EST Sun 11am to 5pm EST [email protected]

Maybe you want to order one for Christmas! I am honored to get to tour his facility and see what someone dedicated to their passion and willing to work to make the American Dream come true, can do.

Sometimes I wonder how I survived all the little critters outdoors.  Until recently, mosquitoes were a nuisance outside but never really bothered me. A red bump would rise where they bit but be gone in a few hours. No longer!

Two weeks ago this past Wednesday I went to my place at Raysville Boat Club. When I arrived at about 4:00 PM I stopped and talked to my new neighbor before unloading.  It was shady in the yard and I did not notice anything flying around.

By the time I got unloaded I had two big red whelps on my right thigh and six or eight more on other parts of my body.  And they itched. I tried to avoid scratching them.  I had some itch cream and it gave me relief for a few hours.

That night I awoke clawing at the bites. I guess I got warm in bed and the heat made them itch. The next morning I had a red bruised looking area about the size of a silver dollar with a black, hard knot in the center of the two on my thigh.

It seemed every time I went outside while at the lake I got another bite, and that made the old ones start itching again.  I had more than 15 red whelps on my body by Monday when I left.

Two weeks later after many itchy nights those thigh bites are still red but haven’t itched in a few days.

I got home from Clarks Hill on Monday and left to camp for six nights at Lake Weiss on Tuesday.  For whatever reason, the campground at Bay Springs did not seem to have any mosquitoes to bite and reenact my old bites. They slowly got better until my last night.

Last Sunday night when I went into the bathroom to shower, a mosquito bit me on my left ankle.  It started itching immediately and made the others itch, too. I scratched most of the night!

When I got home from Clarks Hill I ordered a yard fogger and insecticide for it from Home Depot. It was here when I got home from Weiss and will try it in my yard since I get bit every time I got out to cut grass or pick tomatoes.

A few years ago my garage seemed to be full of the little horrors to the point I could not sit in my boat and tie baits on. I bug bombed it and took them out and so far they have not decided to homestead in there again.

I guess getting older has made me more sensitive to the bites, like it has caused to many other problems.  I think the warranty on this old body expired a long time ago and it was not made to last this long, but I am going to keep patching it up and fishing as long as I can!

 I don’t like spiders and snakes, and that ain’t what it takes….  Actually, snakes don’t bother me much, they try to go the other way when I am around. I have had a few close encounters of the slithery kind that I would rather not repeat, but I really don’t worry too much about them.

Spiders and their webs do get me, though. Walking around in the woods in the early fall I always carry a stick and wave it in front of me to intercept the webs. Walking to a deer stand early in the season in the dark is always a challenge to avoid webs.  I hate running into them.

Spiders crawling on me are creepy, but my worst experience with one of the eight legged horrors was one night running bank hooks. As I eased the boat into a willow tree to bait a line, a limb brushed my right ear. I felt something move on the ear lobe then crawl down into my ear.

I could not get back to the camper fast enough. Shinning a light into my ear made it burrow down deeper. We hoped it was a bug that would be attracted to the light, but the spider was repelled by it and tried to go deeper. Every time that critter moved it scrabbled on my ear drum. That is a horrible sound I will never forget.

Mama was at the camper and she had me lay my head on the table. When she poured baby oil in my ear, the spider came crawling out. I barely had time to see it hit the table before I slammed it with my palm. The whole camper shook, I was kinda wound up!

Wasps gave me a thrill while running bank hooks, too.  I eased the front of the boat under a big willow tree and grabbed a limb to stabilize it. I started to reach for the hook line but something did not look right.  When I shined the light on the big limb I was holding, about six inches from my hand was a wasp nest the size of a grapefruit, covered with big red wasps.

Luckily, wasps won’t fly at night and these did not move even with the light shined on them.

Maybe I should stay away from willow trees at night!

I can’t count the times I have been stung by bees, wasps and yellow jackets but some were memorable.  And I have been very lucky several times.

While cutting the property line at my farm a few years ago I had gone down to the end, turned and came back up. As I turned the tractor and rotary mower for a third pass, about halfway down it looked like a cloud of smoke over the strip I had just cut. At first I thought somehow the mower had started a fire.

I got close enough to see yellow jacket boiling out of their burrow and making a yellow cloud over it. If they had been faster, or if I had not seen them and ran into the cloud, I am not sure I would have survived. I am not allergic to them but do swell up some from a single sting. From hundreds of stings, I am not sure what would have happened.

Another time I walked out on my small dock at the farm to fish. I heard my dog Rip yip as he started to the dock and looked back. His black coat was half yellow with yellow jackets.  He was rolling on the ground, right on top of the nest, trying to get them off.

I ran to him, grabbed his collar and threw him in the pond and ran back out on the dock. I got three or four stings on my hands doing that.

Of course, Rip swam to the bank, got out and started out on the dock, bringing out another cloud of yellow jackets. This time Rip ran to me on the dock and I threw him back in, but grabbed his collar to keep him close to the dock and pulled him back out after the bugs left.

Maybe my worst experience with the yellow devils was deer hunting. One morning I had to go to the bathroom so I climbed down from my stand and went to a nearby tree. Unfortunately, there was an unseen yellow jacket nest at the base of it. They waited to make their presence known until my pants were down!

May the rest of your summer be as bug free as possible.

I went to high school in Thomson, Georgia and live about 25 miles from Thomaston, Georgia, but had never been to Thomasville, Georgia until last weekend. What an amazing town and area with history similar to Jekyll Island. I really enjoyed my tours and stay there.

In the 1800s rich folks from up north wanted to escape the cold weather, just like what we call “snowbirds” now. Without good roads, they needed to ride trains south if they didn’t have yachts and live on the coast, and the main railroad line ended in Thomasville. It did not extend into Florida due to the dangers of mosquito carried diseases like yellow fever and malaria that were widespread a little further south.

A couple fancy hotels survive from that time with elegant rooms and settings for the very rich. But even the very rich balked at paying high prices for rooms for their families and themselves and all their servants that traveled with them for a couple of months each year. They decided they could build their own places outside town and save money.

The results are mansions on “Plantations” out in the piney woods. Most centered on hunting, with deer, quail and turkey abundant. They also ran fox hounds for fox and bobcat.

The rich with yachts did the same thing on Jekyll Island, building huge mansions there similar to the ones in Thomasville to escape south to better weather in the winter.

Touring one of them in Thomasville, like Pebble Hill Plantation, is amazing. As you drive in past outbuildings for servants and other activities you approach a huge brick building designed after Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and think “what a beautiful mansion.” Then you are told that is the stable.

The house, built in the early 1900 after the original burned, has all the modern conveniences of that time, even air conditioning. Each room has a fancy embroidered bell pull to call a servant to your location. Each bed had a button to push for breakfast in bed. There was even an example of the printed menu for guests to check off what they wanted for breakfast.

I toured on a Friday afternoon and there were three weddings going on that day. It is a beautiful, popular place for weddings and other events. And you can still go there and hunt, for a price.

Out in the pine woods, our guide showed us a longleaf pine tree with the nest of one of the rarest birds in the Southeast, a red-cockaded woodpecker. The land on the plantation is managed for wildlife and nature, with proscribed burns to keep the area like it was before it was settled.

The wiregrass covered forest floor is home to many animals and a diverse population of plants. While we were there, yellow blooms carpeted the whole area under the pine trees for many acres. They looked like black eyed Susan flowers but my “Picture This” app on my phone identified them as swamp sunflowers or narrow leaf sunflowers, native to the area and beautiful this time of year.

On Saturday my group met at Myrtlewood Plantation in the clubhouse on a beautiful lake. Some of the members tried fishing but were unsuccessful, the bright sun, clear water and time of day made it tough. Unlike Pebble Hill, Myrtlewood is managed for hunting and fishing, with modern cabins for guests on several different lakes.

Driving in on a dirt and gravel road, we passed a modern five stand sporting clays range where hunters can sharpen their skills before going after quail and doves there. You can also hunt deer and turkey during those seasons. It is an ideal place to hunt, target practice and fish, all in one area.

Very impressive was the Ranges at Oakfield, a modern sport shooting facility owned and run by Thomas County and developed with help from the Georgia Department of Natural Resources. The facility includes two skeet and trap fields, a 5-Stand sporting clays range, a 100-yard rifle range and a 25-yard pistol range.

Rifle and pistol ranges include electronic targets that show you immediately on a screen by your shooting station where your bullet hits. That allows you to adjust sights and shooting stance without walking downrange to the target.

Future plans include development of a static archery range and a 3D archery range. Ranges are open to the public for a small daily fee, or you can join with a membership to use the facilities if you live locally. It was an impressive facility!

I was in Thomasville for the annual Georgia Outdoor Writers Association conference. The highlight of the conference for me was the banquet on Saturday night where “Excellence in Craft” awards were presented.

Each year members of the organization submit our work in about ten different categories. These works are then sent to another state, in this year’s case South Carolina, to be judged by outdoor writers there.

With about 30 outdoor writers submitting their best work in each category to be judged, it is a great honor to win one of these awards.

We did not have a conference this past year due to COVID so judged works were done in 2019. I won first place in the Ducks, Unlimited category for an article “Sportsman Night Out” and second place in the category Non-Game Outdoor Recreation for the article “Life Cycle of White Oak Can Be All-Encompassing.” Both ran in the Griffin Daily News.

I hope some of my articles this past year are good enough to be considered for competition.