Christmas was always a wondrous time growing up in rural Georgia in the 1950s and 60s. We had little compared to today but we had great fun and I have fantastic memories of those Christmases long past. I hope today’s kids are experiencing things they will always remember, too.

Until I was 12 years old I lived in an old farm house that was heated by an oil burning stove. It sat in front of the old fireplace that still had a mantle so that is where we hung our stockings. And they were stockings. We always talked mom into letting us have one of her worn out stockings – and back then, they were stockings, one for each leg – to hang. It would hold a lot!

Oranges and apples were always in them and I enjoyed them, but more fun were the boxes of sparklers, caps for the cap gun I played with for years, some fish hooks and sinkers, and other small items. Sometimes there were small toys, too, but they were usually quickly lost.

Santa always left some great outdoor gifts. Every year I got a block of ten boxes of .22 bullets and several boxes of .410 shells. I got a used .22 rifle when I was about 8 years old and it was great, but when I was 12 there was a brand new Remington semiautomatic .22 with a scope on it under the tree. I still have that gun and shoot squirrels with it.

The .410 shotgun was a hand-me-down and it killed many squirrels and a few doves and quail. My brother still has that gun. He got it when I started using dad’s 12 gauge shotguns. He had three, an old pump Winchester he had growing up, and two semiautomatic guns.

That old pump gun was temperamental. It had a hammer and a very light trigger. So light that sometimes it would fire when a shell was loaded and the slide slammed shut. One day I was sitting on a tree lying in the woods and bumped the butt against it. Fortunately the gun was pointing straight up since it fired. I learned then to never cock the hammer until I was ready to shoot it.

I still have that old pump and the two semiautomatic shotguns and use them when I get to go bird hunting.

Family and friends were very important and we always spent time with my uncles and aunts and dozens of cousins. We usually visited them the days after Christmas since we were in Florida the week before Christmas. One of my aunts lived in Ocala and dad’s mother lived with her. We would head down there the day after school holidays started and spend several days with them.

I loved Florida, from visiting Silver Springs to picking oranges right off the tree. Strange thing was, the oranges in our stockings looked a lot like the ones we had picked and brought home. I also loved digging in the soft sandy soil in my aunt’s back yard. I spent hours digging holes – and filling them back up.

Christmas lights were great and we got to see a good many on our trip since we drove straight through both ways, and it was about a 12 hour drive back then. We passed one house in south Georgia that had a very pretty yard and a pond in front of it. My mom said it was her dream house. They had some lights around the house that the pond reflected and they were beautiful.

Christmas lights were very subdued back then compared to now. No light icicles hanging from eaves, no big lighted statues in the yard. Most house had a single Christmas tree in front of a window. A few had lighted trees outside and very few had other lights. Many houses did have manger displays, the real reason for the season, and it seems it was more honored back then.

I did get to go hunting during the holidays, from trips by myself to kill squirrels to running my friends pack of beagles for rabbits. I loved both. Deer hunting was a few years in the future back then. I didn’t go deer hunting until I was 16, just a couple of years after the first season opened in Georgia.

We also hunted Christmas decorations. An old abandoned field a couple of miles from our house had a lot of cedar trees in it and they were perfect Christmas trees. We also went to an old home site and collected Smilax, which I found out later is green briar. It stays green all winter and was thick at the old home site. We made wreaths out of it and also framed our door with it. It was very pretty since everything else was pretty drab after the leaves fell off the pecan trees in the yard.

I hope you have some great Christmas memories and make even more this year.