{"id":3832,"date":"2019-11-30T21:23:00","date_gmt":"2019-11-30T21:23:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tarleton.edu\/theindustrioushistorian\/?p=3623"},"modified":"2022-11-28T20:43:39","modified_gmt":"2022-11-28T20:43:39","slug":"christmas-memories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tarleton.edu\/the-industrious-historian\/2019\/11\/30\/christmas-memories\/","title":{"rendered":"Christmas Memories"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

by Mary Adams<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Christmas Memories
As the holidays approach, people tend to reflect more on memories and stories of years gone by.  As the Director of the Gordon Center I have been extremely blessed with the opportunity to listen to, record, preserve, and share memories of Thurber. Some of the memories and stories of Thurber come to us through casual conversations with museum guests, and others are collected through planned oral interviews. As the holiday season is upon us I thought it would be fun to share some of these memories.The first comes from Mrs. Leona Roberts. Several years ago, I was privileged to meet Leona when her niece brought her to one of our Sunday afternoon programs. Mrs. Roberts was born in Thurber in 1925 and she shared the following holiday memory with us.                \u201cWhen I was 3 or 4 years old, my dad took me and my oldest brother Christmas shopping in Thurber. He had an old car with a trunk.\u201d She explained that while \u201cMother kept the baby at home\u2026 Daddy sent us to look around to see if there was anything we wanted Santa Clause to bring us. I picked out a doll with a pink dress and bonnet and Grady a train on tracks that they had in the store.\u201d She went on to recount that later, after they had gotten home from their shopping trip, she walked by the car and saw something sticking up so she unwrapped it and found a desk with chair and a chalkboard for her brother and she found a doll for her. \u201cI carried that doll in the house and Daddy was not happy. He told me \u2018you take that doll into the living room and put it on the mantle and if Santa Clause thinks you\u2019ve been good enough he will leave it; if not he will give it to someone else.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n

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\"Vintage<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

                Records indicate that the toy store was a special area set up for the holiday season, though the location changed from year to year. Some records indicate it was above the General Mercantile, however, Ed Bryant, in the oral interview with Dan K. Utley, places it above the Drugstore. \u201cBut all the upstairs was storehouse. But before Christmas time, along in November, that was the toy store, and Mama would take us upstairs, and that whole top floor of that big old drugstore building was nothing but a display of toys. You talk about heaven, man. That was next to it. And we\u2019d go there and we\u2019d just drool over those things.\u201d                While these two memories conjure wonderful images of children enjoying the Christmas Toy Store, Lilly Gibson\u2019s favorite childhood holiday memory is of the Christmas tree at home. In her oral interview with Dan K. Utley she recounts, \u201cAnd I\u2019ll never forget the first time we got to put candles on our Christmas tree. We had \u2018em where you could fasten \u2018em  on a limb, but it was kind of dangerous if the tree was getting old, and my dad \u2013 asked him if it would be all right if we put \u2018em on, and he said, \u2018I tell you what. You can put \u2018em on this time and I\u2019ll take my three gallon water bucket and stand right outside the door. If one of \u2018em catches something on fire, I\u2019ll just let the tree have water.\u2019  So, we had a real pretty Christmas tree that year.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n

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\"Vintage<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

                These three stories focus on Christmas, but there are many more stories about life in Thurber that have been painstakingly recorded and preserved. While there are extensive company records that detail day to day operations of the coal mines, brick plant, mercantile operations and other business related transactions, there are few that talk about the daily life of Thurberites. Therefore, the oral interviews and stories that have been recorded, provide us with a small glimpse into the lives of the people who made their home in Thurber. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Mary Adams Christmas MemoriesAs the holidays approach, people tend to reflect more on memories and stories of years gone by.  As the Director of the Gordon Center I have been extremely blessed with the opportunity to listen to, record, preserve, and share memories of Thurber. Some of the memories and stories of Thurber come to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3914,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"advgb_blocks_editor_width":"","advgb_blocks_columns_visual_guide":"","wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3832","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"author_meta":{"display_name":"brian","author_link":"https:\/\/www.tarleton.edu\/the-industrious-historian\/author\/brian-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-3\/"},"featured_img":"https:\/\/www.tarleton.edu\/the-industrious-historian\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/308\/2022\/11\/doll-300x270.jpg","coauthors":[],"tax_additional":{"categories":{"linked":["Uncategorized<\/a>"],"unlinked":["Uncategorized<\/span>"]}},"comment_count":0,"relative_dates":{"created":"Posted 6 years ago","modified":"Updated 3 years ago"},"absolute_dates":{"created":"Posted on November 30, 2019","modified":"Updated on November 28, 2022"},"absolute_dates_time":{"created":"Posted on November 30, 2019 9:23 pm","modified":"Updated on November 28, 2022 8:43 pm"},"featured_img_caption":"Vintage doll in a white dress and bonnet sitting on a wooden surface.","series_order":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tarleton.edu\/the-industrious-historian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3832","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tarleton.edu\/the-industrious-historian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tarleton.edu\/the-industrious-historian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarleton.edu\/the-industrious-historian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarleton.edu\/the-industrious-historian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3832"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarleton.edu\/the-industrious-historian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3832\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarleton.edu\/the-industrious-historian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3914"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tarleton.edu\/the-industrious-historian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarleton.edu\/the-industrious-historian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarleton.edu\/the-industrious-historian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}