What was Christmas like during the Depression?

“When we were young, the night before Christmas we had a hard time getting any sleep. We were waiting for Santa Claus but sometimes we didn’t get anything. We were told that Santa had hit a mud hole and had to go back.”

Nearly a century ago, the Great Depression changed America forever, and small, rural Arkansas towns were hard hit. In a time before social safety nets, poor often meant hungry.

Historian William Downs interviewed dozens of everyday people who spent their childhood in those towns. Bessie Blacknall, quoted above, grew up in Izard County.

Downs preserved their stories in his captivating 2011 book “Stories of Survival: Arkansas Farmers during the Great Depression”.

Given the season, I thought I’d share a few quotes about Christmas during the Depression.

Mary Frances Izard, who grew up in Saline County, said that on Christmas Eve, “we all set a shoe out by the fireplace and the next morning there was an orange in our shoe and some hard candy.”

She told Downs, “an orange was a very special treat that we seldom ever got.”

“I didn’t get a Christmas present until I was a teenager–a set of dominoes,” said Bill Carter, who grew up in Monroe County. “We played those things until we wore the dots off. At Christmastime, we usually got an apple and an orange and three pieces of candy. And that was it.”

Even the smallest of gifts were prized.

“One of the presents I got that was so precious–and still is at ninety-two–was the year I got a sure-’nuff pencil,” said Floye Wingfield, who grew up in Clark County. “The only thing I had before were these cedar penny pencils. The first time you erased something, the rubber would pop off. But I got a pencil with the eraser put on with metal. I could just erase and erase all I wanted to.”

Just because times were hard doesn’t mean they were unhappy.

“Mama would start baking cakes about a week before Christmas,” said Georgia Hearn Hill, who grew up in Clark County. Hill described how “after she got the cakes all baked, she would wrap five or six cakes–coconut, chocolate, all kinds–in white cloth and put them down in a flour barrel to keep them moist.”

“Oh, Christmas was the time of our life,” Evelyn Langley, who grew in Faulkner County, told Downs. “We had a Christmas tree at different houses. One family this Christmas, another the next.”

“We’d eat, have a Santa Claus,” she went on. “There were some men in the community that could pick guitars and a fiddle. They’d play Christmas carols.”

As Willis Magby, who grew up in Hot Spring County, put it, “We’d have just as good a Christmas then when I was small, as we do now.”

His reason? “Some people are going to be happy with whatever they get.” He added, “I’ve had a rough time through life, but I’ve had lots of joy to make up for it.”