Rattlesnake Granny Books

It being Christmas Day, I thought it would be fun to write about some of the Appalachian Christmas traditions featured in my first Rattlesnake Granny Book. Historical Fiction Novellas Rooted in True Stories and Folklore – Rattlesnake Granny Books.

In case you are new to the novellas, they take place in the 1860s – 1870 in Thornton Gap, Virginia, where the Shenandoah Valley and the Blue Ridge meet.

One old Christmas belief featured in the first book is the idea of cattle kneeling at midnight on Christmas Eve. This came from the idea of cattle remembering the first Christmas when they honored the Christ Child. The narrator of the story, Nancy Pullum, says that she would stay up late as a girl on Christmas Eve to watch and see if her family’s cattle knelt in their pen.

As an aside, in the time the story is set, the Blue Ridge mountaineers would be moving to fencing and penning livestock in. Previously, they would have fenced gardens and crops to keep the livestock out.

Nancy also said that she stayed up to hear if animals spoke at midnight on Christmas Day. I also remember reading and hearing of this old Christmas belief. I enjoyed waiting each year to hear if my grandmother’s dog or cat would speak. They never did, though perhaps that is a good thing, because I also read somewhere that if you heard the animals speak, you were slated to die. Ack!

Moving on to a cheerier belief, Nancy and her friends would shoot guns up in the air to welcome in Christmas. I imagined that they might also have Christmas crackers, horns, or bang on pots and pans.

Also in the book, Nancy’s wealthy neighbors the Barbee family have a Christmas party and feast at their big Hawsburg House. Nancy and her family celebrate in a more modest way by roasting chestnuts and having a small meal. The American chestnut blight had not yet taken hold at the time when the book is set so we might imagine that mountaineer families had chestnuts aplenty.

Another belief in the book comes from the mid-Shenandoah Valley of Virginia by way of Germany and Pennsylvania. It is Belsnickling!

Belsnickel was a holiday figure, somewhat like Saint Nicholas, though he would travel alone and was much scarier. He wore fur and carried switches for the bad children and sweets for the good children.

Here in the Shenandoah Valley, the tradition was a little different. Sometimes there was a Belsnickel figure but often it was more like trick-or-treat at Christmastime for adults. Groups of neighbors would go from door to door. They were dressed in (often grotesque) masks and costumes. They sometimes took other measures to disguise themselves such as stuffing their clothing to hide their size or wearing the clothing of a different gender and disguising their voices (or not speaking).

The tradition was to guess the identity of the belsnicklers so that they would remove their masks. If the disguise was effective, and no masks were removed, the belsnicklers  could come inside for food and drinks. I imagine that food and drinks may have been involved even if the group members were guessed. 🙂

Another old mountaineer tradition is Breaking Up Christmas. This isn’t mentioned in my books because it took place south of where the story is set. In the mountains of Southwestern Virginia, groups of partygoers would visit different houses each night, partying and dancing to celebrate the end of the Christmas season. For them, January 6th (Old Christmas) was the end of the Christmas season. My grandmother remembered the Breaking Up Christmas parties when she was a girl in the mountains of Southwestern Virginia. She said the dancers would go all night and keep her awake!

All this talk of old Christmas customs makes me consider some of our Christmas traditions of today. Here are some that have evolved in my lifetime:

• Ugly sweaters and ugly sweater contents
• The importance of watching Christmas movies (yes to Die Hard)
• Spending Christmas morning in matching pajamas
• Services of Lessons and Carols (in America)
• Cookie swaps
• Elf on the Shelf
• Decorating and celebrating earlier (not after Thanksgiving night as it should be 😉 )
• Multiple (and themed) Christmas trees in a home
• Joking about Christmas songs we are tired of hearing. 🙂 Such as the Little Drummer Boy Challenge of trying not to hear this song this season.
• A revived interest in Christmas creatures and monsters such as Krampus and the Yule Cat (in America)
• And finally, I have read that in Japan, there is now a tradition of eating KFC at Christmas!

Totally random bonus content– You know the part in the old song “Away in a Manager” when it says “The cattle are lowing?” I always thought that “lowing” was a poetic way to say that the cattle had lowered themselves and were kneeling, such as in the tradition described above. But when I went to look it up to see if I spelled “lowing” correctly, I learned that lowing is really a deep guttural sound made by a cow, not a posture. No wonder “the baby awakes.”