Janice Williams Loves Austin

I wrote last week about the tradition of Christmas Eve Gift and Christmas Gift in our family and how that was always my Mamma Williams “thing”–getting us kids especially and not letting us outsmart her.

Then tonight I got a comment on that blog from Sherry that has the same custom:  ”My mother always does  the “Christmas Eve Gift” greeting on the 24th.  She is 90 years old and my siblings and I remember that from our childhood.  Mother says she got it from her grandmother.  You’re the only other ones I’ve ever known that have even heard of it!”

Since I hadn’t done any investigation of it, I Googled “Christmas Eve Gift” and immediately came up with other blogs where people told about their family tradition of Christmas Eve Gift. For some it is was only Christmas Eve. For others, Christmas Day only. Some were like us and did it both days (and, yes, we are likely to say Christmas Eve Eve Gift sometimes too). Susan Buce writes about “Playing the Christmas Eve Gift Game” and her story sounds very much like our family custom. Her family came from Oklahoma.

In her article she said it sometimes too 20 years to get a spouse into the game. Year after year Mark has asked me to “explain” it to him again, though there is no good explanation for why we do it, but he got into the spirit early on. The Susan Buce article questions whether the new technology can count in Christmas Gift. We always claim it can’t, but we all pounce on it anyway. I Facebooked as many in my family as I could last week and Mark sent out a Christmas email minutes after midnight and said his timestamp on the email proved he beat us all even if we said it to him in person before we saw the email.

Susan Buce asked for others that had the same custom and received over 140 emails with similar customs.  I didn’t read through them all, but there are fascinating emails about how the custom possibly developed in the South. Often, the slaves or servants would say it and would be rewarded with a day off or a coin.

Lots of people commented about how they had let the custom die out and wondered if they could revive it. I’m glad ours didn’t die with Mamma or with Daddy. It’s the kind of thing we could have easily forgotten about. I don’t even know how we remember it every year (honestly, I think it is Mark that reminds me of it most years now), but we all make our attempts. Of course, since we do it on both days, it helps the “losers” on Christmas Eve remember and develop their strategy for Christmas Day.

My Googling (isn’t Google a wonderful wonderful thing?) also found me this fabulous John Henry Faulk story. It, too, has a little bit of the Christmas Gift in it. Read it. Shed a few tears.

The story reminds me of the stockings that were always important in our family. Growing up they usually had an orange and some nuts and maybe a new toothbrush. Presents were rarely in the stockings, but the stockings were important just the same. This season on the TV show “The Middle,” the Patricia Heaton character preached to her children about the importance of the orange in the stocking as a reminder of the Depression and other poor times when that was a wonderful gift and an appreciated gift. My sister and I laughed about it because the orange has always been a part of our stockings, though we usually pulled them out, put them back in the fruit bowl where they had been through the week, and went on about our business. This year my sister went all out with the stockings and we had great new electric toothbrushes that we all had great fun with— massaging our faces and seeing how long we could stand to have it on our nose or ear before the tickle became too much to bear. We also had an orange and gum. I don’t believe there were any nuts this year — other than the ones sitting in the living room holding their toothbrushes to their noses.

I hate to brag about a Christmas present, but I am getting the coolest one since I got the cassette recorder in 1970. It is a Flip-Pal! And it gets here tomorrow. I have been seeing genealogy blogs raving about it since it came out in October and I knew I wanted one. If I didn’t get one for Christmas I would have had to order one on my own. But I got one and it is coming tomorrow!

The cool thing about this little scanner is primarily that it is portable. I can take it with me without taking my computer and a huge scanner (like I would) to go visit a relative that my have family photos I would like to have. It runs on batteries and has a small SD card to save the photos on so it is a stand-alone product. And not only can I insert photos into it and scan them, I can lay it down flat on a picture in a photo album and scan it where it is. And, if a photo is in a frame under glass, I can still scan it with the Flip-Pal. And, if the picture is bigger than the screen of the scanner (which is only 4 x 6 inches), its software will “knit” the picture back together so you get the complete picture.

Or at least that is all the things that it promises and the genealogists are raving about. I can’t wait to see if it lives up to its promises. We are going to go on another little road trip and there will be some visiting family and I hope I can use it. I will be practicing a lot tomorrow night to see if I can make it work like I hope it will.

I will be giving a full review of its abilities when I get it in hand and give it a hard workout. And you’ll be seeing some great pictures from it soon, I hope.

My cousin Becky posted after my last blog post and that’s funny, because I was already thinking about writing about her and the other distant cousins I have come in contact with– a lot just this year.

Becky lives in Amarillo and is one of the first very long distance cousins that found me. Funny that she was a cousin in Amarillo right there where I was for 26 years and I didn’t know her . . . though my old roommate Beth ran track with her sister. Not that that ever came up when we lived together several years after her track days were over.

Becky contacted me at the radio station through our website there about 5 years ago. She was interested in genealogy and had contacted a distant cousin in Arkansas that told her about me. Funny thing was, I did not know him at all, but he had met my grandmother years ago and she told him I was in radio. Somehow or another, Becky found me and we stayed in touch by email for a while. Finally I was in Amarillo for a visit several years ago and we met up at the ultimate Texas meeting spot, the Dairy Queen, and got to know one another. Since then we comment on each other’s blogs (her’s is a great read and beautiful photography and scrapbooking at Life in the Texas Panhandle). Oh, and how are we related? Our great-great-grandfathers were brothers, both Hoods. They, along with a third brother, came to Texas together and then one of the brothers went back to Arkansas. She doesn’t know a whole lot about her Hoods because of split families, but her dad’s young family photos look remarkably like members of my family, so I can tell we’re related.

I met another Hood cousin through my blog a while back that lives in Georgetown. Tim is a chef, a cook, and a barbecue family icon in Texas. He found me through the blog and we’ve gotten together once for dinner and have exchanged lots of emails, texts, and phone calls. We are more closely related than Becky and I because we share the same great-great-grandfather Hood. We need to get together again in this New Year. Tim has many adventures and stories to tell. I’d retell them here, but it would sound like I’m name-dropping. Maybe I will entice you with the tease that once, when he was in Vegas to cater the big rodeo championships there, David Allan Coe opened the door between their hotel rooms at about 4 in the morning and said, “You wanna party with me and my old lady?” Tim was grateful he had to go put the briskets in the oven and was able to gracefully decline.

Who else? A man in Chile found me this year through the blog. We share Robertson relations way back down the line. Another man found me that shares the Moore family connection.

Then Laurie found me this year and I’m so glad that she did! She and are have the same great-great-great-grandfather (I guess the same distance as I have with Becky). He was a shoemaker in Alabama and she even has the lasts he made the shoes on! She inherited a bunch of amazing things from the family. Our families both moved to Texas, but then her family returned to Alabama and decided to stay. Laurie and I met and became friends by email. She is from Alabama, but her husband’s work now has her living just 45 miles or so from me. We got together a couple of months ago and talked non-stop for hours.

Through Laurie I met Sandra. She and Laurie also share that same great-great-great-grandfather, but Sandra and I are much more closely related. Her great-grandmother and my great-grandfather were brother and sister. My great-grandfather had 9 sisters and 2 half-sisters so sheer volume has kept me from knowing much about any of them. I haven’t met Sandra yet, but I really look forward to learning more about the women in my father’s father’s father’s line.

Through my blog I also became reacquainted by email to a cousin that I met 30 years ago. I may have written this before…  Susan and I were together at an FTA convention in high school. I met some boys from Winters, Texas, and commented to them that my dad was from Winters. They said, “What’s his name?” I said Williams, with the obvious assumption that there are lots of Williams in every small town. They said, “Susan Williams is here with us. Her father is Melvin Ray Williams.” When they said that, I knew he was a cousin Daddy had talked about. I was already deeply into genealogy even then. They took me to meet Susan and we had a short exchange. What I remember was that she didn’t seem very interested in genealogy. I will give her a pass, she was 17 years old. Now, though, she is interested and she also found me through my blog and my family project (that I swear will get updated in 2011). She is now in San Angelo and I hope we can get together in the new year. We are actually related in 3 different ways, but the closest is that our great-grandmothers were sisters (and their husbands were cousins).

I would have to go look at Facebook to count the new relations I have met through it. Teresa in Illinois and her daughter Shea, Eddie down in Blessing, Texas, who came to our big family reunion this summer, a cousin in Italy and a cousin in Arizona. And more to come, I hope.

I’m sure I’m not thinking of some of the obvious ones as I think of this off the top of my head. I hope to see them all or meet them all this year and have more time for genealogy. It has gone to the back burner recently and I want to make more time for it, even if it is just a little bit every few days.

One time the people from the genealogy software Family Tree Maker called to conduct a survey about how I use their software and why I do genealogy. At one point the girl asked a multiple choice question about why I did genealogy. One of the answers was, “To meet new people and make new friends.” I laughed when she read that answer. She asked why I laughed and said that she had had several people laugh when she asked that question. I told her it was because this was a very solitary pursuit and because the drive to do genealogy was from something totally different than the social aspect. I still stand by that answer, but I am also amazed and grateful to all the friends and relations that it has brought me.

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To all who read this blog I would like to say Merry Christmas. I appreciate you being with me as I ramble on and I look forward to more rambling in the New Year.

I am going to be out of pocket, but will try to update over the next few days.