Memories of Christmas

    It’s Sunday morning and I decided to treat myself to a Jimmy Dean sausage patty and scrambled eggs. As the sausage started to cook I was looking down into our living room at our Christmas tree and was suddenly awash in memories.

    That smell wafting through the room took me to my Maw Maw’s in the Mill Village. She’d wake at 4:30, had most of her life to go to work in the Mill, and start cooking breakfast. First thing on was coffee, remember the old percolators with the glass on top? Next were the butter milk biscuits, flour, buttermilk & lard hand kneaded into the melt in your mouth miracle that to this day I can’t equal. Then the sausage, a giant iron skillet packed with fat patties sizzling away, filling that little house with a ‘Come and Get it’ smell that you just couldn't’t sleep through. A dozen or so eggs scrambled and Saw Mill gravy to top it all! Yeow! Took a good hour to eat it all.

    Then Paw Paw would get out a clean plate and mix up Paw Paw’s Special Butter. Fresh churned butter that, using a fork, he blended with Ribbon Cane syrup to put on that last flaky biscuit you knew you could squeeze in.

    Now days the eggs are bad for my cholesterol so’s the sausage and the lard in the biscuits Oh My! Even though there were no preservatives in the sausage, the eggs were what they now call ‘Free Range’ and the lard hadn’t been hydrogenated.

    So I shouldn’t have eaten today's eggs or the sausage & I rarely do but it was worth that trip to the Mill Village, listening to Maw Maw softly singing her favorite hymns while she cooked for her family.

    Then there were the lights. There were quite a few in the village that participated in the Christmas Light Race but most of ‘em were just trying to keep up with my Paw Paw. Why before he was allowed to turn them on he had to give the power company a 30 minute warning so they could open another gate at Lay Dam. The race was called off by God, on December 20th 1957. A tornado ripped the roofs off of a great deal of the Mill Village, every one off Paw Paws lights along with the trees they were on, and dropped them east of 31 around the old Dan River warehouse.