Saturday, December 23, 2006
Gifts were simple but no less cherished
By EILEEN ZAFFIRO
The Daytona Beach News-Journal Staff Writer
DAYTONA BEACH — Lonnie Mae Graham’s Christmas memories stretch back to 1917, when she was growing up in northern Florida in a home heated with fireplaces and lit by oil lamps.
She remembers riding in a horse-drawn buggy — a two-seater with fringe on top — with her dad to hunt out a tall evergreen they’d chop at the stump and proudly haul home.
Only white paper chains colored with red and green crayons would be laced through the fragrant branches.
Come Christmas morning, a small bounty of treasures wrapped in newspaper were piled under the simple tree.
“We made gifts for our parents, like an ‘I love you’ drawn on paper,” said Graham, a 92-year-old widow living in Daytona Beach.
On one of Graham’s World War I-era Christmases, Santa left metal roller skates. On another, he delivered a doll and dashed Christmas dreams.
“The doll had a citrus orange for the head,” Graham chortled. “I was so disappointed. I wanted a baby doll, but money was scarce.”
Graham’s mother sewed all of her clothes, and Christmas Day usually brought a new outfit. After moving from Lake City to Daytona Beach when she was 6, she recalls strutting into church one year in a soft black velvet dress.
Her mother’s homegrown flowers decorated the church, where the kids would be treated to an orange and maybe a small toy.
“My mother and father sang in the First Baptist Church choir,” she recalled. “When I was real small, they’d put me on the front bench and I’d fall asleep.”
Her parents and two brothers are at the center of each of her memories, from the nights they’d go caroling together to their Christmas Eve journeys to the drugstore for ice cream cones.
“Back then,” she said, “families did things together.”
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