A COUNTRY CHRISTMAS
Story and photography
by Margaret & Eric Anderson

She lays out a selection of socks. "A gift of a good thick warm pair of stockings was always appreciated," she says. "Interestingly enough, though home-knitted socks were usually better quality, there was always an attraction to store-bought items. To a rural family they were a special treat. Fresh fruit was rare in a country store at Christmas. Yet somehow, somewhere, a mother would find an orange to stuff into the toe of a Christmas stocking, along with a dime if the child had been good, or a piece of coal if the child had been bad. Chocolate coins wrapped in gold foil were popular stocking stuffers. Yet 100 years ago, gifts were basic: books and tools for boys and books and dolls for the girls.



Often the gift was not a new doll, but new clothes for an old doll. Children would miss their dolls for a few weeks before Christmas; then their old favorites would appear under the tree dressed in new outfits, carefully and surreptitiously stitched together by a thrifty housewife. A boy might get a pair of new summer overalls, decorated with Christmas candy. Occasionally, he might be lucky enough to get a wind-up boat or a toy train. A mother might be surprised with a woolen hat, a new scarf or a real luxury, a lace-edged handkerchief.

But changes were astir in America. As the years went by, if a woman wanted a fancy handkerchief, she could get one from a mail-order catalog. An American institution, the country store, was disappearing. Its demise was hastened by an increasingly sophisticated public, by prepackaging of food and by the invention of the automobile. Migration to the industrialized cities helped destroy the country trader, as well; in the city people could find luxuries right on their doorstep.

Victorian America was unlike modern America, as yellowing signs on the walls of the Tuckaway Store attest. The signs tout Bigler's Lice Killer, Union Leader Cut Plug Tobacco, and White's Golden Tonic for Horses Out of Condition. In other stores were signs ranging from the common, "Smokers and chewers will please spit at each other and not on the store or floor," to the unusual, like the one stuck one day last century on the door of the Aines Store in Middlebury, Vt., "Store closing. As I am to be married tomorrow, I shall not want to stop to count eggs or weigh out bird seed. Therefore, this store will be dosed from 8:45 a.m. to 9:45 a.m. tomorrow morning. Had Solom Aines owned the Tuckaway Store in Shelburne, he could have stayed home, got married and worked all at the same time. In 1840, the building served as general store, barber shop, post office, tap room, doctor's office, dentist's office and apothecary shop.

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