Christmas Tales of Alabama (8 page)

•  Huntsville: trace amounts in 1909, 1969, 1980, 1983, 1985, 1993 and 2002.

•  Muscle Shoals: trace amounts in 1897, 1906, 1913, 1948, 1980, 1983, 1992 and 1993.

•  Birmingham: On Christmas Eve 1929, about two inches of snow remained on the ground of this central Alabama hub, the remnants of a December 22 storm; however, no new snow fell, and as temperatures rose on Christmas Day, the last of the snow melted. On December 24, 1985, snow flurries began, lifting the hopes of residents in northern parts of the state. The flurries continued into the early hours of Christmas morning but soon stopped, leaving only a light dusting not deep enough to measure. Trace amounts of snow fell in 1961, 1963, 1966, 1980, 1989, 1990, 1993 and 1995 on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day.

•  Montgomery: in 1962, a trace amount of snow fell on Christmas Eve in this south Alabama town.

•  Tuscaloosa: two trace snowfalls were reported in 1962 and 1985.

•  Anniston: trace amounts of snow fell in 1963, 1970, 1985, 1989, 1990, 1993 and 1995 on December 24 or 25.

•  Mobile: the bustling port city—the third largest in Alabama—has never experienced a white Christmas.

“M
ERRY
C
HRISTMAS
” M
ORE
T
HAN A
G
REETING
F
OR
S
PECIALLY
N
AMED
K
IDS

When little Merry was five years old, she accompanied her mother, Edna, on a shopping trip to Atlanta from their hometown of Ashford, Alabama. It was a hot, sticky August day, as are most summer days in Atlanta, and Merry grew bored in the large department store with her mother and big sister. Merry climbed beneath the clothes racks and soon was in an imaginary world all her own.

It wasn't long before her mother realized she couldn't see the tot and began urgently calling her name: “Merry! Merry Christmas!” Shoppers turned and stared, likely wondering if the heat had gone to the poor woman's head.

“I think people thought she was crazy,” Merry recalls with a laugh. “But that was my name. I didn't have a middle name.” Merry Christmas was born on June 28, 1945, the second child of Robert Earl and Edna Christmas. The couple's firstborn, also a girl, was named for her parents: Edna Earl.

Merry enjoyed her name for the most part and would buy “Merry Christmas” signs during the holiday season to hang on the room of her wall. The local newspaper wrote features about her, and people enjoyed inviting her to parties and rarely forgot her name.

The first sign of difficulty came when Merry enrolled in Alabama College at Montevallo. To call home required dialing collect and giving her name. Operators, thinking she was joking, would hang up. Mostly, though, her experiences were positive ones. She said that because of her name, she was outgoing and was named Friendliest Girl on campus her freshman year. Merry would wed Arthur Tarrer, and the two became teachers. She taught elementary school, and he eventually became a professor at Auburn University, where students would jokingly pronounce his name “Dr. Terror.”

“I tell people I went from being Merry Christmas to being Mrs. Terror,” she says, with a laugh.

Another Merry Christmas, this one born in Florida on August 1, 1956, to Don and Barbara Hammontree Christmas, had similar experiences and said the name drew her from a natural shyness and made her more outgoing. She, too, had older sisters with less festive names: Donna and Theresa. She did, though, have a middle name: Joyce.

“When I would call to order a pizza and then give my name, the person would hang up,” she says.

Barbara told her daughter that when her third child turned out to be another girl, the doctor told her this may be her last chance to name a baby “Merry Christmas.” So she did. “My mom had a terrific sense of humor,” Merry said. Little Merry Joyce was featured in the newspaper each year, until she became a teen and refused to have her photo made. When she entered high school, one teacher removed her name from the class roll, thinking a prankster had written it there. Merry had to talk to the teacher after class and show her a driver's license before the teacher believed her.

Merry Joyce married a DiMaggio, trading an unusual name for a famous one. People often asked if she was related to baseball standout Joe DiMaggio. Eventually, Merry moved to Birmingham.

After Merry divorced, her mother was diagnosed with cancer and requested that Merry return to using her maiden name. Merry agreed, changing her name on records and at her job at Regions Bank's headquarters in Birmingham. “It was November when I changed it, and when I called someone else in the building, the phone would display my name,” Merry said. “People kept asking how I got a Christmas greeting on my phone and how they could do that. I told them it was displaying my name.”

Small pockets of the Christmas family live in Alabama, and some in Georgia and Florida, but the surname is relatively rare. American Christmases are thought to be descendants of a family originating in Essex and Surrey in England. One researcher in England, Bryan Sykes, is trying to prove that all the Christmases are descended from one man: in other words, Father Christmas.

Christmases are documented back to 1492 in England, and the name “Cristemass” is found dating back to the 1100s. The name is thought by some to have been given to people born at the holiday time of year.

Another member of the Christmases of Alabama is Joe Christmas of Cottonwood. Now in his nineties, Joe was the subject of newspaper articles in 1948 when the town of Cottonwood voted to annex his land. Joe, who had been elected to the town council but later moved a few miles away, found himself about to lose his post because he no longer lived within city limits. On December 21, 1948, United Press International published a story headlined “Christmas now part of Alabama town.” Council members had approved annexing an extra quarter mile to take in Joe's land so he could stay on the council.

The story ended with this sentence that told a lot about the tiny town: “Four of the 5 qualified voters in the area approved the annexation. The fifth was out of town.”

Many people know the name “Joe Christmas” from William Faulkner's 1932 novel
Light in August
. Described as a “tragic mulatto” and known as one of the loneliest characters in American fiction, Joe Christmas had many traits that alluded to Jesus Christ:

•  his name;

•  his discovery at an orphanage on Christmas night after his mother died in childbirth;

•  Joe Christmas and Jesus Christ have the same initials; and

•  Joe Christmas died at age thirty-three, the same age as Jesus Christ at his crucifixion.

T
HE
H
OLIDAY
C
ARD TO THE
“S
ILLY
L
OOKING
, L
ONG
-L
EGGED
D
OG
”

In 1959, Tillman Eugene Wheeler, known to his friends as “Tim,” was stationed on the USS
Eldorado
in the Port of Japan. As Christmas season approached, the young graduate of the School of Architecture at Alabama Polytechnic Institute (API) in Auburn was feeling lonely. It would be his first Christmas away from home and his family. A Christmas tree had been set up in the officers' quarters on the ship, but the holiday didn't seem the same as it had in Homewood, Alabama. Sailors eagerly anticipated the days when they would receive care packages or letters from home.

To that end, sailors sent many letters home, craving a connection. A few weeks before Christmas, Tim sent a holiday card to Anne Kimbrough, his friend and former classmate at Shades Valley High School. Anne, a senior at API, was dating Fred Burkhalter, who had been Tim's college roommate. The three had spent many happy times together. After Tim filled out the card, decorated with a Japanese design, with a friendly “Merry Christmas,” he faced a problem: he didn't know Anne's address. Being from the small community of Hollywood, which lay outside Homewood in the shadow of the bustling boomtown of Birmingham, Tim reasoned that the mail carrier should be able to find the Kimbrough home if he offered enough description.

On the envelope, he wrote: “Miss Anne Kimbrough, red brick house at top of hill somewhere in Hollywood…Postman: You'll know the house by the silly looking little long-legged dog who lives there. Homewood, Alabama.” The return address said: “Somewhere in the Pacific.”

Back in the States, the mail carrier read the description on the card and wondered if it referred to a dog he'd seen at a home in Hollywood. The little dog would bark excitedly whenever the postman dropped mail in the front-door slot. The postman decided he'd look for the house while on his rounds. Finally, on December 16, when he approached a red brick house in Hollywood, he saw the dog. It was a toy Manchester terrier that had particularly long legs for its small body.

The Manchester, named Pepper, was the beloved pet of the Kimbroughs. Anne, however, was still in class at API when the card arrived. When she came home on the weekend, her mother gave her the card and told her of an unusual request from the postman. He asked if Anne would mind letting the United States Postal Service know the story of its delivery.

Anne kept the card but sent the envelope to Jefferson County postmaster Roy Moncus with her compliments on the detective work. Soon, the
Birmingham News
reported the tale of the card delivered to the house with the “silly looking little long-legged dog.”

A photo of Anne, posing with Pepper, ran with the story with the headline “‘Silly-Looking, Long-Legged' Dog Good Enough Address for Post Office.” It was picked up by the Associated Press wire service and was published across the country under headlines such as “Postal Detective Locates Girl with Silly Looking Dog” (
Toledo Blade
, Ohio), “Dog-Gone! Yule Card Got Through” (
Sarasota Journal
, Florida) and “Neither Rain Nor Snow Nor Sleet, Nor Long-Legged Dog Stop Delivery” (
Tri-City Herald
, Washington State).

In the article, Anne described Pepper: “I think he is darling. They laugh because his legs are about twice as high as his body. They say he looks like a spider.”

The pretty young student with a dazzling smile was surprised to find she was a momentary star. More than one hundred people sent cards about the amusing article, and young men sent bouquets of flowers to the house at 412 Windsor Drive. “It went off like you wouldn't believe,” Anne says.

Another former high school classmate who was working in Philadelphia called Anne and said he opened the paper there and was surprised to see her photo. The attention added to the commotion of the upcoming nuptials of Anne's sister, who was set to be wed not long after Christmas.

One day, Anne's father answered a knock at the door and found a man much older and more sophisticated than his impressionable twenty-one-year-old daughter. “My daddy just had a fit,” she says. “He said, ‘Uh-uh. You're not going to meet my daughter.'”