Thomas Wolfe- Home for Christmas
As time passed, Wolfe family memories of Christmas became muddled with Thomas Wolfe’s fictional versions. While interior Christmas decorations began to take hold in the 1880s and continued to increase as a tradition into the turn of the century, adornments in the Wolfe households were likely not lavish. Perhaps a few modest displays, much like those used today, candles, pieces of garland with pine, ferns, holly, or boxwood. They were not described in later family interviews. Yet, in her book Thomas Wolfe and His Family Mabel Wolfe Wheaton declared, “I have never known anyone, grownup or child, who anticipated the Yuletide with more happiness and excitement than Papa.” Holidays in the Wolfe household at 92 Woodfin Street centered around food. Mabel recalled their father “would begin at Thanksgiving to talk about Christmas.” Fruitcake for Christmas was prepared at Thanksgiving by their mother with Papa’s help. The children gathered black walnuts which were abundant throughout the mountains. Christmas deserts would include coconut cakes, chocolate layer cakes, pound cake, mincemeat, and pumpkin pies. Gifts focused on the necessities, toiletries, nightshirts, petticoats, socks, handkerchiefs, and pajamas. Letters were written to Santa and stockings were hung with care. They were filled with oranges, brazil nuts, raisins, and candy. “Ribbed, and heavy, and long,” the stockings of the day not only kept you warm but were well adapted to the needs of Santa Claus, said Mabel, “they could easily hold all the goodies the generous old fellow fetched.”
The Thomas Wolfe Society’s Spring 1978 newsletter includes a short article with Fred Wolfe’s reminiscences of family Christmas. In the 1930s on visits to New York to see his brother, they would fondly talk of their days at their father’s house. Stories would begin with the big dinners “that all the kinfolks came to.” Small gifts were purchased averaging about .25 cents each- neckties, scarves, or books. Fred declares the saddest family Christmas was that of 1904, after their brother Grover died at St. Louis in mid-November. Soon, holiday events would shift to the Old Kentucky Home boardinghouse where, for Thomas Wolfe, food didn’t have the same flavor. Christmas dinner might also include a couple of boarders, since a few stayed in the house in the winter months. According to Fred, his brother called it “purchased hospitality.” In Look Homeward, Angel Thomas Wolfe describes Eugene Gant coming home from college in 1916. “The Christmas was gray and chill. Helen was not there to give it warmth. Gant and Eliza felt the depression of her absence. Ben came and went like a ghost. Luke was not coming home.”
Slightly different versions of the Christmas of 1917 were remembered by Fred and Thomas Wolfe. Both involved a story surrounding several quarts of liquor. It would be the last the family would spend together. Thomas Wolfe found the hills “bleak and close, and the town mean and cramped in the grim stinginess of winter.” He writes “The scattered family drew together again at Christmas. A sense of impending dissolution, of loss and death, brought them back.” Their father’s health was rapidly declining. Their mother worried about her own heart condition:
Well! said Eliza sorrowfully, as she peered above the stove, let’s all try to be happy this time and enjoy a quiet Christmas. You never know! She shook her head, unable to continue. Her eyes were wet. It may be the last time we’re all together. The old trouble! The old trouble! she said hoarsely… — Look Homeward, Angel
Effie came up from South Carolina. Ben came home from Winston-Salem two days before Christmas. “He prowled through the house like a familiar ghost.” On Christmas Eve Fred recalled coming home from his job in Dayton, Ohio with a suitcase full of “Old Hannah” whiskey, 12 quarts that he had purchased at .89 cents each. At the time Fred was working as an electrical engineer at the Platte Iron Works in Dayton. Hannah and Hogg was a popular whiskey label in the midwest. In fiction Wolfe records “Luke came in from the naval school at Newport, on Christmas eve.” But Fred Wolfe had in fact enlisted 21 Jan 1918. Thomas Wolfe writes when Luke Gant returned to celebrate his holidays with his family he always “brought Gant a suitcase stocked with beer and whisky.” Thomas exaggerates in his fictional account, “the sailor had secured an extra valise and stocked it on the way home with a great variety of beverages for his father. There were several bottles of Scotch and rye whiskies, two of gin, one of rum, and one each of port and sherry wine.” Fred and Thomas both remembered, the family went out shopping leaving Thomas home alone. He became drunk when he helped himself to a couple of quarts from Fred’s suitcase left under a bed. In Look Homeward, Angel Wolfe declares “Why had no one ever written adequately about it? Why, when it was possible to buy a god in a bottle, and drink him off, and become a god oneself, were men not forever drunken?” The drunken Christmas Eve episode, for Eugene Gant, results in becoming sick from alcohol poisoning.
Many years later Fred visited his mother frequently at the Old Kentucky Home from his home in Spartanburg, SC. At Christmas he said he would trim a small tree with lights, three or four feet high in the front room of the house, sometimes off the sleeping porch, or in the formal parlor. In recent years the Thomas Wolfe Memorial has continued the tradition of placing a small tree in the parlor of the Old Kentucky Home. Modest decorations are added throughout the house featuring small statues of Angels and wreaths. The staff at Thomas Wolfe Memorial hopes that your Christmas includes a gathering of angels and a visit to the Old Kentucky Home boardinghouse.