First Florida winter irked beloved writer Rawlings
As much as Floridians have traditionally gloated about our winter weather to the folks Up North, it’s also true that a warm rather than a white Christmas can be an unwelcome shock for new residents.
The now-beloved Florida author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings would come to care deeply for her adopted state, including its Christmas weather, but her first balmy holiday season in rural Cross Creek in 1928 made her sad, and then mad, she later wrote.
Born in 1896, Rawlings grew up in the Washington, D.C., area and graduated from the University of Wisconsin in Madison in 1918. She was living in Rochester, N.Y., in the late 1920s when she moved to the rural Florida hamlet she would later bring to international fame through books including “The Yearling” (1938) and “Cross Creek” (1942).
Her writings exude her appreciation of the area’s people and its environment. But that December in 1928 was tough. “It seemed to me that my first Christmas at Cross Creek would break my heart,” she reflected in “American Cookery” magazine in 1942.
Sunshine and red birds, oh no!
Perhaps she had been “unreasonable to be outraged by a temperature of 75 degrees” during that first Florida Christmas, complete with “hot blazing sunshine and red birds singing lustily instead of Christmas carolers,” Rawlings wrote in 1942.
“I had moved to the subtropics,” she recalled, “and the lush life had become my life.”
But the warm air infuriated her. In a pique, she “built a great roaring log fire in the living room of the old Florida farmhouse — and was obliged to fling wide all doors and windows.” But as she set out Christmas dinner on her sunny veranda, she found flames in the fireplace comforting.
Wild dove and Florida ‘corn’
Eventually, as Rawlings got to know her new neighbors, they helped her appreciate their customs around Christmastime.
“The men, and some of the women, consider Christmas as one of the great days for hunting,” Rawlings wrote. She saw this as “something solid and important” — a bond between man and nature.
The core of Christmas dinner was whatever game was most readily available. “In the Big Scrub, in Gulf Hammock, in the Florida Everglades, it is wild turkey or deer,” Rawlings wrote.
The beverage served with the main course was “likely to be Florida ‘corn,’ or moonshine liquor,” or, for those with a more delicate palate, “homemade Scuppernong or blackberry or elderberry wine.”
As for decorations, Rawlings’ neighbors didn’t display Christmas trees, but instead “festooned their pine cabins with wild mistletoe and boughs of holly, bright with red berries.”
Rawlings came to “love the lazy and casual Florida backwoods Christmas.”
“Now that Cross Creek is ‘home,’ ” she wrote, “I should be as infuriated as on that first Christmas day, if snow fell and sparrows pecked at ice.”
Thanks to the Florida Humanities Council for its 2016 post, “How a beloved author learned to love Christmas in Florida,” at floridahumanities.org.
Rawlings writing awards
Each year, the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Society sponsors a writing contest for currently enrolled college graduate and undergraduate students. Submissions can be either a critical essay or a piece of creative work on a subject related to the works, career or legacy of Rawlings.
Submit work and any questions to Anna Lillios of the University of Central Florida English Department by email at anna@ucf.edu. The deadline is Feb. 1, 2019. Award winners will present their work at the society’s 2019 conference, March 29-30, in Tarpon Springs. For more about the society, visit rawlingssociety.org. Joy Wallace Dickinson can be reached at jwdickinson@earthlink.net, FindingJoyinFlorida.com, or by good old-fashioned letter at the Sentinel, 633 N. Orange Ave., Orlando, FL 32801.