Arts, Crafts, Music, & Events of Breckinridge County Issue 2, July 2015 | Page 55

am a child born of the era of ribbon candy, peppermint sticks,
gumdrops, coconut haystacks, fudge, and popcorn balls. It
was just not Christmas without them in the house and much
of them were homemade by our mothers. Grandmas or
mothers worried over the humidity in the air when divinity
candy was made yearly. The divinity had to be made on a
sunny day. Kids were told to sit down and be quiet so cakes
in the oven would not fall and so candy thermometers could
be watched carefully by our moms. If you had no candy
thermometer, you dropped a little bit of the hot candy syrup
into cold water to tell the stage it had reached. Our jobs were
to lick the cake beaters (no one preached or knew the
dangers of raw eggs back then). Each year we heard horror
stories from our parents that we must stay out of the kitchen
because hot candy dropped on the skin would surely stay
there forever or else burn clear through our arms, and we
were naïve enough to believe it was true. Christmas trees
were not aluminum and were not colors of pink, blue, neon
green, or red like found today. Trees were the real deal,
freshly cut from our grandma’s farm. They were fir or pine,
and actually smelled divine. Old glass ornaments were pulled
out of closets and attics. Paper chains were made by kids to
go on the tree and ornaments made in school were saved to
be used each year. Strings of lights only worked back then if
all the bulbs were good, so we held our breath as the tree
was plugged in the first time each season. Stockings were