The boy who brought ChristmasMorgan, Alice (Fiction writer)
General
The boy who brought Christmas
Morgan, Alice (Fiction writer)
Christmas stories; North Carolina -- Fiction
“Gran’son, I’ve read that there third commandment a heap of times
and I can’t see as it provides for any week-day privileges or
indulgences. When a man’s cussin’ mad, tain’t so powerful ill for him
to bat the old devil’s name about some but, Grover Cleveland, don’t
you never go to triflin’ with the name of the Lord; that’s uncommon
low down, that is.
“There used to formerly be only one kind of Baptises here and they
warshipped in the old red church. But ole man Jordan he got his back
up and he took all his kin-people away and he built another church
and he painted it yaller. You see he had a whole mountain of timber
land that he was glad to get cleared off, and his sons run a sawmill,
and there’s a big bed of yaller ochre right back of his house. He
was smart enough to set ’em all to work, while they was red-hot mad.
If he’d a give ’em time to cool off, that ar yaller meetin’-house
never would been built. They did cool off before they got the chimbly
up and to this day they’re a tryin’ to praise the Lord with their
stovepipe a-stickin’ out the winder.”
“There’s too many kinds of ’em for old Sandy to git round to ’em
all,” said the small boy persistently, returning to his first sorrow.
“Sometimes it looks to me like there’s too many kinds for the Lord
to get round to ’em all, gran’son. There’s some big cities where
there’s more kinds than we’ve got here. There’s two or three kinds
of Meth’-dises and there’s Free-will Baptises and Holinesses, and
they all seem to be workin’ for the same end, only they can’t agree
to work together. But, of course, people’s got a right to all the
religious differences they can pay for; but here in Junaluska we’re
too poor to have so many churches.”
“How did there git to be so many kinds, gran’daddy?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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