“During the incumbency of Rev. William H. Reese, I was baptized in that old church, out of the silver bowl placed on the communion table. When I was a little child, I well remember how Bishop Brownell catechised the children, standing about the chancel rail, but, perhaps, as I grew older, the most vivid impression made upon me was the preparation for, and attendance upon, the old-time Christmas Eve service. Evergreens were gathered upon the Plains, and the people assembled at Mr. George McMahon’s to tie them. They were gathered in Aspetuck, and the people assembled at Mr. Marshall Hill’s or Mr. Stephen Morehouse’s. They were gathered at the village, and the people assembled at the house of my father, Noble S. Bennitt, on Bennitt Street. The refreshments consisted of a pan of doughnuts, round and sugared. The cracking fire on the hearth consumed the broken branches, and the young people remained for a social time after their elders had departed. Such large ropes of evergreens were tied, and afterwards suspended from corner to corner of the church, and all around the walls, and in front of the gallery! “White covers of bleached muslin covered the pulpit and reading desk, to which were attached fringes made of the needles of the pine, by Miss Bostwick, afterwards Mrs. Leroy Buck. Mottoes of evergreen on white cloth were put up on the walls, and candelabra, of five candles each, across the ends of the pulpit and desk cushions. Miss Cornelia Boardman brought a large fluid lamp with a glass globe and put it on the communion table. The people reserved their whitest and purest tallow to make dipped candles to hang up in tin back candlesticks under the gallery, while Edgar and Henry Wells made a great star of five points, covered it with evergreens, and suspended it from the ceiling in the middle of the church, containing as many candles as it was the year of the century. This was the only time in the year that the church was lighted up, and the people of the town turned out and filled the church and its galleries to overflowing. The good old Christmas Eve service of the old times, who that was then alive shall ever forget it! “But the solemnity of the old-time Sunday comes up with all its hallowed associations. The Sunday church bells, with the orderly ringing and tolling of their first bells and last bells; with their solemn tolling for a death--nine for a man, seven for a woman, five for a boy, three for a girl! “The sleigh bells, too, bass ones and tenor ones, jingling all the week in the winter time, but no sleigh bells on Sunday! I well remember when two young men, in their want of respect for the traditions of Sunday, drove through the village street with sleigh bells on their horse on the Lord’s Day, thereby shocking the sober-minded people of the churches and the town.