BEEN THINKIN’ ABOUT… A GREEN CHRISTMAS. “A green Christmas makes a full graveyard,” goes the old mountain saying. It is an old Appalachian omen, dating back likely to old Britain. But Vance Randolph recorded the saying in the Ozarks too and the words have echoed in my mind the past several days. Days in which I walked the trails wearing shorts and sneakers, watching the old honeysuckle vines green unnaturally in the heat. Even the cedars began to smell like a summer afternoon again as the dogs pulled and bounded weirdly, straining against the unnatural heat.
Back in my house, I settled into the cool dark, house smelling of balsam fir candles. The Christmas tree was aglow, curtains pulled firmly against the sun. A moment of calm, of respite. The house was clean, the dogs freshly bathed (it was certainly warm enough), dust motes floating in the air. Puppy stretched gloriously across the back of the couch, lying loving cheek against mine. Outside, the air conditioner hummed vigorously again. Strange summer we’re having this winter. Strange winter, indeed.
Mountain Christmases are full of strange old traditions. Belsnickel Santas peer ominously from behind Christmas boughs. Holly and ivy and mistletoe (now usually plastic facsimile) grace doors and tables. The hearth — if only a cardboard one — is again paid homage, for the hearth is from whence Santa comes. In old Europe, the hearth holds special meaning, a place of ancestral veneration. I light another candle and appreciate the horseshoe above my door, and the small sheaf of grass from the hayfield, a reminder of my own Celtic ancestors’ fields long ago, and of the hot hayfield last August.
Christmas has always been a threshold time, a time of deep magic, a time to eat turnip greens (for money), black-eyed peas (for coins) and cornbread (for gold) and go out to the barnyard to see if the animals indeed speak at the stroke of midnight. My sisters once stayed up late and went out to the barn, and then hurried back in when the roosters woke up and crowed at the stroke of midnight. Magic comes in many forms, particularly out on the farms and fields.
But what is magic? To me, magic is the reminder that there are yet cosmological webs weaving time and space and heart and soul. That moments have meaning. That we are not purely bleak, rational beings, calculable digits, ones and zeroes, reduced to nothingness at the end of the roster, the pay roll, or those numbers etched on a cold tombstone. To me, magic means there is meaning yet, meaning that all the clatter and hubris and commoditizing cannot touch. No matter if magic has a bad name. I believe in such even yet.
The belt of Orion is bright these nights, up there in the eastern sky and flanked by Betelgeuse and Rigel. Jupiter is bright right now as well and further up, Aldebaran and the Pleiades. Long ago, those stars were important to my people and they are important to me again. The moon is so bright too that I have a shadow on the trail. In the distance, coyotes call to the night yet always from the south.
Our old omens are in the books recorded by folklorists and are now mostly forgotten. Hillbilly culture’s ties to Old England are marginalized. Time marches on. And with time, something has been lost. Deep in the lore — the lore that came to be called silly superstition — is the rhythm of the seasons, the darkness of fate, the hope in the magic of another sunrise, sometimes even a sunrise illuminating the frosty Christmas rose. But along the way there is also a lot of suffering and death, just like in the old fairytales. And those stories have been relegated, retold, modernized, sanitized, made palatable for “modern audiences.” But the bridge between mountain magic and the Ozark church pew is not so great after all.
The greatest overlooked promise of the Christ’s apostles was suffering. Today, we hear instead promises of “all the good things.” But what if all the good things are not meant to be? I see those modern folks who believe in only a piece of the story — especially this time of year — with joy on their lips and resentment in their eyes. But suffering is the lot of man in this life, as is joy, just as the innocence of the holy manger points to the excruciation of the cross.
It won’t be long before the snowy Sarvis berries bloom, but before that the yellow witch hazel. “A green Christmas makes a full graveyard,” the old saying goes. May we meet the coming year better in our hearts than last, may we learn again, and savor the joy, and perhaps even the pain, knowing there is yet magic, no matter what men may say, magic just as God made it.
— Joshua Heston, editor-in-chief, StateoftheOzarks
© StateoftheOzarks 2025
