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    Christmas in Plains: Memories
    Christmas in Plains: Memories
    Christmas in Plains: Memories
    Ebook113 pages1 hour

    Christmas in Plains: Memories

    By Jimmy Carter and Amy Carter

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    About this ebook

    Jimmy Carter remembers Christmas in Plains, Georgia, the source of spiritual strength, respite, friendship, and vacation fun in this charming portrait.

    In a beautifully rendered portrait, Jimmy Carter remembers the Christmas days of his Plains boyhood—the simplicity of family and community gift-giving, his father’s eggnog, the children’s house decorations, the school Nativity pageant, the fireworks, Luke’s story of the birth of Christ, and the poignancy of his black neighbors’ poverty.

    Later, away at Annapolis, he always went home to Plains, and during his Navy years, when he and Rosalynn were raising their young family, they spent their Christmases together recreating for their children the holiday festivities of their youth.

    Since the Carters returned home to Plains for good, they have always been there on Christmas Day, with only one exception in forty-eight years: In 1980, with Americans held hostage in Iran, Jimmy, Rosalynn, and Amy went by themselves to Camp David, where they felt lonely. Amy suggested that they invite the White House staff and their families to join them and to celebrate.

    Nowadays the Carters’ large family is still together at Christmastime, offering each other the gifts and the lifelong rituals that mark this day for them.

    With the novelist’s eye that enchanted readers of his memoir An Hour Before Daylight, Jimmy Carter has written another American classic, in the tradition of Truman Capote’s A Christmas Memory and Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster
    Release dateOct 19, 2001
    ISBN9780743225649
    Author

    Jimmy Carter

    Jimmy Carter was the 39th President of the United States, author of numerous books, teacher at Emory University, founder of the Carter Center, and the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. Carter worked with Emory University to establish the Carter Center, a nongovernmental, nonprofit organization advances human rights and alleviates human suffering in seventy-five countries worldwide. Carter is the only U.S. President to receive the Nobel Peace Prize after leaving office.    

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    Reviews for Christmas in Plains

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    • 4/5
      I really liked this audio book. Its a great example of the medium. I feel they are always better when read by the author, and Jimmy Carter has a great friendly grandpa voice (something that probably helped him beat Gerald Ford). While many, if not most, of the stories, I had already heard by "reading" "First Lady from Plains" by Rosalyn Carter, this is a slightly different perspective, particularly I enjoyed the early chapters with his boyhood times of through flaming rag balls to celebrate Christmas. Also he reminds us that for some reason, Santa really prefers rich kids to poor kids.
    • 4/5
      Christmas In Plains by Jimmy Carter – This a truly delightful memoir by the 39th President of the United States. It focuses on his family’s Christmas celebrations through the years, beginning when he was quite young through his years after he left the White House and returned to Plains. However, this memoir also provides glimpses his life in Plains, in the Navy, as the Governor of Gerogia, as the President of the United States of America, and his life after the presidency. It’s a thoroughly charming portrait of this acclaimed, humble, compassionate and spiritual man and his family. Amy Carter contributed illustrations for this book.
    • 4/5
      Imagine sitting on an old, front porch in the South listening to your grandfather tell about the old days communicating the message of faith, home, Christmas, and peace. Delightful late-night read filled with messages of peace from a former president that was way ahead of his time.
    • 4/5
      Jimmy Carter provides a spare, yet touching look at life in depression-era Plains, Ga.
    • 4/5
      ISBN 0743224914 – I’ve got a large collection of Christmas books and thought that Christmas In Plains would fit in nicely. Since then, I’ve read the book and have no desire to keep it – but I am glad to have read it. It’s a nice look at Christmases gone by and a tiny window on the interaction between blacks and whites in rural Georgia over the years.Carter shares his memories of Christmas throughout his life. As a member of a well-off family in Georgia, he is blissfully unaware of any real difference between himself and his black playmates and shares Christmas joys with them as well as with his close family. Even the town figures into the earliest celebrations, with fireworks and church services. Through his years at West Point and in the Navy, including the early years of his marriage and finally reaching his time in public service, when his family grew and grew until, returning to Georgia from the White House, he and his wife find that much has changed – and much has stayed the same. For other former presidents, perhaps the years in office would be their choice for an uplifting ending to a book like this. Carter chooses to end with the beginnings of his time with Habitat for Humanity, a fitting place to leave things for this man who, more than any other recent president, comes across as a normal guy with the ability to relate to the rest of us.I was a little annoyed to find that the first chapter or two never really came into focus. Carter spends most of his ink there pointing out, in various ways, how not racist he is. While I believe that Carter’s an open-minded non-racist, it seemed a little much. On the other hand, bookending the entire tale with his childhood among black neighbors in the 1930-1940s with the story of Curtis and Martha, black neighbors in need of help, is a great choice. Despite being part of a close family, and his mentioning the days before his father’s death, he glosses over that death and its impact on himself, his family and their holidays. The illustrations by Amy Carter would have been cute, had they been done when she was 8. She’s not eight and the only cute factor is that they’re evidence of her closeness to her father. A nice holiday read, just not a keeper.- AnnaLovesBooks

    Book preview

    Christmas in Plains - Jimmy Carter

    Introduction

    This book is a description of some of the Christmases that have been important to my family and me, from my childhood on a farm through eleven years in the U.S. Navy, then later to the Governor’s Mansion, the White House, and back—always when we were able to go home to Plains, or just longing to be there.

    In all that time, Christmas has been a season of mixed interests and meanings, but the very foundation, of course, is its religious significance. No matter what other personal desires or crises we have faced, I’ve never forgotten that this is the time to celebrate the birth of the Baby Jesus, and the impact of this event on the history of the world.

    Although this underlying premise has never changed since my earliest memories, it is remarkable how much my perspectives of Christmas have varied down through the years. I have to admit that, as a child, my anticipation of Santa Claus and gifts was dominant, regardless of any religious reminders. There were times when I was almost totally obsessed with the presents I might receive, and had only secondary thoughts about giving, even to my parents or sisters. Later, there was the added attraction of a few days of vacation—both from school and from work.

    The first time I gave much thought to giving was when I was trying to gain an advantage in competing for the favors of a popular teenaged girl in high school. I wanted my present to be the best one she would receive.

    All during those early years, I took for granted that I would be enclosed within the protective cocoon of my immediate family. After I left home for college and the Naval Academy, Christmas holidays brought an alleviation of homesickness, and a chance to be back in Plains with my family and old friends.

    When I finally fell in love, my sweetheart and I established a new and unshakable desire for Christmas: to be together and to please each other. I was in the navy during my first seven years of marriage, and had to accommodate whatever circumstances were imposed on my family by superior authority. Having three little boys changed the focus of Christmas completely, and we tried to resurrect the pleasant memories of our own childhood and give our children the joy of place and belonging that we had known. Our earlier desire to receive gifts was now gone completely, as we focused on bringing surprise and delight to our own children.

    When we were able to return home to Plains, we had to learn how to balance the demands of our two widowed mothers, both strong-willed and demanding as matriarchal leaders, dividing the hours of Christmas Day so as to please both of our families. Fortunately, all of us had our lives centered in Plains. It was not until our sons married and had their own families that the benefits of our annual family reunion were shattered by the competitive demands of our fellow grandparents.

    Both as a naval officer and in public office, as the First Family in Georgia and then the nation, we often had duties that took precedence over our strong desire to be with family, preferably in Plains. This home community has been central to what has been most often—but certainly not always—a joyous time of year. Finally (at least for now), with our parents and all my siblings gone, we have been challenged to devise means of holding our expanding family together, and, once again, Christmas gives us the answer.

    Christmas, family, and Plains—the three are inextricable.

    1

    Christmas as a Child

    To understand what Christmases were like when I was a child, one has to know a little about where I lived and, of course, the times. I grew up on a farm in Southwest Georgia during the days of the Great Depression. In An Hour Before Daylight, I described my life in the rural community of Archery, about three miles west of town. Our family moved from Plains to the farm in 1928, when I was four years old. U.S. Highway 280, then a narrow dirt road, was fifty feet in front of our house, a modest structure whose plans had been provided by Sears, Roebuck and Company. Paralleling the road was the Seaboard Airline Railway, heavily traveled in those days by both passenger and freight trains.

    But now everything has changed. There is usually only one train a day, and most of the people have moved away. With the coming of modern transportation and the legal end of racial segregation, people have gone their separate ways, and the intimacy between black and white folks has disappeared. But Christmas is still as important as ever, both in its religious meaning and as a time for friends and relatives to get together.

    •  •  •

    In those earlier days, all my close neighbors were black families. Johnny and Milton Raven, Edmund Hollis, and A. D. Davis were the intimate friends with whom I played, fought, fished, hunted, slept, ate, and worked in the cotton and peanut fields that were owned by my father. The other boys lived down the road a half a mile, but A.D. stayed on our farm with his uncle and aunt, and he was an inseparable companion. In a way, the adults had given us to each other.

    When I was five years old, Daddy arranged for me to begin selling peanuts during the summer months, as soon as the crop began to mature. I would go into one of the fields, pull up a small wagonload of vines out of the ground, haul them to our yard, pick off the nuts, wash them carefully, soak them overnight in salty water, boil them early the next morning, and put a half-pound in each of about twenty paper bags. Then I would walk down the railroad track to town and sell the boiled peanuts on the street for a total of about a dollar, usually finishing this task by noon. But even with this daily routine and my time in school, I always felt that I was in an alien environment when I was in Plains, away from my black friends and with the town folks, the white children who were my age, and in the unfamiliar places where we sometimes played together.

    In my earliest memories of Christmas, beginning about 1930 and including my childhood and formative years, I was closely encapsulated with just a few others: my parents, my older sister, Gloria, and our baby sister, Ruth. (My brother, Billy, came along much later.) My father was a landowner and also had a small commissary store adjacent to our house, so our relatively prosperous family life was similar to those of our relatives and friends who lived in Plains, and the quality of the gifts we exchanged was also equal to theirs. Compared to those of our black neighbors, with whom I spent most of my time, Christmas days for us white folks were isolated islands of affluence.

    The Great Depression was a time of almost incredible poverty, not only in Southwest Georgia but all over the country. Although my father was a landowner, cash money was scarce for us and for everyone else. Land seemed to have the only permanent economic value, and hard work was the key to survival. The celebration of Christmas during these times was quite different from what we know today: much more frugal, but with a degree of personal intimacy that brings back warm recollections.

    2

    My Family

    My father, Earl Carter, was a successful farmer and businessman who—like everyone else in the

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