A Look at Seasonal Customs Documented in the Kentucky Historical Society’s Archives.

FRANKFORT, Ky - 'Tis the season when most of us turn our thoughts toward holiday plans with family and friends. While each of us may celebrate in different ways based on our own unique traditions, it’s nostalgic to drift back in time and reminisce on the customs of yesteryear in rural Kentucky.

For some, the hustle and bustle of modern life has cast old traditions aside. Baking a fruit cake, draping a doorway in evergreen sprigs, filling stockings with nuts and fruit, door-to-door caroling, and tromping through the snow to find the perfect live tree are practices that, for some, have slipped into a time gone by.

These relics can still be experienced through the Kentucky Historical Society (KHS)’s large collection housed in their history center in Frankfort, Kentucky. This time of year, Christmas is a popular subject for the folks who work there.

Alyssa Ollier is the digital archivist at KHS, and her role is primarily to preserve physical objects in the digital realm so they can be experienced for years to come.  

“We have thousands of manuscripts, books, diaries, letters, photographs, and things like that, and it's my job to use technology to put them online so people can access them all over the world for free,” she said.

Those collected materials also include a vast array of items related to Christmases of long ago.

“In both our object collection and our archival collections, we do have many things related to historical Christmases, such as Christmas gifts, like things people gave each other as presents,” she said. “We have a lot of old Christmas cards and Christmas carol sheet music, to name a few.”

Ollier added that a couple of her favorite items in the archive are letters to Santa from famed Kentucky artist Paul Sawyier's nephews.

“Dating back to when they were little boys in the 1890s, we have their handwritten letters to Santa Claus asking for things like a sled, or a kitty cat, or new boots,” she said. “There are just all kinds of fun things in the collection.”

Ollier added that when people think of Christmas today, often it is about shopping and the hustle and bustle that seems to inherently come with the season. But if you go back to more rural Christmases, you get a much more home-based, slow-living experience with families gathered around a hearth, spending time together.

“In the past, a lot of rural Kentuckians, they worked on their farms, they worked out in fields, with a lot of hard manual labor throughout the year, but Christmas was really a time to take a break, to rest, to have that one day to come together and pause in the work, and just rejoice in a bright day in a dark, cold winter,” she said. “To rejoice in having good food together, and decorations, and giving gifts to celebrate primarily the birth of Christ, that kind of more religious Christmas.”

Some have intentionally held onto these more mindful traditions, incorporating them into their present-day celebrations.

“People would decorate with things they found out in the natural world like firs, greens, holly, mistletoe, rosemary, and items such as these, but much of that has definitely hung around,” Ollier said. “We still love that kind of natural element to Christmas in a certain way.”

The exchange of Christmas cards is one element of Christmas that has lasted for generations. Ollier said the Christmas cards in the KHS collection go back to about the turn of the century, around 1900, and into the 1930s and '40s.

“The concept of the mailed Christmas cards came about with commercial printing, in the late 1800s Industrial Revolution era, when it was suddenly easier to print a lot of cards,” she said. “But before that, people would often send Christmas letters. It was a time to reconnect with loved ones who may have been away, or who were traveling, or away at war during wartime. And the design of the cards has changed a lot, too.”

Of course, no Christmas is complete without a traditional holiday meal, and yes, you can find some old, rural recipes thanks to records kept by KHS.

“We have a lot of historic cookbooks here, and, in looking through some old recipes, primarily there were a lot of desserts that used dried fruit or citrus peel, things that could keep really well or that you only got once a year,” Ollier said. “Sugar and spices would be saved up and used to make a really good Christmas cake, sometimes with alcohol, maybe some Kentucky bourbon in there.”

She noted that fruitcakes were very popular in the past because they would keep well for longer periods of time. This time of year was also generally a time when hogs were slaughtered for food.  

“That actually has medieval roots, with December being the time with this ancient custom attached to that,” Ollier said. “Of course, with hog slaughtering time, you've got pork fat, and lots of yummy, delicious pork. So hams and things made with pork fat would be very prevalent on the table. I found a recipe for crackling bread, which was bread made with pork crackling mixed into it.”

It was typical Kentucky foods, including beaten biscuits, that showed up on these rural Christmas tables, noted Ollier. She said many people have shown interest in harkening back to the cooking processes of long ago.

“People get really excited about it, and there's a lot of good modern cookbooks that are reinterpreting these old, historical recipes,” she said. “So, we do get a lot of interest in how people used to cook. It's very different, but they're really good sometimes when you take the time to make them.”

Having a genealogical and historical library at KHS, Ollier said many patrons visit to trace their Kentucky roots.  

“They want to find out about how their ancestors lived, and that's very important to them,” she said. “That idea of passing down the same things from generation to generation, and to know that you're still doing it the same way that your great-great-great-grandfather did, that's really special to a lot of people.”

Ollier pointed out that many people, when thinking of history, relate it to important people or events, but there is more to our historical past than just those big events.

“We have things related to Isaac Shelby, George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln, but a lot of our collections are also just from and about everyday people,” she said. “When you actually look at things like an old Christmas toy, or an old Christmas card, or recipe books that are kind of written in, you realize that people in history were people. They were just like us with hopes and dreams and struggles. You can really get close to them through these historical artifacts. And to me, it makes history come alive. It's not something that just happened and is over, we're living in history right now. We all are important and we're all part of history.”

The KHS is open to the public Wednesdays through Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

“We encourage everyone, if you haven't been here before, to come see us,” she said. “We've just got so many exciting things going on, especially as we get into the holiday season.”