An Appalachian Christmas Tradition: Serenading

bonfire

Photo by Court Cook on Unsplash

According to one source [1], serenading was likely based on the English tradition of “The Day of Misrule,” where servants, the poor, and children could visit the homes of their well-off neighbors and merchants to ask for food or other gifts* [2] — and it actually resembles trick or treating more than it does caroling.

Basically, the youth in a community (often chaperoned by one or more adults) would gather late on Christmas Eve with the intent to visit neighboring homesteads. The usual custom was to dress in disguises – girls in men’s clothes and vice versa, with soot covering faces – and sneak upon unsuspecting and sometimes sleepy neighbors with as loud a cacophony of sound as possible. This might mean yelling, banging of pots and pans, firecrackers, gunshots, and any other creative noisemaking that could be thought of.

Conversely, sometimes no noise was made at all, in order to perform a prank at a particular home and run away before being caught.

If the group was discovered before they arrived, a warning shot from the homeowner was enough to put them off. If the group was able to surprise the neighbors, however, they could knock on the door and expect some sort of treat (cookie, cake, candy or fruit).

Eventually, the evening would often end with a bonfire on a hill that might last all night. Listen in on these first-hand accounts from A Foxfire Christmas and The Foxfire Book of Appalachian Toys & Games:

Lawton Brooks

“Back then there wasn’t much Christmas, to tell you the truth, because there wasn’t nothing for you to have like they is now. We didn’t know what a firecracker was. Never heard tell of a firecracker. All the noise we made for Christmas – serenading people on Christmas eve – we done with a shotgun. We’d get shotgun shells, fifty cents a box, and we’d get out there and shoot up in the air. Them shotgun barrels would get so hot, we’d have to set ‘em down and wait awhile, and then start again.

Just gettin’ out and going around, sneaking up to someone’s house [was our entertainment at Christmastime. That’s what we called serenading.] They didn’t know nothing about it, and we’d just come up making the durndest noise you ever heard. If they was in bed, they just as well to get up. They shore to God couldn’t sleep! We’d just keep on making noise until they got up and gave us something to eat. They’d always invite us in and feed us. They’d have something for us to eat and sometimes give us a present or something.

“We’d never start out till about midnight. There’d be about twenty-five or thirty of us. The girls would join us, too, and we’d all go. We’d be sure everyone was in bed and had the lights all out. Everybody would make some kind of noise, one way or the other. You never heard such bells ringing, shooting, hollering, and beating old tin buckets and things. Take us half the night to get back after we got through serenading people; we might serenade a dozen and not get back until daybreak.

“People in them days would have a cow and a horse, at least, in the stalls in the barn. While they were asleep that night, we’d take the horse out of one stall and put it in the cow’s stall, and move the cow into the horse’s stall. They’d go in there to milk the next morning—we liked to be there to watch—and there’d stand the ol’ horse in the cow stall. Boy, they could get mad! They’d throw their milk bucket down on the ground. Us kids got a lotta kick out of that. We’d do all kinds of stuff like that. We’d move people’s stuff, hide their axes or somethin’ else. Whatever we could find loose, layin’ out, we’d hide it. Wouldn’t put it where he couldn’t never find it, but he’d maybe have to hunt for two or three days.

There was one man we wanted to play a trick on, so we just took his wagon apart while he was asleep, took one piece of it at a time up on the barn, and put it all back together up there. So the next morning this man got to looking for his wagon, and it was sitting astraddle of the corner of the barn, all put together and ready to go again. He didn’t know what to think! He was really mad when he found his wagon on top of the barn. He had to go up there and take it down one piece at a time. We didn’t tell the old man how we had tricked him for a long time, but it tickled him later when he found out.

Lloyd Fish

“The night before Christmas was always the big night back when I was a growing up. We’d get firecrackers and cowbells and shotguns and we’d just go from one house to another. We called it serenading. Did you ever hear tell of that? Yeah, we’d just go and slip up on a home. We’d wait till they went to bed, you see, before we started. And we’d slide up in the yard, because if they run out and beat you and hollered “Christmas gift” we had to have something to give them. But if we slid into the yard and went to shooting those firecrackers and ringing them cowbells-that big old bell that you could hear all over the mountains-and holler and whooping until they got up and then they brought us in and had to treat us with fruits and candies and stuff and maybe then some of them joined us and we’d go on to the next house and we’d be lucky if we got in just a little before daylight the next morning. On Christmas morning. We’d leave on Christmas Eve you know. We’d go plumb on down in two or three miles and then go back up these side hollows and so on.

We went to one feller’s house one night and we had a shell fouled up in the shotgun and my oldest brother was a-carrying it, and we-I guess it was twenty or thirty of us-slid up in his yard and we was just a-whispering while waiting on him to get that shell back from behind the ejector and we heard something go “kerplop” in the house. Just about the time my brother got there with the shotgun, it went like, I don’t know, he just jumped out of the bed into the floor and we told my brother to fire with the shotgun a time or two up in the air, you know. And then we began ringing our bells and why his lights come on, an old kerosene lamp, you know, is what it was. He yelled, “Come on in, come on in. Gracious, if I hadn’t a-run both legs down one pants leg when I jumped up on the bed to pull up my pants on me this is one time I’d a-beat you. Why, I hit the floor.” That’s what we heard hit the floor, you know. He’d stuck both feet in one leg and when he jumped up to jerk on his pants he hit the floor.

We’d try to [beat them] you know. We’d probably get more than we needed to stick in our pockets. We’d have something to give them. If any­body happened to be watching and listening for you-maybe with their lights out-they’d pop out there and shoot right up in the air and holler “Christmas gift” first. Then we had to share with them if they beat, you know. But we didn’t tend to get beat, you know.

People looked forward to the serenaders. That’s one thing they looked forward to. They wasn’t one home in twenty but what would turn you in. Mud all over our feet, going on these old side roads and wading the branches, we didn’t use no light so nobody wouldn’t see us coming.”

Florence Brooks: “One time we got serenaded. Starting out at the yard and coming around to the edge of the house, there was a ditch dug a few feet deep from our waterpipe, and they came a-serenading, and every one of them went right in the ditch. That’s the last serenade I ever heard tell of. Boy, they went in that ditch headlong. They was muddy as a hog when they came out of there.”

Robert Cannon: “Down at Duncan Rufus Williams’, they would always slip through the walkway and come in and get the first shot. One year [we] tied a shotgun up in a tree and set a rock and everything back on it and pulled a line to it across the pathway. When they hit that, it would jerk that rifle, and KA-BOOM she’d go!”

Elmer Ponder: “We always shot a lot of firecrackers at Christmas time. Everybody that could get up a few cents, they bought firecrackers. An’ we’d shoot and bang around with them things. And I got me an old tire pump, took it apart and used the barrel. I’d light me a firecracker, and drop down in it, then drop me a walnut in on top of it and aim it like a gun. And boy, could I shoot a walnut outta sight.”

Certainly sounds like a lot of fun, but eventually the practice got a bit out of hand and serenading was outlawed. These days this kind of activity is relegated to a much tamer trick or treat outing on Halloween, and Christmas Eve is typically peaceful.

SOURCES

[1] http://sanda-halcyondays.blogspot.com/2012/12/christmas-serenading.html
[2] https://gotmountainlife.com/appalachian-christmas-history-legends-and-superstitions/
* In later years, the advent of railroads brought an end to the tradition of poor Appalachians calling upon prosperous neighbors for help. Coal and logging communities began setting up a community Christmas tree and each child was given a Christmas present. Families would receive fruit, candy, and nuts. Often the cost of these things was later taken out of the worker’s paychecks.