Yesterday I had to take Granny over to Blairsville for a doctor’s appointment. On the way she told me about her very first job.
Granny, her cousin, and a friend all got jobs working at the dime store during Christmas. She said they were still in high school and had to get a work permit before they could start the job.
The best she remembered she run the cash register, the friend helped customers, and her cousin wrapped gifts in the back of the store.
Granny said “Murphy didn’t have many stores back then and there was so many people in there shopping while we worked that you couldn’t even turn around with out running into somebody.”
I asked Granny what she did with her money. She said “I should have saved some of it, but I spent almost every last cent on a red rain coat that was in a store down the street. I just loved it.”
Her friend spent her money on flowers for her mother. Granny said back then stores put bulbs out at Christmas. She went on to say she didn’t know what her cousin spent her money on but she must have saved it.
Before The Deer Hunter and I were married and I worked at Lake Logan in Haywood County my cousins and I would help pull tobacco for extra Christmas spending money. Like Granny I didn’t save any of mine, but I did take great pleasure in buying my family special gifts.
Folks in my area used to gather galax plants for extra Christmas money. They sold the pretty green leaves to florists. John Parris shared this about the annual industry.
“For almost half a century many a mountain man has been using galax leaves for money. Right now the market is booming just as it does every year about this time for galax has become synonymous with Christmas, and the round heart-shaped leaves of bronze and wine red are fetching a pretty penny in the florist trade. Even during the depression there was a steady market for them in the North where they were used for funeral wreaths. As an industry confined to our mountains, gallackin’ that’s what mountain folks call gathering the leaves is comparatively new. Some folks say that T.N. Woodruff up at Low Gap started it back in 1907 when he visited a florist friend in New York and took him a few bunches of galax leaves as a gift.”
Blind Pig reader Ed Ammons shared this about gathering moss for Christmas.
“We never knew about Gallackin but we did gather moss and boxwood cuttings to sell to florists. Way back in the woods, in deep dark damp hollers where the sun never shines, the thick moss on big rocks can be peeled off like taking covers off a bed. I have seen pieces as big as 4 to 5 feet square. We would roll them up and put them in a tow sack. Boxwood is a domestic plant so we found it around homes and old house sites. One year in November we waded across the Little Tennessee above Loudermilk to get to an old homestead. I wasn’t being careful about where I was putting my feet and stepped into a hole that put me completely under. I got out, shook off and kept going. Coming back across we had to put our tow sacks on our heads to keep them dry but we made it unscathed.”
Miss Cindy told me her mother made Christmas mints and sold them each year for extra money. She said folks looked forward to them and were disappointed when Bonnie stopped making them.
Today folks call extra jobs one might take on to help their finances side hustles. I’m guessing there are still folks who do some sort of annual work to make extra money for Christmas but I don’t know anyone at present who does.
Last night’s video: The Pressley’s Favorite Christmas Candy – Buttermilk Pralines.
Tipper
I guess we were not very smart when I was a kid–we gathered mistletoe but we did not sell it to people we just gave it away…..for Christmas money, not EXTRA money just money period to spend on presents was done by picking up pecans and selling them. Way back then when I first remember selling the pecans we picked up we got thirty cents…then forty…and the last time I picked up pecans as a child and sold them I got sixty cents a pound. Back then you usually got a nickel more for the natives (smaller harder shell but better flavor and more oil in them than in the bigger paper shell). I am not able to pick up pecans anymore, but I do still check on the price places are giving to anyone bringing in pecans to sell and it says alot about inflation because if you are selling pecans you still only get sixty cents a pound but if you are buying cracked blown and picked out pecans you are paying ten dollars for one pound of natives. A side note, it was nothing for each of us kids to pick up a hundred pounds of pecans or more (there was four of us that were big enough to go out in the pasture and pick pecans…plus mom and several of her friends and then neighbors) so hundreds and hundreds pounds of pecans were picked up every year and half went to the owner of the land and then after cracking and picking out enough pecans for mom to use in baking all year we could then sell what we had left over and use that money for buying Christmas presents
Such beautiful fun and endearing memories from past times. My part time work was waiting tables at a family style restaurant at home. It was located between St. Louis and Columbia. During football season were the best times for great tips. These old feet have seen many miles and many dishes loaded with food have been carried to hungry tired , generous people. During the summer I got to work a little more and saved money for school activities, gifts for family members. Have a great holiday everyone.
Loved reading everyone’s stories / memories ! When I was young , I loved when I was able to earn “Christmas money ! “ I truly enjoyed being able to choose gifts for my friends & family with “my own “ money ! Thank you for sharing ! Merry Christmas Everyone!
When my sister and I were teens we helped our sister and her husbands family in tobacco.
Our extra summer money was made pulling tobacco plants, setting the tobacco, chopping out and topping (what seems like the same as what someone here called cropping?
Late summer after the tobacco was cut and put on sticks in the field we would load it on to wagons, which is what was referred to as “housing tobacco”
By late fall we would spend our weekends in the stripping room “pulling” the leaves and putting them in a press. Years ago, most farmers hand tied their tobacco and that was a skill for sure.
After I married I learned that my mother in-law would make cream candy to sell at our annual October Court Days. Back then, early 80s, a pound sold for five dollars, today it would cost you around 18 bucks to buy a pound, if you are lucky enough to find someone that can even make it. It is for sure a skill not everyone can master. I have many happy memories of putting that sweet candy on to cook, then pouring the mixture onto a cold marble slab, then two of use would pull the mixture, passing it back and forth until just the right feel took place, then we cut the candy into small pieces and stored in a candy tin in a cool dry place to cream. It would be snow white and oh so good.
I have really enjoyed reading all the comments.
I only make cream candy these days for my family at Christmas time.
Did Miss Cindy or y’all ever make those mints?
Leslie-Miss Cindy did teach us to make them, but we haven’t made them in ages. It’s the type of mints that you have to stretch and stretch the candy before it’s ready to cut into pieces 🙂
I’m not doing caregiving now so I was trying to think of a way to earn extra money for Christmas. I started making sausage biscuits some with egg and the men at my husband’s work buys them. I do pretty good. At least I can buy a few presents for Christmas.
I worked when I was in high school at Christmas for a engraving company that had a booth in Murphy’s Mart store. I used my money to buy family gifts and saved some back to use for gas money in my mom’s car she would let me use once in a while.
Loved reading about the stories. I remember selling watermelons, working in tobacco and cropping tobacco was usually the boy’s job. It was pulling the green tobacco off, and you’d put all you could carry under your arm then load it in a trailer to be hauled to the tobacco barn to finish getting it ready for the curing process. The “cropping” part was before there were tobacco harvest machines to do it. I’d save my money in an old cigar box, and some was used to help buy school clothes, but I would also save some for Christmas. I remember the first Christmas gifts I was able to buy was a sewing basket for mama, Old Spice for daddy and licorice for my brother. I got them all at the old Rose’s dime store here in town. I also remember my brother getting a job at Christmas putting together bicycles at the Western Auto. When I was a senior in high school, I also worked two part time jobs. Wonderful memories.
The only jobs I had as a school boy were helping farmer neighbors harvest wheat, oats and baled hay. Riding an Allis-Chalmers grain combine as sack tier could get hectic, particularly with oats, because the sacks filled so quickly that I had a devil of a time keeping up. My later jobs included painting. I painted the steeple at our church in two stages. I primed it on the ground, then put on two finish coats from a scaffold after the steeple and bell were installed on the building. I was also the church janitor in high school. That earned my dating money, that and hocking my Elgin watch, which I always redeemed and still wear every Sunday.
Gene, I was to young to ride a combine, but remember those Allis-Chalmers combines. I remember my Daddy would often ride one and tie the sacks to help out a farmer neighbor. For the ones that may not know, these combines were before today’s modern combines, they would be pulled by a tractor and had a a platform on the side that you either stood or sit on and would hold burlap sacks under a chute that the grain came out of. When the bag filled up you had to tie the top and exchange it for an empty sack.
When her health was better, Lovey, my wife, used to make and sell peanut brittle for Christmas money.
Seasonal hiring for temporary workers is still going strong at UPS WorldPort. Most of the 2,000 new hires have full-time jobs elsewhere but can’t turn down the opportunity to rake in some big Christmas bucks while earning $21 per hour. It would have been great to find a job that paid a dollar or two when I was growing up. If there had been any jobs available, they would have been snatched up by the heads of households to supplement their meager income.
My father grew up very poor. He told me that they would gather miseltoe and make small bundles of fat wood and collect a small evergreen he called princess pine. They took those things to town to sell on the street for Christmas money.
I didn’t have just a Christmas job but my first paying job was in a 5 and 10 cent store in our little town. The couple were really nice but she stood with her arms folded and when a customer came in she followed them around. I remember soot from a coal stove in the back on items, some items from the first year they opened the store years before. I don’t remember any sales or discounts. I’ve often thought of them saying, “Don’t answer the phone on the first ring. Make them think we are busy.” Their 3 children grew up in the store, when very young, napped in a box under the counter. They sold ice cream cones and one man who lived nearby would buy a scoop for his dog. They gave me a cast iron skillet when I married, I’ve used it for over 50 years and still have it. Great memories! I also picked strawberries once for a local farmer. Kids were loaded up in the bed of a truck and driven to the site. My fair skin didn’t cooperate. My back was sunburned through my shirt so that was my only day at that job. The dime store and babysitting jobs were better for me.
When I was in high school, the local department store asked students to help them do inventory. I was thrilled when I got assigned to the china and silver department. We had to count every plate, serving piece and fork. I remember the most expensive piece of china was the pattern one of the president’s daughters had chosen.
I used to sew for other people and save my sewing money to buy the special things my two girls wanted for Christmas. I did mostly alterations. I only sew for myself now, and make gifts for others.
So true! Great stories, Tipper. I hope y’all have a wonderful Christmas! Much love, Jane from SC
Our five and dime growing up was TG&Y. As a kid I loved that store especially the toy and candy sections. Mom would go to the fabric section and my sister and I would head to the toys. I loved the batons with colored cellophane wrapped around the ends. I was fascinated by the candy cigarettes that blew powdered sugar “smoke”.
Back in the early 60’s I got a job at the dimestore in the newly built and only mall in town (which has long been gone along with my high school). I was 15 and had to get a work permit. My dad, who was working a full time night shift and two part time jobs somehow managed to drive me to and from work. While walking through the warm mall during my break times was a treat during a northern Christmas, somehow it just didn’t compare to the magic of walking through our small town looking at the Christmas window displays and seeing the outside Christmas lights through the softly falling snow.
I grew up in northeastern Ohio and worked in a department store after school a few days a week for about a year and a half until I went to college. The store had three floors and was decorated beautifully along with the town. The falling snow reminded me of an outdoor scene in “It’s a Wonderful Life.” I used the money I made to buy my family and friends Christmas presents and buy my clothes.
my stepdad used to make wooden Christmas trees that he’d paint and put little wooden stockings that people could custom order with the names of their family members on them. He’d wrap lights aroudn them too and people would put them on their porches. He always sold a good bit. I know he did other crafts like that over the years but that’s the one I remember.
Seems to me there ought to be a market for mistletoe. A big water oak at our church is just green with it this year, the most it has ever had. I once collected some from the sidewalk after an ice storm, which is a good time to find it on the ground. And why is running ground cedar not collected? It is very common here in the upper Piedmont of Georgia.
Ron, you might get arrested if you tried to sell mistletoe today, you know today’s experts tell us the berries will poison and kill us. I went this morning and bought me some of those fresh sausage I mentioned a day or so ago, I got plans for some sausage balls. People were continually coming in to buy the sausage.
You are much more likely to be arrested for selling fresh homemade sausage than mistletoe. American Mistletoe, while it could be slightly poisonous, has no reports of fatilities or anything more than an upset tummy. There are no laws that prohibit it’s sale. European mistletoe is a different species and can be poison. Certain municipalities might arrest you for shooting it down because shooting up in the air like that means you don’t know where the bullets or pellets might fall.
Pray tell what do you mean by “pulling” tobacco? Glenda mentions “cropping” tobacco. Neither of these are familar terms to me. Can you explain?
Ed-we pulled the dried leaves from the stalks so that Mr. Hollingsworth could take it to market. That’s what he called it-pulling tobacco 🙂 I’m guessing cropping was just a way to say working with tobacco for a profit.
The process you’re calling “pulling” we called “stripping”. Two words for the same process. We also pulled leaves off the stalk, in the field, as they started to mature. We that called “priming”. That grade of tobacco fetched, by far, the best prices at the auction barn.
Did you grade the tobacco as you “pulled it”? And what did you do with it afterward?
I was grown and out of the tobacco field by the time you were born so things had probably changed significantly
Ed-the best I remember he had us do certain sections first-maybe he had graded it? Or maybe he sold all of his at a lower grade? I just don’t know. As we pulled the leaves we placed them in a large square container made out of wood I think. He packed it down as we went and then when it was full he bailed it together to take to the market. I wish I could remember more. I do remember we enjoyed it. There was lots of talking and laughing. By the end of the day your hands would be stained brown and your nose would need a good blowing 🙂 One year when Paul was in college he even came and helped.
Was the container like a big woven wooden 4 foot shallow basket with rounded corners? That’s what we used, but we bundled the leaves into “hands” before packing them onto the basket. A hand was a bundle that we gathered by the stem ends and added to until our physical hand couldn’t hold any more. Then we would take and wrap another leave around that end and pull back through to hold it together. The hands were laid evenly all around the perimeter until the height reached five or six feet. When the stack was as tall as we wanted it, we would turn another basket over on top and use heavy twine or baling wire to tighten it all down.
Those full baskets weight more than all of us together could lift. We had to roll them up on a truck to take them to the auction.
Hopefully I have reminded you of something here that will cause you to recall even more!
PS: The “take and” I added wasn’t from ignorance but was a nudge toward an older way of speaking. Personally I don’t use it but often heard it in my youth. You don’t just do something, you “take and”do it.
Ed-I don’t remember the baskets but the hands does seem familiar. I love the phrase take and 🙂 I use it myself and certainly grew up with Granny or Pap tell me to take and do something or other 🙂
I just remembered a side job that many children participated in during the summer when I was growing up near Oak Ridge Tennessee. Children could collect and freeze lightening bugs and the Oak Ridge National Lab would pay for them by the pound. They were researching luminescence at the time. I never did it, but many did! I guess they got it figured out, because that only happened for a short time.
Those pralines look so good. I can see why they’d be a family favorite.
I guess you could say that my niece has some side hustles. Although being a college graduate, she was blessed with the option to stay home to raise her children. During that time, she started baking cakes (on the side) for people. She soon had steady customers and did that for several decades until she tired of it. Now, she has another great side job of making artificial flower arrangements for grave decorating. She has a flourishing demand and many repeat customers for vases and saddles. She recently had me to change out Mamaw’s fall flowers for the Christmas ones she had made. Grave decorating is still a thing here and includes flowers that are changed out for the seasons, holidays, and veterans day. Her clients testify to the continued customs of Appalachia.
There’s a movie I really like called ABOUT SHMIDT. In it there’s a scene with Kathy Bates who is telling Warren about Christmas in the new family his daughter marries into and how they are a very creative family and Christmas gifts must be made from the heart-poems, paintings, crafts anything artsy because they are a creative, loving and special bunch! He sort of just takes it in-this hippy love strange bunch and wonders what his daughter has got hooked up with. Y’all have a good day in art and creation. I’ll just try to keep it real on our last projected “warm” day for a week…
I love hearing these stories . They are truly sweet memories.
For 25 years I have baked over 12 different varieties of cookies and candies to assemble Christmas cookie trays to sell to people who don’t bake. I first started this to make extra money at Christmas but my customers grew so accustomed to my trays that it’s now been passed down to my adult daughters to carry on the tradition and offer them extra Christmas cash! It’s become a joy to share these goodies with others!
As a child in Indiana I remember us loading in the car to head to KY where my dad was born and raised. It was always around Thanksgiving weekend. We would gather mistletoe and have the trunk loaded down. When we got home we would work around the kitchen table as a family and break it into smaller pieces and bag it up in an assembly line fashion. Dad had established a route around local florests and groceries who would purchase it. Little did I know this was how him & mom afforded to buy us Christmas.
As kids we would take glass soda bottles to store and redeem them for money. Also take metal coat hangers to the cleaners for cash too. Gone are those days
When I was a young teen, I would babysit little kids in the neighborhood during Christmas break from school so their moms could work!
The pralines look so good. I will try my luck with them for Christmas!
My parents used to dig ginseng and sell it for extra Christmas money. Mama was so good at spotting it even if the berries were off. She loved going hiking up mountain sides with dad to look for it, and misses the days when they were able to do this. I would always get a summer job during my teen years to buy school clothes and save a little to buy Christmas gifts for my family.
We had a 5 and 10 cent store (G.C. Murphy) when I was young. I loved that store with its escalator. I spent lots of time in their little food booths drinking a soda and trying to “kill time” till my lunch break was over. I was working at Cato and they always made me take an hour for lunch with nothing to do and nowhere to be. So, lots of days, I just sat at Murphys and people watched.
Brenda, Cato was a favorite store for my wife to buy her clothes when we were dating or in the early years of our marriage. We only went to the city of Greenville, SC twice a year, my grandparents would always go with us. You could bet your bottom dollar Grandmother was going in the Woolworth dime store on Main Street and was going to buy herself a dozen doughnuts. They had a soda fountain and probably a bakery. I like to sit on a bench and watch people too, I have seen some mighty pretty sweet things walk by! I use to joke and say that old song from 60’s “I’m A Girl Watcher” was my theme song, My, My, My! Just go on and shoot me, I am worthless.
This brings back memories of the two dime stores sometime called 5 and 10 stores in my area. There was two dime stores on the Main Street at Honea Path, SC – a Harper and Wilson. I didn’t live close enough to town to work in any stores. I worked from the time I was about 12 years old doing anything I could to make a dime, most of it was helping farmers get up hay, dig post holes or set fence post for 10 cents a hole and cutting the grass for a few older neighbors for 50 cents to a dollar. I cut one large yard for $2 and permission to fish their pond. At 14, I begin cutting the grass at my church and cemetery for $25 a month. Except for the church, the grass cutting was done with a push mower. When I turned 16, I begin driving a school bus and worked during my summer break at a company named Her Majesty located in Mauldin, SC, both for minimum wage which was $1.65. Many high school boys would start working full time jobs in the cotton mills on either the second or third shifts at 16 years old and still go to school in order to buy them a clunker car. We did not do this to have extra money for Christmas but did this to have any money at all. I saved my money from my church grass cutting job and bought my first set of Craftsman tools with it. 55 years later I still have and use these tools. (also a whole lot more.) I used the money I made from driving the school bus and working the summer months to buy my school clothes, high school ring and graduation things. My parents didn’t make me do this, I just felt like I should help my parents out. I was not the only one to do this, many others of my age did similar things, back then if you wanted something you worked and earned it unlike today when kids get any and everything they want give to them and then we wonder why so many of them don’t want to work.
It is so interesting about other readers and what they did for money, ‘back in the day’, so to speak. I, along with neighbor kids, we harvested pecans for the neighbor down the street. We would see how fast we could collect a 50 lb ‘croker sack’ full. My Hubby, on the other hand, would crop tobacco along with his other siblings that were old enough. Amongst all of your videos, Friday reads and just interesting talks you have, I can see a BOOK, ‘SHARING STORIES OF BLIND PIG FOLLOWERS’….with you holding a rope or somthing like a rope around a giant pig statue. Come on now, can’t you just picture that on the front cover…lol…Prayers for Granny always and God’s Blessings on your growing clan.
Can you explain what Hubby meant by “cropping” tobacco?
My wife does craft work and sells items at the local Senior Center. She does this year round so I guess it’s not just for extra Christmas money. She does needle work and crocheting mostly along with a few oil paintings.
I live in and am from Northeast Georgia but at one point I lived in Grainger County, TN. A friend and I would gather old grapevines and make bare grapevine wreaths and sell them to a florist in Sevierville. I continued to do that for a while after I had come back home to Georgia.
Love your stories. We grew up in the foothills of the Adirondacks. Lots of snow. I would look out the windows and see it coming down hour after hour and knew I could make enough money for Christmas by shoveling snow after school.