Family Time at Wade.

Isn’t it nice sometimes to just sit and reminisce “ The Olden Days”, as they were called. Some of us as we get older do a lot of that, we can’t remember want we did yesterday but we can remember the “good old days”,

How many of you ever sat around an old wood stove at night? You baked one side while the other side froze.

We always had supper together at the table, usually leftovers from dinner, such as beans and cornbread. We never wondered what we were going to have. It was usually always beans and cornbread. I don’t recall ever saying,” I don’t like that”.

We all gathered around the old wood stove at night. We sat and talked, this is after we got our lessons.As we all gathered around the old wood stove. Sometimes we would pop popcorn, (dad always raised some), we would parch a pan of peanuts, we would make a pot of vegetable soup. I can remember we were so anxious that we would want to eat it even before it was done. Sometimes the potatoes and onions were still a little crunchy. Sometimes, we would go to the cellar and get a jar of home canned peaches and eat them. Perhaps if we had the sugar we would make some fudge. We enjoyed being together as a family.

At Christmas time the boys would go out into the woods and cut a cedar tree and drag it home. Dad would build a stand for it and we would pop popcorn and string it and string red berries gathered from the woods, down by the cemetery. We had a few old glass ornaments from Christmases past that we would put on the tree.We would be so excited to have a Christmas tree, and to wait for Santa to come, even though we always only got one small gift.

Mother would put a pan for each of us under the tree and fill it with an orange and apple, some chocolate drops, some ribbon candy and some nuts. We didn’t have a fireplace for a stocking to hang.It was cozy sitting around the fire with the old coal oil light burning and look at our Christmas tree. It brought our family closer together. Do you suppose that is what is wrong with the world today?

One thing for certain at our house before we went to bed, dad would read the Bible to us and then we all had to kneel at our chair and have prayer. My dad was a staunch believer in devotion time. My how great if families did that today.