NORRIS, Tenn. — Pigeon Forge Winterfest boasts 6 million Christmas lights. A half-million twinkle at Rock City's Enchanted Garden of Lights. But at the Museum of Appalachia, a living history village 16 miles north of Knoxville, the season is celebrated the old-fashioned way — before Santa's worth was measured by how many PlayStation 2s he could deliver.
The museum's "Christmas at Old Appalachia" is an unapologetically low-watt affair that's meant to illuminate in its own quiet way. Continuing through December, the event realistically depicts the humble observances of dirt-poor Southerners before rural electrification connected the mountains of Tennessee, Kentucky and Virginia with the world beyond.
Instead of a Nativity in neon, visitors here find Spartan decorations in several of the pioneer cabins from across Appalachia that have been transplanted to the 65-acre compound.
For instance, in the Peters Homestead House, a log cabin that dates to 1838, the red cedar Christmas tree is bedecked only with chains made of red and green construction paper and popcorn garlands, and it's topped with a tin-foil star. Holly branches with red berries drape the mantel, where a gourd emblazoned with Santa's face also sits (its fading paint makes it look like ol' Saint Nick has endured a long, hard ride). Two stockings bear only apples, oranges, nuts and candy canes.
Yet simple and timeworn as the decorations are, the cabin radiates warmth — and not just because of the toasty fire below that mantel. On a dreary weekday afternoon last week, while 1 1/2 inches of icy snow were slowly dripping away outside, guitarist Gene "Butter Bean" Brewer and autoharp player Judy Carson were picking and singing nonstop mountain music, Christmas classics and even chestnuts like "You Are My Sunshine."
Few visitors stopped by, and Midnight, the homestead's resident black cat, rarely lifted his head from his fireside chair to nod his approval. Yet they played on, eventually joined by museum founder John Rice Irwin on guitar, merrily lost in the music and holiday spirit.
If it all sounds chronically quaint, well, the holidays were once uncomplicated affairs in these hills and hollows.
Vergie Coxe, 65, well remembers her childhood Christmases in nearby Claiborne County, where she and her nine siblings were happy to find an apple or orange and a peppermint stick in their stockings. Back then citrus was especially exotic in her family's remote hollow, only appearing in the country store around the holidays.
"Dad would sit by the fire and slowly peel the orange and never did that peel break," Coxe recalled, her gray eyes lighting up with the decades-old memory. "We would get so excited as he peeled it, and that orange would smell and taste so good."
A few weeks before Christmas, Coxe's mother would begin baking stackcakes — multiple layers of white cake held together by thick spreads of cooked-down apples. It's a mountain delicacy that Coxe makes today in the Museum of Appalachia's modestly named Snack Bar — a haven of delicious and filling home cookin' that's down a few stairs from the gift shop (whose shelves are brimming with hand-crafted holiday gifts).
Coxe's home didn't have any refrigeration, but her mom's stackcakes wouldn't spoil in the cupboard drawer because, Coxe explained in an understatement of immense proportion, "We'd have cold winters."
Winter was still a couple of weeks away when she said that, but as Irwin and I toured the grounds, my timbers were already shivering.
It gave me a new appreciation for the make-do spirit of the mountain folk who survived in these parts, and it made me wish for a wee sip of that corn whiskey that a demonstrator cooked up during the museum's popular Tennessee Fall Homecoming wingding in October. Irwin had to shut the moonshiner down when he started passing around small samples to the admiring crowd.
Even here, where accuracy about mountain ways is paramount, that was a little too authentic.
We ducked inside the "Dan'l Boone" Cabin, an early 1800s structure so named because it served as the home of the title character in the short-lived '70s TV series "Young Dan'l Boone." Here, the Christmas tree sported no greenery whatsoever.
Irwin explained that Christmas celebrations were at first such a foreign concept in the Appalachians that some folks didn't know the tree was supposed to be an evergreen (Kentucky singer Jean Ritchie recalls her family cutting down a sycamore). Yet that only made it easier for mountain people to convert their trees into coat trees when the holidays ended — decades before city slickers began dragging their Christmas trees to recycling centers.
In any season, mountain resourcefulness is a major theme of the remarkable 250,000-piece collection than Irwin has spent more than 30 years assembling, documenting and displaying in his museum.
Collecting clearly is in the genes of the 70-year-old native Tennesseean, whose grandfather, Marcellus Moss Rice, passed down to his grandson a number of primitive family farm items he'd gathered for generations. "Start a little museum of these old-timey things sometime," grandfather encouraged grandson.
Seeking more objects to tell the story of a rapidly changing way of life, Irwin, whose first career was as a public school teacher and administrator, scoured secluded traces of Appalachia for years before opening the museum in the late '60s. There's never been anything little about it.
In addition to the more than 30 log structures — everything from a school house to a smokehouse and mill house to an outhouse — two sprawling buildings contain every kind of item imaginable, and in seemingly infinite variety.
The unheated, two-story Display Barn focuses on life on the farm, showcasing tools such as a bunion stretcher ("used to 'bulge' out a slot inside a shoe to accommodate the bunion," according to the accompanying text), stills, troughs, coverlets, churns, an old general store counter and the tremendous 1892 tower clock from atop the nearby Clinton Courthouse.
There's an entire section entitled "The World of Saddle Stirrups" and another on axes, which, as the handmade sign says, was "our most important tool, and without which the Howling Wilderness would have so remained."
Such purple prose, on signs and information sheets, is unapologetically that of Irwin, who says he was trying to avoid making the museum "cold, formal or lifeless." And, indeed, the wowed tone, here and there, does bring old things, such as a Jolly-Green-Giant-sized rocker, to vivid life. "Rowe Martin, a bachelor, used this chair to sit in with any women visitors," Irwin reveals in the accompanying text. "In his 80s, he sold me the chair because he was 'getting too damn old to be interested.' "
Next door, at the Hall of Fame building, a more reverential tone prevails, and the displays are more refined, though the array of items is just as wide. Irwin's tribute to mountain heroes, famous and unknown, includes a fiddle Roy Acuff played at the Grand Ole Opry, a Stetson worn by bluegrass grandfather Bill Monroe (size 7 1/4, Irwin notes, in case anyone wondered) and World War II hero Sgt. Alvin C. York's leather jacket.
But there's also plenty of just plain odd stuff, such as a glass eye worn for nearly 70 years by a Paris, Tenn., fellow named Gol Cooper. Beside the fake blue orb is the now-rusty pocket knife Cooper poked his real eye out with in a freak accident while tieing his shoe.
With Irwin's obvious zeal to tell the story of His People, it's small surprise that he was attracted to the evangelical roadside markers that stand near the Display Barn.
From 1940 to 1964, the late Harrison Mayes, a Kentucky coal miner, made 300 of these tall concrete, heart-shaped signs, to spread the gospel along America's byways. While some of the messages are mundane — "Prepare to Meet God," "Jesus Is Coming Soon" — Mayes' ambitions were anything but. He carved instructions aside one of them to "Erect on Planet Jupiter, 1990s."
Mayes' signs aren't officially part of the "Christmas at Old Appalachia" observance, but it's hard to view them on a frosty, late fall afternoon and not feel the flaming spirit.