Jimmy Carter: Christmas in Plains Compared to Christmas in the White House and Afterwards
Jimmy Carter grew up on his family farm in Archery, Georgia, several miles from Plains. He remembers: “In those earlier days, all my close neighbors were black families.” Their children “were my intimate friends with whom I played, fought, fished, hunted, and worked with in the cotton and peanut fields that were owned by my father.” When he went into town to sell peanuts, and when he started school, he felt that he “was in an alien environment in Plains, away from my black friends.”
Jimmy Carter continues: “The Great Depression was a time of almost incredible poverty, not only in rural Georgia but all over the country. Although my father was a landowner, cash money was scarce for us and for everyone else. Land seemed to have the only permanent economic value, and hard work was the key to survival. The celebration of Christmas during these times was quite different from what we know today: much more frugal, but with a degree of personal intimacy that brings back warm recollections.” […]
