A Dolly Parton Christmas in Grandma’s Double Wide
/By Shannon T Greene
Greenville, South Carolina
Every year my family watches Dolly Parton’s 1990 holiday special, “Home for Christmas.” My parents still have the old VHS cassette tape recording someone made when the show aired on local television stations. I hope we will watch it again this year, my daughter’s first Christmas.
“Home for Christmas” is on YouTube, so I can watch it from my laptop anytime, but it’s not the same. The old VHS tape has become a portal, the ritual of rewind and pressing the green play button an activation of Christmas itself. It’s an artifact of my ’90s childhood in the mountain South, along with home videos my sister and I bring out on Christmas Eve. The home videos are very personal talismans. Generally, only other family members want to watch family videos, but something about watching Dolly Parton’s family makes me feel at home.
As a 34-year-old new mom, as a professional working in downtown Greenville, South Carolina, a city growing at the rate of kudzu, I feel a little orphaned. My husband and I bought a 10-acre homestead off Highway 11, just 10 minutes from where my Grandma Toole lived in a yellow double-wide, where our family gathered every Christmas. I come home to the mountains every day now. But, in a way, I am always searching for the home of my childhood.
I still have the 8x10 glossy photo of Dolly I got during a trip to Dollywood when I was 7 years old. I put it in a vintage brass folding frame beside a photo of my kindergarten class. I was a devotee of Dolly at that age. I thought she was beautiful and powerful in a mystical way. She was like me and my family, and yet she was different. As I got older, I lost my passion for Dolly. I was a tomboy, and came to see her as silly and too girly.
Listening to Jad Abumrad’s podcast “Dolly Parton’s America” brought me back to that first love I felt for Dolly when I was a little girl. As I listened, I felt held and known. Dolly’s voice is the same as I remember, maybe a bit huskier with age. That Southern Mountain accent rolling around in her mouth and into my ears like honey on a fresh, steaming biscuit. The production of the podcast includes dreamlike soundbites from her concerts and other interviews, as well as banjos and mandolins, and, at one point, a clip of Dolly playing the pennywhistle. As Dolly says in the interview, “It’s just got that ol’ mountain sound.” The music weaves in and out between Dolly’s voice, leaving echoes like trails of mist.
But my video — Dolly Parton’s “Home for Christmas” begins with Dolly traveling back to her parents’ log cabin where she grew up in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. Her Daddy picks her up in a blue Chevy truck at a Pigeon Forge shopping center where she sings the first of many songs, “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” and buys bags of presents to take home to her siblings, nieces, and nephews. The scene fades out to where the truck rounds a mountain curve beside an old wooden smokehouse and ambles into a gravel drive leading to the cabin. The fades overlap, creating a hazy effect of the past and present mingling.
“Home for Christmas” brings me back to my Christmas memories. It’s the old home place, the mountains, the tiny house stuffed to the gills with family. Replace the log cabin with a faded yellow double-wide, and you’ve got Christmas at Velma Toole’s, my Grandma’s. Dolly has 11 brothers and sisters. My dad has 10.
Every Christmas Eve, my mom and dad loaded me and my younger sister into our Ford Taurus station wagon and headed to my paternal grandmother’s house in the mountains. We made the hour trek from the bottom end of Greenville County, South Carolina, to the top, where the roads began to wind around and between the foothills, and through tall woods. My world changed from suburban and open in the cold sunset to the deep wooded wilderness of North Greenville County. The day darkened into evening, twinkling with red and green Christmas lights strung along mobile homes and little farmhouses in the hollows.
The little double-wide glowed from the inside at the top of its hill above an unmarked gravel road and acres of horse pasture. Four skeletal apple trees, the remainder of a long-ago orchard, lined the edge of the woods in a field silvered in moonlight. I could almost smell the glistening, buttered rolls fresh from the oven as our station wagon grumbled up the hill.
Daddy carried our bags of presents. With a family as big as ours, everyone just drew names, so each person brought one gift and got one gift. But this didn’t apply when it came to Grandma Toole. We all laid something for her under the tree, offerings for the matriarch who had worked full-time and mothered her 11 children almost single-handedly through the late 1950s and on through the ’70s.
On Christmas Eve, Grandma’s table was spread with the bounty from harvesting crops, the result of many hands in the process — planting, picking, shelling, shucking, canning, and cooking. My aunts and uncles crammed in, all sharing small pieces of stories about having a mostly absent alcoholic dad, farming, working hard, and loving and losing the land around them.
We ate the winter food of the Upcountry: glazed ham, mac-n-cheese, little smokies, creamed corn, vinegary mustard greens, yeast rolls, green beans, mashed potatoes, pickled beets, Jell-O salad, squash casserole.
The grandkids, including me and my sister and a handful of our cousins, played Chinese checkers in the back room of the double-wide and listened to Uncle Richard’s Green Day and Jewel CDs on his stereo until he found out and yelled at us. Richard is the youngest and still lives in Grandma’s house, alone there now.
The many hands cleared a track around the table, and the coffee maker dripped in the kitchen. We were sated, but always had room for Aunt Kathy’s pound cake. Grandma settled at the table, hands curled on a mug, and started talking about the past, about the summer trips to Pawley’s Island with all the kids, back when it didn’t cost life and limb to vacation there, about catching shoplifters as a clerk at J.C. Penney in downtown Greenville.
In that back room was a cardboard box full of loose photos, many black-and-white, some depicting people I didn’t recognize. Many were charred on the edges or curled, having been saved from the fire that burned Grandma’s house to the ground when I was a baby. When she talked about someone I didn’t know, I fetched a photo based on her descriptions and the time period. I held it out next to her, and she’d exclaim, “There she is. You know, that was my dress but she loved it s’much I just let her have it after a while.”
My memory of Christmas, the mountains, and what I think of as Appalachian is folded and kneaded like dough made of Grandma’s house, my experiences there with family, and with Dolly’s stories of her family and life in the Smokies.
When I was a kid, I knew I was lucky. I was born into belonging, and drew strength in knowing where I came from. But my folly was assuming the feeling would last forever. Instead, I had to carry something of it into the future I would create for myself. Watching Dolly introduce the world to her family and her old home place every year was a catalyst for how I represent my family now, when all that’s left of those times is a shared memory. Watching Dolly prepares me for the overlap of past and present. It teaches me how to go home, and how to progress without leaving behind the meaning-making parts of where I come from. I have a responsibility to carry on the spirit and stories that raised and held me for so long, to pass them to my daughter, my nieces and nephews.
This year, I’ll find that old VHS tape, rewind, press play, and 1990s Dolly will take my hand and lead me there, just as I will take my daughter’s hand and show her what family and Christmas mean.