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We
might say that Christmas
in Texas has always been about the same as it is everywhere else,
but we would be wrong. Our state is and has always been a conglomeration
of cultures, a frontier melting pot, and Christmas celebrations here
have been as diverse and rowdy as the people who settled here.
Not surprisingly, one of the earliest Christmas traditions in Texas
involved firearms. Reuben Hornsby, who settled Hornsby Bend with other
members of his family in the 1830s, liked to get up early on Christmas
morning and fire off a shotgun as a way of saying "Merry Christmas"
to his neighbors and kinfolk. His nearest neighbor, Jess Hornsby,
would fire off his gun a few seconds later, answered in turn by a
dozen or so other settlers, including Tett Cox, who one Christmas
morning accidentally shot a hole in his roof and never lived it down.
But over the years, as the early settlers moved on or passed away,
the tradition faded.
According to a Hornsby family history: "Years afterward, Harry Hornsby
decided he wanted to shoot his shotgun off on Christmas morning to
see if there were anyone to remember. He shot, waited a few minutes,
and there was no one left to answer. He silently came in the house
to put his gun up and realized he was about the last one to remember
to shoot on Christmas morning."
Other Yuletide celebrations were more dangerous. That would include
the Anvil Shoot, which required only two anvils stacked on
top of each other with a healthy dose of gunpowder in between. Somebody,
either the bravest or stupidest, then lit the fuse. The point was
to make a lot of noise. The anvil flying 200 feet in the air was just
a bonus.
On the less raucous side, we have a Christmas party in Anson
in 1885 that New York Times reporter Larry Chittenden attended.
His poem "The Cowboys Christmas Ball" immortalized the party and created
a tradition that continues today.
[The Cowboys'
Christmas Ball by Michael Barr]
Spanish explorer Cabeza
de Vaca and three of his men are generally acknowledged as having
had the first Texas Noel, in 1528, near what is known today as Christmas
Bay. There's also Christmas Creek in Limestone
County, so named by a group of surveyors who camped there on Christmas
Day in 1855. The Christmas Mountains are in the Big
Bend region of Texas, 12 miles northeast of Terlingua. |
Some
Texas Christmas stories contain little holiday cheer and good will
toward mankind. On Christmas Day 1932, Doyle Johnson, a 27-year-old
employee of Strasburger Grocery in Temple,
was gunned down in front of his house while trying to prevent Clyde
Barrow (of Bonnie
and Clyde fame) and an accomplice from stealing his Ford Roadster,
proving once again that crime never takes a holiday.
Family members first spotted Johnson's roadster being taken on that
fateful Christmas afternoon while Doyle Johnson was taking a nap.
Johnson ran to the car as it was being driven away and jumped on the
car's running board in an attempt to stop the robbery by choking Barrow.
At least two shots were fired from inside the car. One of the shots
hit Johnson in the neck and killed him.
W.D. Jones, a member of the Barrow gang, recounted the story a number
of times, but details of the story changed each time. It appears now
that Jones himself probably fired the fatal shot, but his testimonies
always insisted Barrow was the gunman. |
The late Texas
writer and historian A.C. Greene of Salado
recounted one of the grimmest and perhaps most surreal bits of Texas
holiday history in his book The Santa Claus Bank Robbery. The book
details a bank robbery that took place in Cisco
in December of 1927.
The leader of the gang that robbed the bank wore a Santa Claus outfit
as a disguise, which did not fool the local children. They knew exactly
who he was: Santa Claus. They followed him to the bank, making the
robbery one of the most witnessed bank robberies in history. Six men
died either as a direct or indirect result of the botched robbery,
including the dim-witted mastermind, who was later lynched after he
killed a popular jailer.
Ironically, his funeral was delayed because of that town's Christmas
parade, led by a man in a Santa Claus suit. |
Related
Stories:
The-Night-the-Posse-Chased-Santa
by Maggie Van Ostrand
"... [T]he bloody melodrama ... in the town of Cisco... on
the day before Christmas Eve 1927. I know about it because of an
article written at the time by the great Texas columnist, Boyce
House. He should know. He was there..."
Santa
Robber by Mike Cox
Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” stands as an enduring classic,
but truth being stranger than fiction, Texas can claim one of the
nation’s more bizarre real-life holiday tales—a story of a
Santa Claus gone bad...
The
Day Eastland Texas Hanged Santa Claus by John Troesser
The
Cowboys' Christmas Ball by Michael Barr
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