Several years ago, my first cousin, Andy wanted to have a big Smoky Mountain Christmas party and have all of our family together for a grand celebration and feast. It was decided that we would buy several gifts for the children so Andy ordered some big fabric sacks for us to put the their presents in. He sent them to me and asked if I could embroider their names on each of them.

I wanted to make the sacks look old, and add an element of magic to them, so I brewed up a couple of pots of strong coffee and tea. They needed to smell good too, so I put in a bottle of vanilla extract and a few shakes of cinnamon and poured it all into a 5-gallon bucket. (There were eight children to make sacks for, so I had to make a lot of aging liquid.)

I took everything outside and dipped the sacks one by one into the liquid and then hung them on the clothes line to dry. They hung on the clothes line all night, and by the next day, they looked as if they had aged about a hundred years.

Now, my family lives in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee and since we were having a Smoky Mountain Christmas, I wanted to write up a little story that included Andy’s family and my Grandmother and the area that they live. There isn’t enough space to include it here, but you can read the story at my website.

So imagine this, it is Christmas Eve, and we are all in a huge Log Cabin in the Mountains. It is getting dark, and we gather all of the children upstairs and read the story about the Magic Sacks aloud to them. After we read the story, we pulled the sacks, full of toys out of hiding and gave them to each of the children. You can imagine the delight on their sweet little faces upon seeing these!

It was indeed a Merry Christmas for all of us!

That’s the news from the homestead, see you next week!