Quiet No More

The Heartbeat of Family Traditions

• Carmen Cauthen

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What if the essence of your family's past was captured in the rituals of your holiday gatherings? Join me, Carmen Cauthen, on Quiet, No More, as I invite you to explore the rich tapestry of my family's traditions—stories that are filled with laughter, community, and sometimes bittersweet memories. From the tantalizing aroma of turkey and ham during Thanksgiving to the timeless tradition of gathering at my aunt and uncle's house with the Wimberleys, these celebrations were not just about feasting but about weaving a legacy of togetherness. We even had our unique rituals, like exclusive movie nights and a cherished love for homemade cranberry sauce that my children might not have shared.

As we journey through the holiday season, the narrative gently shifts to Christmas and New Year's, where we pay homage to my grandmother with black-eyed peas and collard greens, symbols of our family's prosperity. These moments were carefully preserved, not just in memory but in photographs of us working side by side, washing dishes, and serving meals with fine china. 

It's a trip down memory lane where each shared meal and family gathering helped shape our identity, reinforcing the bonds that define us. Listen in to discover how these traditions serve as a bedrock for continuity, reminding us of the unity and the legacy we strive to keep alive.

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Carmen Wimberley Cauthen is an author, speaker, and lover of history, Black history in particular. As a truth teller, she delights in finding the hidden truths about the lives of people who made a difference - whether they were unknown icons or regular everyday people.

To Learn more of Carmen:
www.carmencauthen.com
www.researchandresource.com

Speaker 1:

Unseen, unheard. We've lived like that far too long. I'm Carmen Coffin and this is Quiet, no More. So let's talk about traditions. Do you have any? I mean not just around holidays, but around everything. We have traditions for so many things that we don't realize they are traditions. We've just celebrated Thanksgiving here in America, so we have traditions around holidays here in America, so we have traditions around holidays, and in my family we had traditions for everything.

Speaker 1:

So for Thanksgiving, when I was growing up, we always gathered at my aunt and uncle's house, and it was the whole Wimberley side of the family. I don't remember if everybody brought something, but that would make sense because I was a kid. But we practiced that tradition until I was grown and married, I actually think Shortly after that. Then the Wimberley family as it began to change. Then the Wimberley family as it began to change, as we began to add people to the family. We began to the Grady part of the Wimberley family, which was my mom's side of the family. We began to break off because one of her sisters had moved to town and she invited everybody to her house for Thanksgiving because, unfortunately, her late husband lost his father at Thanksgiving and so to help him combat that grief. She would invite all of the Grady's to her home for Thanksgiving and some of their friends.

Speaker 1:

But it's always been a traditional type of thing. We had traditional meals. We'd have turkey and usually turkey and ham. There'd be some kind of sweet potatoes, usually a pie. There would be stuffing usually a pie. There would be stuffing. For my mom, if she was making stuffing it was Pepperidge Farm always and she would just cut up onions and celery and add to that. Then there was homemade gravy with giblets from the turkey. You'd cook all the stuff in the bag and that big neck and pull the meat off and chop up all the giblets, chop up the heart and the liver and that'd be part of your gravy. And it wasn't stuffing, because I never remember my mother stuffing the cavity of the turkey. It was dressing to go on the side Rarely.

Speaker 1:

Until my mother's sisters moved here from the north did we have anything other than jellied cranberry sauce out of a can that went in the refrigerator a couple of days early so it would be chilled. I wasn't crazy about that, but I did when I got on my own. I like to make cranberry sauce fresh from the cranberries and oranges and put it in a mold and eat it that way. Now my children don't like it, so I don't make it anymore, but that was one of the things that I love to do. That was a tradition for me. We also always had collard greens and I think we always had string beans, and then there'd be some sort of cake and my grandparents would come and they would spend the night with us. They would come and stay. They might come earlier in, would come and stay, they might stay, come earlier in the week and stay. You know, my mom was an educator, so she would be finished with school either on Tuesdays at the end of the school day or midday on Wednesday, and then she would start to cook.

Speaker 1:

And it was a fun time, a family time, a time when cousins would get together, we would play games. We would, as long as I can remember, regardless of whether it was the Wimberleys or the Grady's, on Thanksgiving night we went to the movies. There was always a new movie coming out and after we grew up we got, you know, probably high school age. We would all pile in cars and go to the movie and then we'd head home and we'd have some more time together the next day eating leftovers. Turkey sandwiches. You know you had to have some white bread and some turkey and plenty of mayonnaise so it would be moist. We didn't think about the turkey necessarily maybe being dry, but we did like a lot of mayonnaise on our sandwiches. That was just Thanksgiving.

Speaker 1:

We had traditions for Christmas. We had traditions for New Year's Day because my mother's mother's birthday was January 1st and she, wasie, was a little bit spoiled but she was a delightful woman and her children as many of them as could would gather for New Year's Day for her birthday dinner, until she was not with us anymore. And I remember Mama cooking black eyed peas and there would be collard greens, because if you're from the South, particularly collard greens are the green money that you're going to have in your house and so you have to have that cooked before you. You don't cook on New Year's Day, you cook the day before. You don't cook on New Year's Day, you cook the day before, so it's in your house. When midnight strikes, there was the black eyed peas were the coins that you would have, so you'd have to have them cooked. I don't remember mama cooking them from scratch. Those. I remember her cooking out of the can we would have. I want to say maybe, as she got older, it would be more like barbecued ribs and baked chicken. That would be the meat for that day and there'd be some kind of punch.

Speaker 1:

My mom was the red Kool-Aid lady definitely, except in the summer. Then she would switch off to lemonade and it was still probably a Kool-Aid mix. She didn't make lemonade from scratch a lot, but my father's mother made lemonade from scratch every day and when my grandfather would leave his drugstore and drive home, she would walk to the drugstore to relieve him to go home for dinner and there was always a small pitcher of freshly squeezed lemonade for him, literally every day. And we didn't make our lemonades the same way. My father's mother would boil the lemons. She would wash the lemons and then she would boil the lemons and then cut them up and squeeze the juice out of them. My mom and her family, or her mom, would. They would wash the lemons, but they would just cut them in half and squeeze them.

Speaker 1:

It's amazing the ways you learn to do things and you have a tradition about how you do it, even reading. My dad had a tradition of reading. He would read Louis L'Amour, cowboy novels and I never got into that. But he also liked to watch stories on TV like Mannix and Mission Impossible, and that is probably where my love for shows like Law and Order, chicago Fire, shows that are dramatic and you have to figure out what's going to happen at the end because it's not just cut and dry and that helped to lead to my love of reading police novels and black ops novels Doesn't mean I don't like romances, but I have a very eclectic type of reading that I like to do and for those of you who know me as a historian, it's because there's just importance to me of figuring out what my family did and what kind of traditions that they came from, and that's what's led into all of my desire to know the history of everything. Some of the other traditions we had Fourth of July while we didn't really celebrate so much that it was the time that our country started, we would watch the fireworks on TV, but Fourth of July was a time when daddy could take a break, he could close the store and he could be home and we could have a cookout, and so it would be a mix of whoever was in town, but generally it was the Wimberley side of the family. I remember daddy had a big oven, a Dutch oven, and he would grill ribs.

Speaker 1:

We would always make ice cream from scratch. So mom and I would make the custard the day before and it would have to sit in the refrigerator and cool enough for us to put into the ice cream maker, which for a long time had a I can't think of what you call it a handle, and we would have to push and turn the handle and you would know when the ice cream was almost done because the handle would get harder and harder to turn. But you know, sometimes the handle would just get hard to turn because your arm was tired and it wasn't time for the ice cream to be done. We were so excited when they finally made an electric model. So all we had to do is make sure that there was ice and Epsom salts around the ice cream maker. And I'm sure for some of you you're thinking what are you talking about? We just go to the store and get the ice cream.

Speaker 1:

We didn't always do that. In fact, for the 4th of July we would make different flavors of ice cream. There would be a paddle inside the ice cream maker and we would fight over who was going to get the drippings off the paddle. Just like when you bake a cake today and the um, the mixer has the handles. You know the things that go inside or attach and you fight over who's going to get the batter that was left. That you know you could scrape out the bowl with your finger.

Speaker 1:

Those were traditions for us On Daddy's birthday. You knew it was going to be a yellow cake with chocolate icing, because that was his favorite cake, and so you knew that's what you were going to have. And we'd have Neapolitan ice cream and if you've never heard of Neapolitan, it's chocolate, vanilla and strawberry all in one. I hated it. I just wanted the vanilla. I didn't want the strawberry or the chocolate. I'm still not a great big chocolate ice cream fan, but I have learned to like strawberries.

Speaker 1:

One of the things Mama would do for Memorial Day or the 4th of July, when we would have people over, was to make toppings. We would just make a vanilla custard, a French vanilla custard, which we had to cook on the stove before we put it in the refrigerator. But we would add she would make, she would take strawberries or blueberries and make toppings like cook them so that you could put these fruit toppings on top of your ice cream and your cake. And one other huge tradition for every holiday was there was more than one dessert, and so she would ask or she would send us to ask the guests what kind of dessert would you like? And our favorite thing was I'll just have a little bit of everything. So we had daddy and one of our uncles that was always what they would say and you would make sure that they had a little sliver of everything on their plate, usually topped with some ice cream, and then we would go and deliver the plates to everybody. So we learned how to wait to be waitstaff when we were growing up, just at family holiday dinners. We were growing up just at family holiday dinners. One of the other things that we learned was you always make enough so people can go back for seconds or thirds.

Speaker 1:

There wasn't as much taking food home when we were growing up by the other people, because everybody brought something, but the food was always served in the kitchen at our house, and so you would go and Mama would put all the food out on the kitchen table and we would circle around the table, we would say grace and then we would take our plates and rarely it was until, I would say, she was much older we would always use the china, we would always use the fine china. We didn't use paper plates and you know that meant somebody had to wash all those dishes. Fortunately, when we moved into the house in 1969, there was a dishwasher there, but there were still things that you couldn't put in the dishwasher, like couldn't put the good crystal in the dishwasher. All of that had to be washed by hand, and some of my favorite pictures are pictures of my dad with an apron around his waist and my aunt in the kitchen washing dishes, washing and drying dishes, because everybody pitched in on all the things that they did.

Speaker 1:

So what are some of the traditions that you have created or that you have had to come down? What are some of the meals that have become traditions in your family based on the things that you remember eating during the holidays? Eating during the holidays whichever holiday or birthdays the things that we celebrate, the things that make our lives so much more than just every day get up, go to work standard things. Those are the things that make up all of our family memories. Some of them are good. All of our family memories. Some of them are good, some of them are bad, some of them are joyful, some of them are sad, but they are all important in the tradition of your family and in the tradition of our country, and so those are things that we can't be quiet about anymore. You've been listening to Quiet no More, where I share my journey.