Howdy and welcome to Wise About Texas, the Texas History Podcast, I am very grateful that you chose to tune in today

and talk a little bit about Texas History. I'm recording this episode in December of 2016 and I'm releasing it in December the

23rd so I thought what we might do is keep it a little light since we're right in

the middle of the holiday season.

I know that I'm very busy trying to get all the Christmas shopping done and

chasing the kids around and then the annual torture for me which is the attempt to actually wrap the Christmas

presents. I can do a lot of things but wrapping presents is certainly not one of my talents.

And on thinking about some sort of topic we could use to celebrate the holidays, I thought maybe we'd take a look back at some Texas Christmas traditions.

And this episode of course going to focus on

Christmas traditions that's our time of year and even if you don't celebrate

Christmas some of these are pretty fun to think about how they came to Texas.

Now back in the early days of Texas, there really wasn't much celebrating going on.

Christmas was a fairly simple prospect for the folks of the Republic.

They were actually more focused on trying to survive.

There is a book put out by a cousin of Stephen F Austin.

Her name was Mary Austin Holly.

And she described a New Year's Day celebration

which sort of closed out the season in Brazoria

in 1838 as basically a dance although they didn't dance on

New Year's Eve because New Year's Eve was a Sunday but they played music all night and that's really what Christmas

back in old-time Texas was. It was a time to gather and have a big party. Now that party

wasn't always calm.

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