Sweet Christmas Tradition

Everyone has Christmas traditions. My dear friend, Lisa Cheramie, bakes decorative iced cookies with her daughter, and now grandchildren, each year. Many families holiday traditions center around football games and tailgating. And then there are hunting, caroling, church services, and more. One of my favorite Christmas traditions is captured in Truman Capote's fruitcake saga, A Christmas Story.

My dad was recently invited to participate in a tradition held this time each year in his neck of the woods that echoed back to the old days....

Dad was instructed to meet friends at an area outside Florien, Louisiana known as Devil's Branch. Directions led him down to the end of Jungle Club Road to a field of freshly cut, stripped sugar cane.

Next to the field, a Christmas syrup-making tradition was in full swing. Modern technology, a riding lawnmower, had replaced the mules of yesteryear, but the process was still the same.

The cane was  ground down to fill two 55 gallon drums of juice. The juice was then poured into a metal cooking pan.

Wood had to be chopped to keep a steady fire burning. If the fire was too hot, the syrup would scorch; if the fire wasn't hot enough, the juice wouldn't thicken. During the cooking process, wood was constantly being added or removed from the fire to keep the syrup at the optimum temperature.The syrup made that day took about five hours to cook, which was about 1 1/2 hours longer than the day before because the weather was much cooler.

As the sugar cane juice began to boil, a foam formed on the surface and had to be skimmed from the top.

As time passed, the juice began to thicken and its color began to darken. Then it was time to pour the finished product into half-gallon jugs.

When Dad broke open the seal on one of the jugs, I was instantly transported to Grandma Wig's kitchen where butter was melting on a pan of her homemade biscuits that were about to be swimming in delicious pure cane syrup!

The best thing about this sweet Christmas tradition is that on Christmas morning we will all sit down to Oakdale biscuits, Pleasant Hill sausage, and Devil's Branch syrup. It doesn't get any better than that. Thanks, Tom!!

Love ya'll,

Shelli

Christmas....

that magic blanket that wraps itself about us,

that something so intangible that it is like a fragrance.

It may weave a spell of nostalgia.

Christmas may be a day of feasting,

or of prayer,

but always it will be a day of remembrance...

a day in which we think of everything we have ever loved.

-Agusta E. Rundell