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“There is something in the very season of the year that gives a charm to the festivity of Christmas.”

“Old Christmas,” The Sketchbook of Washington Irving, 1819-20

Seasonal festivity brightens the year’s shortest days at the approach of a holiday that combines the deeply sacred and secular as well. In 1928, the city of Nashville first launched its Christmas Season with a downtown parade, and Tennessee’s Legislative Plaza glowed with holiday lights and gigantic letters that blazoned, MERRY CHRISTMAS. The city thus joined the national celebration of the Bethlehem Nativity in tandem with gift giving, Christmas cards, lighted fir trees, and the North Pole from which Santa Claus would alight in his toy-filled sleigh pulled by reindeer, thanks mainly to Clement C. Moore’s A Visit from St. Nicholas (1820), better known as “The Night Before Christmas.”

By 1933, the Cheek family had settled into their country estate, Cheekwood, and Mrs. Leslie Cheek—Mabel— began her holiday plans, writing to daughter Huldah of a “delicious” dessert (“which I will try out on you at Christmas”) and posting her letter to her daughter at boarding school in Pennsylvania: “MAIL EARLY FOR CHRISTMAS.” Two years later, Huldah’s “Christmas list” perplexed her mother, who found just one item, a “pajama suit” to be a suitable holiday gift.

Mabel customarily penned letters to Huldah and to her son, Leslie, Junior, in her favorite room at Cheekwood, the library, where she worked at her desk of inlaid woods. On the library shelves were the complete writings of two authors who might be dubbed founding fathers of the Yuletide holiday: Charles Dickens and Washington Irving. The American, Irving (b. 1783), and his English counterpart, Dickens (b.1812), were both represented at Cheekwood in leather-bound volumes that paid tribute to their status as literary figures of consequence. Both honed their skills in tales of a heart-warming Yuletide holiday that established the tradition with values of charity, friendship, and festivity as well.

Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843) is the better-known story of the impoverished Cratchit family, their hobbled son, Tiny Tim, and the miserable and miserly Ebenezer Scrooge who finally grasps his mortality and the imperative of empathy and generosity. A Christmas Carol was first brought to the silver screen in movie theaters in the 1938 production, starring Reginald Owen as Scrooge and Terry Kilburn as Tiny Tim.

Washington Irving’s “Old Christmas” predates A Christmas Carol by two decades and situates American readers in England “of yore,” harkening to an era of the English Squire’s country house and nearby village, where friends and family gather at the glowing hearth, attend services at the nearby cathedral where the choir sings in “triumphant harmony,” and on Christmas Day feast on roasted fowl and puddings in a spirit of merriment and fellowship.

It has been noted that, just as Charles Dickens presented a tale applicable to America, so Washington Irving’s “Old Christmas” deliberately appealed to the U.S. to ally with England by setting aside the rancor generated by the War of 1812, which stung in recent memory. Irving’s “Old Christmas” was thus a holiday appeal for peace in the guise of a yuletide reminiscence of Old England at its best.

Dickens, Irving, and a Cheek family Christmas coalesce in the WWII years of the 1940s, when Huldah’s husband, Walter Sharp, chronicled the family Christmas of 1944 in a lengthy letter to his mother in Franklin, Tennessee. Serving as a US Army Lieutenant stationed in Fort Sam Houston, Texas, Walter described a Texas Christmas with Huldah, their infant, Leslie, and his mother-in-law, Mabel Cheek. An old electric train was resuscitated in this moment when wartime production mandated that viable metals serve the war effort, though the baby preferred to “cuddle” a toy lamb. Walter continues, “Huldah gave me a lovely vase in Steuben glass, which is the finest American glass” and concludes, “Of course we missed all of you at Christmas, but, curiously, you didn’t seem so very far away….It was just as if we could run around the corner and there you all would be.”

There you all would be…. In place and in mind, those words speak volumes over the holidays, from years gone by to the farthest future.

Blog post provided by Cheekwood’s Writer-in-Residence, Cecelia Tichi, Ph.D.

Cecelia Tichi is an award-winning author and Professor of English and American Studies Emerita at Vanderbilt University. Her books span American literature and culture from colonial days to modern times, but her recent work draws upon the Gilded Age (post-1870) that prompted her book on Jack London and another on seven activists in that tumultuous era.

Cecelia’s research and teaching inspired What Would Mrs. Astor Do? The Essential Guide to the Manners and Mores of the Gilded Age, followed by Gilded Age Cocktails and Jazz Age Cocktails , which set the stage for her mystery crime novels that boast “Gilded” in each title.

Cecelia can be followed on her website: https://cecebooks.com/

Family traditions merged with timely customs when Nashville prepared for the annual Thanksgiving holiday on the third Thursday of November. Early in the autumn, questions of whose turn it was to host Thanksgiving this year were settled, and guests invited to Cheekwood would understand that preparations fell mainly to Mabel Cheek as the lady of the house. From childhood in her Clarksville, Tennessee home, Mabel doubtless had observed and participated in the holiday planning. As the mistress of Cheekwood, she would monitor the sumptuous feast at each point of preparation, just as she saw to it that every room sparkled, as did the china, silver, and her favorite ruby-red glassware, with the pristine linens crisp from the flatiron and the table arrangements at the standard of the preeminent country estate. (The guests need not know that Mabel reported on extensive “housekeeping” in a pre-Thanksgiving letter to her daughter, Huldah, who was away at college. “My fifth week with the same general cleaner,” Mabel wrote, also mentioning a seasonal dinner party that anticipated Thanksgiving in the dining room: “The table was beautiful in autumn flowers and fruits.”)

By the early 1930s when Leslie and Mabel Cheek moved into Cheekwood, few recalled that a “Day of Thanksgiving and Praise” was proclaimed in 1863 by President Abraham Lincoln. The sixteenth US President was esteemed in the northern states that embraced the first Thanksgiving of Pilgrims and Native Americans sharing a meal in social harmony in the Plymouth Colony on the shores of Cape Cod, Massachusetts in 1621. The South, however, took a different view of the inaugural Thanksgiving holiday. A similar feast had occurred two years earlier in 1619 at the Berkeley Plantation in Virginia, and the president of William & Mary College, Lyon G. Tyler, fervently advocated for the South’s preeminence in Thanksgiving.

The Cheeks did not enter into the “First Thanksgiving” debate, but perhaps Mabel realized that volumes purchased for the Cheekwood library linked directly to the development of the national holiday. For $125.00, the Cheeks acquired Godey’s Ladies Books, 1854-1858, thus furnishing their shelves with bound volumes of magazines produced by Sarah Josepha Hale, the editor-in-chief of the first major US magazine for women, Godey’s Ladies Book. According to historian James W. Baker, the widowed Mrs. Hale “began her advocacy of Thanksgiving in 1837” and in the following decades became the “godmother” of Thanksgiving for her campaign to have “the last Thursday in November declared Thanksgiving in every state and Territory.” Apart from Mrs. Hale’s letters to Lincoln promoting the holiday, no direct evidence exists to link the magazine to the President’s proclamation, but her campaign is widely credited as foundational for the creation of the national holiday.

The exact recipes for Thanksgiving fare at Cheekwood may not be fully known. Perhaps Mabel had attended the Centennial Club program, Thanksgiving Menu—demonstration and recipes,” on November 8, 1927. And possibly the Cheekwood kitchen held a copy of Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), principally a cookbook of recipes contributed by ladies throughout the South, including seven recipes for roast turkey.

When the Cheekwood mahogany dining room table was extended to accommodate all guests, rain or shine, on the third Thursday of November, a prayerful thanks was given for a holiday said to be unique to the United States of America.

Blog post provided by Cheekwood’s Writer-in-Residence, Cecelia Tichi, Ph.D.

Cecelia Tichi is an award-winning author and Professor of English and American Studies Emerita at Vanderbilt University. Her books span American literature and culture from colonial days to modern times, but her recent work draws upon the Gilded Age (post-1870) that prompted her book on Jack London and another on seven activists in that tumultuous era.

Cecelia’s research and teaching inspired What Would Mrs. Astor Do? The Essential Guide to the Manners and Mores of the Gilded Age, followed by Gilded Age Cocktails and Jazz Age Cocktails , which set the stage for her mystery crime novels that boast “Gilded” in each title.

Cecelia can be followed on her website: https://cecebooks.com/

In 2019, Cheekwood was gifted a shoebox full of letters that had been pulled from the closet of a relative. This find proved to be a true treasure – missives between Cheek family members dating from the 1880s to the 1950s. When the pandemic hit in 2020, Cheekwood was thrilled to receive funding from NEH to support staff members as they worked to transcribe and scan each of the 247 letters. The contents of the letters give an incredible look into the daily life of the Cheeks, from the days of Leslie and Mabel’s courtship to their lives with young children, to their shared years at Cheekwood, and to the next generation’s ownership of the estate. As part of her time as Writer-in-Residence, Cecelia Tichi has read through the letters and supplied her thoughts on their meaning.

And none will hear the postman’s knock
Without a quickening of the heart….

W. H. Auden, Night Mail, 1936

Letters posted to and from the Cheekwood estate continued a vibrant and longtime tradition of personal correspondence among the Cheek and Wood family members. To put pen to paper was de rigueur for pleasure and commitment, and the US Post Office sped the family’s first-class missives from the late 1800s and well into the twentieth century. The initial letters between Leslie Cheek and his devoted fiancée, Mabel Wood (soon to be Mrs. Cheek), broadened in due course as the family correspondence included letters of Mabel and Leslie and their children, Leslie, Jr. (b. 1908) and Huldah (b. 1915). Eventually, the family letters crossed into every region of the country and the globe, for the well-traveled Cheeks kept up correspondence at every locale, be it for duty or leisure. The Cheekwood heritage thus amplifies its grounds, gardens, and magisterial home to include a trove of correspondence, a kaleidoscope of the life and times of its founding family.

From the era of sharpened goose quills and inkpots, handwritten letters were aesthetic objects in and of themselves. For the Cheeks and their social set, it was second nature to have at hand the proper stationery and pens too. By the mid-1800s, the Crane Company was known for quality papers worthy of personal correspondence (as well as US banknotes, for the company won government contracts to produce paper currency). On good paper, including fine hotel or business letterhead stationery, the strokes of a pen held firm, never to “bleed” as in coarse, pulp papers. By the years of Leslie and Mabel’s courtship, the fountain pen was surpassing the inkwell, which had required repeated dipping with the penpoint nib. The innovative fountain pen held a reservoir of ink and allowed the letter writer to proceed without interruption to the page—and in the fine penmanship drilled since grade school days and considered a measure of one’s character.

To sample the letters of Leslie and Mabel’s courtship, we scent the “exquisite roses” that Mabel received in spring, 1895: “Really, Mr. Cheek, I fairly dimpled with delight.” In response, Leslie admitted how much he missed her. “While tis only three days since I saw you,” he confessed, “still it seems like a long time to me…all alone in my room.” Leslie nonetheless hoped her dreams would be “all pleasant.” “Believe me Miss Mabel,” he concluded, “I will always love you” and closed with, “Most Sincerely Yours, Leslie C—”

The letters soon began, “My darling husband,” and from Leslie, “My Candy” and “Dearest Love,” and the volume of their correspondence in years to come attests to Leslie’s busy, prosperous business career and Mabel’s involvement in art and culture in Nashville and beyond. In short order, issues of household economy and furnishing came to the fore, as the new Mrs. Leslie Cheek, sojourning to New York City in 1906, compared the prices of floor coverings (“I looked for carpets today at Lord & Taylors [sic]…these people wanted $2.75 a yard”). Mabel also remarked on the weather (“beastly”) and a Broadway play, Peter Pan (“queer…but delightful”).

Parenthood predictably enters the letters with qualms about nursemaids and schedules, and Mabel’s letters take a maternal turn, at times in comic exasperation, as when she heard her toddler son’s “tongue going like a bell clapper,” but otherwise ebullient that Leslie, Junior, is “handsomer than ever” and “full of play and curiosity.” In due course, daughter Huldah weighs in, telling her father that “brother plays bucking bronco with me and it is great fun but hard on mother’s nerves, as she thinks every ‘buck’ will be my last.”

The letters spool through the years, as Leslie, Junior, and Huldah enroll in prep and boarding schools, and thereafter to college (Huldah to Bryn Mawr, her brother to Harvard). By 1933, the letters originate from Cheekwood, where parental encouragement mixes with admonitions for serious study and supplies the latest household doings (“I have worked hard getting the draperies down…. The carpenters are working on loggia which promises to be very lovely but are not making sufficient progress, so Daddy will double the force Monday morning”).

In 1922, Emily Post had lamented in Etiquette that “the art of general letter-writing…is shrinking until the letter threatens to become a telegram, a telephone message, a post-card.” Yet she conceded that “people do write letters…and there are some who possess the divinely flexible gift for a fresh turn of phrase, for delightful keenness of observation.” Over hundreds of letters, the Cheek family correspondence demonstrates that “gift” in abundance.

Blog post provided by Cheekwood’s Writer-in-Residence, Cecelia Tichi, Ph.D.

Cecelia Tichi is an award-winning author and Professor of English and American Studies Emerita at Vanderbilt University. Her books span American literature and culture from colonial days to modern times, but her recent work draws upon the Gilded Age (post-1870) that prompted her book on Jack London and another on seven activists in that tumultuous era.

Cecelia’s research and teaching inspired What Would Mrs. Astor Do? The Essential Guide to the Manners and Mores of the Gilded Age, followed by Gilded Age Cocktails and Jazz Age Cocktails , which set the stage for her mystery crime novels that boast “Gilded” in each title.

Cecelia can be followed on her website: https://cecebooks.com/