Christmas Memories I — The Story of Yuletide Carol December 7, 2009
Posted by Dan R. Dick in Advent, Christmas, Personal Reflection.Tags: Advent, Christmas
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Each year, early in December, my thoughts return to my hometown and to some of the significant memories of my young life. One signficant memory concerns one of those eccentric, colorful characters that seem to populate every small midwestern town. These people become accepted fixtures, even though they behave in odd, bizarre ways. They are just part of the landscape — even though sometimes they are treated in less than kind ways, especially by youngsters who should know better but don’t. In Muncie, Indiana in the 1960s and 1970s one such person was a woman known to many as Yuletide Carol.
I am fuzzy on Carol’s full story, but what I was told and what I remember is that in a matter of months she lost her husband and three children, and it pushed her over the edge. One child was hit by a car, one drowned in a boating accident, and her husband and last child were in a terrible automobile accident. Carol ended up living in a converted garage on Willard Street and she could be seen daily walking the streets in a dirty, frayed sweater singing Christmas songs. It didn’t matter what time of year — she sang Christmas songs in a dreamy, detached voice. If you tried to talk to her, she would look at you and sway back and forth, but she would never stop singing. As kids, we all thought she was crazy, and we took every opportunity we could to make fun of her and torment her. She must have walked twenty miles every day, just wandering through town, singing.
