A Snowy Christmas Eve in the Blue Ridge

Re-read: The Homecoming, Earl Hamner Jr.

In 1961, Hamner published his novel Spencer's Mountain, about Clay and Olivia Spencer and their nine children, living a hardscrabble life in Appalachia (specifically the Blue Ridge in Virginia), where Clay works in a soapstone factory. They long to better their children, and most of the story revolves around Clay Spencer Junior, called "Clay-Boy," his growing up and budding teenage feelings, resentment at being the eldest and "babysitter" for the younger children, and feeling the first pangs of romance, while his parents work to raise enough money to send him to college to become a writer as he desires. The book was made into a film in 1963 by Warner Brothers. In 1970, Hamner published this book, a novella about the Spencer family at Christmas, and it was turned into a Christmas movie in 1971, with the names of most of the principals changed because Warner Brothers now "owned" the Spencer family's names.

As The Waltons was a slightly softened version of the television film of this book, the film was a softened-down version of the novel. Although the basic story remains the same—the family father is late returning home from his job thirty miles away (a drive we now make in no more than an hour) and the family anxiously awaiting his arrival—certain details differ. In the book instead of the father's parents, we meet Olivia's parents; the Baldwin sisters are Miss Etta and Miss Emma Staples; Ike Godsey runs the combination pool hall/restaurant, not a store; Clay-Boy only briefly meets Hawthorne Dooley, and Hawthorne does not work for the sisters; Claudie doesn't tell the family about the missionary woman, Birdshot Sprouse does (Birdshot is kind of a Huck Finn character); Clay-Boy goes out to get the Christmas tree alone and has an adventure with a deer (he also smokes); Charlie Sneed isn't a "Robin Hood," he's a poacher hunting out of season to give the food to deserving families; a few other minor things. It's much grittier than the television film, giving one a good sense of just how tough life was for the Virginia working man during the Depression.

 

If you're a fan of the Christmas film, you owe it to yourself to read the original.