“On Christmas Eve some decades ago, a nurse at North Carolina Baptist Hospital in Winston-Salem handed a five-pound bundle to my mother and said, ‘Well, Mrs. Smith, you have just got yourself a real live baby doll!’ That ‘Night Before Christmas’ story was repeated to me each December 24th — my birthday — as long as my mother lived. It was undoubtedly the beginning of my enduring love for Christmas.”

So begins the preface of Nancy Smith Thomas’ book, Moravian Christmas in the South.  

From such an auspicious beginning to growing up as a young girl in Winston-Salem, Thomas seemed destined to become inextricably bound — as if by birthright — to the yuletide season and its local Moravian customs.

Only her consuming passion for books would rival her love for Christmas. That passion eventually led Thomas to New York City to pursue a career in publishing after graduating from Wake Forest University. It was there that the author began her library of children’s Christmas books that includes multiple copies of The Night Before Christmas — a personal favorite.

Thomas also began collecting antique Christmas memorabilia, an odyssey that has lasted for decades. “I bought my first Christmas ornaments in a little shop on lower Fifth Avenue in New York City,” Thomas recalls. “My fascination with the holiday souvenirs of the past has never abated.” 

Still, it wasn’t until she moved back to Winston-Salem and became a volunteer at Old Salem Museums & Gardens that Thomas truly developed a deep appreciation for German holiday traditions, and turned a scholarly eye toward Christmas as a time when home means more than the place where you live.

“We have the Germans in particular to thank for centering Christmas in the home,” she says.

Today, Thomas and her husband, Charlie, make their home in Wakefield, a delightful reconstruction of George Washington’s birthplace (which was featured our July 2008 issue). 

It is the perfect place to spotlight the author’s collection of period holiday decorations — a place where Christmases past feel right at home; where meaning, pride, love, memory, and ritual live.

And what could be more symbolic of Christmastime, more emblematic of the spirit and promise of the season, than a gaily decorated evergreen tree with a Moravian star at the top? The German tradition of “Tannenbaum” is alive and well in the Thomases’ front parlor.

Placed at the center of the room, the family’s “memory tree” is free of electric lights, its evergreen boughs laden with the memories and heirlooms of a lifetime: ornaments collected during the couple’s travels, handmade decorations by loved ones, the generous gifts of treasured friends — “everything meaningful to us,” Thomas says.

In that same spirit, the house is adorned in natural greenery gathered from the property. With skillful hands, gardener Eddie Matthews creates wreaths and garlands from boxwood trimmings, holly cuttings, and nandina sprays of bright red berries. These evergreen decorations represent the triumph of life over death and have figured prominently in winter-solstice rituals since ancient times.

Sprinkled throughout the house amid the natural decorations, the author’s collection of small, antique feather trees pays homage to early Victorians and a time when “table-top” trees were a Christmastime standard. Feather trees were the first artificial trees and were typically made of goose or turkey feathers wrapped around wood and wire frames to resemble German white pines.

It wasn’t until the late 19th century when German manufacturers mass-produced ornaments and made them widely available to the public that larger trees became common.

Later this month, dozens of Thomas’ neighbors, both young and old, will gather outside her house to sing Christmas carols. “Each year we open our home and invite them in to see the decorations,” she says.

It is no doubt like entering a time machine, transporting visitors to Christmases past, an experience akin only to Thomas’ beloved Old Salem.

It is said that “Home is where we start from, but home is also where we are bound for, the place we always seek.” During this season, may we all reach home safely, even if it may only be in our hearts and minds. Happy holidays!