With the publication of Clement Moore’s 1849 poem, “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” Victorians in Europe and the wealthy industrialist families across the pond in America were overwhelmed with a mass compulsion of the era to overdo. Not satisfied with the religious customs and traditions evolved over centuries for the celebration of Jesus’ birth, they tacked on a gingerbread trim of secular symbols, including Santa Clause, gaily decorated trees and gift giving.

This new-fangled Christmas was slow to arrive and even slower to take hold in the area now known as Clay County.

While wealthy, trend-setting industrialists in the North were becoming flush with money and time on their hands, the majority of the 1800s’ residents of Clay County remained locked in an uphill battle to survive in a raw, near frontier environment, dependent on an agricultural economy with cash money scarce and free time just as hard to come by.

It was not until the 1880s, when tourists and investors discovered the St. Johns River, that locals were significantly exposed to these new secular trappings of Christmas.

Smitten by balmy climes, the Florida tourist bug and orange fever, Northeastern tycoons of manufacturing, railroading and mining flocked south to winter in resort hotels in Green Cove Springs and Orange Park. Naturally, they schlepped along their furnishings, staffs and opulent lifestyles including their new ideas of the proper way to celebrate Christmas.

Raphael Canova, wealthy and influential planter and former Sheriff of St. Johns County, settled in Green Cove Springs soon after the end of the Civil War. His family was possibly one of the first locals to be known for their gaily decorated and candlelit Christmas tree – and the year it almost burned the house down.

A children’s party was under way in the front parlor when Santa’s sleeve brushed against a candle carefully clipped to the end of a branch of the large, gift decked cedar tree. Children and grown-ups were frozen until family patriarch, Raphael, arrived on the scene. He swept off his great coat, wrapped the tree and Santa, his eldest son, in its folds and carried both outside and into the watering trough usually reserved for the horses. Santa, also known as Phillip, celebrated that Christmas with singed eyebrows.

Some say the adoption of the tree in the house Christmas custom in Green Cove Springs was probably set back several decades by this event. More likely, the cause was that Northern tourists and investors were lured further south and the orange industry was decimated by back to back freezes in the winter of 1895-96.

The economic good times sputtered. What little cash was generated was sucked up by taxes, barter ruled and frivolous spending spelled doom.

Until the middle of the 1900s, the celebration of Christmas in Clay County revolved around school and church programs, family and friends and had more in common with ancient medieval observances of seasonal feasting and religious worship than the reinvented Victorian holiday.

Especially in the 1930s, when there came a national depression on top of their decades of hard times. Some said that conditions were so bad that if a reindeer landed on a roof in Clay County it would be shot, skinned and cooked or cured by daylight.

For the most part, Christmas memories and stories of those times are still precious and full. Long timers in Clay County remember paper chains by the mile, sumptuous smells dancing around cook stoves all over the county and church. They remember cane grindings and playing tag into the dark with family and friends who had time to travel only at Christmas.

Church played a strong part in community life in Clay County and even the tiniest child knew that Baby Jesus was the be all and end all symbol of Christmas, not Santa. At Christmas, even the tiniest rural churches reenacted the nativity.

Older boys and girls in cobbled together costumes assumed the prescribed roles and portrayed the birth of Christ in Bethlehem. The shepherds, adolescent boys with sticks, were always the big unknown and added an element of suspense to the ages old story. Some of the tales spun by local former wise men have become epic and they usually end with a whippin’ and a tongue lashing.

Come the late 1930s when the World War II buildup began in Clay County, the population increased for the first time since the 1880s. Residents were cash flush from supplying or working at nearby military bases. With more money to spend, locals began to join the rest of country in embracing the secular traditions of Christmas.

Since then they have kept right up with every latest trend – Frosty and Rudolph and the Grinch - and today can overindulge their children with the best of them. Still, for many in Clay County, Christmas remains, even with all the mass marketing, a time for celebrating the birth of Christ and sharing good times and good food with good friends and family.