Christmas found in slum jar

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December 23, 2008

By AMBER DILLEY The Glasgow Daily Times Tue Dec 23, 2008, 08:52 AM CST

GLASGOW — The Christmas stories of those who have lived long enough to gather a memory full are always much more interesting than those of us who have only seen a handful of holidays.

Take my grandmother, for instance. Nobody in my generation would have ever used a “slum jar,” but one of those jars was the subject of her most memorable Christmas.

My grandmother, who responds to “Nanny” from most who know her, received her very first doll at the age of seven.

Of course, she almost completed an early-morning activity on that doll without knowing it.

The way Nanny tells it, one of her older sisters, Mabel, had bought her a doll for Christmas, but couldn’t stay for the holiday, so she gave the doll to their mother to hide.

Grandma Clarkston’s clever idea was to hide the doll in the slum jar.

The slum jar was sort of an indoor outhouse for homes that only had an outhouse.

Cue Christmas morning, little Nanny gets up to use the bathroom and notices “something odd poking out of the top” — her Christmas present from a dear sister.

“I almost sat right on that doll,” Nanny told me.

This “bathroom humor” has stuck with her through the years, I can assure you.

The doll was hard plastic, bald and wore only a diaper.

She had the doll for quite some years before it was stolen and torn up by a “neighbor boy.”

“It may not have been my favorite Christmas ever — that would have been after all my kids were born— but it was certainly the most memorable,” she said. “I still can’t believe Momma put that doll in the slum jar, of all places.”

Amber Dilley is a staff writer for the Glasgow Daily Times. She can be reached by e-mail at adilley@glasgowdailytimes.com.

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