For the last two years, the pandemic’s restrictions have prevented many communal celebrations, especially our holiday traditions. Trips along Memory Lane have helped us to compensate. This, too, has been especially true around the holidays. We’ve shared remembrances of gatherings, of those who are no longer with us, of customs in our homes and in our town. Reminiscing has, somehow, brought us nearer to one another. Hopefully, next year we’ll return to collective health, and our retrospections will culminate with what we can anticipate in the current season.
Although the New Year announces itself with much reverie in many places, it’s much mellower in our little hamlet. For a few years the Recreation Commission sponsored dances at the Community Center, which housed several holiday festivities, the Gazette providing cultural cuisine and entertainment for St. Patrick’s and Cinco de Mayo, and the Historical Society hosting a Mother’s Day Tea. The Community Center has followed in the footsteps of the Little River Grange, the institution that, for over a century, sponsored holiday traditions and many dances, whether there was a holiday or not.
In Hampton Remembers the Second Half of the Twentieth Century, Louis Chatey shared a newspaper clipping of a school Valentine’s Day Dance, recalling that while Debbie (Schenk) Moshier was voted queen, the young men were too timid to come forward, and so Leon Pawlikowki, the bus driver, volunteered to be crowned king. Anyone from another town seeing the photograph and reading the caption, Louis pondered, must have wondered – what on earth is going on there?
Spring brought several celebrations. Easter was all about bonnets and baskets and Sunday bests. There was only one “Easter Parade”, according to a diary entry in Hampton Remembers, put on by “perfectly respectable men, the First Selectman and the Minister among them,” who wore “gorgeous flower-garden hats, high heels, and fancy gowns.” Easter Egg Hunts, however, have been an abiding tradition, at the Church and in the Community.
When I was Matron of the Juvenile Grange, we had an Easter Egg Hunt for the children. We hid the colored eggs in the tall grass around the Grange Hall and then the Mac Millan’s dog came over and he began to find the eggs before the children did!
Margaret Marcus, from Hampton Remembers
We’ve celebrated Earth Day with participation in “Adopt-A-Road”, and Arbor Day was recently revitalized at our elementary school with the assistance of the Recreation Commission and the customary poems, posters and planting of trees. Long ago, spring was also celebrated with the Strawberry Festival and May Baskets.
Maybaskets was the thing then…Each family would get one and it would be everybody else hangin’ it and you’d kind of suspect when there was no word out of where we’re goin’ this week – it didn’t take too much figgering to figger it would be at your house, y’know. And then of course you didn’t do it till it was dark and then you had to catch everybody.…they would ring the bell and have it on the door-step and then they’d go to the door, whoever they were hanging the basket on, and they’d have to run out and catch all the kids who were hiding up the trees and all over – and it’d take two hours…It was a grand chase! When you caught anybody, and you had to physically tag ‘em, then they had to help you find the rest of ‘em…It was mostly a game of hide and seek, only at night.
George Fuller, from Hampton Remembers
Memorial Day remains a community favorite. The American Legion sponsored the many events — intramurals between the town’s seven schools, a parade, concerts in the afternoon, the Ladies Aid sold a picnic lunch and the Little River Grange hosted a chicken barbecue. Through the years, we’ve retained most of these festivities, with various organizations participating in the parade, and a ceremony with a gun salute, the raising of the flag, taps, prayers, songs, and a commemorative speech. The Congregational Church provides breakfast, the town supplies the ice cream the General Store used to distribute, the Gazette, the annual chicken barbecue, and the Recreation Commission sponsors music, dance and baseball. Even Covid couldn’t keep us from some of our commemorations, socially distanced activities like a take-out barbecue, a list honoring veterans at Town Hall, taps, and a virtual presentation, Hampton Remembers Memorial Day, featuring photographs of parades and ceremonies and veterans, some no longer with us, as well as their words of wisdom. Whatever the events, the message we communicate is always clear.
Memorial Day left a lasting impression on me because it was a time to learn and be reminded about patriotism and service to our country and about gratitude…It really brought home to me the sacrifices so many made for our country…I felt back then (and still do today) so grateful for those sacrifices and being so proud to be from a town that does not forget.
Debbie Fuller
Long ago, there were 4th of July celebrations. George Miller shared a memory of the 1942 parade, recalling “oxen, teams of horses and the Fire Department which was the 1927 LaFrance Pumper and Barney Pawlikowski.” An entry in Hampton Remembers describes “large picnics of over a hundred people on the Fourth of July…when all the summer families brought their own food, spread out blankets on a lawn and had a sociable day…On the evening of the Fourth of July Mr. James Goodwin put on for the town a very elaborate fireworks display on his lawn just north of the church.”
At one time we traveled all around town for Halloween to visit folks who looked forward to seeing us in our costumes. We also walked the village on foot, which is the custom that has continued, thanks to the generosity of Main Street residents who have always assumed the responsibility of greeting trick-or-treaters with jack-o-lanterns and candy.
Trick-or-treating on Main Street was awesome! We always went there and to the Moon’s and Berard’s. Mr. Berard used to always dress up and scare us! I remember one year at the Church’s house on North Bigelow, they dressed up like giant pillows and chased us!
Melissa (Pawlikowski) Bangs
Establishments like the grange and the schools also provided parties.
We had the best Halloween parties at the school, Lela Henri and Linda Grindle put on the best haunted house and the cake walk was epic! I looked forward to that all year!
Tadria (Pawlikowski) Milhomme
Of course we had the annual Halloween party with prizes for the best costumes and a dance following. The Grange Hall was always jammed with all sorts of ghost and pirates and princesses.
Dot Holt
The Grange continued to host Halloween parties into the 60’s, as Kit Crowne recently reminded us when he recalled the year he decided to dress as a woman : “Hamptonites – gentle by nature and tolerant of the many peccadillos we frail humans possess – weren’t prepared for the spectacle of a 13-year-old cross-dresser invading their midst…It was, as the saying goes, a night that will live on in infamy.”
Of course, there were a few “tricks” as well as “treats”. In Hampton Remembers, Arthur Kimball relayed that “Halloween was a lot of fun with a favorite prank being tipping over outhouses.”
The season of autumn itself was celebrated in our rural area, the Little River Grange sponsored a Harvest Supper and the Fish and Game Club hosted a Hunter’s Dance. Students still commemorate Veterans’ Day; however schoolchildren no longer have the Thanksgiving feast they once shared.
The entire school walked from the old school to the Congregational Church to celebrate together. The younger grades dressed with pilgrim or Indian headdresses and each grade contributed something to the dinner. One class churned butter, one made a relish, I think the littlest kids filled nut cups….Visualize 200 people walking single file from the school to the church. People living along Main Street loved to come out and watch.
Diane Becker
We would get all bundled up and walk to the church. We would feast together! The entire kindergarten through grade six and all staff. We all wrote what we were thankful for on paper turkeys we traced with our hands. It was the best school event of the year!
Helen Halbach Merasco
The first community Thanksgiving feast we recall is the one our Mennonite neighbors invited us to after they first arrived in town two years ago. It was a feast, and a gesture, none of us is likely to forget.
And then there’s Christmas. Last year, we shared people’s special memories, past and present, riding in a horse drawn sleigh to the Congregational Church where a tree was lit with real candles, of Santa Claus visiting the Little River Grange with a present for every single child, of Christmas programs performed in the one room schoolhouses.
Some traditions, such as caroling to our elders, have continued:
Does anybody remember being greeted at one house by an elderly gentleman clad only in long johns, brandishing a shot gun? Some fast talking by one member of our group convinced him that our intentions were harmless.
Pearl Scarpino, the Hampton Gazette, 1978
And selecting Christmas trees, at Warren Stone’s, Popover Hill, and Halbach’s where their children remember the “Charlie Brown” varieties:
We ended up with the most deformed, disproportioned, asymmetrical tree of all! It was such an annual event that we kids would make bets ahead of time as to which tree would be left for us!…The use of “imperfect” (but I use that term rather affectionately) Christmas trees lasted into the years when my own children were growing up.
Kathie Halbach Moffitt
And our candlelit village, which continues to enchant us:
White lights, wreaths, menorahs, red bows and berries….a beacon of home and hope as you turn onto Main Street.
Wendy Timberman
Happy Holidays, Hampton. Here’s to home and hope.