Book: Christmas in Plains

I thumbed through this book while staying in a rented house during last year’s vacation near Asheville, North Carolina.  I enjoyed recently reading Carter’s memories from boyhood as well as his adult family Christmas memories.  He included his four years in the White House, and I reminisced those historical years as I read.

There were a couple passages that caught my attention:

He explained that his father used to make sousemeat.  It was a “special” holiday meat that used up the aftermath of hog-killing time.

Sousemeat is a conglomeration of feet, ears, faces, and other parts that were cleaned thoroughly, boiled into a homogeneous glutinous consistency, seasoned heavily, and then formed into a large loaf.

He talked about raccoon and opossum hunting with neighboring black men.

‘Possums were scavengers and needed to be fed clean food for a week or two before they were good to eat.

I guess opossums were captured and taken home to be cared for until they were “good to eat.”

He remembered that Trivial Pursuit was a very popular game in 1980, and he proposed a question of his own:

Which former presidents, if any, are not buried within the continental limits of the United States?

Answer: Any living former president.