Carolyn Murphy

Christmas 1927

By Carolyn Murphy

April 1997

This is a story which my parents Signe and Marty Turner have often related to me. It was Christmas of 1927 and Grandma had very little money to spend for the holidays. Grandma was friendly with her neighbor Mrs. Pheifer. Mrs. Pheifer’s husband had left her and their three children. Mrs. Pheifer and her children even ate at Grandma’s quite often, and they did many things together. It was, therefore, natural that the two of them decided to make crepe paper roses and try to sell them in their neighborhood. They had patterns which they used to cut the petals and leaves. They would then carefully roll the edges and assemble them into a rose on a stem. They also made lilacs which they gilded around the edges and dipped them in wax. Mrs. Pheifer was not very good at selling them, but Grandma, being the enterprising soul that she was, did quite well. In fact on Christmas Eve, she went out again selling her flowers and on the way home she stopped at O. P. Skaggs. From her earnings she bought all the ingredients for a wonderful Christmas. She spared no expense, in fact, she spent the entire $25.00 which she had earned. She bought a tree, candy, oranges, nuts, and all the food for a wonderful Christmas dinner. What interested me was the fact she held nothing back. She was determined to make Christmas a wonderful celebration and let the remainder of the year take care of itself. I believe that Grandma must have had great faith in herself, life, and her Heavenly Father. She was not a worrier but a doer.

Return to Millidgeville

By Carolyn Murphy

April 1997

In February of 1996 my husband Don and I had the opportunity to travel to Millidgeville, Georgia where Grandma had served a mission some 42 years before. My mother Signe, my sister Joyce, Joyce’s husband Larry, and I had traveled to Millidgeville in May of 1954 to pick Grandma up from her mission. For me the return in 1996 was rather nostalgic. There is now a beautiful brick LDS chapel surrounded by lovely woods. We attended church there, and amazingly there were members there who still remembered Grandma and the beautiful sweaters which she knitted. One lady stated that Grandma had lived in her home. After the meetings were over, we located, with directions from the local members, the old chapel Grandma had helped raise funds for back in 1954. Fund raising came natural for her, it was a skill she had no doubt perfected in her early years of raising a family all by herself. The building is now abandoned and in need of repair and is no longer owned by the LDS Church. But to me it stands as a monument of the seeds that were planted in Georgia by my Grandma some 42 years before.