By 1812Blockhouse
This story will be posted through Christmas Day, and we will see you again on Friday. Best wishes to you and your family for the holidays!
There is no question that Mansfield’s Pulitzer Prize-winning author Louis Bromfield was a fan of the holidays. During the period of time that Bromfield lived at Malabar Farm, it was an active place during the Christmas season.
In 1950, for instance, holiday visitors witnessed the wedding of Bromfield’s daughter Mary Hope to Robert TemBroeck Stevens, among the guests for which was the Governor of Ohio and the parents of actress Lauren Bacall.
The year before, Bromfield had received a unique holiday present from a good friend. After joking that he wanted a “little Sicilian donkey,” friend Herbert Cobey of Galion actually had a donkey from Sicily delivered via truck to Malabar on Christmas Eve. The donkey had a bright ribbon tied around its neck with a tag reading, “My name is Jose.” Bromfield was pleased and speculated that the animal would become a beloved pet.
The Bromfield family’s first Christmas at Malabar Farm was in 1939, although Louis was absent, writing a screenplay in Hollywood.
The author’s love of the holidays was a lifetime one. In 1943, the Chicago Tribune shared a post by Bromfield looking at three Christmases he remembered well — one as a boy visiting his grandmother: “I was in a big sleigh with my brothers and sisters on the way to my grandmother’s farm in Ohio. The steaming horses crossed a high bridge and plunged up a hill and suddenly, beside the watering trough hewn from a single log and filled with unfrozen living water from the spring, my father pulled the horses up short with a great jingling of bells. A door opened in the big white house and out of it came my grandmother, a tiny, pert little woman although she was the mother of eight strapping sons and daughters. She picked me up and carried me into the warm living room already filled with my uncles and aunts and cousins of all ages.”
The second profiled a prewar Christmas evening in a hotel “high in the Swiss mountains,” where those present included Mrs. Winston Churchill, various members of minor nobility, as well as “a fine assortment of trollops and not a few spies.”
The third took place in the company of soldiers and locals in church in the small French village where the Bromfields were living. “All of them were friends for I had lived with among them off and on for years.” Bromfield remarked on the hymn “Adeste Fidelis” being sung. Knowing would be the family’s last Christmas in Europe, the family was silent on their trip back home.
Clearly, Louis Bromfield knew how to celebrate Christmas.
Merry Christmas, Richland County, from your only daily updated, free to access source for news and information — 1812Blockhouse.
