Story: Pearl S. Buck
Adaptation: David Warner
Music: Mack Wilberg

Celebrated stage and television actor Richard Thomas grew up in New York City, but his father’s family was from a small mining and farm community in eastern Kentucky. Thomas spent his summers there on the family farm and drew on that first-hand experience when he played the role of John-Boy in the award-winning television series The Waltons. That nostalgic evocation of rural Virginia wasn’t so different from the setting of “Christmas Day in the Morning” by Pulitzer and Nobel Prize–winning author Pearl S. Buck. Buck’s family was also from the South, and although she spent her childhood in China, stories of old-time Southern celebrations at Christmas became treasured traditions in her family.

This story, one of numerous Christmas tales Buck published after returning to the United States, first appeared in Collier’s magazine in 1955. Mack Wilberg’s underscoring for “Christmas Day in the Morning” evokes the simplicity of the American folk music tradition. It also incorporates the old African-American song “Oh, Watch the Stars,” from the Sea Islands of South Carolina that was first collected and published in 1924.

This song became more widely known when Ruth Crawford Seeger included it in her 1953 songbook American Folk Songs for Christmas, where it represented a stage in the journey toward Bethlehem. Like Buck, Seeger hoped to celebrate a Christmas (as she put it) “not of Santa Claus and tinseled trees but of homespun worship and festivity.”

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7sa7SZ6arn1%2BstKO0jpyfq6Gjqbqiv4ytmJudoqOupLjEZpqhp5mnfKS7zZycq6xdZ31zfI6cn6uho6m6or%2BMnZiyZZmjerW0xGakqKqenruoew%3D%3D