For 76-year old Glasgow resident Bill Simmons, Christmas is about his faith in Jesus and about family and memories.

The retired J.C. Penney executive grew up the second of 11 children on a family farm near Temple Hill and his life was shaped by his experiences as a hardworking farm boy on the heels of the Great Depression.

Bill’s parents, James E. and Emma Beatrice Simmons were married in 1928. The first of their nine sons, James Robert, was born in 1929. Bill came along in 1932, Kenneth in 1934, and the three oldest boys were followed in succession by Roger, Delmer, twin girls Betty Sue (Hopkins) and Emma Lou (Pendygraft), Samuel Leroy, twin boys Danny and David, and finally Tony who arrived in 1955, about the same time as Bill’s second child.

The family farm was located on what was then known as Poplar Springs Road, later to become James Simmons Road off Bulldog Way.

As would be assumed, Christmas was a special time with that many siblings awaiting Santa.

The days leading up to Christmas included cutting a big cedar, at least eight feet tall, off the family farm and decorating it with strings of popcorn, tin foil ropes, handmade ornaments and a cardboard star wrapped in foil. “We slept upstairs in a big two story farm house. We didn’t have electricity for many years and the house was heated by a wood stove. We heard Dad get up to start a fire and when we heard the door shut on that big old stove, we knew we could get up,” Bill recalled recently. “We slept in feather beds or straw ticks and under lots of quilts. We didn’t want to hit those cold floors until Dad had fire going in the stove.”

Usually, each child would get one present and Bill recalled that after opening that gift, it was off to the barn to begin milking. “Cows don’t know it’s Christmas day, they have to be milked twice a day, 365 days a year,” he said.

“I started helping my dad milk when I was 9 years old. I made a deal with him. I would help him milk if James Robert would crank the cream separator. That was harder than milking,” he said.

After the morning chores were done, it was time to go to breakfast.

“My mother was the best cook I’ve ever known. She would make about 50 biscuits every morning on that wood stove. We would have ham or sausage, sometimes fried chicken or pork chops, tenderloin and always gravy. There was always gravy and biscuits.”

James E. Simmons purchased his first land at the courthouse door in 1932 for $600. “It was supposed to be 100 acres but when it was surveyed, it turned out to be only 58. Dad got a refund and he ended up paying $468 for the farm. He raised his first crop of burley tobacco in 1936, fighting a severe drought all summer long and hauling water in barrels from Glover Creek to irrigate his crop. He got $1,260 for one acre of tobacco and we started adding on to the farm,” Bill recalled.

The Simmons farm ended up being about 188 acres.

In addition to the one gift for each child, the parents also bought a bushel of apples, a crate of oranges, a full stalk of bananas, about 20 pounds of English walnuts and a like amount of chocolate covered sugar drops. The only girls in the family, Betty Sue and Emma Lou, recalled that their father many times brought home a huge peppermint candy cane, so hard that it took a hammer to break off a piece to eat.

Bill also remembered a big hook hanging from the ceiling in the kitchen where his father hung the stalk of bananas. He said that hook remained in the kitchen until the farm was sold.

One gift has special significance to Bill. His father had a 1934 Ford and when Bill was about 7 or 8 years old, he found a toy ’34 Ford pickup pulling a trailer in a mail order catalog. He got that as his present that year.