How This Country Legend Celebrates Christmas: Food, Memories and Jesus’ Birth
By Movieguide® Contributor
Dolly Parton has some significant recipes and memories that make her holidays special, and she’s sharing those with us this Christmas season.
“Like a lot of you, I cook for the week ahead and freeze meals. I love canning my own tomatoes and peaches too. So when Christmas comes, you bet I’m in a happy frenzy,” she said. “My mouth waters when I just think about my holiday dishes — tasty biscuits (perfect with my pecan chicken salad), savory pimento cheese sandwiches (cubed dill pickle gives it tang), luscious pies (if you’re a pecan lover, wait’ll you taste my butterscotch pie crust) and, of course, my signature chicken and dumplings.”
“Sorry, but that recipe is under lock and key. It was Mama’s specialty and now it’s mine. I remember being at her side, standing on tiptoes, waitin’ for when she’d let me drop the dumpling batter into the steaming-hot chicken pot with a big old spoon,” she said.
And of then there’s the main event — the ham.
“There was always a holiday ham ever since I was a bitty thing growing up with my 11 brothers and sisters in our two-room Smoky Mountain cabin. We knew how hard Daddy worked to raise his hogs and how much love Mama put into preparing them for the smokehouse,” Parton said.
“Back then we’d wake up on Christmas morning to find our stockings filled with some apples or oranges and hard candy. We loved our hard candy! Daddy whittled us new toys. We sang all the Christmas carols, our voices ringing throughout the holler.”
Parton’s mama always read Jesus’ Christmas story to the family.
“Sure, I miss those times. But I’ve created some new traditions of my own. About a week before Christmas, I host what I call Granny Night. I helped raise some of my younger brothers’ and sisters’ children, and they started calling me Aunt Granny,” she said.
“So come Christmastime, I’m Granny Claus. I get all gussied up in a red velvet Santa suit. (You don’t think I’d miss a chance to wear a costume, do you?)” she said.
She brings lots of sweets, a bag full of gifts and her jolly voice crying out, “Ho, ho, ho!”
“I don’t know who has more fun, them or me,” Parton said. “I like to do things big. At Dollywood in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, not far from where I grew up, we decorate every inch of the place with lights for our Christmas festival.”
“Our little white clapboard Christmas Chapel glows like the star in the east,” she continued. “By the way, near the chapel is Aunt Granny’s restaurant, the one place you can get my chicken and dumplings.”
Several years ago, her theme park, Dollywood, did a version of “The Christmas Carol.” In it, there’s a hologram of Parton playing the ghost of Christmas past.
But, “Of course the message of divine redemption will always stay the same,” Parton says.
“On Christmas Day, when our family gathers around the table, we’ll bow our heads to say grace, thankful for the food before us and for the best gift the Lord ever gave us, each other,” she said. “Now, if you wouldn’t mind, please pass the biscuits, and maybe save some room for dessert. Merry Christmas, y’all, from my kitchen to yours!”
Parton is the winner of 2021’s Movieguide® Graze Prize for her performance in CHRISTMAS ON THE SQUARE.
READ MORE: HOW DOLLY PARTON RESCUED A CHILD ON THE SET OF CHRISTMAS ON THE SQUARE
The synopsis for the movie reads:
A rich and nasty woman, Regina Fuller, returns to her small hometown after her father’s death to evict everyone and sell the land to a mall developer – right before Christmas. However, after listening to stories of the local townsfolk, reconnecting with an old love, and accepting the guidance of an actual angel, Regina starts to have a change of heart. This is the story about family, love, and how a small town’s Christmas spirit can warm even the coldest of hearts. Starring Dolly Parton, Christine Baranski, Jenifer Lewis, Treat Williams, and directed and choreographed by three-time Emmy and Golden Globe winner Debbie Allen. Featuring 14 original songs by Dolly Parton.
“Why did you want it to be around Christmas?” Movieguide® asked Parton about the movie.
“My partner Sam [Haskell] loves Christmas, and so do I, and we’d often talked through the years when we were doing movies that we did, like the COAT OF MANY COLORS and CHRISTMAS OF MANY COLORS: CIRCLE OF LOVE. We thought wouldn’t it be great to have a true Christmas musical, and Sam had the idea of this Christmas on the Square. He was going to write a book about it. I said why don’t we make it a movie and make it a musical?” Parton said.
Then, Parton began to write music for the movie and talked to several people in the music and film industry to get the project started.
“We were excited about having a wonderful Christmas movie and especially musical because I love Christmas and I just wanted something of my own that might last through time and hopefully this will,” she shared. “…People seemed to really enjoy it and that made me feel good that I could be part of lifting people up during that time.”
Of being honored with the Grace Prize® Parton said, “You never take that for granted. I never have. I’ve always been so honored.”
“I don’t work for awards,” she continued. “It’s a reward enough just to do good work and to be able to work with good people… You hope to be recognized for the good work that you’ve done but it makes you feel really proud to know that you’ve done something good enough to… win an award or some kind of you know acknowledgment for the hard work that’s been done. So it’s it never gets old.”
“I’m always appreciative. I’m always very humble with that…When I do get recognized for things like this, it just makes me think, Well, praise the Lord, you know? You can have it. It’s yours,” she said.
READ MORE: DOLLY PARTON’S CHRISTMAS ON THE SQUARE REVIEW
