During my childhood in the 1960s, my family’s church, Garden Creek Baptist Church, held an annual Nativity play at Christmastime. The first play that I had a part in, when I was around six years old, required me to recite a Bible verse. I had memorized and rehearsed my lines at home, and when I entered the church that Sunday evening, I felt confident that I was prepared. My parents and brother sat in a front pew, and despite my efforts to ignore my brother, I couldn’t take my eyes off of him. Something in his mischievous facial expression made me not only forget my lines, but totally freeze. I was unable to speak or move. Despite the promptings of my Sunday school teacher, I remained mute, and we had to move on to the next person’s lines. In later Christmas plays, I settled for singing in the children’s choir, belting out carols like “We Three Kings of Orient Are.”
The conclusion of these Sunday evening Christmas services was what I most looked forward to. As the congregation exited the sanctuary, ushers waited to distribute our Christmas pokes. These brown paper bags were filled with seasonal fruits and candies—oranges, apples, English walnuts, and chocolate drops. This holiday tradition at our church—enjoyed by us kids, our parents, and the elderly folks—launched us into the Christmas season.
My mother often spoke about her childhood Christmases in the Clinchfield cotton mill village in Marion. She told me that on Christmas morning, children watched for horse-drawn wagons that carried pokes of treats to the mill houses.
“What was in your pokes?” I asked her.
“A lot of stuff,” she said, her eyes bright with the memory. “Apples, oranges, nuts, chewing gum, bananas, hard Christmas candy.”
I was impressed by the generosity of the mill’s offering. And she emphasized that every member of every mill family received a poke.
She said her daddy, an overseer in the mill’s card room, stayed late at the mill on Christmas Eve to help fill pokes.
“He’d bring home leftovers,” she added, which meant extra treats for her large family. She noted that when she was “real little,” the pokes were delivered in horse-drawn wagons, but later the wagons were replaced by trucks. I could imagine the mill children looking out their windows for the wagons or trucks to arrive.
The word poke—at least in my region of Western North Carolina—is seldom used anymore. When I taught Southern Culture at my local community college, I discussed certain words that were considered “Southernisms.” Most of my younger students had never heard the word poke, but many of the older ones fondly recalled Christmas pokes at their churches and enjoyed recounting their memories.
My husband remembers his own childhood Christmas pokes at Hankins Baptist Church in Marion, then a white wooden church that’s since been replaced by a brick church. After the Christmas play, he said, the pokes were handed out from a table near the church’s front door.“What was in your Christmas poke at Hankins?” I asked.
“An orange, an apple, a peppermint stick, bubble gum, and a little religious item—a bookmark or something.”
“Back then, did you ever hear anyone using the word poke other than in the expression ‘Christmas poke’?”
“Yes,” he said. “That’s what people called a paper bag then.” And he recalls when he was getting ready to leave his great-grandmother’s house, she would say something like, “I’ll put your apple butter biscuit in a poke for you to take home.”
From my research, I’ve learned that the word poke is considered chiefly a Southern word. However, according to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, the expression “poke bag” is still used in parts of Scotland to indicate a paper bag in which purchases like candy are carried. Poke is actually a ancient word, first appearing in the English language in the 13th century.
Whatever its origin and past or current usage, poke is a word that stirs good memories for many of us. It takes us back to our childhood churches and the Christmas pokes that we received after the Christmas play.