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Plain Christmas

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By BILL HUTCHINSON, Sarasota Herald-Tribune

Published: December 23, 2007

Updated: 12/22/2007 10:22 pm

CHRISTMAS - Christmas comes out of nowhere on State Road 50 east of Orlando, just as you start to catch your breath from miles of Disney-spawned sprawl.

After a last stand of auto shops and fast-food joints around a town called Bithlo, the landscape opens up to palmetto and pine woods: Real Cracker Country, they call it, meaning tough and stark, no fairy-tale forest, but strangely beautiful on its own terms.

A prim sign at the side of the road marks the start of Christmas, founded on Dec. 25, 1837 - hence the town's name.

Population: 3,500 or so. Churches: three. Bars: two.

Places to visit, shop, spend a night, or have a meal: two, one, none and none, although there is an RV campground and the hot foods counter at the Circle K.

A second sign a few yards along points to the only reason most travelers might have to pull off the highway on the way to Interstate 95 or the Kennedy Space Center.

The post office, a snug brick building with an outsized parking lot, is one of two places in the United States - the other a tiny snowmobile resort in Michigan - where the postmark says Christmas.

That keeps the big parking lot busy most days from right after Thanksgiving until the last of the season's 400,000 cards and letters and gift packages are stamped with the magic name. There's been a line in the lobby for much of the month, and everybody has a story.

One man's brother in Japan asked him to drive over from Cocoa Beach and send gifts from Santa to his children, homesick during Christmas in an unfamiliar land.

A young tourist from Orlando has come to send his girlfriend back home in Minnesota a plush alligator in a Santa hat.

A smartly dressed doctor's wife from Titusville, 15 miles east, arrives in a Lexus full of gifts because this post office is friendlier than the one a short distance from her home.

The residents of Christmas spend much of December being charming to strangers at the post office and at the annual Cracker Christmas celebration that this year brought 20,000 people into town over the first weekend of the month.

"This is a real nice community and we don't mind showing off a bit," drawled Cecil Tucker, 76, a courtly seventh-generation son of Old Florida whose family ran the Christmas post office for the better part of a century.

No one is sorry, though, when the New Year comes and it's just family again - almost literally, since most everybody in town seems related in some way or another to pretty much everybody else.

"We're a tight little community, and we have our ways," said Charlene Yates, 65, in whose youthful face and manner it is possible to see traces of the girl who married a Christmas cowboy when she was 14.

The ways of Christmas are rural and church-going and quiet-living, family first, neighbor helping neighbor, all of which imply a degree of distance from modern life as it is lived in the world beyond Bithlo.

"It's kind of a last frontier here," said Bobby Beagles, a stocky, bearded man of 66, grandson of a sharecropper, who calls himself "just as country as country can be."

Beagles raises a small herd of beef cattle at the north end of town, and serves as president of the civic association, which functions as an ad hoc town council, business guild, planning department sheriff's auxiliary and keeper of the flame.

"It's our job to keep Christmas Christmas," said Beagles, work that "gets tougher every year."

Remarkably, in a state that has been exploiting every quirk and cranny since the 1920s, it was almost 50 years before anyone acted on the merchandising possibilities of the town's postmark. Even then, there were no apparent commercial motives involved.

Ten years after she took over the postmaster's job from her mother-in-law in 1932, Juanita Tucker initiated a modest effort to make Christmas the post office of choice for cards and packages sent to World War II servicemen overseas.

The idea caught on and a seasonal tradition was born, eventually attracting the attention of feature writers on the hunt for Christmas stories, and bringing to the town a gentle glow of minor celebrity.

In 1969, Tucker fulfilled a long-standing dream when that year's special-issue U.S. Christmas stamp was released at a ceremony in her little post office.

The idyllic rural scene portrayed on that stamp was by then disappearing from around Christmas, first nudged aside by spill-over growth from Cape Canaveral, then by frontal assault from Disney World after 1971.

When Juanita Tucker retired in 1974, Central Florida's destiny was evident in the housing developments going up on thousands of acres of orange groves and ranch land.

In the fevered spirit of the times, even Christmas relaxed its usual zoning restrictions to allow a district of small lots intended for manufactured homes.

The town's ultimate tool for controlling growth, though, is the steadfast refusal of its old families to make their land available, including miles of potentially valuable highway frontage along increasingly busy S.R. 50.

Which is not to say that the idea of selling out doesn't tempt them from time to time.

On the one hand, said landowner Cecil Tucker, "it would be nice to get out from under the taxes and the responsibility and enjoy my old age."

On the other hand, "knowing what effect that could have on the town, I don't know that I could ever do it."

"Like the man who sees his mother-in-law going off a cliff in his new Cadillac," he sighed, "you might say I have mixed feelings."

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