16-year-old Helena Muffly wrote exactly 100 years ago today:
Saturday, December 23, 1911:Went after my Xmas tree this afternoon. Ruth made some candy for Christmas. Made a general nuisance of myself all day. Jimmie and I have our scraps occasionally. Just now am trying to commit twenty-seven verses to memory. Have about half of them, and the rest yet to learn.
Was Grandma memorizing the Christmas story?
Her middle-aged granddaughter’s comments 100 years later:
Whew, 27 verses is a lot! Grandma was trying to memorize 700+ Bible verses so that her Sunday School would give her a Bible. She’d been working on it since sometime prior to September. (I think that I’d give up before I even started, but Grandma apparently was still trying to reach her goal.)
Filed under: Other Tagged: | 100 years ago, 1911, diary, hundred years ago
Getting her Christmas tree on Dec. 23 is just my style!
[...] Some weeks Grandma was the only pupil in her class—but she always went the following week. Other diary entries noted that she was trying to memorize more than 700 Bible verses in the expectation of eventually getting a free Bible. (One week she memorized 27 verses!!) [...]
[...] generally did not complain about needing to memorize something. For example, one Sunday she memorized 27 Bible verses. This poem must have had some very difficult text (a dialect [...]
[...] verses several additional times during Fall, 1911 but the last time she wrote about it was on December 23. I’d felt certain that she’d never reach her goal—but I was wrong. Grandma persisted, but [...]
[...] She learned 700+ verses to get it—and some weeks she learned more than 20 verses. For example, on December 23, 1911 she wrote that she was trying to learn 27 verses that [...]