In Rachel Barnett’s family, Christmas Day is a big deal, she says. There’s no Christmas tree or stockings hanging from the mantle, but for 60 or so years, it has been a time for the extended family in South Carolina to gather for a special meal. 

Born in 1956, Rachel grew up in the only Jewish family in the small town of Summerton, which sits about halfway between Charleston and Columbia, where she now lives. When her grandfather Morris Gordin and his brothers came to the U.S. from Eastern Europe in the early 1900s, they settled in the South and like many other Jewish families in the area, they became shopkeepers. 

Over the years, members of the Gordin family operated dry goods stores, a pharmacy, and her grandmother Charlotte from the other side of the family, who moved to the area, opened the “better ladies shop,” in Summerton, the Towne Shoppe in the 1960s. 

“From the time I could see over a counter, I was working in a store,” Rachel says. And the busiest time at the shops was right before Christmas. “Everyone worked long hours and was happy when we were able to close at nine o’clock at night on Christmas Eve,” she shares in “Kugels & Collards: Stories of Food, Family, and Tradition in Jewish South Carolina,” which she co-authored with Lyssa Kligman Harvey. 

Christmas Day was “a day to relax and enjoy what they hoped had been a good holiday season,” she adds. The day belonged to Rachel’s mother Miriam — who she calls Mama — and Ethel Mae Glover, an African American woman who worked for the family from the 1930s to the 1990s. “It was their day,” Rachel shares. 

Ethel would arrive on Christmas morning to open her gifts, including a new dress and hat for church that Rachel would pick out from her grandmother’s shop. And Mama and Ethel would cook together. The family introduced Ethel to the rules of kashrut and she introduced them to Southern cooking, adapting classics like fried chicken to be made without dairy and collards without pork to fit with their tradition. 

On the Gordin family table, Southern and Jewish dishes appear side by side. “The idea of a Southern Jewish table is not a mash up of recipes — it is where Jewish recipes and Southern recipes co-exist,” Rachel shares. The Christmas menu has remained virtually unchanged since Rachel’s childhood when the tradition started. Chopped liver was served with drinks to start, and for the main meal, there was brisket, smoked turkey, stuffed cabbage, rice, squash casserole, succotash, a Jello-O mold, and more. And there was always fudge and divinity candy as part of the dessert spread — a holiday gift from Ruth Furse, who ran one the family’s dry goods shop.  

Cousins from Charlotte, Greeleyville, St. Matthews, Charleston, and beyond would drive to their home in Summerton, which sat on Route 301, the major highway in the area before Interstate 95 was built. The dining room table was always set and the card tables her mother kept on hand for her bridge club would be set up as well, while the kitchen was transformed into the buffet area. 

In 1989, Rachel took over the hosting responsibilities and has kept the menu mostly the same — she makes a vegetarian version of stuffed cabbage for her daughter, and she’s replaced her mother’s brisket recipe with a riff on one she learned from her ex-mother-in-law with grape jelly and Heinz Chili Sauce. Now that she’s in charge of the meal, Rachel says she appreciates all of the work Ethel and her mother put into the meals. 

Today, the family no longer owns shops, but they still gather on Christmas and even use it as a time to celebrate Hanukkah since everyone is together. On Christmas Eve, Rachel makes French onion soup and they light candles together. 

Reminiscing about the many Christmas Day meals in her life, Rachel notes that many of the relatives who joined the celebration have passed away, but she adds: “their memories live on with us.”