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Chances are that on Christmas morning, Nancy Simpson will be elbow-deep in flour in her warm, spacious Eastside kitchen. Her husband, Lamar, and her aunt, Hazel Morgan, will be working away beside her. Eleven-year-old Lydia—the youngest of the family’s five children—will find her place in the kitchen, too, as her sisters sleep in.
Together, they’ll make a spread of Southern homestyle favorites—bacon and eggs, grits and sausage, orange juice and coffee—large enough to impress the Furman football team. But it will be Nancy who will be in charge of the biscuits—huge, flaky, scratch-made creations that reign unparalleled in the eyes of her family. “I typically cook everything but the biscuits,” says Lamar, the chief financial officer at Carolina Alliance Bank in Spartanburg. “When you come over this Christmas morning and taste her biscuits, you’ll know why I don’t even try.”
For this outgoing family, it will take at least two dozen, plus the rolled-up, obscurely shaped scraps the couple’s daughters (twenty-four-year-old twins Ashley and Sarah, fourteen-year-old Laura, twelve-year-old Elizabeth, and Lydia) dubbed “funny biscuits,” to satiate the family’s Christmas-morning biscuit love. When they are hot out of the oven and everything’s ready, the group—which is sure to include Fini, an eight-year-old fluffy, brown, mixed-breed dog that Nancy calls her baby—will gather around the oblong oak table filling their kitchen to share a mouth-watering breakfast together.
The meal is the family’s most beloved Christmas tradition, the one activity that says it’s finally Christmas for the Simpsons.
“Everything else pales in comparison,” Lamar says.
“We don’t normally eat that kind of food,” Nancy adds, and her kids love it. “To get biscuits—that’s greater than an iPod,” she laughs. “Other people are eating turkey on Christmas. We’re eating biscuits.”
The tradition showcases the family’s holiday spirit, one imbued with love and appreciation for family and history. Even the decorations—from the fifty-year-old Nativity scene in the den to the five garnet-hued stockings dangling from the den’s fireplace mantel—shows a devotion to family. “It’s family time and I love my family,” says Nancy, who works in computer support for Milliken and Company. “Christmas morning is our morning.”
The home is custom-built and perfectly intertwines the family’s modern needs (from a three-car garage and basement-level motorcycle shop to a filtered ice maker housed in the mudroom adjacent to the kitchen) with their proclivity to custom and tradition. Gathered around the country kitchen table, Lydia, Laura, Elizabeth, and eighty-eight-year-old Aunt Hazel—who lives in an attached four-room apartment off the home’s kitchen—create handmade gingerbread ornaments, each with its own festive personality. Adorned with icing, one sports a jaunty green bowtie. Another boasts blond hair and a red dress. They all look good enough to eat.
“They’re not real formal, fancy, fussy,” explains Marie Tanner of the Greenville design firm Manly Street Design, a sentiment Nancy explains: “When I grew up, we literally did not have matching spoons and forks and plates. I’m just not a formal person. If you come to my home, I’m just going to say, ‘Make yourself at home and get what you want.’ ”
And she admits that when someone mentions interior design, her eyes roll back in her head. That’s where friend and interior decorator Marie comes in, raiding home boutiques and antique shops for many of the rustic accessories and furnishings to complement the home’s warm palette and clean finishes, which she hand-selected.
Self-described “math brains,” both Nancy and Lamar studied at Erskine College in Due West, where she double majored in math and accounting and he studied accounting. The two married as students and both went on to graduate in 1981. In 2004, the Simpsons started building their current home, which is the third Lamar has designed for the family.
He wanted the space not only to accommodate Aunt Hazel, but also to fit into the long-established personality of the neighborhood, a wooded area with homes of different sizes, designs, and ages. “I also wanted something that would fit in with the natural feel of the area,” he says. “The design, I think, is a mix of traditional and contemporary architecture that fits with the diversity of the houses on the street, the topography, and the natural setting.”
He selected natural, earthy colors for the outside brick, and, in the spring of 2005, the family moved in. Inside, Marie chose light, earthy colors, punched up with bursts of deep, rich colors, from the rugs to the draperies. It gives the active house—often the gathering point for the girls’ friends—a casual, warm feel.
Once they moved into the home, they counted on Marie’s artistic sensibilities to help with everything from fabrics to paint colors. “I’ve got no right side of my brain,” Nancy says, to which Marie adds: “We laugh that we’re Frick and Frack. But you’ve got to have all of those things to make it work.” The sentiment extends to holiday decorating, Marie offers. Heirloom china placed in the formal dining room inspires an overflowing arrangement of roses, magnolia leaves, and Christmas pine that serves as a centerpiece, extending the theme to a reproduction chandelier that hangs from a vaulted ceiling.
Just off the dining area in a lofty front foyer, a freshly cut pine twinkles with hundreds of brilliant white lights and bright trimmings, visible from the home’s front windows and designed to be the formal showstopper. Magnolia leaves, fresh holly stalks, and long gold and red ribbons are interspersed throughout the fragrant arbor, lending a sophisticated, Southern style to the tree’s décor.
Framed antique doilies hang on the vaulted ceiling above, and musically inspired, handmade ornaments carefully placed on tree branches showcase the family’s generations-long love of art and song. Marie and several of the girls copied sheet music from old hymnals and turned them into scrolled Christmas decorations, which they tied onto the tree with festive red ribbons next to miniature wooden instruments and ruby and gold glass balls. Just beyond the foyer tree sits a small Steinway grand piano that the girls can play, tucked in a corner of the family’s living room.
Several of the Simpson daughters have also played other instruments, from Sarah’s forays with the flute, piccolo, and cello to Ashley’s love of the violin and French horn. Lamar’s grandfather, Raymond Leander Mattison, worked for more than forty years a textile worker, but his dream was to be a musician. He received a fiddle in December 1918 and he taught himself to play. “I never knew him,” Nancy says. “But he was a special man. He did whatever he could to support his family, but he had his dreams and his talents.”
The fiddle easily earned its place as a treasured family heirloom, and is now proudly and tastefully displayed in a custom shadowbox along with the patriarch’s Freemason Bible and ring, pocketknife, and pocket watches. The back of the box is papered with sheet music for “The Star Spangled Banner,” “White Christmas,” and “Somewhere, My Love,” songs played by Nancy’smother, who was a pianist for Glenwood United Methodist Church.
Even during the holidays, it’s important to make sure the children understand their family’s history, both Nancy and Lamar say. Both came from families rooted in some of South Carolina’s longest traditions—farming and textiles. Lamar grew up on a farm near Ware Shoals in southern Greenville County, and his father, three uncles, and two cousins were brick masons and farmers during their lifetimes. Both of Nancy’s parents were mill workers, as were her grandfather and his brothers.
Today, the family’s skills and interests are rooted in their heritage. Lamar, with the help of his father, built the wood-burning brick fireplaces. He loves antique tractors, particularly Farmall models, which he enjoys outside in a two-story detached workshop. He owns a Farmall from the 1950s and collects models of the antique farm equipment. “I think at the core I’m a bricklayer that has chosen a career in accounting and banking,” Lamar says.
“Accounting and banking is what I do. It does not define who I am as much as how I grew up does.” Now, he’s remodeling a 1940s home the family owns. “I love to work with my hands,” he says. “There’s just this part of me that’s got to build something.”
For her part, Nancy spends time sewing clothes for the family and baking bread from wheat she grinds herself. She and Aunt Hazel work on projects together in the sewing and craft room off the kitchen. “We live in a totally different world than when we grew up and when our parents grew up and our grandparents grew up,” Nancy says. “It’s important for me to teach my children the possibilities of the future, but also the sacrifices that were made for us to be here.” And, she adds, those sacrifices ran alongside deep dreams for the future.
But, really, can breakfast be better than an iPod? Nancy turns and consults her nearest experts—daughters Elizabeth and Lydia. “What do you like about Christmas?” she asks. The answers are unequivocal.
“Christmas breakfast,” Elizabeth says. “Christmas breakfast,” Lydia says.
And with a family so rooted in tradition and history, their answers surely mean that the celebration will continue for generations to come.
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