This is a break you’re definitely going to want to take. As part of Instagram’s #TakeABreak series, Dolly Parton is sharing a few of her finest Christmas memories and tales from her childhood.
Like the one year when she got a baby brother for Christmas.
She recollects getting a catalog in the mail that she thought of the family’s Wish Book. “And within the toy part, they had a walking talking doll. You could feed it water, and it would pee and cry tears. We wished a kind of dolls so bad,” Parton says. “So my brother Randy was a December child, so my mama stated, ’Y’all wished a walking talking doll that did all of the stuff, come over right here to see your new walking-talking doll: we had our personal child that 12 months.”
And now you can hear Parton and Randy sing together on “You Are My Christmas,” off her new album A Holly Dolly Christmas.
Then there was the year that her dad purchased her mother a marriage band, after years of not being able to afford one. He hid it on an ornament on the family’s Christmas tree and informed all the youngsters that whoever found it could get the one current that year. Parton and her brother Denver each discovered it collectively, and their reward was a giant field of goodies that everybody ultimately needed to share.
As a result of the claims she is older than Christmas trees, Parton’s holiday memories go way, way, way back. “Actually I grew up again in the Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee in a giant household, and of course we didn’t have all of the things that cash might purchase again then. So we sort of had to improvise to make Christmas every part that it wanted to be. And naturally, my dad was very inventive, and he would always exit with my brothers and lower down a Christmas tree from our own property and drag it in. And naturally, mama was so creative and she would at all times make issues for the tree-like this little gingerbread,” she shares. “We did everything that we might to make it particular. And what was so nice about it’s that we all got to do it together.”
Read also-Dolly Parton’s Christmas TV special: Our five favorite moments from ‘Holly Dolly Christmas’