Experience Christmas Candlelight Tours at Aycock Birthplace Dec. 3 and Dec. 5 with costumed interpreters who explain rural Christmas traditions and demonstrate open-hearth cooking. Tours will be given from 6:30 to 9 p.m. Admission for ages 5 and older is $3; ages 4 and under are free.
Music from the Harmony Boys of Mount Olive will add to the festive mood Tuesday, Dec. 3 as food is cooked at the hearth. The joy of cooking again will be highlighted Thursday, Dec. 5, with food prepared on the hearth over an open fire.
Visitors can help present an old-fashioned shadow play on Thursday, Dec. 5 in the site’s 1893 one-room schoolhouse using cardboard cut-outs and making animal sounds. A costumed volunteer will read the Christmas story as guests dramatize it through their craft. Visitors can make other crafts also.
Interpreters in the master bedroom will explain how men prepared the family for Christmas, and in the parlor will explain the traditions of stocking-hanging and home-made tree decorations.
A 19th century culinary expert will prepare traditional holiday dishes over a roaring kitchen fire. The heavily laden dining room table will display various meats, collards, biscuits and plum pudding, such fare as the Aycocks might have enjoyed for the holiday meal. Food will not be served, but guests will receive samples of tasty hot apple cider at the end of the tour and light refreshments will be available.
Found off the beaten path two miles south of Fremont, the Gov. Charles B. Aycock Birthplace Historic Site features a mid-19th century farmstead that includes a house, kitchen, garden, and farm animals. Period pieces furnish the house and kitchen. The 1893 Oak Plain Schoolhouse represents the grassroots statewide educational revival led by Gov. Aycock after his election in 1900.
For additional information, please call (919) 242-5581 or email aycock@ncdcr.gov. Aycock Birthplace is within the Division of State Historic Sites of the N.C. Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.