Christmas 1934 played important part in Harper Lee's 'TKAM'

'Atticus Finch' and 'Heck Tate' from 'To Kill a Mockingbird'

Another Christmas will come to pass this coming Monday. As I pondered this earlier this week, I remembered that the fictionalized Christmas of 1934 was the setting of one of most important events in Harper Lee’s novel, “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

Many of you will remember that in Chapter 9 of the book, Scout tells us that she and her brother, Jem, have mixed feelings about Christmas. They like having a Christmas tree and the fact that their Uncle Jack comes home to visit his brother, Atticus, during the holidays. On the other side of the coin, Scout and Jem don’t like going to their Aunt Alexandra’s house at Finch’s Landing or spending time with their irritating cousin, Francis Hancock.

During Christmas 1934, Uncle Jack arrives home by train on Dec. 24, and Atticus has to pick him up at the railroad stop at Maycomb Junction. If you believe that fictional Maycomb County is loosely based on real-life Monroe County, then clues indicate that the railroad station at Maycomb Junction could have been in one of two likely places. It could have been located at the old railroad stop at Monroe Station, not far from downtown Monroeville, or possibly in Repton, which originated as an old railroad town.

When Uncle Jack steps off the train, a porter hands him “two long packages.” After supper that night, the family decorates the Christmas tree, and when Scout goes to bed, she dreams of what’s in the long packages. The next morning, when Scout and Jem rip into the packages, they discover that Atticus has given them air rifles for Christmas.

We go on to read that even though Atticus gave the air rifles to Scout and Jem as Christmas gifts, he won’t teach them how to shoot. That task is left to Uncle Jack, a medical doctor. Remember that elsewhere in the book, Miss Maudie Atkinson refers to Atticus as “One Shot Finch” because in his younger days, Atticus was considered the best shot in the county. Atticus has retained the skills, as we see in the dramatic scene where Atticus brings down a rabid dog with one shot from Sheriff Heck Tate’s Krag-Jørgensen rifle.

Atticus later tells Jem, “I’d rather you shoot at tin cans in the back yard, but I know you’ll go after birds. Shoot all the blue jays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.” Scout had never heard Atticus say that it was a sin to do something, so she asks her neighbor, Miss Maudie, about it.

“Your father’s right,” Maudie said. “Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”

These paragraphs not only give us the book’s title, but they also convey the novel’s central message: It is a sin to harm or kill the innocent. A deep reading of the book shows us that Maycomb is full of “mockingbirds.” These innocents include Jem, Scout, Boo Radley and, of course, the falsely convicted Tom Robinson.