The first Christmas season commercial that made me cry was Folgers in 1986. Research tells me the iconic “Peter comes home for Christmas” continued to be a Folgers’ staple for 17 years.
Everything about that commercial reminded me of my mom’s house in the small west Tennessee town of Lexington where I grew up. She was a Folgers loyalist, and the coffee pot was always perking in the kitchen. It would have been hard to get up earlier than my mom but had I been able to sneak into the house and get the coffee going, the smell would have brought her immediately to the kitchen.
We had a thoroughly modern house, built brand-new in 1960 after my father died, and we moved to my mom’s hometown. We began our life in Lexington living with my grandparents on a dead-end street that sided up to a big field. Three houses would someday fill that field, but for most of my growing-up years, it was our playground.
The field, you see, stretched between Mamaw and Papaw’s house on Holmes Street and our new house on Dixie. You had to cross Dixie Street to get to our house, but it was a pretty sleepy street. Mother built our house there, one door down from her brother and across that field from her parents.
The field was our “pocket park.” Someone kept it mowed fairly well, and it was the neighborhood site of all manner of sports games, hide-and-seek, kick-the-can and hours of catching lighting bugs at dusk.
While the field was the center of our world, the kitchen was the center of Mother’s. The coffee pot was a tall, stainless steel GE brand that mother called her percolator. It percolated, for sure, and we all knew to look for the dark liquid to start popping to the center of the glass knob on the top. When it did, we would holler toward the back of the house where mother was making beds, “Momma, coffee’s ready!”
The percolator made 12 cups of coffee at a time. Mother always made a full pot, and there was seldom any left by lunch. Her siblings and best friends knew the coffee was always on and always hot at Frances’ house, and the door from the carport to the kitchen opened often for coffee drinkers to stop by in the mornings.
One Christmas after I was married and the children were still small, Mother unwrapped a brand-new Mr. Coffee from her friend Warren on Christmas Eve. It was amazing, and we all wished we had thought of this perfect gift. To make it even more amazing, it was fully programmable. Warren would set the timer before he left Mom’s house at night, and she would wake up to coffee already brewing in the pot.
She marveled at it and assured all that it was the perfect gift. She set it up immediately in the kitchen.
And she used it every morning from then on.
At night, however, when the house was quiet except for the night owls – my mom and me – she would get out the old percolator, and we would have a cup of coffee.
“No need to mess up the timer on Mr. Coffee,” she would tell me, with a small smile, giving the old percolator a shine with the dish towel as she spooned in the Folgers.
I’m not sure what my mother would have thought about Starbucks, but I have never had a better cup of coffee than the ones from the percolator.