By Cecelia “CeCe” Redmond

September 2025

My foot rolled on the thick green skin of money and memories.

Last week, in the heart of Alabama—Red Level. I don’t think there’s even a red light in Red Level, but there are pecan orchards. Pecan trees on every road, their limbs burdened with gold: not just the golden meat inside each shell, but the payment per pound.

Here in L.A. (Lower Alabama), we call them pah-cahns, not pee-cans.

September is too early. October—the great raining-down of pecans begins. The sharp, sour, metallic scent from that single green nut under my foot brought a flood of memories.

When my brothers and I were kids, our job in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving and Christmas wasn’t wrapping gifts or stringing lights. It was gathering pecans.

“In the South, the street value of shelled pecans just before holiday baking season is roughly that of crack cocaine.”
— Celia Rivenbark

Southern sass meets culinary truth. Pecans are serious business.

Front of my grandmother’s house in Lower Alabama

Every spring, Granny had her own ritual. She’d drive a rusty iron nail into the trunks of the trees around her house — my grandparents’ place and any neighbor’s tree she could get to. “It feeds them iron,” she’d say with a nod, “makes the pecans sweeter, the harvest heavier.” We didn’t question it. We just believed. And come fall, when the pecans dropped in fat clusters, it seemed she was right.

The nuts and leaves left the trees bare, naked against winter winds. The chill of late October through the first frost of November we crunched through dried leaves on the ground and hunted for buried pecans. But it was our treasure to dig with the toe of our shoes, fingers and I remember the first spiraled wire at the end of a broomstick that picked up pecans without having to bend over.

We’d make the rounds — to both of our grandparents’ houses, to the family property in Spring Hill. And if we were lucky enough to ride up to Glenwood, Alabama, where our great-grandmother lived on nearly 1,200 acres, it was a gold mine for my brothers and me.

While we collected, Mammie, Momma, and Granny worked the nutcrackers. Two of them sat permanently mounted at the end of the kitchen counter, clicking and snapping without pause. The garbage bins overflowed with cracked shells until they spilled onto the floor. The women cracked, handed off the pecans, and we kids went to work — picking out the little sour threads that clung stubbornly to the meat. Of course, plenty went straight from hand to mouth.

Freshly shelled pecans ready for recipes, roasting, or selling

Grandmother Redmond and Great-Grandmother Copeland — pecan trees in the background

The major portion of shelling always happened the weekend before Thanksgiving. While we kids picked and sorted, Mammie would slide a baking pan full of fresh pecans into the oven for a slow roast. The kitchen filled with laughter and love, with oven-warmth wrapping around us like a blanket. And always, always, the aroma of roasting pecans. That smell baked itself into my memory as much as the nuts baked in the pan.

“If we don’t have the pecan pie we have every year, then it just won’t be Christmas.”
— Faith Hill

Holiday rituals, stitched together with sugar and memory.

When the baking was done and the snacking slowed, whatever was left belonged to us kids. We’d bag the nuts, divide them evenly, and get them ready for Thames Pecan or one of the other buyers. That was our ritual every year. And the money we earned wasn’t just money — it was Christmas. Our gifts, our giving, our independence all shelled out of those brown and green husks.

Even now, as I sit here typing these words, the scent rises again — rich, warm, and sweet — and I am back in that kitchen, surrounded by family, shells crunching underfoot, the taste of Christmas taking shape.

Memory Becomes Medicine

Those pecans were more than food. They were freedom, family, and Christmas wrapped in a shell.

Memory becomes medicine.

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