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Many of the traditions associated with Christmas celebrations
in the United States today are related to the Civil War experience.
By re-establishing familiar European traditions and creating
some new ones, citizens and soldiers alike found solace from
the loneliness, insecurities, and heartbreak of war. This created
the illusion of love and peace at a time when very little of
that existed in their daily lives.
Christmas, like most social events, was widely celebrated in
Europe with eating, drinking, and dancing. The Puritans, however,
put an end to this indulgent behavior when they came to America.
On their arrival, Christmas became a serious occasion, the purpose
of which was to introspectively ponder sin and religious commitment.
It took almost 200 years for the country to move away from
this Puritan ethic and enjoy the holidays once more. Louisiana
was the first state to make Christmas a holiday in 1830, and
many states soon followed. Congress did not make Christmas a
federal holiday until 1870. The extensive religious revival
of the mid-19th century combined with the hardships of the Civil
War to instill the nation with a desire to unite, celebrate,
and recognize the joys of the Christmas season.
For the United States, the widespread customs of Christmas
cards, carols, special foods, and holding winter dances, all
date to about the 1850s. It was a feature story in Godey's Ladys'
Book, the Vogue of its day, which initiated the custom of Christmas
decorating. The story was about Queen Victoria and Prince Albert's
Christmas preparations, which included a Christmas tree. This
originally was a German custom Prince Albert brought to England
from his country of birth.
After that, Americans began to cut evergreens and take them
into the home as seasonal decorations. The trees were tabletop
size and usually were arranged with fruit, candles, other greenery
and mistletoe, all supposed to bring good luck to the household.
Union soldiers’ letters mention decorating their camp
Christmas trees with salt-pork and hard tack.
It was the development of the modern Santa Claus that embedded
Christmas into the American way of life. In 1862, German immigrant
Thomas Nast was working as a writer and artist at Harper’s
Weekly. When he was tasked to create a drawing to accompany
Clement Clark Moore’s 1821 poem, 'Twas the Night Before
Christmas, he reached back to his Bavarian childhood and the
result became our All-American Santa Claus. Nast depicted his
Santa as a Union man(!) , and also as cherubic and pot-bellied,
bringing gifts of Harper’s to the soldiers. This made
Nast the first to combine imagery (Santa Claus) and commercialism
(selling Harper’s) into the American marketplace.
The gifts Santa brought children during the Civil War always
were home made. In those days, children were happy to receive
just small hand-carved toys, cakes, oranges or apples. Many
Southern diaries tell the story of Santa running the blockaded
ports in Dixie to fill children’s stockings with what
little the parents could spare to make the day special for them.
Even General Sherman’s soldiers played Santa to impoverished
Southern children by attaching tree-branch antlers to their
horses and mules as they delivered food to the starving families
in the war-ravaged southern countryside.
The most famous Christmas gift of the Civil War was sent by
telegram from William Tecumseh Sherman to Abraham Lincoln on
December 22, 1864: “I beg to present you as a Christmas
gift, the city of Savannah, with 100 and 50 guns and plenty
of ammunition, also about 25,000 bales of cotton.” The
gift, of course, was not the guns, the ammunition, or the cotton,
but the beginning of the end of the Civil War.
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