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It
hasn't escaped the attention of many that the traditions
associated with holiday celebrations in the United States
today began during the Civil War. Without
a doubt, it was the loneliness and insecurities of war that
prompted citizens and soldiers alike to re-create the solace
and comfort of the homes they left behind. They did this by re-establishing familiar European traditions,
thus creating the illusion of love and peace at a time when
very little of that existed in their daily lives.
Christmas had
been celebrated in Europe with eating, drinking, and dancing. It
was the Puritans who attempted to end this indulgent behavior,
and did it successfully when they came to America. With
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 our 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
religious revival of the mid 19th century also
added to the desire to unite, celebrate, and recognize Christmas.
Christmas cards,
carols, special foods, holding winter dances, all date back
to the late 1850s. During
the Civil War, it was common to cut down fir and pine trees
and take them into the home. They usually were tabletop
size and often arranged with 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 1861, Thomas Nast was a German immigrant working as a writer
and artist at Harper’s
Weekly. When
he was tasked to provide a drawing to accompany Clement Clark
Moore's 1821 poem, T'was the Night Before Christmas, he called upon his Bavarian childhood
to create our modern image of Santa Claus. His cherubic Santa--thin by today’s standards--was depicted
bringing gifts of Harper's to
the soldiers, making Nast the first to combine imagery (Santa
Claus) and commercialism (selling Harper’s)
into the American marketplace.
Santa brought
children gifts and gifts were always home-made. Children
were satisfied 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 bringing food to the starving families in the war-ravaged
Georgia countryside.
The
most famous Christmas gift of the 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, wasn't the guns, the ammunition or the cotton,
but the beginning of the end of the Civil War.
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