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It
hasn't escaped the attention of many that the traditions
associated with Christmas celebrations in the United States
today began during the Civil War. Without
a doubt, it was the loneliness and insecurities of war
felt by citizens and soldiers alike that created a need
for them to seek solace and security. They
found it in part by re-establishing familiar European traditions. This
created 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 view 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. Even
before the Civil War, it was common to cut Christmas trees
and take them into the home, although they were tabletop
size, and usually were 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 with providing a drawing to accompany Clement
Clark Moore's 1821 poem, 'Twas the Night Before Christmas, he called upon his Bavarian childhood
to create our modern image of Santa Claus. His cherubic (but thin by today's standards) Santa 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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