Catching Up on Your ECW Christmas

If you’ve been wrapped up in the hubbub of the holiday and are just now settling down to catch up on your ECW reading, here’s a quick recap of all our Christmas coverage, collected for you in one convenient spot:

On Dec. 15, Meg Groeling kicked off our Christmas offerings with “Christmas in Camp,” a poem reprinted from The Civil War Christmas Album (Philip Van Doren Stern, ed.).

On Dec. 17, Ashley Webb invited readers to “A Grand Christmas Ball.”

On Dec. 21, Meg Groeling followed up with another poem, this one from the Southern Illustrated News: “Santa Claus in the Confederacy” by Mary A. M’Crimmon

On Dec. 22, Edward Alexander offered a different perspective of Santa from the South: “Coal from Confederate Santa, Christmas 1864.”

For those who like brown paper packages tied up with string, Ashley Webb offered one of your favorite things on Dec. 23: “Sundry Boxes and Mysterious Parcels.”

On Dec. 24, guest contributor Richard Williams, Jr., shared the story of “One of America’s first Christmas Trees.”

On Dec. 25, Meg Groeling offered a hopeful postscript to our sesquicentennial coverage with her look at “The First Peacetime Christmas, 1865.”

As Civil War buffs know, William T. Sherman ended up on Abraham Lincoln’s “nice” list—and the South’s “naughty” list—by capping his March to the Sea by capturing Savannah, Georgia, on Dec. 22, 1864. Sherman presented the city to Lincoln as a Christmas present. As Sarah Kay Bierle recounted on Dec. 26, Lincoln responded to Sherman with a thank-you note.