Book Review: Debunking The Yule Log Myth: The Disturbing History of a Plantation Legend

Debunking the Yule Log Myth: The Disturbing History of a Plantation Legend. By Robert E. May. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2025. Hardcover, 204 pp. $27.00.

Reviewed by Sarah Kay Bierle

Debunking the Yule Log Myth: The Disturbing History of a Plantation Legend is a book about the Christmas season, but also so much more—making it an insightful read for any time of year. Author Robert E. May takes a southern holiday folklore legend to task and guides the reader through layers of historiography to uncover the facts.

Yule log stories are sprinkled plentifully in southern Christmas tales, and most follow a common pattern. As the tale goes, enslaved men selected a massive log and soaked it in water for weeks or months because as long as that Yule log burned (or smoked or sizzled) in the back of the hearth in the plantation’s “big house” the enslaved community had days of leisure. But is there historical evidence that this actually happened? And if there is no evidence of a water-soaked log and weeks of work-free happiness, who would invent and perpetuate this story . . . and why?

Building off of his research and previous book Yuletide In Dixie: Slavery, Christmas, and Southern Memory (University of Virginia Press, 2019), May’s new book takes a microhistory approach, focusing on a popular story and sifting through its origins in the historiography.

The embers of the story are found not in the facts of the fireplace, but rather in the myth-making of happy plantations, and tied to the Lost Cause narrative. May sorts through the white southern writers who spun legend and convincingly lays out why these writers wanted to paint slavery in the glow of happy memory. However, politics and power also played into the making of the legend: “Lurking behind the quirky, colorful prose of Gilded Age Yule log stories was a deep-seated urge among white southerners to cast themselves, their recent political history, and their racial biases in as positive a light as possible.” (41-42)

While some of the Yule log tale writers may be new names to Civil War book readers, there is biographical information in the chapters to provide helpful context. One writer’s name will especially stand out, though: “La Salle Pickett,” wife of Confederate General George Pickett. Her stories about antebellum Christmas memories changed, sometimes plagiarized, and rarely added up to the known facts of her childhood, but she was in the front ranks with other female writers to craft a Christmas memory with warmth and cheer beyond the dark realities of the season during slavery for both enslaved and enslaver. May also explores how Black writers wrote or fell silent on the subject of Yule logs and why this matters in the context of the Reconstruction Era and Gilded Age society and politics.

The style of the book takes readers on a detective journey, almost as if sitting beside the author and making the discoveries with him. “But, wait, what about?” is easy to ask and here come fresh clues as the pages turn. The approach is exploratory, rather than preachy—inviting the reader to examine and reconsider. Rather than accusing or a blaming a reader who may have encountered and believed the Yule log stories, May guides through an understanding of why these stories became so engrained in the popular memory image of antebellum Christmas.

This book will be particularly helpful to readers interested in microhistories, antebellum and post-Civil War southern culture and memory, holiday history, and slavery in historical memory. Readers with an interest in women’s roles in historical memory in the post-Civil War South will also find certain sections and chapters of interest.

The stories of Yule logs woven with the memory theme of “happy plantations” have been long burning in popular literature and in seasonal interpretation at some historic sites. It is time for that myth-soaked soaking log to crack. This book provides the opportunity and the citations to help with that breakthrough. As the smoke clears, it will be easier to understand why stories like the Yule log were crafted and to take a more honest look at the realities of the Christmas season in the South during the antebellum period and the way people during the Civil War and beyond wanted to remember . . . or forget.