Christmas comes around faithfully year after year, but it doesn’t always find us well. Sometimes life circumstances find us hurting, grieving, and otherwise having a hard time and not able to celebrate the holidays the way we might like. Last Blogmas, I wrote a little about dealing with grief during the holidays.
During one of the nation’s darkest periods- the Civil War- Christmas as a holiday was still a relatively new celebration in America and hadn’t yet become the national holiday that we know it as today. It wouldn’t be declared a federal holiday until 1870- five years after the end of the Civil War.
Some historians credit the efforts made during the war to bring holiday cheer to a hurting nation as being the foundation that solidified Christmas from a disjointed collection of traditions into the more cohesive national holiday we know today. Illustrator Thomas Nast is responsible for our modern portrait of Santa Claus as a bearded, jolly old soul from his political cartoons of the day. Along with his illustrations, Harper’s Weekly published a variety of Christmas stories in the hopes of boosting morale of soldiers and their loved ones at home. With more attention on the holiday, traditions such as a family holiday meal and gift giving began to become more popular.
But it was really countless individuals across the nation whose names we don’t know who worked to make Christmas a little more bearable during those bleak days that really set the standard for making the holiday one that focused on family, hope, peace, and love in the midst difficult days. There are many stories of people donating hams, turkeys, and other food for soldiers to enjoy on Christmas Day. Nurses in hospitals worked to prepare special meals. Carols were sung around fires. Christmas trees were decorated with salt pork and hardtack. A thousand little moments that shone a glimmer of light in the darkness.
President Lincoln did not do much to celebrate Christmas and treated it like any other work day most years. Early in his career as a politician in Illinois, there was a vote to take the day off and he voted against it, feeling it would be cheating tax payers to take a day off. Of course, Christmas didn’t become a federal holiday until 5 years after his death, so it makes sense he might treat it like any other day.
But he did take part in some special celebrations in 1862.
If Christmas 1861 was difficult as the first Christmas of the war, Christmas 1862 was even more difficult as most soldiers and families had been telling themselves that the war would be over by that Christmas. But it was nowhere close to over and thousands of families found themselves once more separated for the holidays.
That Christmas in 1862, there were mass efforts to make Christmas special for wounded soldiers far from home. Churches, society groups, and countless volunteers came together to provide Christmas dinners for the many hospitals around Washington. Elizabeth Smith, wife of the Secretary of the Interior helped to organize all the meals and collected donations from businesses and individuals, including from the President and Mrs. Lincoln. Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln visited at least two different hospitals that Christmas to spend time with some of the wounded who couldn’t be with their families.
It’s easy to dismiss these gestures as little consolation given the devastation that was to be found in those hospitals. Probably to some it was. But I think it highlights the reason that Christmas as a holiday became more solidified in America during those days and continues to endure today. Beyond the food, gifts, and decorations, there are ideals at the heart of Christmas that every human heart longs to embrace, no matter how cynical or hardened by life circumstances that heart might have become.
Some years, we have to work a little harder to find those Christmas ideals. Twenty-four hour news cycles fill our minds with stories of all the world’s injustices, lack of human kindness, and out right hatred. Those stories are often the loudest, but they aren’t the only stories out there. Right now, countless individuals, whose names we don’t know, are busy trying to make someone else’s holiday season a little brighter. They are buying gifts for Angel Tree projects. They’re giving money to a Salvation Army Santa. They are making a meal for people who would otherwise not get a holiday meal. They are visiting lonely nursing home residents. They are bringing little glimmers of light to a dark world.
“I have found that it is the small everyday deed of ordinary folks that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love.”- J.R.R Tolkien
The world doesn’t stop being the same old dark place that it always is just because it’s Christmas. But thanks to the “small everyday deeds of ordinary folks” maybe we can keep that darkness at bay.
Rachel F. Jean 
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