'Tis the Season for Southern Cookin': A Christmas Feast

Merry Christmas! We hope you're enjoying a wonderful day with family and friends, lots of presents, and delicious food. As you sit down for your own Christmas feast this evening, we've got a holiday meal to offer you as well. We've cooked up you a lavish Christmas dinner, based on a Christmas menu listed in Atlanta's own The Dixie cook-book (1883). Below you'll find the full dinner menu, with recipes waiting for you after the jump. Enjoy! 

A Christmas Dinner Menu

Raw oysters served with sliced lemon

Turtle soup

Baked fresh fish

Roast turkey garnished with fried oysters

Mashed potatoes

Lima beans

Pickled beets

Mayonnaise of chicken salad

Celery

Cranberry sauce

Christmas plum pudding with rich sauce

Mince pie

Sponge and lady cake mixed

Fruit and nuts

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas, dear readers! May your day be filled with everything that brings you joy! 

 

A Gone with the Wind Christmas by gwtwscrapbook featuring diamond earrings

Christmas Trees in the Era of Gone with the Wind

In 1870, Christmas was proclaimed an official federal holiday, in an effort to unite into one celebration a country that had been divided by a war. The foundations to this project lay in a series of elements that were already common to Christmas celebrations both in the North and in the South and that ultimately contributed to forging an American identity. It's on one of these elements that we are going to focus today: the Christmas tree.

The first Christmas trees appeared in the German communities of Pennsylvania in the first decades of the 19th century. Multiple accounts and sketches survive of these decorated trees, including a charming announcement from the Society of Bachelors in York, Pennsylvania  that in 1823 was promising to decorate its Christmas tree so that it would "be superb, superfine, superfrostical, shnockagastical, double refined, mill'twill'd made of Dog's Wool, Swingling Tow, and Posnum fur; which cannot fail to gratify taste." (Because, seriously, who wouldn't want a Christmas tree that is superfrostical and snockagastical at the same time?) The custom quickly became a point of fascination for Americans in the neighboring states and Christmas trees began to appear in parlors in New York and Boston.

By the early 1840s, the phenomenon of the Christmas tree had started to move southward.  In 1842, the citizens of Williamsburg, Virginia were buzzing with excitement to see the very first Christmas tree known to state history. It was Charles Minnegerode, a German-born professor of classics at William and Mary College, who introduced the first Christmas tree that holiday season, bringing over an evergreen to the home of his friend, Judge Nathaniel Beverly Tucker. Fortunately for us, a first-hand account of this 'inaugural' Southern Christmas tree has not been lost to the sands of time. A young Sarah Pryor, who you might remember from her account of the daring hoop skirt blockade runner, was on hand to recall the event in her memoir:

"The beautiful Christian custom of lighting a Christmas tree—bringing 'the glory of Lebanon, the fir tree, the pine tree, and the box,' to hallow our festival —had not yet obtained in Virginia. We had heard much of the German Christmas tree, but had never seen one. Lizzie Gilmer, who was to marry a younger son of the house, was intimate with the Tuckers, and brought great reports of the preparation of the first Christmas tree ever seen in Virginia.

"I had not yet been allowed to attend the parties of 'grown-up' people, but our young friend John Randolph Tucker was coming of age on Christmas Eve, and great pressure was brought to bear upon my aunt to permit me to attend the birthday celebration... The tree loaded with tiny baskets of bonbons, each enriched with an original rhyming jest or sentiment, was magnificent, the supper delicious, the speeches and poems from the two old judges (Tucker) were apt and witty."
--excerpted from My Day: Reminiscences of a Long Life by Sarah Pryor (1909)

Throughout the 1840s and early 185os, Christmas trees continued to grow in popularity, spurred by three very powerful forces in Victorian America: religion, commerce, and the publishing industry. Sunday schools began to incorporate Christmas trees into their holiday season festivities. The cheerful evergreens served as an enchanting reminder to young children about the Christian messages of renewal and promise at the heart of the Christmas season. In addition, resourceful teachers constructed games based around the Christmas tree, where pupils would receive small trinkets or sweets from the tree's branches for correctly reciting Bible verses.

Outside of the religious sphere, the world of commerce had also started to capitalize on the novel concept of the Christmas tree. Christmas trees were likely first sold for profit as early as 1840, when an intrepid farmer's wife from New Jersey set out for New York City with a cart full of trees for sale. By 1851, one of the first Christmas tree markets in New York City was set up in Washington Square by a gentleman by the name of Marc Carr. Other large cities soon adopted Christmas tree markets of their own.

The publishing world also served to widen the reach of the Christmas tree. Advertisements for Christmas trees started to cropped up in newspapers and magazines began to include holiday stories about Christmas trees. But there was one publication that played a greater role than all others in popularizing the Christmas tree in the United States. Any guesses about which one?

Black Christmas in the Antebellum South

"For the first time in their lives the negroes were able to get all the whisky they might want. In slave days, it was something they never tasted except at Christmas, when each one received a 'drap' along with his gift."

--Gone with the Wind, Chapter XXXVII

Starting with 1820, criticism of slavery and of the Southern lifestyle based on it became more and more pronounced, as the problem of the former expanding to the new Western territories arose. Faced with this pressure, the Southerners countered by creating a "cavalier" myth of the South that would help define and defend its peculiar institutions, and Christmas was to play a central part to this end. As P.L. Renstadt notes in Christmas in America. A History, "Christmas became a key element in expounding the southern ideal, one in which the perceived virtues of the plantation system could be symbolized and ritualized. In the boldest ways, the southern Christmas provided a picture of harmony amid increasing tension."

The relationship between master and slaves and the way slaves themselves celebrated Christmas became essential in defending the perceived rightness of the state of affairs in the South. Memoirs and letters use Christmas as an example that the reality of slavery was much less harsh than the Abolitionists imagined. Christmas in the antebellum South was ultimately a charade of benevolent paternalism, glorified to the limits of caricature in stories like William Gilmore Simms' Maize in Milk. A Christmas Story of the South, where noble planters with names like Colonel Openheart ignore their own financial difficulties to buy the old and infirm slaves of neighboring plantations to save them from being sold down river. 

And since noblesse oblige, this expensive act of charity couldn't shadow in the least the lavish celebrations of Christmas on the Carolinian plantation Maize in Milk. It was more important than ever to keep the old traditions alive in times of hardship, Colonel Openheart proclaimed to his somewhat more prudent wife. On Christmas day, he gathered all of his slaves -both old and new - to give them the gifts he had bought from them in the city. These included shawls, caps, razors, hatchets, knives, scissors and cases of pin and needles, but no money, for it would have been "spent perniciously at some neighboring groggery."

Poster of the Week

Most of our featured posters, and most Gone with the Wind posters in general, tend to focus solely on Scarlett and Rhett. To make up for that (and just in case you were bored with our favorite couple. Though, how could you ever be?), today we chose a set of 11x14 theater lobby cards from 1939 that show all of the four main characters, along with a title card with credits. You can leave thanks for the chance to gaze at Ashley Wilkes here.

 Movie images from moviegoods.com. Poster information cited from Herb Bridges' "Frankly My Dear..."

White Christmas in the Antebellum South

"I'm mighty glad Georgia waited till after Christmas before it seceded or it would have ruined the Christmas parties, too." 

--Gone with the Wind, Chapter I

“'Do you remember,' he said and under the spell of his voice the bare walls of the little office faded and the years rolled aside and they were riding country bridle paths together in a long-gone spring…  There was the far-off yelping of possum dogs in the dark swamp under cool autumn moons and the smell of eggnog bowls, wreathed with holly at Christmas time and smiles on black and white faces.” 

--Gone with the Wind, Chapter LIII

In the years following the Civil War, Southerners, both black and white, would look back at the old plantation Christmases with overwhelming nostalgia. For the former, like for Scarlett and Ashley, it was the charm and security of the wealthy antebellum days that they were crying after, the self-assured grace of their old lifestyle which had vanished in the throes of war and Reconstruction. For the latter, for the slaves upon whose labor and confinement that illusion had been built, the old Christmases stood out as bright spots from their life before Emancipation, as occasions when they'd receive small gifts from their masters, the permission to drink and, more importantly, when they didn't have to work.

In writing today's post I tried to bring you one side of the story first and see how Christmas was celebrated among the white Southern nobility. Tomorrow we will look at the way slaves themselves celebrated Christmas and try to see how and why Christmas became a central element in establishing the myth of the Old South as an untroubled world of chivalrous masters and happy slaves. To bring you a taste of 19th century Christmas celebrations, I've relied on a handful of period sources, as well as on Penne L. Restad's excellent Christmas in America. A History. You will find all of them listed at the end.

And now, let's roll!

Doppelganger Dresses, Part 17: Scarlett's Red and White Christmas Dress

Fresh on the heels of Scarlett's green Christmas dress, the Doppelganger Dresses series is delighted to bring you Scarlett's other Christmastime outfit from Gone with the Wind: the charming red and white gown she wears to say goodbye to Ashley as he returns to war. This dress is one of my all-time favorite costumes from Gone with the Wind, and I think Walter Plunkett did an inspired job in creating it.  It hits all the right notes: it's playful without being over the top, girlish without being too demure, festive without screaming "CHRISTMAS" at the top of its lungs.

Little surprise here, it's also grounded in historical style. After the jump, you'll find two dresses from period fashion plates that bear close resemblance to Scarlett's own Christmas gown. One important difference to note: both of our period selections feature long sleeves, as was standard for day dress styles. Plunkett actually did toy with a long-sleeved version of this costume, but opted for the short-sleeved version instead, which he felt made Scarlett look more youthful. 

The fashions are waiting for you after the jump. Check them out and, as always, let us know what you think. Which one reminds you most of Scarlett's red and white Christmas dress?