Recalling the winter snow settling over Virginia’s western Tidewater, southern local colorist Thomas Nelson Page felt memory stir—from the firelight and candle-glow that spilled through frosted windows, to the scent of evergreens and mistletoe that signalled, on Christmas Eve, the arrival of “The Holidays” on his family’s plantation.1 Beginning in the 1880s, former enslavers and their descendants reached instinctively for these fragments of sensory nostalgia when they recalled Christmas under slavery.2
Their memoirs—circulated in regional magazines, serialized in local newspapers, and issued by national publishers—often included scenes of abundance and plenty: a “world of eatables” and a “big flowing bowl of eggnog, renewed daily,” seasonal greenery and other bright decorations, and a repertoire of songs set to banjo and fiddle music that “floated on the air by day and night.”3 Yet such scenes do not capture the passive recordings of memory; they narrate a carefully curated nostalgia, fashioned by white southerners in a post-Civil War climate of economic instability and racial tension, meant to cast the Old South as a timeless bastion of social order and cultural continuity, where seasonal traditions and family rituals were deeply rooted in the fabric of plantation life. Christmas, in these accounts, was a stage on which plantation paternalism and an imagined interracial harmony were theatrically performed.
The genre of postbellum-plantation-lifewriting exhibits a remarkable predictability, with authors drawing on a broadly consistent set of rhetorical strategies. Former enslavers writing in the late nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth—figures such as Susan Dabney Smedes, James Battle Avirett, and scores of lesser-known memoirists—describe Christmas as “a gala time,” when the plantation family, white and Black, supposedly came together in celebration of “that blessed queen of all the plantation highdays and holidays.”4 In this context, former enslavers routinely asserted that the plantation’s enslaved workforce—the servants and laborers whom they labeled ‘our people’—looked forward to Christmas celebrations with a naïve, almost child-like anticipation.
Their narratives linger especially on the custom of ‘Christmas Gif,’ a ritual through which enslaved people were given a small token—often fruit, nuts, or candy—from the enslaving household, alongside clothing, shoes, or extra rations. These “gestures of deference” were framed as evidence of the enslaver’s munificence, even though some gifts—garments cut out and sewn on the plantation and ready-made footwear items—were annual necessities withheld until the year’s end.5 These exchanges, designed to secure subordinates’ loyalty, became symbolic—at least as plantation memoirists claimed—of the “mutual relations of kindness and confidence” that, in their view, characterized “the old regimé” but had been severed by emancipation and freedom.6
By the late nineteenth century, Christmas at home had become a celebrated site of emotional resonance. Its associations with children, family, and ritual made it an ideal vehicle for the postwar memory projects of dispossessed planter-class families and other conservative elites, who wove such representations into the broader fabric of the Lost Cause.7
In this context, many plantation memoirists strike a wistful, almost elegiac tone, mourning not only the end of the plantation system but the loss of their own youth. As Margaret Devereux of Virginia recalled, “Merrily the Christmas went by,” each one “followed by others as merry,” the seasons “turning childhood into maturity, and maturity into old age.”8 Christmas became a portal to a world where those who had enslaved others could re-experience—however fleetingly in memory—the sense of power and status once reinforced by familiar rituals. Yet their nostalgia was unstable. Former enslavers writing in the years following Reconstruction often contrasted the “order” of antebellum Christmases with what they portrayed as the disorder of the present. For example, Devereux recounted that the enslaved workers on her grandfather’s plantation showed “deep obeisance,” marked by a “scrape of the foot,” when receiving their Christmas Day payment for crops grown in their limited free hours. “What a contrast between those happy, sleek, laughing faces and the sullen, care-worn, ill-fed ones of now!” she pointedly remarked. Memoirists’ portrayals of the formerly enslaved—who now appeared “haunted,” were susceptible to “heartache and worry,” or for whom emancipation had “proven a cheat and a snare” —suggested that freedom had, as H. M. Hamill put it, ruined the “singular beauty of the social system of the Old South.”9 In doing so, former enslavers and their kin—writing decades after the events they described—transformed the plantation Christmas into a symbol of lost mastery, and of a social order they believed had melted away.
Winter—and Christmas especially—offered former enslavers a vocabulary of warmth and closeness through which they recast dominion as care and softened the image of slavery. Yet the glow of their nostalgia obscures more than it reveals. Their memoirs tell us less about the antebellum southern Christmas and more about what former enslavers needed it to be in a world that no longer affirmed their power.
1 Thomas Nelson Page, Social Life in Old Virginia (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1897), 82, 85, 92.
2 Robert E. May, Yuletide in Dixie: Slavery, Christmas, and Southern Memory (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019), 202.
3 M. Hamill, The Old South: A Monograph (Nashville: Smith and Lamar, [1904]), 40; Mrs. Roger A. Pryor, My Day: Reminiscences of a Long Life (New York: Macmillan, 1909), 77-78; Susan Dabney Smedes, Memorials of a Southern Planter (Baltimore: Cushings and Bailey, 1887), 161.
4 Cornelia Branch Stone, “Vivid Reminiscences of the Old Plantation,” Confederate Veteran, 20 (December 1912), 569; James Battle Avirett, The Old Plantation: How We Lived in Great House and Cabin Before the War (New York: F. Tennyson Neely, 1901), 57.
5 Stephen Nissenbaum, The Battle for Christmas (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), 273.
6 Q. Mallard, Plantation Life Before Emancipation (Richmond: Whittet and Shepperson, 1892), vii.
7 Penne L. Restad, Christmas in America: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 80.
8 Margaret Devereux, Plantation Sketches (Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1906), 132.
9 Hamill, Old South, 18, 31-32.