Much to his surprise, Small obtained his leave while the applications of two officers were rejected.

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The most beloved symbol of the American family Christmas–the decorated Christmas tree–came into its own during the Civil War. Christmas trees had become popular in the decade before the war, and in the early 1860s, many families were beginning to decorate them. Illustrators working for the national weeklies helped popularize the practice by putting decorated table-top Christmas trees in their drawings.

It was only a matter of time before the Christmas tree made its way into military camps. Alfred Bellard of the 5th New Jersey remarked about the arrival of the newly popular Christmas icon to his camp along the lower Potomac River. “In order to make it look much like Christmas as possible,” he wrote, “a small tree was stuck up in front of our tent, decked off with hard tack and pork, in lieu of cakes and oranges, etc.” Sergeant Albert C. Harrison of the 14th New Jersey described for his mother a holiday dinner he attended near Fredericksburg, Maryland, the day after Christmas 1862. “I must tell you about their Christmas tree,” he wrote. “It was a splendid one. I saw some nice ones in New York when I lived there but I saw none equal to that.”

That same year, Union officer Walter Phelps, Jr., of the 22d New York, wrote to his wife to ask about the family’s first Christmas tree. “I presume Christmas must have been quite an occasion with you, more particularly as the Christmas tree was in vogue–” he wrote, “did Annie enjoy it–and how did the matter pass off?”

Notable residents of Richmond, during the final Christmas of the war, momentarily threw off the dark veil of impending doom and put on a merry holiday face for a gathering of children at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. President Jefferson Davis himself hosted the party with his wife Varina, and their children. Alice West Allen, age 11, and her siblings, who had been sent to Richmond as Major General Philip Sheridan’s men destroyed their native Shenandoah Valley, attended the event. She wrote that they had been invited to see “a Christmas tree given to President Davis’ children.”

The tree was a lovely holly laden with homemade candles and dolls made out of hickory nuts and Canton flannel; then there were cotton and Canton flannel rabbits, dog and cats, and numerous other presents all homemade, as was everything on the supper table–home-made coffee, tea, sugar, and everything. I never saw anything that looked so pretty to me.

Varina Davis committed her memories of the affair to paper three decades later. “When at last we reached the basement of St. Paul’s Church,” she wrote, “the tree burst upon their view like the realization of Aladdin’s subterranean orchard, and they were awed by the grandeur.” Her husband apparently even surrendered his normally prickly demeanor to the cheerful holiday spirit:

The orphans sat mute with astonishment until the opening hymn and prayer and the last Amen had been said, and they at a signal warily and slowly gathered around the tree to receive from a lovely young girl their allotted present.

The President became so enthusiastic that he undertook to help in the distribution, but worked such wild confusion giving everything asked for into outstretched hands, that we called a halt, so he contented himself with unwinding one or two tots from a network of strung popcorn in which they had become entangled and taking off all the apples he could when unobserved, and presenting them to smaller children….

Those soldiers who could not come home for Christmas touched base with their loved ones through letter-writing. And in the soldiers’ letters, it is common to find mentions of Santa Claus. Lieutenant Robert Gould Shaw of the 2d Massachusetts Infantry (before he became commander of the famous 54th Massachusetts Colored Regiment) penned a letter to his mother while on guard duty in Frederick, Maryland, on Christmas morning 1861. He recounted his holiday misadventure of trying to eat breakfast in the presence of the sleeping sergeant of the guard and proceeded with a tongue-in-cheek explanation for why he had not seen Santa Claus overnight:

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