Christmas in the American Civil War the Union blockade, and one little girl, Sallie Brock Putnam, plotted the course Santa Claus would have to take to avoid it. Sometimes fathers on both sides were allowed furlough, and children were said to react to their fathers as if seeing "near strangers". Excuses for a lack of Santa included Yankees having shot him. Thomas Nast, who used his editorial cartoons to issue Union propaganda, made several illustrations reflecting the war. The one for Christmas Eve 1862, which ran in the January 1863 issue of Harper's Weekly shows a wife on one side praying though a window in one
Thomas the Tank Engine and connecting rods are therefore not externally visible. Awdry was unsatisfied with one detail of the illustration — the fact that the front end of his footplate featured a downward slope, which meant that his front and back buffers were at different levels. This was an illustrator's mistake that was perpetuated in subsequent books. The accident, in "Thomas Comes to Breakfast" was partly devised as a means of correcting this. Thomas has always been shown with a curved front buffer beam in the television series. Unfortunately, despite creating the visual image of such an iconic character, Payne did not receive