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
The Christmas Album (Lynn Anderson album) Nashville country music songwriters of the day was enormously popular and became a Christmas classic itself among country music and American popular music fans. The album's opening song "Ding-A-Ling the Christmas Bell" was released as a single and at one point considered as a possible Christmas cartoon special but the project never got off the ground. The album was in print for a decade and, in the 1990s, Sony released limited quantities on CD with new cover art (the image shown above). In 2015 it was reissued on CD by the Real Gone Music label, with alternate charity single mixes