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In his Civil War diary, Private Alfred Bellard of the Fifth New Jersey Infantry Regiment wrote about the attempt his unit made to celebrate Christmas from the front line in Virginia. “In order to make it look [as] much like Christmas as possible, 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.,” Bellard wrote. The Christmas traditions we take for granted now were still new in the 1860s; the Christmas tree, which had been disdained as a pagan symbol in the nation’s early years, only started to appear in popular Christmas imagery in 1850.Accordingly, soldiers in both the Union and Confederate armies were eager to cling to those traditions,…

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