A CONFEDERATE CHRISTMAS.
The following is an account of a Christmas dinner held under the rule of the confederate government in 1861. The individual who helped to celebrate the day, herewith gives the testimony which enables us to set before you, what Christmas meant in those days, and what it cost:
"The dinner of 1861," he says, "did not differ materially from its predecessors in the 'piping times of peace,' and though in 1862 the feast was home-made, it was enjoyable. Turkeys were only eleven dollars a piece, and salt had fallen to thirty-three cents a pound. The yule log was attainable at fifteen dollars per cord; wines were to be had by the very rich, and sorghum rum, or apple, peach, or black-berry brandy, cost thirty dollars a gallon. A few toys were left in the stores in the cities, and fire-crackers, essential to the southern festival, were five dollars a pack. By 1863, the closest search of Santa Claus revealed no play-things, and fire-crackers indicated great wealth, or reckless extravagance. The few turkeys in the market were forty and fifty dollars a piece; whisky, or sorghum rum, for egg-nog, cost seventy-five or eighty dollars per gallon; sugar was five and ten dollars a pound, and flour one hundred and twenty five dollars per barrel. With gold at 2,800, a plain Christmas dinner for a large family, cost two or three hundred dollars. In 1864, when Christmas fell on Sunday, gold was at 5,000: flour was six hundred dollars per barrel; sugar, two dollars an ounce; salt, one dollar a pound; butter, forty dollars; beef, thirty-five to forty dollars; wood, was one hundred dollars a cord. A Christmas dinner at a country house, near Richmond, is described thus: The four gentleman were in uniform, the three ladies in home spun. They had for dinner a three hundred dollar ham and the last turkey on the plantation, valued at one hundred and seventy-five dollars, with one hundred dollars worth of cabbage, potatoes and hominy. Corn bread was served, made of meal at eighty dollars a bushel, and salt at one dollar a pound. The desert was black molasses at sixty dollars a gallon, and after a cup of tea, real tea, worth one hundred dollars a pound, treasured up for the occasion, as a surprise, and not sassafras; there was coffee at discretion made from sweet potatoes cut into little squares, toasted and ground down."