Yuletide in Dixie
Slavery, Christmas, and Southern Memory
Robert E. May, 2019
Yuletide in Dixie is a pathbreaking book that covers both how enslavers and enslaved people in the South before the Civil War celebrated the Christmas season and how those celebrations and experiences have been misrepresented and romanticized in American popular culture ever since. Although historical treatments have generally dwelled on all the feasts, booze, presents, and special privileges masters gave slaves over the holidays, this book shows, in contrast, that whippings, separations of Black families, and other abuses of enslaved people persisted over the holidays. Some slaves weren’t even given a day off for Christmas. Rather than being content with their situations, as so many accounts of Christmas in the Old South suggest, many slaves spent Christmas hoping to capitalize on their enslavers’ immersion in holiday partying to escape their bondage. Most importantly, the book shows that masters betrayed their own subconscious understandings of the cruelties of their labor system by falling prey to mass panics about slave rebellions over the holidays. Clearly, they weren’t confident in their own professions that slaves were happy, a staple in slaveholders’ propaganda. This book deepens our understanding of enslaved culture in the Old South and has influenced Christmas programming during holiday tours at tourist plantation destinations.
