"Merry Christmas" — Harper's Weekly Holiday Plate, December 30, 1865

This multi-panel Christmas plate, almost certainly drawn by Thomas Nast, arranges holiday vignettes around two large circular portraits: a curly-haired girl clutching a doll before a garland-hung mantel, and a fur-clad Saint Nicholas — Nast's signature invention — caught mid-list. Smaller panels show a family dancing under gaslit lanterns and a street scene in falling snow. The panoramic bottom register is political: figures labeled "US" parade alongside what appear to be Reconstruction-era allegorical characters, including men in costume carrying a trident, with a classical portico at left occupied by watching dignitaries. Published five months after Appomattox, the plate threads domestic sentiment with anxious national reunion — Christmas peace set against the unresolved question of what the restored Union would actually mean. The crowd caricatures in the lower panel carry the broad ethnic shorthand common to illustrated weeklies of the period, rendering non-Anglo figures with exaggerated features that reflected, and reinforced, the nativist visual vocabulary Nast himself used throughout his career.