For young Ed McCree, enslaved on a thousand-acre Georgia cotton plantation, Christmas and New Year’s Day 150 years ago were like none he’d ever known. After time off for Christmas and feasts with young pigs, cattle, and peaches (still summer-sweet because they were packed in wheat straw and cottonseed that kept them fresh), New Year’s Day typically meant that McCree would be again forced to carry buckets of water to the men and women working in the fields.
The difference that December 1864? Wi
