I love Christmas music. Every year after Thanksgiving I only listen to stations that have Christmas music in my car. I love to hear the voices of people like Nat King Cole, Bing Crosby, Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme, Frank Sinatra, and Johnny Mathis singing classic Christmas songs. I am reminded of just how great these professional singers really were. This year I noticed one station playing Christmas music even before Thanksgiving, but that’s too early even for me.

About 135 years ago a civil war soldier got off the train at the depot in Statesville.  He had just been released from a Union prisoner of war camp at Point Lookout in Maryland after signing the Oath of Allegiance on June 11, 1865.  He was a probably a happy young man when he stepped off that train and looked around at the then small village town of Statesville.

February is Black History Month and it’s hard to think of Black History Month without the word “slavery” entering your mind at some point. Slavery, like the Holocaust, is a painful subject and I tend to think of them only in a historical context. There is a book though in the Local History Department at the Iredell County Public Library that brings it home. “Samuel Hall, 47 Years a Slave; A Brief Story of His Life Before and After Freedom Came to Him” was first published in 1912 when Sam was 94. “The book quotes Sam recalling, “I was born May 7^th, 1818, in Iredell County, N.C. of slave parents, whose forefathers were full-blooded Africans.”