Civil War Celebration

Our culminating unit Celebration was lots of fun! Earlier in the unit we'd talked about the new art of photography and photographers of the Civil War. Then I'd had the children take photos that told a story. We displayed them at our celebration.

Here's the invitation to our celebration, which was modeled after Lincoln's Second Inaugural Ball.

Here are the tickets—each admits one gentleman and two ladies! (These are pictures of the actual documents. It's cool to see how they really looked.)

We had one hoop skirt already, and I bought two more so all of the girls could dress up. They LOVED that! There was a great flurry of preparation all day long, doing their hair and getting all dressed.

They were lovely Civil War Belles!

Daisy did such pretty hairstyles for everyone.

And at the last moment they decided Clementine must be dressed up too, so they put her in this rather…Medieval-looking dress and a too-bit petticoat. She felt very grand!

Here are the guests arriving at the ball, the ladies on the arms of their gentlemen.

For some reason Gus felt this was appropriate attire.

We had a program to start everything off, where the children presented their Civil War Final Projects.

Ziggy hopped in at the last moment with a nice presentation on "what's in a Civil War Soldier's backpack."

Clementine added her two cents

Malachi presented "Babies of the Civil War"

And the other presentations can be read about in this post.

Next…the fancy buffet! I shortened the original menu a bit, but took all the menu items I did use from the original :) 

A great spread! For dessert I Mary Todd Lincoln's almond cake, which was surprisingly good! Very light because of the whipped egg whites, and with a nice almond flavor. It was dry a few days later, but not at all dry the day we made it. Here's the recipe…I actually blended up the almonds instead of just chopping them, so they were very fine!

Mary Todd Lincoln's White Almond Cake

Waiting politely for their food…unlike the guests at the real ball, who trampled over each other and made a huge mess when they descended upon the food, apparently!

After dinner we watched the silent movie The General with Buster Keaton (so good!) and then there was, of course, a little dancing!