This appropriately timed column is being reprinted.

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Christmas hasn’t always been the celebration time that it is today, especially for a planter who lived south of Vicksburg on Fisher’s Ferry road.

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The most consistent thing about Christmas for B.L.C. Wailes before the War Between the Sates was recording weather in his diary.

And the weather was inconsistent.

Each Christmas for most of the decade between 1852 and 1862 (he didn’t write in December 1857) Wailes not only wrote about the weather but also made a few notations about the events of the day, most often having nothing to do with Christmas.

Wailes lived part of the time in Warren County on Fonsylvania Plantation and the rest of the time at Meadvilla, his home in Washington, Miss., or at nearby Propinquity Plantation.

His writings reveal that Christmas weather, then as now, was not easily predictable.

Christmas arrived on a Saturday in 1852, and it had no resemblance to a Courier and Ives print: “No fires required,” the eminent scientist, planter and historian wrote. It was 78 degrees.

The next year was quite the opposite: “Dark, cold, cloudy, gloomy day,” Wailes wrote. His grown children did manage to get across a rain-swollen creek and arrive at home for Christmas dinner.

On some Christmases it was business as usual for Wailes. In 1854 he went to see a neighbor, Mrs. Miller, about buying her plantation, but someone else had beat him to it. It was warm and raining when he made the trek over to the Miller place.

If he had been dreaming of a white Christmas, his wishes were realized in 1855. There was heavy sleet on Christmas Eve and ice covered everything the next morning and it snowed intermittently all day; the temperature had dropped to 18 degrees at sunrise. Mr. and Mrs. Wailes rode in the carriage over to their neighbors, the Gees, for dinner, and the roads were frozen and slippery.

A year later Wailes simply spent the day at home; it was warm and there were a few clouds. No mention of the fact it was Christmas Day was made in the diary.

In 1858 Wailes was in Adams County and spent Christmas Eve night sitting with a sick friend. He got home in time to prepare for his return to Warren County, “Christmas notwithstanding; Take another day in place of it.”

Wailes never mentioned Christmas gifts, except for giving delicacies and supplies to his slaves. In 1859 he arrived by steamboat at Warrenton, spent the night at Squire Crawford’s — which cost $2.50 — and bought himself some cigars for 75 cents. When he started to Fonsylvania, there was frost on the ground; later in the day the thermometer read 70 degrees.

The next year, 1860, “partial gleams of sunshine” penetrated the otherwise cold and cloudy day. It wasn’t a particularly good day for one little boy: Wailes switched the lad for fighting.

On Wednesday, Dec. 25, 1861, Wailes was at Washington and went to a worship service at Jefferson College where the chapel was “very tastefully decorated with evergreens, wreaths and festoons. This was the only mention in his diaries of any yuletide decor.

The day was warm and cloudy and Wailes thought it a “very dull gloomy Christmas.” There were few people out and about and little celebration as gun powder was $4 a pound “and only the boys from the Poor House” had the money to buy firecrackers “a few of which were very economically fired off singly, one at a time at considerable intervals.”

On his last Christmas, Wailes gave his servants a holiday for the rest of the week. He died the following November at Meadvilla and is buried near the house.

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Gordon Cotton is an author and historian who lives in Vicksburg.