January 30, 2019
Posted by: David R. Daly
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 For the Longfellow family, gift giving was an important part of celebrating Christmas. The children usually received toys and sweets, and adult members of the family often exchanged books as presents, frequently inscribed by the gift giver with a simple message. The Longfellow children got in on the act of giving present to others as well at a young age. The sheet of paper shown above is covered with drawings by Charley Longfellow, and was given to his father Henry as a Christmas gift in 1850.
The drawings, done when Charley was only six years old, cover a variety of subjects, most likely modeled after images from a copy book. Included are several sketches of people, ducks or geese, a cow, what might be a wine glass, and a figure that bears more than a passing resemblance to the character "Punch" from the popular British magazine Punch. Charley would have been familiar with Punch, as his father had bound copies of the magazine that at least one of the Longfellow children, perhaps Charley, used as a coloring book, filling in the black-and-white cartoons with crayon or colored pencil.
Henry Longfellow annotated Charley's drawings, as he did with much of his children's artwork. In the upper right-hand corner of the paper he wrote in pencil "Charley to Papa. Christmas. 1850." Charley's sketches are now part of the park's archives, along with hundreds of other examples of the Longfellow children's drawings and paintings.
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