Christmas is especially poignant in wartime, with families separated, longing for home, or praying for those serving on distant fronts. As someone who grew up in the Army as Newt did, it is especially poignant.

For my coauthor and I, it is the Christmas of 1862 that holds a special place in our hearts. Why this year, rather than so many others?

The Civil War had started in 1861, but it was not until the spring of 1862 that the terrible vast scope of that struggle unfolded, with well over a million young men, North and South, in the field, many never to return. More than 100,000 had died in that fateful year. America had become a battlefield.

Less than two weeks before Christmas, a horrific defeat had been dealt to the Union's Army of the Potomac, with over 10,000 men falling at Fredericksburg, Virginia, in a desperate frontal assault against Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. These were the same armies that had been locked in battle since June of that year and would meet at Gettysburg the following summer.

This Christmas, perhaps more than any in American history, was a Christmas laden with tragedy and yet ultimately with hope. Never had so many young American men been called from home to serve in the military. Most were now seeing their first Christmas away from family and loved ones. On that Christmas Eve of 1862, they endured the cold lonely night, dreaming of home, singing carols, and offering up prayers. At home, millions of families longed and prayed for the "dawn of peace."

The miracle of that Christmas, and the testament to American character, is that the vast majority of men serving were volunteers, willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for the cause they believed in. Though many grumbled, and some deserted, nearly all the rest stayed and endured. For Northern soldiers this was even more poignant, for the year of 1862 had been a year of setbacks and defeats.

And yet, on that Christmas Eve, there was a distant light of all that would be. In six days the Emancipation Proclamation would become official, changing the fundamental nature of the war from a conflict about the nature of our government, to one that addressed the far more difficult question... were all men indeed created equal?

The true miracle of that Christmas at war... that in the end we as a nation would heal. In defense of our freedom, great-grandsons of the soldiers of 1862, North and South, white and black, would serve side by side in the freezing cold of Bastogne and in the extraordinary heat of Guadalcanal, and on this Christmas of 2003, soldiers of our country yet again stand the long, lonely watch, so that back home, we may quietly celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace, and the Miracle of the Lights in the Temple.

May God bless America and all those who serve her this day.

Newt Gingrich, a senior fellow at AEI, and William R. Forstchen are coauthors of Gettysburg: A Novel of the Civil War.