HOLIDAY EVENT : Drum Barracks’ celebration offers a <i> really </i> old-fashioned Christmas.

The Drum Barracks Civil War Museum in Wilmington will resound with the merry sounds of fife, drum and caroling Saturday as a holiday from history comes to life.

Never mind that people during the Civil War era celebrated Valentine’s Day more heartily than Christmas, said Marge O’Brien, director of the Drum Barracks museum and research library.

For the first time, the museum will mark the holiday season with a day of music and performances that will transport visitors to the Christmas of the 1860s.

Costumed performers will re-enact traditions of that time and perform its music on the museum grounds, which will be decked with period garlands, wreaths and poinsettias.

The museum and library are housed in what is the last remaining major building from Camp Drum, which served as U.S. Army headquarters for Southern California and the Territory of Arizona from 1861 to 1871. It is the only intact U.S. Army building from the Civil War period in Southern California, according to the museum.

The Christmas celebration, which will include 17 music and re-enactment groups, will be from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. It has been organized to thank museum supporters.

Members of the re-enactment groups are deep into their characters, she said. They are mostly “people who can’t live in the 20th Century, so they try to live in the 18th Century,” O’Brien joked.

The groups include the 7th Calvary Re-enactors, who will present a small cotillion, demonstrating dances of the time. The Horse Soldiers, a vocal duo, will sing Civil War songs with a contemporary twist.

“They sing the Battle Hymn of the Republic as The Coasters would sing it,” O’Brien said. Scottish fiddlers, a Celtic harpist and fife and drum corps fill out the bill.

Performers costumed in hoop skirts, corsets and other period dress will demonstrate crafts of the time such as carding and weaving wool, and making lace.

Visitors can learn about characters from the period through theatrical skits. Among the characters represented will be Mary Chestnut, who kept a detailed diary during the war that historians have used as a reference for the period. A character playing Edwin Booth, the brother of John Wilkes Booth, will talk about what it was like to be the brother of the man who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln.

Edwin, like his brother, was a Shakespearean actor and practiced his craft in Los Angeles, O’Brien said. “He was one of the best Macbeths we ever had in Southern California,” she said.

At about 4 p.m. costumed carolers will take to the streets surrounding the museum to sing holiday songs and music from the 19th Century--including “Jingle Bells,” written in 1820.

The public is invited to march and sing too. Singers will march up Banning Boulevard to L Street, then left to Cary Avenue, right to Opp Street and then back to the museum.

The event is free. The museum tour costs $5. Information: (310) 548-7509.