The Battle for Christmas
Page 1
Acclaim for STEPHEN NLSSENBAUM’S
The Battle for Christmas
“Erudite yet entertaining … an unusual history of consumerism … an original study.”
—Boston Globe
“A vivid, engaging achievement in social and cultural history. Nissenbaum’s interpretation of the centuries-long struggle to control and shape our most popular holiday is a revelation. The Battle for Christmas is a rare treat, brilliant and accessible.”
—Richard D. Brown, University of Connecticut
“Refreshingly original and utterly engaging. It is brilliant in conception and astonishing in terms of research.”
—Michael Kammen, Cornell University
“This is cultural history at its most riveting—lively, quirky, insightful. Nissenbaum has a sharp eye for the telling detail, and a keen sense of historical development.”
—Richard Wrightman Fox, Boston University
“Using Christmas as a lens that refracts American social history as a whole, [Nissenbaum] has written a fascinating account that demystifies Christmas and, paradoxically perhaps, humanizes it.”
—Time Out New York
“Like St. Nick himself, Stephen Nissenbaum has brought us a gift that will delight everyone fascinated with the remarkable twists and turns of American culture.… In vivid, compelling prose, Nissenbaum shows how the Christmas holiday has carried multiple meanings in our past.”
—Robert A. Gross, College of William and Mary
“The Battlefor Christmas renews my faith in Santa Claus, for it tells us who he really is and where he came from…. This rewarding book shows that American Christmas was a highly contested holiday long before the Grinch got his hands on it.”
—Peter H. Wood, Duke University
“Full of unexpected revelations about the evolution of Christmas, Nissenbaum’s book is a stellar work of American cultural history. In probing the historical contexts of Christmas, Nissenbaum casts fresh light on such diverse issues as consumerism, popular culture, class relations, the American family, and the African-American experience.”
—David Reynolds, Baruch College
“Nissenbaum’s excursion is both enlightening and entertaining in this well-researched book. He travels the centuries with a focus, weaving between the class struggles that define almost every age.”
—New Jersey Star Ledger
STEPHEN NISSENBAUM
The Battle for Christmas
Stephen Nissenbaum received his A.B. from Harvard College in 1961, his M.A. from Columbia University in 1963, and his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1968. He has taught at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, since 1968, and is currently professor of history there. He has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Antiquarian Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the Charles Warren Center at Harvard. In addition, he was James P. Harrison Professor of History at the College of William and Mary, 1989–90. Active in the public humanities, he has served as member and president of the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, and as historical advisor for several film productions. The Battle for Christmas was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in History in 1997.
ALSO BY STEPHEN NISSENBAUM
Salem Possessed:
The Social Origins of Witchcraft
(with Paul Boyer, 1974)
Sex, Diet, and Debility in Jacksonian America
Sylvester Graham and Health Reform (1980)
The Pursuit of Liberty:
A History of the American People
(with others, 1984, 1990, 1996)
EDITOR
The Great Awakening at Yale College (1972)
Salem-Village Witchcraft:
A Documentary Record of Local Conflict
in Colonial New England
(with Paul Boyer, 1972, 1993)
The Salem Witchcraft Papers:
Verbatim Transcripts of the Legal Documents
of the Salem Witchcraft Outbreak of 1692
(with Paul Boyer, 1977)
Nathaniel Hawthorne,
The Scarlet Letter and Selected Writings (1984)
For
William R. Taylor
My teacher
Contents
Preface
1. New England’s War on Christmas
2. Revisiting “? Visit from St. Nicholas”
3. The Parlor and the Street
4. Affection’s Gift: Toward a History of Christmas Presents
5. Under the Christmas Tree: A Battle of Generations
6. Tiny Tim and Other Charity Cases
7. Wassailing Across the Color Line: Christmas in the Antebellum South
Epilogue: The Ghosts of Christmas Past
Notes
Acknowledgments
Preface
THIS BOOK had its beginnings more than twenty years ago, when I delivered a speculative scholarly paper titled “From ‘The Day of Doom’ to ‘The Night Before Christmas.’” In that paper I dealt with the striking parallels between the best-known American poem of the 1600s and 1700s and the best-known American poem of the 1800s and 1900s. The earlier poem was about God’s wrath, the later one about the goodwill of Santa Claus—but somehow the two were engaging in a kind of dialogue with each other.
Actually, though, it is clear that the book began earlier still, with my childhood fascination for “The Night Before Christmas,” whose verses I recited over and over when December came around. For me, growing up as I did in an Orthodox Jewish household, this was surely part of my fascination for Christmas itself, that magical season which was always beckoning, at school and in the streets, only to be withheld each year by the forces of religion and family. (I once decided that Christmas must mean even more to America’s Jewish children than to its Christian ones.) I can remember, one Christmas Day, putting some of my own toys in a sack and attempting to distribute them to other children who lived in my Jersey City apartment house: If I couldn’t get presents, at least no one stopped me from giving them away, and in that fashion at least I could participate in the joy of what, much later, I would come to think of as the “gift exchange.”
Much later came soon enough. By the late 1980s I had been a professional historian for some twenty years, and I was also regularly engaging in the nonacademic aspects of my trade. In 1988 I found myself involved in the development of a teacher-training program sponsored by Old Sturbridge Village, the living-history museum in central Massachusetts. The theme we decided to focus on with the teachers (they taught grades 3–8) was holidays. Remembering that paper I had written more than a decade earlier, I figured young children might be intrigued by seeing unfamiliar things in “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” that most familiar of poems. (“Mama in her ’kerchief and I in my cap …”? “Away to the window … and threw up the sash …”? “A miniature sleigh”? “Eight tiny reindeer”?) So I volunteered to take on Christmas myself.
Preparing for my session, I made a series of startling discoveries that precipitated me into writing this book. To begin with, in an essay by the preeminent modern scholar of St. Nicholas, Charles W. Jones, I learned that “Santa Claus,” far from being a creature of ancient Dutch folklore who made his way to the New World in the company of immigrants from Holland, was essentially devised by a group of non-Dutch New Yorkers in the early nineteenth century. (This discovery tied into another new notion I was acquainted with in a different context, that of “invented traditions”—customs that are made up with the precise purpose of appearing old-fashioned: the idea, for example, that every Scottish clan had its own unique tartan plaid—which turns out to have been the product of a nineteenth-century
effort to romanticize the valiant Scots.)
Second, from reading a biographical sketch of Clement Clarke Moore, the author of “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” I realized that the history of his best-loved poem was intertwined with the physical and political transformation of New York City during the early nineteenth century. Moore, it turned out, was a wealthy and politically conservative country gentleman who found himself at war with the encroaching forces of New York’s commercial and residential development at the very time he was writing his undying verses about the night before Christmas.
It was my third discovery that helped make sense of that curious convergence. The Christmas season itself was undergoing a change, I learned. From the writings of several obscure nineteenth-century folklorists, along with contemporary historians Peter Burke and Natalie Zemon Davis and Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, I discovered that Christmas had once occasioned a kind of behavior that would be shocking today: It was a time of heavy drinking when the rules that governed people’s public behavior were momentarily abandoned in favor of an unrestrained “carnival,” a kind of December Mardi Gras. And I found that in the early nineteenth century, with the growth of America’s cities, that kind of behavior had become even more threatening, combining carnival rowdiness with urban gang violence and Christmas-season riots. (My key guides here were essays by the great British historian E. P. Thompson and one of his American disciples, Susan G. Davis.) Given the changed historical circumstances of the nineteenth century, I began to understand the appeal of a new-styled Christmas that took place indoors, within the secure confines of the family circle.
Those discoveries became the basis of much of the first three chapters of this book. Before long, I found myself exploring other issues, issues that stemmed from what I was learning about the creation of a new-styled domestic Christmas: At what point, and in what fashion, did Christmas become commercialized? What happened to family relationships on this holiday, when children became the center of attention and the recipients of lavish gifts? (After all, before our own day, weren’t parents supposed to have avoided at all costs such gestures of intergenerational indulgence?) So I began to think about Christmas in the context of the larger history of consumer culture and child-rearing practices. Once again, I came up with some rather unexpected findings, findings that drove me to the conclusion that where Christmas was concerned, the problems of our own age go back a long way. The Christmas tree itself, I discovered, first entered American culture as a ritual strategy designed to cope with what was already being seen, even before the middle of the nineteenth century, as a holiday laden with crass materialism—a holiday that had produced a rising generation of greedy, spoiled children.
Those issues became the subjects of Chapters 4 and 5. The remaining two chapters, about Christmas charity and Christmas under slavery, respectively, resulted from two very different circumstances. I had intended, from an early point, to write about Dickens’s novella A Christmas Carol, that other classic text of the holiday season (along with Moore’s poem). But when I reread Dickens’s book (for the first time in many years), I was led to explore the intricate and not always proud history of face-to-face Christmas charity, especially as it related to impoverished children. As far as Christmas under slavery is concerned, it was my students at the College of William and Mary, where I taught during the 1989–90 academic year, who provoked my interest in that subject. The documentary materials several of these students brought to me proved to be something of a revelation. I glimpsed a picture of Christmas under slavery that oddly resembled the pre-nineteenth-century carnival celebration I had discovered at the beginning of my work. As I struggled to achieve a deeper understanding of the slaves’ holiday, I realized that with this topic my project had come full circle and it was time to stop.
One consequence of stopping there was that my book would essentially come to a halt with the turn of the twentieth century, well before the present day. But, I decided, this was exactly where I wished to stop. By the end of the nineteenth century, if not earlier, the Christmas celebration practiced by most Americans was one that would be quite familiar to their modern descendants. Between then and now, the modifications have been more of degree than of kind, more quantitative than qualitative. The important changes—the revealing changes—had all taken place. And those were the only changes I really cared about.
For the real subject of this book is not so much Christmas itself as what Christmas can tell us about broader historical questions. In writing about the commercialization of Christmas, for example, or the way Christmas made children the center of attention and affection, I have always tried to remember that those changes were expressions of the same forces that were transforming American culture as a whole. But it has been equally important for me also to see Christmas as one of those very forces—as a cause as well as an effect, an active instrument of change as well as an indicator and a mirror of change. From that angle, Christmas itself played a role in bringing about both the consumer revolution and the “domestic revolution” that created the modern family.
To raise such questions in this context is new. Until recently, the history of holidays has pretty much been written in what could be called an “antiquarian” fashion, as a subject that existed in isolation, sealed off from matters of broad importance. It is largely the work of anthropologists that has provoked a new look, by showing that the holiday season has long been serious cultural business. Christmas rituals—whether in the form of the rowdy excesses of carnival or the more tender excesses that surround the Christmas tree—have long served to transfigure our ordinary behavior in an almost magical fashion, in ways that reveal something of what we would like to be, what we once were, or what we are becoming despite ourselves. It is because the celebration of Christmas always illuminates these underlying features of the social landscape—and sometimes the very “fault lines” which threaten to divide it—that the content of the holiday, its timing, and even the matter of whether to celebrate it at all, have often been hotly contested. For this reason the book I have written constitutes just a single large chapter in the history of the perennial battle for Christmas.
But if I am concerned with those larger issues, I remain fascinated by Christmas itself, as fascinated today as when I was a child in that Jersey City apartment house—perhaps even more so, in the light of what I have learned in writing this book. For if I am writing about Christmas with the larger goals of a social and cultural historian, I also aim to tell a good story in a new way. Whether I have succeeded or not, I know that I have at least (and at last) managed to make Christmas my own, and I hope I have done so without betraying either its enduring meanings or my own patrimony.
Cambridge, Massachusetts
June 1995
CHAPTER 1
New England’s War on Christmas
THE PURITAN WAR ON MISRULE
IN NEW ENGLAND, for the first two centuries of white settlement most people did not celebrate Christmas. In fact, the holiday was systematically suppressed by Puritans during the colonial period and largely ignored by their descendants. It was actually illegal to celebrate Christmas in Massachusetts between 1659 and 1681 (the fine was five shillings). Only in the middle of the nineteenth century did Christmas gain legal recognition as an official public holiday in New England. Writing near the end of that century, one New Englander, born in 1822, recalled going to school as a boy on Christmas Day, adding that even as late as 1850, in Worcester, Massachusetts, “The courts were in session on that day, the markets were open, and I doubt if there had ever been a religious service on Christmas Day, unless it were Sunday, in that town.” As late as 1952, one writer recalled being told by his grandparents that New England mill workers risked losing their jobs if they arrived late at work on December 25, and that sometimes “factory owners would change the starting hours on Christmas Day to five o’clock or some equally early hour in order that workers who wanted to attend a church service would have to forego, or be dismissed for being l
ate for work.”1
As we shall see, much of this is misleading or exaggerated. It is true that the New England states did not grant legal recognition to Christmas until the middle of the nineteenth century, but neither did most of the other states. There were Christmas Day religious services in Worcester before 1850. And nineteenth-century factory owners had their own reasons for treating Christmas as a regular working day, reasons that had more to do with industrial capitalism than with Puritan theology. Still, the fact remains that those factory owners were indeed operating within a long New England tradition of opposition to Christmas. As early as 1621, just one year after the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock, their governor, William Bradford, found some of the colony’s new residents trying to take the day off. Bradford ordered them right back to work. And in 1659 the Massachusetts General Court did in fact declare the celebration of Christmas to be a criminal offense.
Why? What accounts for this strange hostility? The Puritans themselves had a plain reason for what they tried to do, and it happens to be a perfectly good one: There is no biblical or historical reason to place the birth of Jesus on December 25. True, the Gospel of Luke tells the familiar story of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth—how the shepherds were living with their flocks in the fields of Judea, and how, one night, an angel appeared to them and said, “For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord.” But nowhere in this account is there any indication of the exact date, or even the general season, on which “this day” fell. Puritans were fond of saying that if God had intended for the anniversary of the Nativity to be observed, He would surely have given some indication as to when that anniversary occurred. (They also argued that the weather in Judea during late December was simply too cold for shepherds to be living outdoors with their flocks.)