The Battle for Christmas

by Stephen Nissenbaum

  In a suitable manner… Without superstition … The excesses of this day … We should not assume that these were merely the prim phrasings of unworldly clergymen. Consider a little episode that took place on the night of December 22, 1794, in the rural western Massachusetts town of Deerfield (now the site of Historic Deerfield). It is the kind of incident that rarely leaves any mark in the written record. We know about this one only because it appeared in the account book of a disgruntled local shopkeeper, John Birge by name. What Birge reported was a charivari of sorts. “Just before two of the Clock in the morning,” he wrote, “my house was assaulted by sum Nightwalkers—or rather blockheads.” These wassailers demanded entry: They “assaulted the house very bould by knocking or pounding as if they meant to force the house.” When Birge refused to let them in, the intruders shattered one of his windowpanes “all to slivers.” They may even have broken in and carried something away—the shop sold foodstuffs and clothing—because Birge ended his account with the comment, “I cannot see why it was much better than Burglary.”79

  WHAT DOES it all add up to? The answer must be that when Christmas returned to New England in the second half of the eighteenth century, it was embraced by different groups with different cultural agendas. Then as now, there was no single “Christmas.” For some it was probably little more than the name for a day in the year. For others it was a time of pious devotion, devotion that could range all the way from mirthful joy in the Savior’s birth to angst over personal failings, and from stately prayers to ecstatic hymns. For others still it was a time of feasting—accompanied or not by a supply of alcohol. Finally, Christmas might mean misrule and carnival, in which alcohol could lead to sexual liberties, social inversion, or even violence.

  But not one of these ways of celebrating Christmas bore much resemblance to the holiday that most of us know today. All of them were public rituals, not private celebrations; civic events, not domestic ones. In none of them would we have found the familiar intimate family gathering or the giving of Christmas presents to expectant children. Nowhere would we have found Christmas trees; no reindeer, no Santa Claus. Christmas in late-eighteenth-century New England—or anywhere else—was not centered around the family or on children or giving presents. It was neither a domestic holiday nor a commercial one.

  FROM HOUSE OF ALE TO HOUSE OF GOD: CHRISTMAS IN BOSTON, 1750–1820

  The House of Ale: A Masonic Holiday

  Nowhere is the variety of forms in which New Englanders celebrated Christmas, and their occasional intersection or even conflict, better revealed than in the region’s major urban center, the town of Boston. We have already encountered Christmas in eighteenth-century Boston, in the 1711 Christmas “frolic” that moved Cotton Mather to deliver his sermon “Grace Defended.” Mid-century Bostonians witnessed a far more open display of Christmas revelry, performed by some of the town’s most prosperous merchants and tradesmen. These were the members of the Boston lodge of Freemasons. The Masonic lodge had been organized in 1730, and it held a festive banquet each 27th of December, the name-day of St. John the Evangelist.

  As it happens, the lodge’s 1749 banquet was described by one of the participants in a long and comic poem published several weeks after the event. (The poem constitutes the sole extant record of any of these Masonic festivities.) It begins by promising to “regale” its readers “with a diverting christmas tale.”

  The “tale” went like this. First, the Freemasons assembled at a tavern, then they attended a church service, and finally they marched back to the tavern in a formal procession that gathered along its route an “aprond throng” of curious workingmen. It was the eating and drinking that formed the center of the story, and it was this that bound the masons together in mutual brotherhood. As the poet put it (in what amounts to a stunning parody of both Masonic culture and Puritan social theory, with its insistence on the need for mutual love):

  ’Tis Love, pure Love cements the whole.

  Love—of the BOTTLE and the BOWL.

  The interval of religious service (“Masons at church! … / Such folk as never did appear / So overfond of coming there”) is treated simply as an ironic interlude, showing “how they came

  To house of God from house of ale

  And how the parson told his tale:

  How they return’d, in manner odd,

  To house of ale from house of God.

  Even the clergyman who preached on this occasion (“told his tale”) acknowledged that it was the feast, and not the sermon, that made up “the weightier business of the day.” His “sermon” is reported in aphoristic verse modeled on that of the English poet Alexander Pope:

  For eating solid sense affords,

  Whilst nonsense lurks in many words.

  Doubting does oft arise from thinking,

  But truth is only found in drinking.

  This having said, the reverend vicar

  Dismiss’d them to their food and liquor.80

  These verses are funny today (and would have been shocking in 1749) for their deliberate juxtaposition of the sacred and the profane. And the event they described must have made for quite a scene in mid-eighteenth-century Boston. But in the context of older Christmas traditions one point stands out: The Freemasons’ banquet was limited to the lodge members themselves, all of whom were prosperous men. The “aprond throng” that collected on the streets to watch the procession was not invited to participate in the feast itself. Even so, it may have been part of the ritual. The British historian E. P. Thompson has argued that in England, too, the eighteenth-century elite no longer performed the requisite paternalist rituals of the season, but Thompson adds suggestively that the English elite still continued to “perform” in front of the poor, in a kind of disdainful “theater of the streets.”81 That may have been what the Boston Freemasons were doing when they chose to march to their feast in a formal procession. The poet even suggests that the “apron’d throng” put on something of a performance of its own in response to the march—“shouldering close,” they managed to “close, press, stink, and shove” around the marchers.” In an aside, the poet reveals that the Grand Master of the lodge, a wealthy Boston merchant, decided not to attend the banquet—ostensibly because he had caught a cold, but in fact because he had foreseen “that the jobb/Would from all parts collect the mob.”82 An interesting reason: Could it be that the Grand Master was not wholly comfortable with the implications of this performance?

  Carriers’ Addresses: Wassailing in the Streets

  It is difficult to know how the poorest residents of eighteenth-century Boston observed the Christmas season. But the limited evidence that does exist suggests a reemergence of Christmas misrule, reminiscent of what was happening in European cities. In its more innocent form this involved a ritual that is still with us today: giving Christmas tips to the paper carrier. Newspapers were delivered door to door in eighteenth-century Boston. During the Christmas season these newspaper carriers expected a tip. Unlike their modern successors, the colonial carriers were not members of prosperous families who took on a paper route to earn a little extra spending money; they were the sons (very likely the teenage sons) of the poor.

  By the 1760s these Boston carriers were going on their begging rounds armed with little printed verses that they presented in turn to each of their patrons. Such “carriers’ addresses” were usually written and printed by the editor of the newspaper and distributed on or about New Year’s Day. (The custom originated in Philadelphia during the 1730s and had been picked up in Boston by 1760.) But there were at least four Boston carriers’ verses (printed between 1764 and 1784) that referred to Christmas as well as New Year’s. The 1764 verses in the Boston Evening Post, for example, was headed “The News-Boy’s Christmas and New Year’s Verses.” It begins:

  The Boy who Weekly Pads the Streets,

  With all the freshest News he meets,

  His Mistresses and Masters greets.

  Christmas Begging Broadside. This Boston “Carri
er’s Address” was delivered during the 1770 Christmas season. The final verse asks patrons to bestow a “few shillings on your lad.” Similar broadside pleas were used by other “plebeian” residents of Boston. One, dating from the mid-176os, was from a blacksmith’s apprentice: “This is unto all Gentlemen who shoes [sic] here, / I wish you a merry Christmas, a happy New Year: / For shoeing your Horses, and trimming their Locks, / Please to remember my New-Years Box.” (Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society)

  And it goes on:

  Christmas and New-Year, Days of Joy,

  The Harvest of your Carrier Boy,

  He hopes you’ll not his Hopes destroy….

  [That] His generous Patrons may inspire,

  By filling up his Pockets higher!83

  Three other carriers’ addresses wished their recipients “a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year,” and asked, respectively, for a “few shillings,” “some pence,” and a “lib’ral hand.”

  To be sure, this ritual was a far cry from the boisterous begging we have encountered in European popular culture (and will reencounter shortly in Boston itself). The paper carrier approached his patrons individually, not as part of a gang. As far as we know, he did not demand entry into his patrons’ houses or threaten damage if refused a gift. Above all, the verses that the carrier handed to his patrons were written by his employer. This was a ritual that was largely controlled and regulated from above—and perhaps that was its point. Nevertheless, it was a form of door-to-door begging, in which poor and youthful clients approached older and more prosperous patrons. It involved the exchange of gifts for expressions of goodwill, and the exchange was mediated by a “performance”—the token gift of a verse that expressed the essence of the exchange. The ritual’s roots in wassailing are clear, and they were probably in the back of the participants’ own minds. (And if the newsboy was not tipped, he was always capable, like his modern descendants, of leaving water-soaked newspapers at his patrons’ doors.)

  The An ticks: Mumming in the Houses

  As begging goes, the “Carriers’ Addresses” may have been pretty tame stuff. But that is not to say that other forms of begging, more aggressive or threatening, did not take place. Evidence of such activity is hard to come by. Generally, the only public disorders reported by eighteenth-century Boston newspapers were those occasional crowd actions that had serious and overt political meaning (such as the Stamp Act riots of 1765). Episodes of a more ordinary nature—including the less politicized rituals of the Christmas season—did not make it into print.

  With one vivid exception. Several sources, taken together, make it clear that a tradition of aggressive Christmas mumming (a variety of wassail) was practiced by some of Boston’s poorer inhabitants over a period of at least thirty years, beginning no later than the early 1760s and continuing at least into the mid-179os. These groups called themselves the Anticks, masked troupes who demanded (or forced) entry into the houses of respectable Bostonians at Christmas. Once inside, they engaged in a dramatic “performance” and demanded gifts of money in return.

  The first piece of evidence of the existence of the Anticks is sketchy, taking the form of an oral report given to a folklorist late in the nineteenth century by a man whose mother—born in about 1752—had told it to him.84 It serves chiefly to date the origin of the Anticks at least as far back as 1760 or so. The second report, too, is from the later recollection of a Bostonian who recalled their visits from the years of his childhood. But his is a detailed account of the Anticks’ actual “performance.” The man, Samuel Breck, belonged to a very wealthy family. He was born in 1770 and lived in a mansion in central Boston during the years when the Anticks paid their holiday visits (his recollections presumably date from the years around 1780). Breck recalled the Anticks as “a set of the lowest blackguards” who were “disguised in filthy clothes and ofttimes with masked faces.” They “went from house to house in large companies, and bon gre, mal gre, obtruding themselves everywhere, particularly into the rooms that were occupied by parties of ladies and gentlemen.” There they “would demean themselves with great insolence.”

  Breck’s account makes it amply clear that the Anticks were indeed Christmas mummers, and that they would actually perform an old mummer’s play, “St. George and the Dragon”:

  I have seen them at my father’s, when his assembled friends were at cards, take possession of a table, seat themselves on rich furniture and proceed to handle the cards, to the great annoyance of the company. The only way to get rid of them was to give them money, and listen patiendy to a foolish dialogue between two or more of them. One of them would cry out, “Ladies and gentlemen sitting by the fire, put your hands in your pockets and give us our desire.” When this was done and they had received some money, a kind of acting took place. One fellow was knocked down, and lay sprawling on the carpet, while another bellowed out,

  “See, there he lies,

  But ere he dies

  A doctor must be had.”

  He calls for a doctor, who soon appears, and enacts the part so well that the wounded man revives.85

  This often went on for half an hour. Breck remembered that even after the men finally left, “the house would be filled with another gang.” (Apparently there were multiple bands of Anticks.) Breck concluded by recalling an especially significant cultural point, that the victims of such visitations did not feel entitled to expel the Anticks from their houses: “Custom had licensed these vagabonds to enter even by force any place they chose.” (“What should we say to such intruders now?” Breck asked rhetorically in the very different culture of his old age. “Our manners would not brook such usage a moment.”)

  The third and final report about the Boston Anticks reveals that at the century’s end the customary “license” to which Breck referred was coming under challenge. This third report, dating from 1793, is firsthand evidence. On December 20, 1793, a Boston newspaper printed an anonymous letter to the Boston Police Inspector, warning of the Anticks’ imminent annual appearance and demanding that something be done to stop them. The letter specified in outraged detail the threat these mummers posed to respectable Bostonians:

  The disadvantages, interruptions, and injuries which the inhabitants sustain from these gangs, are too many for enumeration, a few only must suffice. When different clubs of them meet in the street, noise and fighting immediately commences. Their demands for entrance in house, are insolent and clamourous; and should the peaceful citizen (not choosing to have the tranquillity of his family interrupted) persevere in refusing them admittance, his windows are broke, or the latches and knockers wrenched from his door as the penalty: Or should they gain admittance, the delicate ear is oftentimes offended, children affrighted, or catch the phrases of their senseless ribaldry. [In other words, the Anticks used bawdy language.]86

  Aggressive, indeed. But the behavior of these mummers can also be seen as a kind of symbolic “counter-theater,” their response to the refusal of “peaceful citizens” to perform their allotted Christmas role. In any event, the Police Inspector responded with a letter of his own. Such gangs had been performing for years, he noted, though he agreed that they caused “inconveniency and frights” by “disturbing families and begging a Copper.” But it was difficult to identify the participants, because they went around in disguise. The Inspector also implied that they came from the town’s poorest classes (the kinds of people who “seldom if ever read the public papers”). In conclusion, the Police Inspector urged Boston’s respectable citizens to take into custody any Anticks who harassed them, promising that such persons would be prosecuted as criminals. (When William Bentley of Salem read this item, he considered it worth noting in his diary that “[t]he inspector of Police in Boston has forbidden the ‘Anticks,’ as they are called, by which the resemblance of this Christian feast to the Saturnalia has been so admirably maintained.”87)

  A final note about this episode. The exchange of letters about the “Anticks” never once mentioned Christmas by na
me, even though the connection would have been clear enough to anyone (as it was to Bentley). But the same issue of the newspaper that contained the Police Inspector’s notice also contained a pious poem about the mystery of the Nativity—and it took Christmas as its title. The presence of this word in the poem, and its complete absence in the discussion of the “Anticks,” suggests something of a rhetorical contest over the meaning of the word itself—whether it signified pious devotion or disruptive misrule. Back at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the people who “spoke for” New England culture associated Christmas so profoundly with misrule that they needed to suppress it altogether. By the end of the eighteenth century, the descendants of those same people had discovered an alternative (and more acceptable) meaning of Christmas. Now they could wrest the word—if not the thing itself—away from the Anticks and their ilk, to redefine (and reclaim) it as their own.

  The House of God: Reviving Christmas as a Public Holiday

  With the turn of the nineteenth century, the reappropriation of Christmas took on a concerted form—a move to hold church services on December 25. This move was led by both evangelicals and liberals. In the forefront of the evangelicals were the Universalists. Largely a rural sect, Universalists openly celebrated Christmas from the earliest stages of their existence in New England. The Universalist community in Boston held a special Christmas Day service in 1789, even before their congregation was officially organized,88 and in the early nineteenth century it was this denomination that proselytized for Christmas more actively than any other.