The Battle for Christmas

by Stephen Nissenbaum

  A present given to create a sense of obligation, even to a dependent or child, becomes at the best a Chanty, humiliating rather than inspiring the receiver. Charity is well in its place … : but a Gift of Affection is quite another matter.

  That was why it was so important for the gift to stand outside the realm of ordinary day-to-day needs, to be a luxury item and never what Greeley called “a matter of homely necessity or mere mercantile utility.” “In short, it should not so much satisfy a want as express a sentiment, speaking a language which if unmeaning to the general ear, is yet eloquent to the heart of the receiver.”29

  Greeley knew that spouses and lovers often presented such Gift Books to each other. And an editorial puffin the New York Herald in 1839, describing the “splendid volumes” of Gift Books on sale at the local bookshops, suggested that they would make the best possible present for the “one beloved object,” the “cherished flower of affection” in their lives. The notice concluded pointedly: Such presents say, “in language not to be mistaken, ‘Forget me not.’”30

  In other words, the presentation of a Gift Book could be used as part of the courtship process, as a way of deepening a personal relationship or signaling a willingness to do so. That often meant treading a delicate line—to be personal and sincere yet not too intimate. As the preface to one Gift Book phrased the matter:

  In the festive season of the year, when kind feelings flow forth in gifts, tokens, and remembrances, nothing … is more appropriate as a souvenir, than a handsome book. It can be given and received without a violation of delicacy….31

  There was a problem here. Whether Gift Books were used by suitors or by affectionate parents, there was an inherent tension between the message they were intended to convey and the fact that they were actually mass-produced and mass-marketed commodities. Given the personal weight such gifts were meant to carry, that was hardly appropriate. It was crucial that they be able to conceal the facts of their own production and distribution—to disguise their origins, in other words.

  One reason that Gift Books made such successful Christmas gifts is that they managed to do that job very well. (In the antebellum years, as now, both jewels and flowers seemed to do the job, too, since they were not only beautiful luxury goods but also objects that could be represented as the creations of nature. This was another reason so many Gift Books were named for jewels and flowers.) Sometimes the very title of a Gift Book indicated the sentiment it was meant to carry: thus Souvenir itself (meaning something to be remembered), but also Affections Gift, Forget Me Not, Friendships Offering, Gift of Friendship, Keepsake, Leaflets of Memory, Memento (subtitled “A Gift of Friendship”), Remember Me, Token, and Token of Friendship. Both The Pearl and The Rose were subtitled “Affections Gift,” and in that way associated jewelry and flowers, respectively, with personal feelings—with the world of domestic affections, not the world of commodity production.

  The publishers of Gift Books took pains to give their products a personalized look. Of course, any book given as a present could be personalized by means of an inscription on the flyleaf, giving the name of the giver and the recipient (and their relationship), and adding the date on which the book was presented. But Gift Books went further than that. Ironically, the very techniques of mass production were employed to make Gift Books appear personal and unique, to convey the impression that they were customized, even handmade, products. At the frontispiece of each volume, there typically appeared a special introductory page known as a “presentation plate”—an engraving expressly designed to be written on by the buyer of the book, to personalize it and make the presentation itself an intrinsic part of the book.

  Some presentation plates contained room for the purchaser not only to fill in his name and the name of the person who was to receive the book but even to compose a phrase that indicated the precise degree or quality of affection he wished the present to convey. Thus the presentation plate in The Token for 1833 (a Gift Book that also happened to include three newly published stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne) left an empty line in which the purchaser was to fill in just what the book was a token of. (In the copy of this volume owned by the American Antiquarian Society, a man named Waldo Flint has written that his present to Rebekah Scott

  Presentation Plate. The printed part of this plate (from a Gift Book called The Token) leaves only three phrases to be filled in by the books purchaser. It reads: “From ——— as a Token of ——— to ———.”This particular number of The Token happened to contain the first publication of three stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne. (Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society)

  Courtship at Christmas. The young Cupid in the foreground of this presentation plate has just shot an arrow into the heart placed in the background at the right. There is little ambiguity here as to the point being made by anyone who purchases this Gift Book as a Christmas present! (Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society)

  Dean was to be taken as a token of “his regard.”) In other Gift Books the nature of the relationship was already embedded in the design of the presentation plate, as it was in an 1837 design showing a picture of a Cupid who has, William Tell-like, just shot an arrow into the heart that sits perched atop a pediment located to his right.

  Gift Books might be said to represent the “commercialization of sincerity.” As a genre, they flourished for little more than a single generation, between 1825 and 1860. Perhaps they held a special appeal for this particular generation, which was the first to be overwhelmed by the world of commodities and thus the only one that needed to disguise commercial transactions when they threatened to intrude on an intimate setting. A generation earlier, one could argue, such transactions had not been possible; a generation later, they would be so commonplace that the violation would have seemed virtually invisible.

  Bibles as Christmas Gifts

  Most American families owned a Bible if they owned no other book. But before the nineteenth century these were family Bibles, large and durable folio volumes meant to be used in family devotions and to be passed down through the generations. But early in the nineteenth century Bibles became “personal” books as well, books meant to be the property of the individual who owned them.

  Such Bibles—especially editions of the New Testament—were heavily marketed at Christmas. Booksellers frequently advertised their selection of Bibles as heavily as they did their Gift Books—and right beside them. Here is a selection of ads placed in a Philadelphia newspaper by five different booksellers on a single day, December 24, 1844:32

  —[B]eautiful annuals [i.e., Gift Books], bibles, and prayer books, and other publications, suited to all ages and inclinations.

  —[A]n elegant assortment of juvenile books, religious books, miniature books for gift books, bibles, prayer books and testaments.

  —[A]nnuals, prayer and hymn books, pocket bibles, &c.

  —[H]andsome hymn books, annuals, prayer books, and bibles.

  —[A]nnuals, bibles, prayer books, &c.

  Even more self-evidently than with Gift Books, giving Bibles must have felt like a gesture suffused with sincerity, far removed from the world of commodity production and commercial exchange. But from a publisher’s perspective, Bibles were commercial products. And as the market for Bibles expanded, so did the competition between editions. They came big and small, fancy and plain, fat and thin. Like Gift Books, too, Bibles came in a great variety of sizes, shapes, cover styles, and colors. Personal Bibles, especially, were often small in size—“pocket Bibles,” as they were known. There were even illustrated Bibles for young children.33 Booksellers advertised such Bibles as they advertised Gift Books, emphasizing their elegant bindings and illustrations. Personal Bibles were marketed with special vigor during the Christmas season, along with booksellers’ other wares, as another kind of “elegant” Christmas present. As early as 1818, a bookseller in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, printed such an advertisement on December 22 (and headed it “Christmas and New Years Day”):

  A Personal
Bible. A pocket-size edition of the New Testament, printed in 1827. As this illustration shows, the binding included a leather clasp (shown at the right), the handle of which would be inserted into a slit on the front cover when the book was closed. This particular volume was inscribed to “Mrs. Dean,” the mother of Rebekah Scott Dean, whose Gift Books “presentation plate”. (Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society)

  His shop was offering “Elegant diamond type Pocket Bibles, superbly bound in morocco, full gilt”—though he would also sell “Common [i.e., plain] Pocket Bibles.” In 1821, in Worcester, Massachusetts, Isaiah Thomas managed to spend the enormous sum of $30 on “elegant Bibles” for his granddaughters.34

  By the 1820s Bibles were competing with one another for market share even in their content. One might think that all Bibles were the same on the inside, but this was not the case. Take illustrations, for example. The pictures printed in various illustrated editions of the Bible often emphasized one or another element of the text (divine wrath or divine mercy, for instance), presumably to appeal to readers of varying theological preferences or aesthetic sensibilities—once again, a form of market segmentation. And many Bibles were published with end matter appended to make the book more accessible or alluring; these included chronologies and tables of pronunciation, etymology, geography, scriptural weights and money, as well as colored maps. Several Bibles published in the 1820s contained an ingenious foldout “Key,” designed to make the meaning of many of the verses easier to ponder.

  But Bibles were able to disguise their identity as commercial products, even more effectively than Gift Books. The divine authorship of the Bible, and its role as an infallible guide to the conduct of human life, rendered any clever sleight of hand quite unnecessary, especially when a Bible was intended as a present—and even when its physical packaging was used as a marketing device. Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune made the point quite clearly in 1846. After arguing that holiday gifts had to be “the free will offerings of Friendship and Affection,” objects that would “express a sentiment,” Greeley went on to suggest that Bibles were the “fittest” holiday present he had “ever yet beheld.” But Greeley was not referring to just any Bible: “We speak of THE ILLUMINATED BIBLE, published by Harper & Brothers in a superb royal quarto of some 1500 pages, profusely illustrated by Adams from designs selected from the most superb European editions.” This edition contained “a Chronological Index, a General Index of Subjects, a Concordance, an Alphabetical List of Proper Names, with their significations, Tables of Weights and Measures, &c.” Most impressive of all was the physical package itself; the press work was “glorious” (there were usually three or four illustrations on each page) and the binding “rich and durable” (the book was leather-bound, hand-tooled, and embossed with gold, and its pages were gilt-edged). For those reasons, Greeley predicted that “many thousands of copies are destined to be treasured as tokens of Affection from and after the Holydays.”35 And indeed, the Harpers Illuminated Bible opened with a presentation plate of its own, an inscription page that read only “A Sacred Token, From————To————,” leaving two blank spaces for the names of giver and intended recipient to be filled in. In other words, the Illuminated Bible was deliberately marketed as a Gift Book.

  The Illuminated Bible was a commercial triumph, selling enough copies in its first dozen years to earn the publishers a staggering $500,000 in retail receipts.36 But tiny personal Bibles sold well, too, and they seemed better suited to fulfill Greeley’s own stated criterion, as objects that would “express a sentiment.” Like Gift Books, again, these small volumes were often purchased to be given as a present by one family member to another: by a parent to a child, a husband to a wife, or a lover to his affianced. Here are several examples, taken from the American Antiquarian Society’s holdings of Bibles published in the single year 1827—a randomly selected year:

  —“Henry Cheever, From his affectionate brother George—A Thanksgiving present, November 14, 1828.”

  —“This little volume is a New Year’s Gift to Horace James, by his affectionate Mother…. Jan. 1, 1828.”

  —“Mrs. Dean with the sincere love of her affectionate daughter Rebekah. December 21st, 1827.” (This is the same Rebekah Dean who would in turn be presented with a Gift Book six years later, by Waldo Flint in token of “his regard” for her—see illustration)37

  There is a classic literary example of all this, and one that occurs in a very famous book—Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 novel Little Women. When the four young sisters who inhabit this novel awaken on Christmas morning, each one finds a “little” illustrated copy of the New Testament under her pillow, inscribed with “a few words by their mother.” The four presents are of the identical edition (each contains “the same picture inside”); but the colors of the covers are different, and Alcott specifies just what they are: Jo’s copy is “crimson-covered,” Meg’s is “green,” Beth’s is “dovecolored” (i.e., beige), and Amy’s is “blue.” (Beth was “very much impressed by the pretty books,” Alcott tells us; and Amy says “‘I’m glad mine is blue.’”38 The gift of these Bibles is an effective gesture of emotional intimacy (their mother, “Marmee,” knows her daughters’ precise individual tastes). But at the same time they are part of a process by which Marmee is training her daughters to make informed decisions of their own in the confusing world of consumer preferences.39

  In fact, another popular fictional heroine of the period is simply overwhelmed when she is forced to select her own Bible. Near the beginning of Susan Warner’s runaway best-seller of 1851, The Wide, Wide World, the young heroine, Ellen Montgomery, is taken by her mother to visit a book shop. As mother and daughter enter the shop, Ellen senses “a delicious smell of new books” (starting with “[c]hildren’s books, lying in tempting confusion near the door”—that is, placed right at the entrance). And when Ellen heads for the Bibles, her “wits were ready to forsake her”:

  Such beautiful Bibles she had never seen; she pored in ecstasy over their varieties of type and binding…. “Now, Ellen,” said Mrs. Montgomery, “look and choose; take your time, and see which you like best.”

  Ellen looks the Bibles over intensely: “[A]s though a nation’s fate were deciding, she was weighing the comparative advantages of large, small, and middle-sized; black, blue, purple, and red; gilt and not gilt; clasp and no clasp.” First, Ellen selects for herself “a large, royal octavo Bible, heavy enough to be a good lift for her.” But her mother persuades her that it would be too bulky “for everyday use.” So she chooses again, this time “a beautiful miniature edition in two volumes, gilt and clasped, and very perfect in all respects, but of exceeding small print.” (Ellen says, “‘Isn’t it a beauty? I could put it in my pocket, you know, and carry it anywhere with the greatest ease.’”) This time Mrs. Montgomery warns Ellen that reading the fine print in such a book would soon cause her to require eyeglasses—and so presumably to lose her beauty.

  Ellen is bewildered. She has “lost the power of judging amidst so many tempting objects….” Finally, rejecting “all that were decidedly too large, or too small, or of too fine a print,” she chooses among three Bibles “of moderate size and sufficiently large type, but different binding.” Her mother approves of all three; Ellen finally picks “the red one.”40

  This was the best-selling novel of its day. Susan Warner’s point is clear, and her scores of thousands of avid readers must have responded to it: There was simply too much stuff. The very choices buyers faced made them feel helpless. Middle-class America was consumer heaven, but consumer heaven was also consumer hell. The Bible itself—the Book of Books, the one book that offered a certain guide through the labyrinth of human existence—had become a part of the labyrinth, another overwhelming commodity.

  THE SEDGWICKS: HOW ONE FAMILY DISCOVERED CHRISTMAS

  The commercial and domestic Christmas did not enter American culture in some abstract fashion, through some impersonal force called consumer capitalism. It was actively pressed, as w
e have seen, by actual producers and sellers and their cultural allies. And on the other side it was actively embraced, person by person and community by community. To show something of that embrace, I have chosen to focus in detail on a single American family. What makes this family—the Sedgwicks of western Massachusetts and New York City—such a rewarding case study is the richness of the private papers they left behind. The Sedgwicks were more numerous, and their papers cover a longer period of time, than any of the scores of other families whose Christmas practices I have traced. The extant Sedgwick family correspondence, housed in several hundred manuscript boxes at the Massachusetts Historical Society, is filled with detailed and interlinked descriptions of domestic events, including holiday rituals. The family letters give us a good picture of the way a prosperous New England family made the transition to a child-centered Christmas focused on the exchange of commercially produced presents. Some of the letters were actually written by children. And there is a final touch, though it will receive its due attention only in the next chapter: One member of this family, the writer Catharine Maria Sedgwick, herself played a small role in the larger history of this holiday—for it was she who wrote the first fictional account of an American Christmas tree, in a story published in 1835.