As it turns out, the Christmas tree plays only a small role in this story, and the maidservant Madeleine does not make any further appearances. As far as I can tell (and I have carefully read the family’s correspondence during these years), there was no German maidservant in Catharine Sedgwick’s house, and no Christmas tree. It is possible, of course, that Sedgwick learned of the tree through a neighbor’s maidservant. What is far more likely is that she learned about it from the Follens themselves.
But there was much else in Sedgwick’s short story that clearly was based on her immediate experience. And in order to understand the story (and so to understand the meaning that Christmas trees bore at the moment of their introduction into American literature), it is necessary to make still another visit to the Sedgwicks’ New York household during the Christmas season.
Catharine Sedgwick was in the habit of spending her winters in the New York home of her brother Robert Sedgwick and his wife, Elizabeth Ellery Sedgwick (see Chapter 4). This house was a fashionable place, perhaps too much so for Catharine’s more understated tastes. Elizabeth Ellery Sedgwick cared intensely about accumulating both material goods and success in New York’s fashionable social circuits, and she had a sense that by lavishing herself with the one she would help ensure herself the other. Each year Mrs. Sedgwick proudly reported to her father what she had been given that holiday season and also the number of visitors who had called upon her household on New Year’s Day (one year she boasted that the total was “about 70 gentlemen”). In turn, she noted that her husband, Robert, “made 63 calls in five hours, so you may judge how he walked.” (Such a schedule meant that each visit took less than five minutes, including traveling time.) Elizabeth Sedgwick even thought about her children’s holiday gifts in the context of the fashionable world. Recalling how she had just greeted her seventy callers in the front room of her house, Mrs. Sedgwick proudly noted that the children “occupied the back parlor, and made a pretty perspective for us as we received our visitors.” Nor did she fail to note that several of the children’s gifts were “very valuable.”25
Out of the sense of noblesse that governed so much of her life, Catharine Sedgwick participated fully in the fashionable ritual of receiving the gentlemen callers. But the visitations wore on her patience. In a private letter (written to a favorite young niece) Sedgwick noted that on New Year’s Day, 1835, she had greeted “between 70 & 80” gentlemen, but she added that neither their names nor their fashionable witticisms (the latter presumably repeated at every stop) were worth passing along. A single example would have to do, Sedgwick confided to her niece. One of the callers had chosen to comment cleverly on the beautiful winter weather (the sun had come out on that very day) by comparing it to the seasonal appearance of Gift Books (or literary “annuals,” as they were also known): “He said ‘Nature has come out with her annual at last, & as bright as the best of them—the gentlemen find it a book of beauty.’”26
The following year Catharine Sedgwick took an authors revenge, in the form of a mocking fictionalized account of that same experience. Her account made up the central section of the short story in which the Christmas tree also figured. In Sedgwick’s fictional rendering the woman who receives the visitors is the tale’s teenage heroine, a charming and attractive girl named Lizzy Percival, the oldest child in a New York family of great wealth and prominence, and the character who obviously represents Catharine Sedgwick herself. (Lizzy Percival is sweet, caring, and sincere—a young woman who shares Catharine Sedgwick’s disdain for artifice.)
Like the Sedgwicks, the fictional Percival family experienced a busy New Year’s Day: “their visitors were innumerable, and a continual stream poured in and poured out,” uttering in the process “the stereotyped sayings of the season.” When one of their visitors referred to the New Year’s ritual as a “fine old custom” created by “our Dutch ancestors,” Lizzy secretly thought of him as an “interloper who had not a drop of… Dutch blood.” (And when another asked for “whiskey-punch,” Lizzy modestly reminded him that alcohol had been “‘banished from all refined society.’” Catharine Sedgwick evidently supported the detoxification of New Year’s visitations.)
Every one of Lizzy’s fictional visitors spoke in stock phrases, and most of them were coarse, materialistic, and competitive. One man boasted that his wife had received fully 200 visitors the previous year. Another openly compared the hospitality he had received at various houses. A third betrayed the confidence of a woman he knew—a relative of Lizzy’s who had declined to receive visitors that day on grounds of ill health—by revealing that the woman was not sick at all: “‘” Say to my friends, “I’m sick, I’m dead [she had confided].” But, between ourselves, my dear Lizzy, the draperies to the drawing-room curtains are not completed—that’s all.’”27
The least offensive of the fictional visitors were the ones who merely attempted to be clever. Among these was a young man whose witticism will already be familiar to us. Echoing almost verbatim Sedgwick’s earlier, real-life report, this young man extolled the weather “and said that nature had, last of all the publishers, come out with her annual, and the gentlemen had found it ‘a book of beauty.’”28
This kind of extended (and autobiographical) satire provides a literary contrast that sets off the brief but important appearance of the Christmas tree in this story. Set in this new context, its meaning is simple: Catharine Sedgwicks Christmas tree is associated with everything that is absent in the fashionable visitation ritual. It is associated with children—innocent, good-hearted children—and the private space of a purely domestic ritual. In effect, Catharine Sedgwick had turned the tables on the sheriff (discussed in Chapter 3) who had identified with the world of alcohol and male culture and dismissed the world of women (and temperance) as cold comfort.
Here again, Catharine Sedgwicks fictional presentation stands in contrast to the Sedgwicks’ actual experience. In real life, as we have seen, the children of Robert and Elizabeth Sedgwick were playing with their presents in the back parlor at the same time that Catharine and Elizabeth Sedgwick were receiving their fashionable visitors in the front one. In fact, the door between the two rooms remained open the entire time. Elizabeth Sedgwick chose to comment on the children’s activities only by noting how they enhanced the charm of the adult ritual: “the children occupied the back parlor, and made a pretty perspective for us as we received our visitors.” But in Catharine Sedgwick’s fictionalized account of the same event, the two rituals appeared to be taking place in a separate time and space—and it was crucial that they did.
The central theme of Sedgwick’s story is the contrast between artifice and authenticity. The holiday season functioned as a literary occasion on which it was easy to carve out a divide between the private and the public worlds, and to take the pleasures of the former more seriously than the demands of the latter. That is the point of the love story in which Sedgwick’s plot is superficially framed (and which is not worth retelling here). And it is the reason Sedgwick chose to set the story at Christmas, a time when, as she saw it, the most artificial rituals were juxtaposed with the most authentic ones. Sedgwick’s young heroine, Lizzy Percival, may be able to hold her own in repartee with the gentlemen visitors, but it is to the private domestic ritual that her heart belongs. Through the character of Lizzy, Sedgwick manages to establish a core of authenticity in a household that is besieged from without and within by the forces of social convention, whether “the stereotyped sayings of the season” or the equally stereotyped holiday presents the real-life Sedgwick children received.
I don’t know exactly what those presents were, but the children’s mother did report that they were numerous and “some of them [were] very valuable.” When Catharine Sedgwick fictionalized this part of her experience she was more specific. The toys that Lizzy Percival placed on the Christmas tree consisted of things like books, dolls, animals, and a regiment of toy soldiers. At first glance these, too, would appear to be commercial toys, toys she has bo
ught, the kind of toys that are available at any of number of New York shops. But as the children—Lizzy’s younger brothers and sisters—comment on their gifts one by one, it becomes absolutely clear that Lizzy has prepared them all herself.
Catharine Maria Sedgwick. This picture shows the author as a young woman, and suggests something of the charm that helped endear her to a wide circle of acquaintances. (Courtesy of the Fine Arts Library, Harvard College Library)
Consider the children’s responses. One of the brothers receives “a nice book, filled with copies for him to draw after;” and exclaims pointedly, “‘how much pains you have taken to do this for me! how much time and trouble you have spent upon it….!’” A sister receives a beaded bag and makes the same point: “?, sister Lizzy! ‘I did not know when I spilt all your beads that you was knitting this bag for me … !’” The dolls that two other siblings receive may have been store-bought, but they come dressed in clothing Lizzy has sewn. (“?, Anne, your doll is dressed just like mine; sister has even worked their pocket handkerchiefs.’”) Even the toy soldiers have been hand-finished: “‘Sister, sister, did you paint these soldiers?’ cried Hal; ‘kiss me, you are the best sister that ever lived.’” One of the children speaks for them all when, thanking Lizzy for the handembroidered apron she has received, she exclaims, “’O papa! does not sister do every thing for us?’”
Finally, we learn that Lizzy has done the same for her father, too; she presents him with “a pair of slippers …, beautifully wrought by her own hands,” together with “several pairs of fine woolen hose which she had knit for him, in her intervals of leisure.” Sedgwick hammers the point home: “They were just such as he liked, just such as he could not buy, just such as nobody but Lizzy could knit….”29
Just such as he could not buy. As early as this story, written in the mid-1830s, Catharine Sedgwick was able to make a point of how special it was for Christmas presents to be handmade or even hand-finished. More to the point, Sedgwick chose to have all these gifts made by hand in order to reinforce further the point she had already suggested by the German Christmas tree: The true essence of the Christmas gift exchange must be forged outside the fevered crucible of market relations.
HANDMADE GIFTS, a German maidservant, and a Christmas tree—by employing such literary tactics, Catharine Sedgwick was partially able to resolve the contradiction between market relations and intimate personal ones. But there was one aspect of the contradiction that remained immune to such a literary solution: the tension between the story’s message and the medium that carried it. After all, whether or not Catharine Sedgwick actually knew a maidservant like the fictional Madeleine, her story conveyed the impression that the tree really was a folk tradition observed by servant girls. But in fact it was not the German maidservant Madeleine who effectively spread the idea of the Christmas tree throughout American culture. It was the Yankee patrician Catharine Sedgwick—popular author and Unitarian daughter of a Massachusetts congressman—who accomplished that. Even more important, Sedgwick did this not by setting up such a tree but by writing a story about it—and publishing that story in a popular Gift Book read by middle-class readers throughout America, a Gift Book that went on sale just in time for the 1835 holiday season. Remember that the fashionable gentleman visitor (in both Sedgwick’s story and her actual experience) had tried to construct a stylish pun by speaking of Mother Nature as if she were the publisher of just such an annual. (In fact, the particular volume in which Sedgwick’s story appeared—a Gift Book called The Token—remains notable to literary historians for another reason entirely: It contains the first publication of two important stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne—“The May-Pole of Merry Mount” and “The Ministers Black Veil.”)
Literary annuals were hardly produced in the workshops of folk culture. They were a part of the fashionable new commercial world, a world that Catharine Sedgwick was critiquing from within.30 Sedgwicks readers may unconsciously have assumed that they were learning about Christmas trees directly from the folk character Madeleine, but in fact the path of transmission was nothing other than the latest holiday-season commodity—a Gift Book that had been purchased as a present in a fashionable shop.
TOWARD A HISTORY OF CHRISTMAS TREES
We have happened upon an important paradox: The Christmas tree entered American society through the avenues of commercial culture, but it did so in the name of precommercial folk culture. This was exactly what happened with the figure of Santa Claus. We might go so far as to say that both rituals were part of an early “folk revival” of sorts, a revival that emerged close behind the full-blown emergence of commercial culture itself.
It is commonplace to believe that Christmas trees were transmitted to America by early German immigrants in Pennsylvania. And in all probability, American Christmas trees did, indeed, first appear in the Pennsylvania German community in the early nineteenth century. But it is unlikely that they made their appearance much before 1820. Folklorists have done their best to seek out the first tree in Pennsylvania, and it seems plain that credible evidence of actual Christmas trees dates no earlier than the 181os. In 1819 (possibly as early as 1812), an immigrant artist from Germany drew a picture of a tree he saw during a tour of the Pennsylvania countryside, and that picture has been preserved in his sketchbooks. The first extant verbal reference to Christmas trees dates from the very next year, 1821 (it is an entry in the diary of a Lancaster resident, who reported that his children had gone to a nearby sawmill “for Christmas trees”).31 After that, references begin to multiply.
What this sequence suggests is that Christmas trees were first set up by Pennsylvania Germans sometime during the 1810s (the very decade during which St. Nicholas was introduced in New York). If that chronology holds, it is natural to wonder why Christmas trees were introduced in Pennsylvania at such a late date. Why didn’t they appear a century or so earlier, when the first Germans emigrated to Pennsylvania? The answer to this question is intriguing. It turns out that the Christmas tree was a relatively new tradition in Germany itself, one that was still emerging there in the early nineteenth century. In fact, the story of the German Christmas tree has parallels to that of the Dutch Santa Claus. What happened in both cases was that a small group of people suddenly began to make much of what had previously been a distinctly minor tradition.
An Early American Christmas Tree. This sketch was drawn from life (in either 1812 or 1819) by John Lewis Krimmel, a German painter who had emigrated to Philadelphia, and who drew the sketch while touring the Pennsylvania countryside. (Although Krimmel’s sketch is the first picture of an American Christmas tree, it was not printed until a few years ago.) The eleven people who appear here are apparently members of a single family. Judging from the dress and furnishings, this was a relatively prosperous household—a point of some significance in tracing the way Christmas trees were diffused through the Pennsylvania German community. (Courtesy, The Winterthur Library: Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera, No. Col. 308)
A careful reading of the German sources suggests both a chronology and a pattern to this process. Before the last third of the eighteenth century, Christmas trees had been a localized custom, largely limited to a single place—the Alsatian capital of Strasbourg—where they seem to have developed by the beginning of the seventeenth century. The Strasbourg Christmas tree was apparently used as part of a judgmental Christmas ritual—much like the similar St. Nicholas ritual in Holland—in which good children were rewarded with bonbons provided by the “Christkindle” (i.e., the Christchild), while “disobedient” youngsters were punished by a figure known as “Hanstrapp,” the local version of the Belsnickle.32
The ritual began to spread to other parts of Germany—minus Hanstrapp—only after 1750. A key date in this development may have been 1771, when Strasbourg became the site of an extended visit by the young writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who discovered in this city a new sense of “German” identity that transformed his larger cultural vision
. Goethe came to associate the Christmas tree itself with that new awareness. In fact, a Christmas tree scene is included at a dramatic moment of the 1774 novel that established his literary reputation, The Sufferings of Young Werther (the scene takes place shortly before the hero’s suicide).
It was largely through Goethe and his literary colleagues that the Christmas tree spread to other parts of Germany. It did so as a fashionable new ritual that was perceived—even there—as an ancient and authentic folk tradition. Christmas trees were adopted by the elite in Berlin, for example, only in the 1810s. In 1820 a young American visitor, the future historian George Bancroft, saw a tree there in the home of his local host, the distinguished jurist Baron Friedrich Karl von Savigny—a man who had married the sister of Goethe’s mistress Bettina Brentano. (Bancroft reported this episode in vivid detail in a letter to his father, who was a Unitarian minister in Worcester, Massachusetts.)33
It was not until the 1830s that Christmas trees became a truly national practice in Germany. They were introduced to Munich, for example, only in 1830, by the queen of Bavaria. It seems fair, under the circumstances, to consider Christmas trees as something of an “invented tradition,” much like Santa Claus in New York—a ritual picked up by the elite and spread via literary channels through a middle class that was interested in discovering its “authentic” national culture.
By the early nineteenth century, Christmas trees were being described as a timeless tradition. In 1820—the same year that produced the earliest evidence of an actual Christmas tree in Pennsylvania—a story of modern European authorship, but set in medieval Germany, noted that on Christmas Eve “every family assembles all its members together and fathers and mothers are surrounded by their children; they light up a number of wax lights, which they suspend to the branches of a small fir-tree, which are also hung round with the presents they mean to make them.” (The same story also informs us—remember, this is the fourteenth century—that “the shops in the streets” are filled with “toys of every kind.”)34
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