The Battle for Christmas

by Stephen Nissenbaum

  The difficulty in making this kind of determination was compounded by a new strain of thinking that emerged after 1830, largely within the Unitarian community itself. This strain (more broadly considered, it was a local expression of the movement known as Romanticism) took the Unitarian argument about child-rearing substantially further than was initially intended. It suggested that the natural impulses of children were not flawed, after all, and that those impulses should not be suppressed but actually encouraged and indulged. In this new and controversial view, it was children who offered adults a model for emulation, and not the other way around. Children were not imperfect little adults; rather, adults were imperfect grown-up children. The seeds of perfection lay within each child, like the unopened buds in a plant; and the ills of society were produced by corruption and artifice within society itself, and not by the child’s own natural impulses. The English Romantic poet William Wordsworth (a friend of Samuel Taylor Coleridge), put the idea in a nutshell in a classic phrase: “The Child is father to the Man.”

  In the United States, the most famous early expression of this new philosophy came from the pen of Ralph Waldo Emerson, himself a former Unitarian minister (he left the pulpit in 1831). In his very important 1836 essay “Nature,” Emerson wrote that the best people were those who “retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.” The “wisdom” of a man’s “best hour” was no better than “the simplicity of his childhood.” As Emerson summed it up, “the sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and heart of the child.”48 (By the 1860s, when this radical notion had succeeded in transforming the way thousands of Americans treated their children, the now-aging Emerson looked back on the change with a certain irony. He opened an essay about the reformation of New England life in his own time by reporting a witty aphorism: “‘It was a misfortune to have been born when children were nothing, and to live till [adult] men were nothing.’”)49

  These Romantic ideas of childhood had obvious implications for educational practices, implications that were most influentially articulated in the work of the European educational reformer Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746–1827). Pestalozzi, a German-speaking Swiss whose name is unfamiliar today except to students of intellectual and educational history, was well known in the second quarter of the nineteenth century—as well known as, say, John Dewey a century later. In his most influential writings, Leonard and Gertrude (1781) and How Gertrude Teaches Her Children (1801), Pestalozzi stressed above all the importance of mothers in childhood education. He suggested that “feelings of love, confidence, and gratitude, and [even] the habit of obedience,” are characteristics that “originate in the relationship established between the infant and its mother.”50 (In retrospect, we can view Pestalozzis ideas as part of the larger process by which moral authority within middle-class households shifted away from the father and into maternal hands, and by which the teaching profession itself became essentially women’s work.)

  Hundreds of educators and tourists visited the progressive boarding school that Pestalozzi established in Yverdon, Switzerland, in 1805, and Pestalozzian schools were set up over the succeeding decades throughout Europe (especially in Germany). Pestalozzis progressive ideas about education—and about childhood itself—had become influential late in the 1820s among upper-class liberals in Philadelphia and Boston, and several “infant schools” were set up in those cities. (In both cities, in the late 1820s, funds were raised for these schools by holding fairs at which Christmas presents were offered for sale; these fairs were the models for the antislavery fairs of the 1830s.)

  Controversy over the Pestalozzian system surfaced in Boston in the mid-1830s. In 1835 Emerson’s friend Amos Bronson Alcott, an educator who had absorbed Pestalozzi’s ideas (and who would later test them out on his daughter Louisa May), opened a Pestalozzian school in Boston, a school in which Alcott devoted much of his energy to listening to the children and otherwise turning conventional child-rearing practices on their head. The pupils in the Temple School (so called because it was housed in Boston’s Masonic Temple) were drawn from the children of Boston’s well-to-do Unitarian establishment. Alcott’s program was controversial from the beginning—for example, when his pupils misbehaved badly, Alcott would punish them by ordering them to whip him! But with the publication of Conversations with Children, on the Gospels, a book containing verbatim transcripts of the children’s responses to passages from the New Testament (the idea was that children could teach their elders even about theology), more conservative Unitarians were scandalized. Enrollment in Alcott’s school declined precipitously, and in 1839 he was forced to close it down (the last straw was Alcott’s refusal to deny admission to an African-American pupil). From Stockbridge, Elizabeth Dwight Sedgwick (author of that 1833 story about the father who uses Christmas to teach lessons of self-discipline to his sons) had written a critical review of Alcott’s first book about his school.51 Even Harriet Martineau was appalled by Conversations with Children, on the Gospels, and she wrote almost savagely about Alcott in her book Society in America.

  But Charles Folien subscribed to Pestalozzis ideas, and as we have seen, it appears that the main reason he was fired from his brief tenure as live-in private tutor to the children of the deceased Colonel Perkins was that he insisted on employing Pestalozzian techniques in the boys’ education. Later, when he was forced to give up his tutelage, Folien insisted that he had dealt with the boys “by imposing only such rules as their own moral sense approved,” and by sharing “a ready sympathy with all their concerns and wants, and a hearty desire to gratify all their legitimate and innocent desires.” (He added, “I was aware, that, to some, this mode of treating the boys might seem too indulgent.”)52

  It is interesting that Folien felt obliged to modify the term desires with the adjectives “legitimate and innocent.” What that little gesture reveals is that the Pestalozzian wing of the Unitarians was caught up in a dilemma just as serious as that of their more conservative colleagues on the other side. Those more conservative Unitarians invoked a strategy of child-rearing that implicitly placed children at the center of the domestic universe, a strategy that could easily bring out the very selfishness it was intended to control. For its part, the Romantic wing of the Unitarians explicitly looked to children to find the roots of human perfection, and they found it difficult to acknowledge that children who had been properly raised would show any signs of corruption. They tried hard to believe that children were innately unselfish, and that it was only a corrupt society, and improper educational practices, that rendered them selfish and greedy. It was a risky assumption.

  ?HE ISSUE came to a head at Christmas. Here was the one occasion on which even those parents who held to the more traditional idea of child-rearing tended to give up any real effort to maintain what Elizabeth Ellery Sedgwick called “the balance between restraint and indulgence.” Christmas had long been the kind of occasion on which restraint (of whatever sort) was momentarily suspended and indulgence ruled. In a different culture—a world of scarcity, with seasonal cycles of plenitude—the axis along which that shift took place was one that involved a brief period of gluttonous feasting or similar forms of revelry. In contrast, for genteel Unitarian families who inhabited a world of relative abundance, that axis involved a similarly brief period of undammed affection for their children, an affection made manifest in a lavish orgy of gift-giving.

  Back in 1827, Charles Follen (then a newcomer to America) had a conversation with a friend “about the celebration of Christmas in Germany.” Follen lamented that there were “no feasts for the children” in the United States. “Such festivals for the feelings,” he mused, “would be a great improvement of the moral state of the nation.”53 As we know, even as Follen spoke, this kind of festival was becoming more widespread—1827 was the very year that Clement Clarke Moore’s poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” was widely printed for the first time.

  But even among those who, like Elizabeth Ellery Sed
gwick, were ordinarily anxious about the dangers of such indulgence, Christmas functioned as a momentary release from that anxiety, a “festival for the feelings.” Mrs. Sedgwick herself offers a case in point. During the second half of 1835, she was deeply concerned about her oldest child, a 10-year-old boy named Ellery. Young Ellery had been placed in the trustworthy care of his Aunt Elizabeth (Elizabeth Dwight Sedgwick, the critic of Bronson Alcott and author of the aforementioned 1833 Christmas story), but he was showing worrisome signs of moral weakness. On one occasion he asked his mother to give him a silver pencil. (Characteristically, she refused, suggesting instead that he buy himself “a wooden one—learn to take care of it—and then you shall deserve a better kind of one, and shall have it.”) Far worse, his Aunt Elizabeth had caught him cheating systematically on his Latin homework and then lying about the matter when he was confronted with it. All that autumn, the boy’s parents carried on an intensive correspondence about how to handle the matter. Elizabeth Ellery Sedgwick endured sleepless nights on her son’s account. (“I am mortified and distressed, & fear I have been unfaithful to him, for these faults come back to the Mother.”) But at Christmas the parents’ pent-up anxiety was released in a torrent of affection, as both father and mother wrote letters assuring their errant son (still away at school with his aunt) of how intensely they missed him (“We miss you dreadfully dear Ell, every hour of the day”) and letting him know that they had actually set up a table filled with presents for him (“to show where he would be if he was here”).54 Mr. Sedgwick even chose to let Ellery know that his mother was shedding tears over her letter as she wrote it. All this was hardly the kind of treatment that Elizabeth Dwight Sedgwick, young Ellery’s aunt and teacher, had proposed in the Christmas story she had published two years earlier!

  For followers of Pestalozzi, the impulse to make Christmas a child-focused “festival of the feelings” was reinforced in 1833 with the publication in Philadelphia of a biography of the Swiss reformer (he had died four years earlier). In the middle of that book the biographer, Edward Biber by name, chose to insert a chapter bearing the title “Christmas-Eve Discourse.” This was simply the transcript of a talk—a passionate, rhapsodic talk—that Pestalozzi had delivered in 1810, on Christmas Eve, to the children and fellow teachers at his school in Yverdon. Judging from the context, it would seem that Pestalozzi gave the talk just before distributing presents to his pupils, and it is probable that those presents were hanging from a Christmas tree. (The editor of the English-language edition of Biber’s biography felt compelled to offer a footnote for his British and American readers, explaining that in German-speaking regions the presents would be placed on “‘Christmas trees,’ young fir-stems, lighted up with little wax tapers, on the twigs of which all the glittering gifts are hung.” He went on to explain that when German children asked who had put their presents on the Christmas tree, they were told, “‘The Christchild brought them.’”)55

  It is just such a scene that we might imagine as Pestalozzi explained the holy significance of Christmas Eve. He addressed his rhapsodic words directly to the children at Yverdon, insisting that it was they who formed the core of his household: “Beloved children! it is for your sakes that we are united in one family; our house is your house, and for your sakes only is it our house.”56

  In a way, those words would have sounded familiar enough, at least during the Christmas season, when people in authority were used to deferring symbolically to those who at other times of the year would have owed deference to them. (It is not difficult to imagine Washington livings old Squire Bracebridge using the same ornate phrasing, but substituting the poor for the children.)57

  But Pestalozzi meant something more than that. He meant that children were the center of the household not only in a symbolic fashion—not only on this ritual occasion—but that they constituted the actual and enduring center of the household. In part, that was because the training of children was what families were all about. But it was also because—and here Pestalozzis radicalism surfaced—the very training of children was ultimately designed to nurture the seeds of innocent perfection with which they had been endowed at birth. In other words, children (properly raised) offered an actual model for adults to imitate. Adults, Pestalozzi felt, needed to become like children: “We know that except we be converted and become as little children, except we be elevated to the simplicity of a childlike mind, we shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven … !” And he continued by pleading for their childish spirit to redeem the very imperfections of their adult teachers: “Children, let the graces of childhood elevate our souls, and purify us of all contamination of anger, and wrath, and hastiness in your education….”58

  The spirit of Christmas might help to accomplish that inner transformation. The presents that parents gave their children on Christmas might help them reverence the spirit of childhood in their own children.

  Oh [Pestalozzi mused] … that we might all be like unto our children, to whom the invisible love of God is made manifest in the Christchild under the form of an innocent babe, like unto them in appearance, but descending from heaven with pleasant gifts….59

  That we might all be like unto our children. What Pestalozzi ultimately wished to achieve was the reformation of adults. But in order for that to come about, children themselves had to play the role they had been assigned. Their joy had to be innocent joy. They had to experience Christmas with what Pestalozzi constantly referred to with the word simplicity. (“And you, my beloved children, who celebrate this Christmas in the simplicity of your hearts, what shall I say to you? We wish to be partakers of your simplicity, of your childlike joy.”)

  Pestalozzi wished very deeply to believe (in fact, he committed his life to the venture) that the hearts of children were simpler and purer than those of adults. But even as he was speaking, the assembled children were waiting to receive their Christmas presents, gifts that were probably hanging on a Christmas tree at that very moment. I’m not sure exactly what was “innocent” about such childlike joy, but its connection with material expectations surely was (and remains) troubling—and this despite the efforts of parents to disguise the nature of the gifts by attributing them to such transcendent figures as St. Nicholas, or even (as Pestalozzi and German culture had it) the Christ child himself.

  Whether it took a Pestalozzian form or the more conservative shape represented by Elizabeth Dwight Sedgwick, Unitarian pedagogy contained a serious internal contradiction. It attempted to teach children to be selfless, but it did so while placing them—by placing them—at the center of the domestic universe.

  It was a heavy burden to place on children. At one point near the end of his talk Pestalozzi himself hesitated and actually urged the children in his audience to conform to his definition, to become more childlike: “[B]e ye innocent children in the full sense of the word…. Let this festival establish you in the holy strength of a childlike mind….”60 The holy strength of a childlike mind. Under the weight of this definition, it was surely difficult to grow up as an actual child—perhaps as difficult, in its own way, as it was to grow up as a child whose will was being broken by physical or psychological abuse.

  From Belsnickle to Christkingle

  As it happens, a short story that was published in the 1836 edition of a Gift Book, The Pearl, deals with these questions. The title of the story was “The Christmas Tree,” and its author—for once, not a Sedgwick!—was identified simply as “Mrs. G.” The story is about using a Christmas tree to teach children a hard lesson: how not to be selfish on the occasion of a holiday that was centered around making them happy. The author, a Philadelphian, lets us know where she got the idea for “The Christmas Tree.” It came from “a book I have lately read, in speaking of the celebration of Christmas by the Germans.” In a footnote, that book is identified as “Bibers Life of Pestalozzi.”61

  “The Christmas Tree” deals with a prosperous, child-centered family, the Selwyns. The author lets us know on the first page just where
on the ideological spectrum this couple’s hearts lay: “Mr. and Mrs. Selwyn were very affectionate parents, and nothing gave them greater pleasure than to gratify the wishes of their children.” And their daughter Mary has great expectations of the Christmas holiday. The story opens almost two weeks before Christmas Day, with young Mary asking her mother how long she has to wait until the big day arrives: “‘How much I wish it was here!’” she exclaims. When Mrs. Selwyn asks why she is so eager, Mary replies without hesitation: “‘Because I expect to get a great many presents.’” Mrs. Selwyn responds noncommittally: “‘I will make no rash promises; Christmas is almost two weeks off, and, you know, many things may happen before that time.’”62

  Of course, Mr. and Mrs. Selwyn are plotting a surprise: “They had been planning a Christmas celebration a few evenings before, and they thought of following the German custom in making it a surprise, by keeping the preparations a secret.” They have made their preparations in the drawing room, which is ordinarily kept locked and off-limits to the children (who therefore “had no suspicion of the treat their kind parents had in store for them”). Young Mary is “a little disappointed that her mother had said nothing about a party, but she consoled herself by counting how many presents she expected to get.”63

  Christmas Day brings Mary one disappointment after another. The family goes through its standard rituals, but none of these yields a single present. First, Mary tries an old game: “Before sunrise …, Mary and her brothers were up and dressed, and ran into their parents’ room, to catch them by calling out ‘Christmas gift’—knowing that, according to the old custom, if they could say it before their parents, they were entitled to a present.” This tactic fails to produce any results. Later that morning, the family goes to visit their grandfathers country estate, “where they always dined on Christmas day.” But on their arrival the children are once again disappointed—“there were no presents on the table.” Again they console themselves, this time with the thought that “they would get them after dinner,” and again they are disappointed. At last, toward evening, the family sets out for home. On the way, “little Mary … burst into tears,” sobbing that she had “‘never spent such a dull Christmas in her life…. Christmas is almost over, and I have not had a single present to-day.’” Finally, Mr. Selwyn chimes in: “‘I am sorry, my daughter, to see that you have so little fortitude in bearing disappointment.’” He gently but firmly expresses disappointment in her behavior: “‘every effort that has been made by your kind relatives, to amuse you and make you happy, has been entirely lost, merely because you could not have every wish gratified.’”64