The Battle for Christmas

by Stephen Nissenbaum

  That is the bad news. The good news begins as soon as the Selwyns reach their own house. Now the children are told to dress up. They are led to the parlor, where they are delighted to find “a little party of their young friends, who had been invited by Mrs. Selwyn.” The children play party games (these include “Chair of Criticism,” “Cross Questions and Silly Answers,” and “Ladies’ Toilet”). It is in the midst of these that the denouement is reached. Mr. Selwyn asks the children to come with him to the drawing room. The scene is just what we have come to expect: a Christmas tree.

  [U]pon his throwing open the drawing-room door, an universal exclamation of delight burst from their lips at the beautiful sight presented to them. In the centre of the room was a large table covered with a damask cloth, and in the middle of this was placed a Christmas Tree, brilliantly illuminated with wax tapers, and suspended to the branches were all kinds of beautiful gifts….65

  The trick has worked. By evening’s end little Mary Selwyn has experienced the most delightful Christmas of her young life—and she has been taught an important lesson at the same time. The key, even more than the Christmas tree itself, is the element of surprise that accompanies it. The Selwyns, we are told, were “following the German custom in making it a surprise, by keeping the preparations a secret.” (It is indeed the case, in Christmas-tree references from the 1820s and 1830s, both in stories set in America and in reports from Germany, that Christmas trees are invariably set up in a room that is normally off-limits to the children—the library, the parlor, or, as here, the drawing room.66)

  In real life, obviously, the surprise factor would be effective only once or twice; after that, the children would surely catch on. But even after the surprise was gone, the ritual would retain a lingering utility: It would continue to keep virtually total control of the gift exchange in the hands of the parents—control of the time and place, and of the knowledge of how many gifts there would be and what they were. Frequently, permission for the children to enter the till-then secret room is signified by the ringing of a bell (in one instance, the children cannot enter until the third time the bell is rung!).

  In this 1836 story, we might say, the Christmas-tree ritual was explicitly represented as a tactic by which the parents might seize total control of the gift exchange. The main part of the tale consists of a series of disappointments for its little “anti-heroine”—moments at which her expected presents do not appear. The first of these moments is especially striking. It is when the children “catch” their parents “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.”67 (This is a ritual we will encounter again in Chapter 7, where it will be performed by slaves in the antebellum South.) But now the old ritual leads to nothing. It is only at the very end of the day, after several more such disappointments (and when the children have ceased to expect anything at all) that the carefully orchestrated surprise of the Christmas tree is sprung.

  The difference between the ritual of crying out “Christmas gift” and that of waiting for the “Christmas tree” is the difference between children playing the role of active agents in the gift exchange and their assuming the passive role of silent, grateful recipients. The Christmas-tree ritual, as it was introduced to American reading public, was designed to render children completely passive participants in the process. (Just so, as we will see in the next chapter, were new rituals of Christmas charity designed to make poor people themselves passive recipients of largesse.)

  The Christmas-tree ritual had another lingering effect. That effect was a hidden one—hidden, I suspect, even among those who had adopted the ritual. It was to manipulate children’s behavior, perhaps even their feelings, in a new way. At the end of the story we have just examined, “The Christmas Tree,” there is a kind of explanatory epilogue in which the father, Mr. Selwyn, places his new ritual in historical context. When he himself was a child, Mr. Selwyn tells his children,

  “no little girl or boy ever went to bed on Christmas Eve without hanging up a stocking, which they expected would be filled with gifts by the good Christkingle. They were always up bright and early the next morning, to see what was given to them. The good children were always sure of having their stockings filled with cakes, sugar plums, and little presents by the Christkingle, but the naughty ones would find a rod thrust in theirs by the old Bellsnickel…. [The Christkingle was regarded] as a kind of fairy, or good genius—such as you read of in fairy tales—who rewarded good children and the Bellsnickel was an evil genius, who punished the bad ones.”68

  A generation earlier, in other words, it would have been easy to deal with a girl ilke little Mary Selwyn; if her parents were trying to teach her a lesson, she would have received her just desserts from the Belsnickle. But Mr. and Mrs. Selwyn are just as interested in their daughter’s inner life as they are in her actual behavior. They want her to learn how to control even her selfish expectations. (Mr. Selwyn tells her at the very end that “‘you ought to submit with cheerfulness to your situation’”—to “submit” rather than to nag; and to do so “with cheerfulness.”) They want her to be truly, spontaneously grateful. Not only is young Mary to make no demands for presents, she is not even supposed to harbor any desire to receive them.

  As a practical matter, of course, that was impossible. What was possible was only concealment. Stories like “The Christmas Tree,” if they were actually put into practice, secretly encouraged children to behave hypocritically—to pretend they didn’t know or care what their parents were really planning. Ultimately, the effect of such stories was to encourage children to deny (even to themselves) their own selfish feelings, or else to feel guilty about having them. Children were being encouraged to feign, first to their parents and then to themselves, both selfless indifference and spontaneous joy; to act as if they enjoyed their presents only because they were expressions of love—because they were “affections gift.”

  SOME PERFECT CHILDREN

  Beginning in about 1840, yet another kind of Christmas story began to appear. This kind of story was about children who were already perfect in the Romantic, Pestalozzian sense, children who did not need to be taught a lesson about selflessness because they were utterly unselfish by nature.69 At the very least, these children were willing, even eager, to sacrifice their own Christmas gifts to make other children (or even grown-ups) happy. On occasion they were willing, even eager, to sacrifice their very lives. Perhaps the best-known of these stories is Louisa May Alcott’s classic novel Little Women (1868). This book opens with an extended Christmas sequence in which the four young title characters voluntarily give their Christmas presents to an impoverished neighboring family.70 Louisa May Alcott herself was the daughter of Bronson Alcott, the radical Pestalozzian Transcendentalist—and a man who had raised his children in the Pestalozzian fashion.

  Little Women was of course a tremendous best-seller, but by the time it was published in 1868 these issues (along with the Christmas tree itself) had thoroughly permeated middle-class American culture. But as it happens, another associate of Bronson Alcott’s had addressed a wide audience on similar matters a full generation earlier. This was Margaret Fuller, the first great female American intellectual figure. Back in 1835, Fuller had assisted Alcott in running his radical Temple School, and it was she who actually wrote the controversial 1836 book, Conversations with Children, On the Gospels, that had caused so many conservative Unitarians (including Harriet Martineau) to take offense. Fuller had also been among the very first American intellectuals to devote serious study to German language and philosophy.71

  In 1844 Margaret Fuller was living in New York and trying to support herself by writing for Horace Greeley’s successful new newspaper, the New York Tribune. It was she who authored the Christmas editorial that appeared in the Tribune on December 25, 1844, an editorial read by thousands of people. Fuller wrote:

  Christmas would seem to be the day peculiarly sacred
to children, and something of this feeling shows itself among us, though rather of German influence, than of native growth. The evergreen tree is often reared for the children on Christmas evening, and its branches cluster with little tokens that may, at least, give them a sense that the world is rich, and that there are some in it who care to bless them. It is a charming sight to see their glittering eyes, and well worth much trouble in preparing the Christmas tree….

  We borrow the Christmas tree from Germany. Might we but borrow with it that feeling which pervades all their stories about the influence of the Christ child, and has, I doubt not—for the spirit of literature is always, though refined, the essence of popular life—pervaded the conduct of children there.72

  Here Fuller retold two German Christmas legends. The first was about “St. Hermann Joseph,” a lovely child who one day offered an apple to a church sculpture of the Virgin and child—and the sculpted young Jesus “put forth its hand and took the apple.” From that time forth, “little Hermann” took every gift he received and carried it “to the same place. He needed nothing for himself; but dedicated all his childish goods to the altar.” The second legend was about “the holy Rupert,” a young prince who gave away his possessions whenever he saw a suffering child. One cold day Prince Rupert gives away his coat, stops and falls asleep on the road home, and has a dream. (He dreams of a mild old man who bathes a group of children in a river and then places them “on a beautiful island, where they looked white and glorious as little angels.” One of these children turns out to be little Jesus, who is wearing the coat that Rupert had given him.) Upon waking, Rupert takes ill from having stayed out in the cold without a coat. He dies, and at last he is able to join the band of little children he has helped.

  Margaret Fuller acknowledged that these stories were legends—Catholic legends, at that—but she insisted that they were useful, good legends, and Protestants should not reject them. “The thought of Jesus, as a child, has great weight with children who have learned to think of him at all.” That is, the child Jesus can become a model for modern children. “In earlier days, the little saints thought they imitated the Emanuel by giving apples and coats [i.e., like Hermann and Rupert]; but we know not why, in our age, that esteems itself so enlightened, they should not become also the givers of spiritual gifts….” If children were taken seriously (and educated properly) at home, they could save the world. If they were not, the fault lay in the parents:

  The cause of education would be indefinitely furthered, if in addition to formal means, there were but this principle awakened in the hearts of the young[:] that what they have they must bestow…. Were all this right in the private sphere, the public [sphere] would soon right itself also, and the nations of Christendom might join in a celebration such as “Kings and Prophets waited for” and so many martyrs died to achieve, of Christ-Mass.

  Margaret Fuller spent part of her own Christmas Day that year visiting the inmates of the city’s asylum for deaf and dumb children. The experience, she reported three days later, was one of personal “edification and delight.” The children at the asylum put on a theatrical performance for the visitors, a performance that demonstrated that they were capable of expressing intense and authentic emotion. Fuller wrote: “It was gratifying to see the faces of so many children of eternal silence radiate with intelligence, and evincing a knowledge and elevation of sentiment which it would seem impossible, thus benighted, to acquire.”73

  The performance put on by these deaf and dumb children represented one end of the spectrum of New York’s Christmas season in 1844. Like an increasing number of New Yorkers, Horace Greeley found it considerably more satisfying than what was still going on—and would continue to go on—at the other end of that same spectrum. Writing a week later, another Tribune reporter commented on what the streets of the city were actually like on New Year’s Day:

  The grog shops, we regretted to observe, overflowed throughout the day—so did some of their visitors toward evening. This was the worst feature of the anniversary, though the howling, and popping and banging through the preceding night were little better. What a profundity of emptiness there must be in that boy’s head who deems gun-firing an appropriate observance of the solemn, majestic, noiseless march of Time.

  This reporter had even seen one 18-year-old youth “loading and firing a fowling-piece through the streets at midday!” And he concluded with a sentence that expressed the behavioral concerns of one culture in terms of the generational assumptions of another: “The mother of that boy has much to answer for.”74

  CHAPTER 6

  Tiny Tim and Other Charity Cases

  HOME-LIFE IN GERMANY

  THE YEAR 1853 marked two important achievements in the life of young Charles Loring Brace. The first achievement was practical: Brace helped establish the Children’s Aid Society, a New York charitable institution that would become, within his lifetime and due chiefly to his unceasing efforts, the most important charitable organization in the city and probably the entire United States. Brace’s other achievement was literary: the publication of a book. That book, Home-Life in Germany, would soon be forgotten, overshadowed both by Brace’s subsequent literary work and, more important, by his labors with the Children’s Aid Society itself. But it is of interest here, if only because of the light it casts on Brace’s subsequent charitable work with children, and also on his enduring interest in Christmas.

  Home-Life in Germany was a travelogue of sorts, the account of an extended visit Brace had made to that country two years earlier, at the age of 25. During his visit Brace was struck by several important contrasts between Germany and his native United States. For example, Germans tended to be far less individualistic and self-reliant than Americans were. On the other hand, family life—the main subject of Brace’s book—was far more important in Germany than it was in America.

  The contrast between the home life of the two cultures came to a head at Christmas. Brace devoted an entire chapter of Home-Life in Germany to an account of the Christmas celebration in that country. Here, too, the graciousness of German culture contrasted with the emptiness Brace found in the United States:

  As I recall our hollow home-life in many parts of America—the selfishness and coldness in families—the little hold HOME has on any one, and the tendency of children to get rid of it as early as possible, I am conscious how much after all we have to learn from these easy Germans.

  Brace acknowledged that there was a certain “compensation” for this failing: In the United States “a boy is an independent, self-reliant man …, when he is [still] in leading-strings in Germany.” But for the most part, that compensation was inadequate, because self-reliance alone was no asset at all—unless it was softened by unselfish geniality. Otherwise, it would only intensify the hollowness of American home life. And that was just what was happening in the United States, where the acquisitive spirit was destroying family values:

  Materialism—the passion for money-making and excitement, is eating up the heart of our people. We are not a happy people; our families are not happy. Men look haggard and anxious and weary. We want something more genial and social and unselfish amongst us …

  What was needed was an antidote to raw materialism, and such an antidote was provided by the domestic Christmas. “Any family-festivals of this kind,” Brace wrote—“anything which will make home pleasanter, which will bind children together, and make them conscious of a distinct family-life, is most strongly needed.” For Brace (as for so many Americans), Christmas was now above all a domestic idyll, an opportunity to produce and foster family values as an antidote to materialism and selfishness. Once again, Germany offered an object lesson for Americans:

  There is something about this German Festival, which one would seldom see in our home enjoyments. People do not seem to be enjoying themselves, because it is a “duty to be cheerful.” … They are cheerful, because they cannot help it, and because they all love one another. The expression of trustfulness through the
children of these families … was very beautiful to see. They were all so happy, because they had been making one another happy.

  Christmas in Germany was an occasion of unforced, spontaneous mutuality. Brace connected this domestic Christmas with authentic religious piety: “Good people are to recognize that there is a religion in Christmas feasts, as well as in prayer-meetings; that a father who has made his home gloomy, has done quite as great a wrong to his children, perhaps, as he who made it irreligious. We want these German habits—these birth-day and Christmas festivals—this genial family life …”1 It is difficult to imagine a better definition of what modern historians have taken to calling the “religion of domesticity.”