3. Salem Gazette, Dec. 18, 1806; New-York Evening Post, Dec. 26, 1808. Philadelphia’s first ad for Christmas presents came in 1812. If we include ads for “New Year’s Presents”—or “Holiday Presents”—this dating needs to be moved back a decade or two earlier. Salem came in in 1804, two years before the ad that named Christmas. (It was placed on Dec. 21, 1804—four days before Christmas—by the same bookseller. Headed simply “Elegant Presents for Children,” it was followed on January 1 by a similar ad headed “Elegant New Year’s Presents for Children.” It is as if this bookseller was testing the cultural waters before actually daring to name Christmas.) But Salem was not the first American community to advertise New Year’s gifts. The first community to do so was another New England town, Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1783 (more about Worcester a little later). New York followed in 1789; Philadelphia, in 1796; Boston, in 1801. Salem Gazette, Dec. 21, 1804, and Jan. 1, 1805. Other New England examples: Amherst, New Hampshire, in 1811; Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1816.
4. “Christmas and New Year’s Presents,” in New England Galaxy and Masonic Magazine, Dec. 26, 1823. By 1825 the same periodical was able to claim that Christmas was a season “which custom from time immemorial has pointed out as a proper one for giving and receiving remembrances, and tokens of affection” (ibid., Dec. 23, 1825).
5. E.N.T., “Christmas and New Year’s Presents,” Christian Register, Dec. 20, 1834. In Worcester, Massachusetts, one man noted in his diary on Christmas Eve: “[G]eneral preparation for Christmas: the children must have presents and the parents, uncles, and aunts are all getting them.” (Levi Lincoln Newton Diaries, 1837–1843, in manuscript collection, American Antiquarian Society.)
6. Farmer’s Cabinet (Amherst, N.H.), Jan. 2, 1835. The story urged children to buy books rather than candy for the holidays.
7. The same pattern is true of ads labeled “New Year’s” or “holiday” gifts. Worcester, Massachusetts (1783): “New Year’s Gifts [all of them books] for Children;” New York (1789): books “for young gentlemen and ladies;” Boston (1801): “Books for Young Persons;” Portsmouth, New Hampshire (1816) “Juvenile books, suitable for To-morrow [New Year’s Day].”
8. In contrast, I have found only a single advertisement that advertised presents for servants. During the 1822 Christmas season, one Boston bookstore, after advertising a great variety of books and games for children of various ages, added that it also had “a large collection of Narratives, Popular Stories, &c., very cheap and neat editions, suitable for presents to Domestics and others.” (New England Palladium, Jan. 3, 1823.) The 1820s may have been the last decade in which such an ad could reasonably appear; after that, servants would not have been considered real members of the household. (Conversely, the early 1820s were also virtually the first time such an ad could have appeared; only a decade or two earlier, nobody would have received a commercial Christmas present.) In January 1820, a prosperous New York woman recorded spending “2.6” [2s. 6d.?] for “N[ew] Year presents to servants.” The following December the same woman made a similar entry: “New Year presents to servants[:] 1.56.” [Jane Minot Sedgwick?], Accounts and Commonplace Book, 1817–59, in Miscellaneous Sedgwick Papers (Massachusetts Historical Society), vol. 16.
9. New-York Herald, Dec. 23, 1839; New-York American, Dec. 27, 1841; see also New York Tribune, Jan. 3, 1844.
10. In 1844, the first Christmas ads in the New-York Tribune appeared as early as December 12.
11. [Philadelphia] National Gazette, Dec. 24, 1841.
12. Philadelphia Public Ledger, Dec. 25, 1841.
13. The idea probably originated in New York, where one paper reported in 1838 that “[f]our or five mammoth cakes have been made in this city to be cut up on New Year’s Eve. That at Ameli’s, 395 Broadway, is the largest ever made in this city. It weighs about 3300 pounds, and is worth $1500” (New York Weekly Herald, Dec. 22, 1838). But even as early as 1819, a New York baker advertised a “mammoth cake … weighing 300 pounds” (New York Evening Post, Dec. 28, 1819).
14. The quotation is from Eliza Leslie, “Snow-Balling; or, The Christmas Dollar,” in The Violet (Philadelphia, 1839 [c. 1838]), 36–52.
15. New York Daily Herald, Dec. 23, 1839.
16. Cary Carson, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert, eds., Of Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994).
17. Emily E. F. Skeel, Mason Locke Weems, His Work and Ways (3 vols., New York, 1929), III, 29. This advertisement originally appeared in the Georgia Journal (Milledgeville), Nov. 18, 1810.
18. Worcester Spy, Dec. 25, 1783; Dec. 23, 1784.
19. In some years, at least, Isaiah Thomas published more books during the holiday season than at other times of the year. In 1794, for example, between March and late November he placed a total of anywhere from one to four book ads in any given issue (the paper was published weekly). But on November 26 he placed five such ads, a number that went up to six on December 10, and then to nine on both December 17 and 24, before falling back to seven on December 31, then to four on January 7 and 14, and to a single one on January 21. It would appear that in some years Thomas printed his books on a seasonal cycle, a cycle that peaked during the Christmas season. There were other children’s books that we can assume were published for the Christmas trade, since the word Christmas was part of their title (and they had no other Christmas-related content). See, for example, “Peter Pinchpenny,” The Hobby Horse; or, Christmas Companion (Boston, 1804).
20. Copies of these two Munro and Francis catalogs are held by the American Antiquarian Society.
21. For the decentralized nature of the American book trade, see two books by William Charvat: Literary Publishing in America, 1790–1850 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993); and The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800–1870: The Papers of William Charvat (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1968), ch. 1.
22. New York Herald, Dec. 23, 1839. Bennett’s $3 minimum suggests the financial level below which Gift Books did not penetrate.
23. The New-York Book of Poetry (New York, 1837).
24. David Kaser (ed.), The Cost Book of Carey & Lea, 1825–1838 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1963), 68–108, 280–284. This paragraph is based on the work of UMass graduate student Richard Gassan—who also devised the idea of calculating these figures.
25. The Annualette: A Christmas and New Years Gift for Children (Boston, 1840), preface. There was a similar verse in the same Gift Book for 1841.
26. The Pearl (Philadelphia, 1837), 186. The publishers of The Pearl may well have pressured their authors to insert such advertising copy into their work. In another children’s Gift Book, Christmas Blossoms for 1850, a Santa-like figure named Uncle Thomas embeds the same point in a passage explaining the advantages of mass production and mass marketing:
What a wonderful thing printing is! It seems hard to understand how the world could have got along so long and so well without it…. Even after printing was invented, it was, for a long time, so costly that books were often bound with strong iron rings fastened to the leather, and were fixed to the walls of the library or the sides of the book-cases, by means of iron chains, for fear they should be stolen. How happy, then, Uncle Thomas should be that he can now print his Christmas Blossoms, and send them over the country so cheaply that everybody can easily get to see them. He can now talk to six millions of little boys and girls, and shake hands with them on paper all at once (pp. 19–20).
27. St. Nicholas’ Book, for All Good Boys and Girls (Philadelphia, 1842), 6.
28. John Davis to Elizabeth Bancroft Davis, Dec. 26, 1826, in John Davis Papers, American Antiquarian Society.
29. Reprinted in Albany Journal, Dec. 16, 1846.
30. New York Herald, Dec. 23, 1839.
31. The Brilliant: A Gift Book for 1850 (New York, 1850). This was edited by T. S. Arthur, best remembered today as the author of the temperance novel Ten Nights in a BarRoom.
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p; 32. Philadelphia Public Ledger, Dec. 24, 1844.
33. In a Boston bookshop in 1823, King Solomon “might there find his own proverbs illustrated, and made familiar to the eye of childhood, by means of the graphic art; and the [wonders] of Egypt and the realm of his favorite queen of Sheba, displayed in miniature, to furnish up an evening of entertainment for the nursery.” (“CHRISTMAS AND NEW YEAR’S PRESENTS,” in New England Galaxy and Masonic Magazine, Dec. 26, 1823.)
34. New Hampshire Gazette [Portsmouth], Dec. 22, 1818; “The Diary of Isaiah Thomas 1805–1828,” in Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society X (1909), 171. Bibles had long been commercial products, but never before to this degree.
35. Albany Journal, Dec. 16, 1846 (reprinted from the New York Tribune).
36. Peter J. Wosh, Spreading the Word: The Bible Business in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994), 19–21. Wosh adds that the Harpers “established the Bible as an article of mass consumption, an attractive centerpiece for the proper Victorian bookshelf. The medium rather than the message assumed center stage as mere possession of the volume conferred cultural status on, and testified to the good taste of, the purchaser” (ibid., 20). See also R. Laurence Moore, Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 17–18, 34–35. An excellent reference source is Margaret T. Hills, The English Bible in America: A Bibliography of Editions of the Bible and the New Testament Published in America 1777–1957 (New York: American Bible Society, 1961).
37. The dates of these inscriptions also confirm that these personal Bibles, like Gift Books, were seen as appropriate presents to be given during the Christmas season (or, in one of these cases, at Thanksgiving).
38. Louisa May Alcott, Little Women; or, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy (Boston, 1869), Ch. 2.
39. See Richard H. Brodhead, Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 95–96.
40. Susan Warner, The Wide, Wide World (New York, 1851), ch. 3, 30–31 (this scene is also briefly described in Moore, Selling God, 34). Later in the novel, in a scene set at Christmas, the feeling of helplessness became especially acute. Ellen and her friends are discussing Christmas presents they are about to make out of satin cloth and morocco leather they have received. They agree to choose which pieces each of them will take. “But this business of choosing was found to be very long and very difficult….” One girl says: “I declare it’s too vexatious! Here I’ve got this beautiful piece of blue satin, and can’t do any thing with it; it just matches that blue morocco—it’s a perfect match—I could have made a splendid thing of it, and I have got some cord and tassels that would just do—I declare it’s too bad.” She is told by another girl: “Well, choose, Margaret.” But Margaret replies: “I don’t know what to choose—that’s the thing. What can one do with red and purple morocco and blue satin? I might as well give up” (ibid., 292–293). For another example, see Anna Warner, Mr. Rutherford’s Children. Second Volume (New York, 1855), 91–96. (Anna Warner was Susan Warner’s sister and her sometime collaborator.)
41. The Sedgwick family maintained its cohesion and distinction well into the present century; one of its more recent members, Edie Sedgwick, achieved notoriety—and an early death from drugs—as a movie starlet in Andy Warhol’s “stable.” See Jean Stein, Edie, An American Biography (New York: Knopf, 1982).
42. Pamela Sedgwick to Theodore Sedgwick, Dec. 18, 1792 (Sedgwick Family Papers, Collection III, Box 1.13) and Dec. 25, 1794 (ibid., Box 1.18); see Henry Van Schaack to Theodore Sedgwick, Dec. 25, 1788 (Sedgwick Family Papers I, Box 1.12—“Merry Christmas”). Theodore Sedgwick himself returned such salutations for the first time only on Jan. 1, 1795, in a pair of letters, one to his wife and the other to Ephraim Williams (Sedgwick Family Papers V, Box 1.14). Note: The Sedgwick Family Papers are catalogued in five separate collections at the Massachusetts Historical Society, labeled I-V, respectively. Henceforth these will be referred to as “Sedgwick I” [etc.]. The papers of Catharine M. Sedgwick are catalogued separately.)
43. Henry Van Schaack to Theodore Sedgwick, Jan. 2, 1784 (Sedgwick I, Box 1.5). Van Schaack jokingly added that his wife had “eloped,” so there would be no women present. Eight years earlier, when Sedgwick and Van Schaack were both serving in the War for Independence, Sedgwick sent his friend a copy of a soldier’s drinking song in mid-December; the song concluded: “Its not right for a soldier to grumble I know / But there is one grudge that I lawfully owe / those Damnable Sutters[?] how slighly [i.e., slyly] they’ll come / and charge us one Dollar for a Quart of rum. / Sweet Connecticut if I shall see you one [once] more / for the price of one Quart I could have three or four. / I would Drink & be Merry my Toast it shall be / Success to the Lads that shall gain Liberty” (Sedgwick I, Box 1.1).
44. Theodore Sedgwick to Ephraim Williams Jan. 9, 1795 (Sedgwick III, Box 2.1); Henry Van Schaack to Theodore Sedgwick, Dec. 25, 1799 (Sedgwick I, Box 4.4). Van Schaack said the wine was “excellent” and asked Sedgwick to get more. “As long as I can drink such wine you and others may consume Madeira and Claret and Cherry [Sherry] and Lisbon….” Van Schaack’s brother Peter had also received a gift of wine from Sedgwick (ibid.).
45. The phrase comes from his letter to Pamela Dwight of Jan. 1, 1795 (Sedgwick V, Box 1.14).
46. Pamela Sedgwick to Theodore Sedgwick, Jan. 1, 1798 (Sedgwick III, Box 2.10). On New Year’s Eve, 1799/1800, Theodore Sedgwick, Jr., wrote to his father: “I should [prefer to] live in a Town, at this season” (Sedgwick III, Box 2.16). And in 1808 Catharine M. Sedgwick wrote to her sister Frances Watson on Dec. 25 that she felt “secluded and alone” in Stockbridge (Sedgwick IV, Box 2.12).
47. Catharine Sedgwick to Frances S. Watson, Dec. 28, 1807-Jan. 1, 1808, Catharine M. Sedgwick Papers I (Massachusetts Historical Society), Box 1.1. (Note: Catharine M. Sedgwick’s papers are catalogued in three separate collections at the Massachusetts Historical Society. Henceforth these will be referred to as “CMS I” [etc.], and Catharine M. Sedgwick’s name will be abbreviated “CMS.”)
48. Henry Dwight Sedgwick to Theodore Sedgwick, Dec. 24, 1805 (Sedgwick V, Box 2.13).
49. Theodore Sedgwick to Henry Dwight Sedgwick, Jan. 2, 1806 (Sedgwick III, Box 3.7).
50. Eliza S. Pomeroy to Henry D. Sedgwick (Sedgwick V, Box 5.1). A letter from Theodore Sedgwick to Henry D. Sedgwick, written the next day, Jan. 2, 1812 (ibid.), makes no reference to this “feast.”
51. For Christmas: CMS to Robert Sedgwick, Dec. 23–24, 1817 (Sedgwick IV, Box 3.9); Charles Sedgwick to CMS, Dec. 25, 1820 (Sedgwick IV, Box 3.23); for New Year: Jane Sedgwick to Louisa Minot [part of a letter from Henry D. Sedgwick to William Minot], Dec. 29, 1820 (Sedgwick IV, Box 3.23).
52. Ibid. (“mince pies”). It was actually New Year’s rituals in New York that were unknown in Boston, as Henry D. Sedgwick pointed out in a letter to his Boston fiancée: “Tomorrow is the commencement of a new year consecrated here to a species of brisk hilarity and hurried sociability of which you have scarcely an idea in Boston. After Church, which is out at ***1/2*** past 12 & before dinner at 3 you are expected to call on all your friends everywhere to get a glass of wine & a cookie (small cake). You cannot stay at one place more than 3 minutes.” [Henry D. Sedgwick] to [Jane] Minot (from N.Y.C.), Dec. 28–31, 1816; quoted passage is dated December 31 (Sedgwick V, Box 8.9). The next day Henry D. Sedgwick described the scene: “On New Year’s day Robert began his visits at a quarter past twelve. I accompanied him. It is considered indispensable to visit all your friends at that season…. We finished our rounds or rather ex[h]austed our time at a quarter past 3 having made more than 30 visits in every part of the city. There were still several omissions which he very much regretted.” [Henry D. Sedgwick] to [Jane] Minot, Jan. 1, 1817 (Sedgwick V, Box 9.1).
53. This was not because of a dearth of young people in the family. From 1795 to 1820 there were twenty Sedgwick children born to the
third generation (i.e., Theodore Sedgwick’s grandchildren).
54. “Vous savez notre cher pere que nous vous aimons et que nous n’avons rien a vous donner si nous avions ete dans la ville certainement nous vous avarions donne quelque chose. A l’un qui est toujours indulgent et toujours genereaux a tout le monde et surtout a ses enfans a [sic] billet est presente par Theodore Sedgwick et M. Sedgwick.” Maria and Theodore Sedgwick III to their father, Theodore Sedgwick, Jr., Jan. 1, 1824 (Sedgwick II, Box 6.17). Theodore III was 12, and his sister was 10 years old. Of course, the letter itself was the real present, displaying, as it did, the children’s command of a foreign language.
55. See, for example, Elizabeth Sedgwick to Robert Sedgwick, Oct., 1835: “The fact is the whole responsibility of affairs falls upon her shoulders, and even hers are not broad enough to bear it” (Sedgwick V, Box 17.14). This was one of the rare acknowledgments of the way Catharine Sedgwick was handed responsibility by her relatives. As for her love of children, Catharine Sedgwick wrote of one little boy, the son of two of her close friends: “He had better come to his Aunt Catharine who has nothing to do but to make time pass agreeably to children from two to ten years old.” CMS to Eliza Cabot Follen, April 1, 1833 (CMS I, Box 8.8). Catharine Sedgwick didn’t much like the commercial part of Christmas, but it was she who ended up doing much of the family’s shopping, because other family members trusted her judgment (and as an unmarried woman, she was expected to have the time).
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