The Battle for Christmas

by Stephen Nissenbaum

  32. Memoirs of Baroness Oberkirch, quoted in Alexander Tille, “German Christmas and the Christmas-Tree,” in Folk-Lore: A Quarterly Review of Myth, Tradition, Institution, and Custom (London), III (1892), 166–182. This and the following paragraphs are based on the above article, along with the following: Kurt Mantel, Geschichte des Weinachtsbaumes (Hanover: M. u. H. Schaper, 1975), 5–32 and passim; Alexander Tille, Die Geschichte der Deutschen Weinacht (Leipzig, 1893), 256–278; Alexander Tille, Yule and Christmas: Their Place in the German Year (London, 1899), 103–106, 170–176, 214–218; and Ingeborg Weber-Kellerman, Das Weinachtfest: Eine Kultur-und Sozialgeschichte der Weinachtszeit (Lucerne and Frankfort: Christmas. J. Bucher, 1978), 104–131. See also Phillip V. Snyder, The Christmas Tree Book (New York, 1976), 14.1 have used these sources to arrive at the above interpretation, but the interpretation itself is my own.

  33. George Bancroft to his parents, Aaron and Lucretia Bancroft, Dec. 30, 1820, in Bancroft Papers, American Antiquarian Society.

  34. “Christmas Eve; or, The Conversion. From the German,” Atheneum, VII (May-June, 1820). This story had appeared earlier that year in a French magazine, La Belle Assemblée (Jan. 1820). For a much later story (which placed the origin of the Christmas tree even earlier), see Henry Van Dyke, The First Christmas Tree (New York, 1897, illustrated by Howard Pyle), set in the German forests in A.D. 722.

  35. For Coleridge’s gentry associations in Ratzeburg, see Oswald Doughty, Perturbed Spirit: The Life and Personality of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (East Brunswick, N.J., 1981), 150–152. Coleridge himself, in a 1798 letter, referred to his society as “Gentry and Nobility.” His description of the house in which he observed the Christmas tree refers to two parlors. (Coleridge was rather offended by the sexual looseness he witnessed in Ratzeburg.)

  36. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Christmas Within Doors, in the North of Germany,” The Friend (Burlington, Vt., 1831), 321–322.

  37. Ibid., 322. This scene took place “in the great parlour” of his host’s house. The ritual contained some of the old elements of Christmas as judgment day: Just before the presents are actually distributed, “the mother says privately to each of her daughters, and the father to his sons, that which he has observed most praise-worthy and that which was most faulty in their conduct.” It is interesting that the parents tell the children their faults “privately;” this has the ring of a new practice (like the Christmas tree itself).

  38. Catharine Sedgwick diary, Jan. 19, 1836, in CMS I, Box 11. The Burlington edition of The Friend was reprinted in 1831.

  39. Christian Register, III (Apr. 24, 1824), 152. I suspect that I have not completely tracked down the printing history of Coleridge’s little report, or the history of the way it reappeared in American sources, sometimes without attribution.

  40. Lydia M. Child, The Little Girl’s Own Book (Boston, 1831), 286–287. (The title was registered for copyright on December 25, 1830, and the preface wished the children who read it “a merry Christmas and a happy New-Year” (ibid., iv). The book was reprinted several times, into the 1850s.

  41. J. K. Smith, Juvenile Lessons; or, The Child’s First Reading Book (Keene, N.H., 1832), 70–71. (This last statement of this lesson reveals that Coleridge himself, and not Lydia Maria Child, was almost surely the source.) Circumstantial evidence suggests that J. K. Smith, too, was a progressive Unitarian. Smith’s book went through three editions, all published in Keene, between 1832 and 1842.

  42. Youth’s Companion, XIV (Dec. 25, 1840), 129. This magazine was edited by Nathaniel Willis, the father of two writers who were very popular in their day, N. P. Willis and Fanny Fern. The children in this “story” go on to propose (again following Coleridge’s report) that on Christmas Day their parents give them notes “‘telling them what faults they have overcome during the year, and what they have still left to overcome.’” (“‘I should like that,’” one of the children says.)

  43. Philip J. Greven, The Protestant Temperament: Patterns of Child-rearing, Religious Experience, and the Self in Early America (New York: Knopf, 1977), 206 Greven adds that such parents (whom he calls “moderates,” as distinct from “evangelicals”) “were preoccupied with self-established and self-maintained boundaries over their passions and appetites” (p. 206). Theodore Parker, “Phases of Domestic Life,” quoted ibid., 168. For an overview of attitudes toward child rearing in nineteenth-century America, see Bernard Wishy, The Child and the Republic: The Dawn of Modern American Child Nurture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968); and for a splendid and provocative recent analysis of the corporal-punishment debate, see Brodhead, Cultures of Letters, 13–47. An influential nineteenth-century book on this subject is Horace Bushnell, Views of Christian Nurture (Hartford, 1847).

  44. Mrs. [Elizabeth] Sedgwick, “The Game at Jackstraws and The Christmas Box,” in The Pearl; or, Affection’s Gift (Philadelphia, 1834), 17–52.

  45. Ibid., 31, 36, 46.

  46. Ibid., 32, 46–47. This same number of The Pearl contained a prefatory poem about holiday gifts, signed “A.D.W.” and dated from Stockbridge (the author was almost certainly a friend of the Stockbridge Sedgwicks). This poem concludes with two stanzas advertising The Pearl itself: “And here is one,—look, Ellen dear,—/ That I from all would choose; / Its very name’t is sweet to hear; / Affection’s Gift’ who’d lose [“Affection’s Gift” was the subtitle of The Pearl].” “True, true, dear Sarah, I am sure / We need not look for [presents] more, / While here we have, so chaste and pure, / ‘The Pearl’ for thirty-four” (ibid., 10).

  47. Elizabeth E. Sedgwick to Robert Sedgwick, Aug. 22, 1835 (Sedgwick V, Box 17.12).

  48. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature,” in Nature, Addresses and Lectures (The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 12 vols., Boston, 1903–4), I, 8–9.

  49. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England,” ibid., vol. 10, 325. I am indebted to Conrad Wright for this reference.

  50. Quoted in E. Biber, Henry Pestalozzi, and His Plan of Education (London, 1833), 447–448.

  51. “S.” [Susan Sedgwick], “‘Record of a School: Exemplifying the general principles of spiritual culture,” The Knickerbocker, 8 (Feb. 1836), 113–130. Mrs. Sedgwick called Alcott an “enthusiast” and an “ultra.” Richard Brodhead makes a compelling linkage between radical educational theory and the abolitionists’ horror of the use of the lash on slave plantations. See Brodhead, Cultures of Letters, 13–14, 35–42.

  52. For this episode, see Folien, Works, 1, 360–378 passim; and specifically, 362 (“individual talent and taste”), 375 (“legitimate and innocent desires”). Folien maintained, as Elizabeth Palmer Peabody later reported, “that the child should be handled not with reference to his future, but to his present perfection; that the father of the man is the perfect child in the balance of childish beauty, and not the child prematurely developed into a man; that education which does the latter both destroys the child and dwarfs the man.” This is quoted in Spindler, Charles Folien, 107–109 (the quotation is from Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s 1880 volume Reminiscences of W.E. Channing, 250–257). For further evidence of Follen’s adherence Pestalozzian principles: In 1826 he tried to procure some “fables” by Pestalozzi (Works, 1, 161). And in 1828 he attempted to revise William Russel’s Pestalozzian “Teacher’s Manual,” a work evidently still in manuscript (ibid., 240).

  53. Diary entry, Dec. 26, 1827, in Folien, Works, I, 222.

  54. Elizabeth E. Sedgwick to Ellery Sedgwick, Aug. 4, 1835 (Sedgwick V, Box 17.9—this letter is addressed to “My dear precious son”); Elizabeth E. Sedgwick to Robert Sedgwick, undated but postmarked Sept. 1, 1835 (Sedgwick V, Box 17.12); Robert Sedgwick to Ellery Sedgwick, Jan. 3, 1836 (Sedgwick V, Box 18.1).

  55. E. Biber, Life and Trials of Henry Pestalozzi (Philadelphia, 1833), 38–43. (The quotation marks appear in the original.) The translator continued: “Christmas-eve is abroad as here [i.e., in England and America], the time when children receive gifts of every kind from the
ir parents, godfathers, &c.; but instead of ‘Christmas boxes,’ they are. The preparation of the ‘Christmas tree’ is a family mystery, and if the child asks from whence all the goodly things come, the answer is, ‘The Christchild brought them.’”

  56. Ibid., 43.

  57. Pestalozzi actually made the same connection. Somewhat like John Pintard (and many others of their generation), Pestalozzi waxed lyrical about the paternalist social relations that had characterized Christmas in the old days—meaning, in Pestalozzis case, the early days of Christianity itself. On Christmas Eve, Pestalozzi wrote, the high and the low together—patrons and clients—gathered in a spirit of harmonious reciprocity. On such occasions, the patrons expressed their spiritual [piety] by offering “earthly gifts” to their clients. “Thus stood the mother among her children, the master among his workmen, the landlord among his tenants. Thus assembled the congregation before its pastor; thus the rich entered the cottage of the poor …” (ibid., 38). But that was in the old days. In modern times, Pestalozzi implied, neither side in this exchange, whether workmen and masters, tenants and landlords, even congregations and pastors, had kept their part of the arrangement. But with children, Pestalozzi insisted, the old relations could and did still continue to function in their original harmony, and in the enactment of these relations with the young the intense spirituality of the old days could be re-created. (To an extent, Pestalozzi was simply playing on the symbolism of the Magi bringing gifts to the Christ child, with the assembled children taking the role of the Christ child. But for Pestalozzi the connection between children and the Christ child was real as well as symbolic—and it was here that his words crossed the line from symbolic social inversion into something much more radical.)

  58. Ibid., 43.

  59. Ibid., 39.

  60. Ibid., 43.

  61. Mrs. G. “The Christmas Tree,” in The Pearl; or, Affection’s Gift: A Christmas and New Years Present for 1837 (Philadelphia, 1837 [c. 1836]), 179–189.

  62. Ibid., 179.

  63. Ibid., 180.

  64. Ibid., 180, 183.

  65. Ibid., 183–185.

  66. This point constitutes further evidence that Christmas trees were used by prosperous families, families who could afford to live in houses that contained enough rooms to do this job—and who were up-to-date enough for these rooms to be “specialized” to the extent that at least one of them was off-limits to the children.

  67. Ibid., 180. The same custom is implied in Catharine Sedgwick’s 1836 story “New Year’s Day.” There the children “waked [Lizzy Percival, the heroine] at dawn with … cries of ‘Happy New Year’;” and the servants “besieged her door with their earnest taps and their heart-felt good wishes, and each received a gift and a kind word to grace it.” (Sedgwick, “New Year’s Day,” 17.)

  68. Mrs. G., “The Christmas Tree,” ibid., 186.

  69. For example: [Christophe von Schmid,] The Christmas Eve: A Tale from the German (Boston, 1842, etc.; apparently translated by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody); Theodore Parker, Two Christmas Celebrations (Boston, 1859); Lydia Maria Child, “The Christ-Child and the Poor Children,” in her Flowers for Children (Boston, 1861), 9–48; L. D. Nicholas, “Willy Ely’s Christmas Tree,” Our Young Folks 2 (1866), 737–740; Louisa May Alcott, “Tilly’s Christmas,” in her Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag (Boston, 1872), 122–133.

  70. Louisa May Alcott, Little Women; or, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy (Boston, 1869), ch. 3.

  71. The best book about Fuller is Charles Capper’s analytic biography Margaret Fuller, An American Romantic Life: The Private Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), the first of two projected volumes, taking Fuller’s career only up to 1841.

  72. New York Tribune, Dec. 25, 1844. I ascertained the authorship of this essay from Charles Capper. For another “German” legend, printed in an American newspaper in the mid-1830s—complete with suffering child, a vision of the infant Jesus, and a Christmas tree—see “The Forlorn Child’s Christmas Eve, a translation from the German of Ruckert,” in the Philadelphia Public Ledger, Dec. 24, 1836.

  73. New York Tribune, Dec. 28, 1844.

  74. Ibid., Jan. 3, 1845.

  Chapter 6

  1. Charles Loring Brace, Home-Life in Germany (New York, 1853), 225.

  2. Ibid., 122–124.

  3. Ibid., 221–222. Brace was staying at a lodging-house near the Lindenstrasse (ibid., 121).

  4. A Christmas Carol never even shows us the poor, even though the book opens by evoking a general vision of a society riven by vast economic and social divisions. But the book provides hardly a glimpse of poverty, and none at all of discontent. The Ghost of Christmas Past takes us back into the time of Scrooge’s childhood, a time portrayed as if it antedates capitalism altogether. The Ghost of Christmas Present takes Scrooge on a tour of England, but the only workers he chooses to show us are miners (a happy family, singing Christmas songs) and, even more briefly, a group of sailors at sea. Real poverty does make one appearance on this tour—but only in the form of a pair of allegorical figures labeled “Want” and “Ignorance.” And these figures, who do not move or speak, take the innocent form of a pair of young children. In any case, even this brief excursion into the industrial hinterlands of “Christmas Present” is fictionally framed on either side by two lengthy and richly detailed stops at which we witness Christmas dinner with the families of a pair of characters who are already familiar to us: The first is at the house of Scrooge’s merry nephew Fred; the second is at the Cratchits’. Because these two scenes are portrayed so vividly, they end up satisfying us emotionally. But both Fred’s Christmas dinner and (as we have seen) the Cratchits’ are bourgeois events—even though the Cratchits’ dinner has all the pathos (without any of the accompanying resentment) of a proletarian meal.

  5. New York Times, Dec. 25, 1893. See also ibid., Dec. 25, 1876: “Should the weather prove fine there seems to be no reason why everybody, including all the possible Bob Cratchits and Tiny Tims in the great Metropolis, should not to-day have the happiest of ‘Merry Christmases.’ The times are hard, it is said, but the charitable institutions are all bountifully supplied with substantial food, and with an abundance of toys and fruit and candy for the children…. In the markets the dealers say that never before were there so many purchases by employers who desired to reward faithful employees, and to make their gifts in the shape of poultry.”

  6. Susan Sedgwick to Theodore Sedgwick II, Jan. 2, 1838, in Sedgwick Family Papers II (Massachusetts Historical Society), Box 8.15. Sedgwick assured her husband that “It would have just suited you—sufficiently republican, yet in excellent taste.” She went on to note that “We came away at half past 8, & reached home in time to get seasonably soust[?!]”

  7. New York Tribune, Jan. 3, 1844. See also ibid., Dec. 24, 1845: “Who can devote even one day to hilarity and social enjoyment until he shall have at least devoted as much of his worldly substance as that day’s enjoyment will cost him to the relief of the misery so imminent and appalling.”

  8. Ibid., Dec. 30, 1853.

  9. Ibid., Dec. 22, 1854.

  10. Ibid.

  11. Ibid., Jan. 1, 1848. Greeley went on to insist on the need to attack poverty as a systemic problem.

  12. New York Times, Dec. 26 and 27, 1855.

  13. “How to Help the Poor,” New York Times, Dec. 25, 1854.

  14. Ibid., Dec. 26, 1866. See also ibid., Dec. 25, 1868 (“The evils of individual, which is, as a general rule, indiscriminate, charity, are almost equal to its benefits; and the truly charitable will wisely give what they can to the organized societies”) and Dec. 23, 1871 (“A dollar given to an institution like this [the Children’s Aid Society] is sure to be more fruitful than twenty bestowed in undiscriminating alms”).

  15. Ibid., Dec. 25, 1893.

  16. For the cloakmakers, see ibid., Dec. 26, 1894.

  17. For the Five Points, see Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 68–69, 81.
For the missions: Marilyn Irvin Holt, The Orphan Trains: Placing Out in America (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 98–102. See also Peter C. Holloran, Bostons Wayward Children: Social Services for Homeless Children, 1830–1930 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1994); and Luc Sante, Low Life: Lures and Snares of New York (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991), esp. pp. 305–312.

  18. [Emma Brace,] The Life of Charles Loring Brace, Chiefly Told in His Own Letters (London, 1894), 75–76.

  19. Charles Loring Brace, Short Sermons to Newsboys (New York, 1866), 13. For Brace, see Boyer, Urban Masses, 97–107; Holt, The Orphan Trains, 41–79, 120–155. See also Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (New York: Knopf, 1986); Thomas Bender, Toward an Urban Vision: Ideas and Institutions in Nineteenth-Century America (Lexington, Ky.: University of Kentucky Press, 1975).

  20. New York Times, Dec. 25, 1855. A recent examination of New York’s orphan children is Bruce Bellingham, “Waifs and Strays: Child Abandonment, Foster Care, and Families in Mid-Nineteenth-Century New York,” in Peter Mandler, ed., The Uses of Charity: The Poor on Relief in the Nineteenth-Century Metropolis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 123–160.