by Adam Gopnik
There are, of course, old Dutch legends of a Middle Eastern saint, Saint Nicholas, who lived in the fourth century bce. His feast day was celebrated on December 6, and he got established in northern Europe in time for the Reformation. He’s essentially a Protestant symbol and saint. In Germany he assisted Jesus — the name Kris Kringle, a synonym for Saint Nicholas, was originally Christkindl, the Christ Child. And so the same process of syncretism that generally characterizes Christmas characterized its patron, although it was now Protestants adapting a Catholic figure rather than Catholics adapting pagan ones, but with the same purpose: to drain the figure of its original content so that it could be, so to speak, repurposed and preside over a new kind of feast.
It is this secularized figure, brought to New York by the first Dutch settlers and made literary by Washington Irving, that Nast transforms. Nast takes the Dutch Saint Nicholas, a tiny, benevolent but imp-like elf, and turns him into our vast, corpulent, white-bearded figure. And just as Dickens has a particular politics attached to his Christmas inventions, Nast has a very particular politics attached to his. The first time that Santa Claus appears as a figure unto himself is in 1862. It’s the very height of the Civil War; in fact, it’s at the low point of Union fortunes. It’s in a picture called Christmas Eve, published in Harper’s Weekly: a young mother prays as her two children sleep on Christmas Eve, while her pensive bearded husband is in uniform on the Potomac, far away. Above are two tiny Santas, one leaving toys for the children, the other throwing gifts to the soldiers. Santa becomes a kind of benevolent Union spirit who will eventually unite them all.
It’s a hit, and it’s followed up that same year by a second image, Santa Claus in Camp, which shows Santa at greater length as a chubby, rotund elf dressed in the Stars and Stripes and passing out presents in a Union army camp. That’s the thing about Nast’s Santa: he never evolves. He is always Santa — fur-trimmed suit, white beard, pink cheeks. And at that very moment Santa Claus becomes not only the embodiment of a spirit of American abundance, he also becomes a specifically Union local deity. He becomes the positive spirit of northern plenty and domesticity to set alongside and against the southern myths of chivalry and tradition and indigenous culture. The South has chivalry, but we have Santa.
Santa as Nast drew him over the years is benevolent, but he is also, above all, busy. He rushes from rooftop to rooftop, practises the piano, visits soldiers at camps, consults with bad children, wipes the sweat from his brow. Nast gave the American Christmas its patron saint and its particular tone of abundance distributed rather than virtue rewarded. Santa brings good Americans stuff because they deserve to have it. Nast’s American Christmas is entirely child centred. Dickens’s Christmas is essentially family oriented. In Nast’s drawings it’s Santa and the kids and no one else.
Nast’s great theme, as for Dickens, was reform, but his great subject was the triumph of materialism, a triumph that had become so vast in America after the Civil War that it could absorb the national myth entirely. It was a triumph that could be imagined benevolently, but it was also a gilded age, an age of corruption and bad faith, and Nast immortalized that age too. He was the great cartoon enemy of Boss Tweed and the Tammany Hall ring in New York — “It’s them damn pictures,” Tweed said in exasperation — yet the eerie thing is that Nast’s caricature of the Boss throughout the 1870s is a perfect twin of his Santa. The embodiment of everything corrupt and wrong in American civic capitalism and the figure of Santa Claus look like identical twins, one evil and one benevolent but both entirely material incarnations of American life. For Dickens, Christmas poses the problem of reconciling charity and capitalist ethics, but he is still working within the relatively parched terms of the first Industrial Revolution — one turkey for one family is still a big deal. There’s not a lot of butter to go round. For Nast the problem is different because the issue is different; Nast sees the Christmas struggle as one between ever-growing prosperity and ever more corrupted politics. For Nast in America, life is one endless cycle of Christmases and corruption, two brother deities that can’t quite be separated.
But it’s only in the 1870s, after the Civil War in America and the Reform Bill in England and the establishment of the Third Republic in France, that the transition from the Dickensian–Nast Christmas, which is still essentially domestic, to our contemporary commercial, urban Christmas takes place. It’s in the 1870s when we move from the domestic Christmas, the Christmas of the heart and the hearth, to the department-store Christmas, the Christmas of the city street. In one way it’s another move from an indoor Christmas to an outdoor Christmas — the back-and-forth between indoor Christmas and outdoor Christmas has always been fundamental to the way people imagine the holiday. Is it a reversal festival, where everybody rushes into the street at midnight, or is it a renewal festival, where they’ve withdrawn into their homes? That tension, that doubleness or ambiguity, still goes on today.
Though marked by economic recession, in many ways the 1870s are one of the most pivotal decades of modern times. It’s the moment when what historians call the second Industrial Revolution begins, and while the first Industrial Revolution, of the 1820s and ’30s, sees a drop in general living standards in which great masses of people become impoverished — that’s what leads to The Communist Manifesto and Marx and Engels in the 1840s — the second Industrial Revolution is the one in which living standards suddenly start to shoot up. You begin to get for the first time a broad urban middle class. And this festival becomes their festival.
Though the intellectual and moral premises of the modern Christmas are set in the 1840s and ’50s, and most of the rites and characters are formed then, most of the rest of what we think belongs to our Christmas begins in the seventies. Christmas carols are first introduced in that decade as a distinct form. The practice of poor children singing in the streets has been going on for centuries, but it’s only in the 1870s that people self-consciously become aware that you have a body of musical literature worth conserving and expanding. So not only do you have traditional carols such as “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” and “I Saw Three Ships” being transcribed and published for the first time, but you also have newly written carols like “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” and “In the Bleak Midwinter” entering the Christmas canon on equal terms, as though they’ve always been sung. From the very beginning, these two bodies of music — the very old and the very new — are completely mingled. The first important publication of carols, in 1871, is called, significantly, Christmas Carols: Old and New — the barriers between present and past come down musically, as they do on the feast.
Goose and turkey clubs spring up all over the Western world. In every capital people put aside money so they’ll have a Cratchit-sized turkey for Christmas. Gift giving, which, dinner aside, played a very minor role in Dickens’s Christmas, becomes customary and even de rigueur. So do Christmas cards. And it’s in 1871, in both Britain and the United States, that Christmas becomes an official holiday; it becomes a bank holiday in Britain and a national holiday in America as well. The Times of London writes that “Christmas as their feast is secured to our people now by an act of Parliament.” Scrooge’s epiphany and Santa’s feast have become the revived neo-pagan Saturnalia of the Western world.
And something else is going on too. It’s now that Christmas becomes the winter holiday of city people, with its special public hearth — the department store, with a dress-up Santa inside and animated Christmas windows filled with puppet figures outside. (It is not for nothing that the second Industrial Revolution is often called the Technological Revolution; its sign is not the factory but the mechanical marvel.) The Christmas windows of department stores become the new hearth of the public holiday, stretching from Paris to San Francisco. (My wife and I cherish a Christmas window of this legacy at Ogilvy’s in Montreal, famous in our childhood — “The Enchanted Mill / Le Moulin Enchanté,” with a thousand clockwork dolls — intricately intact until ve
ry recently. We eagerly took our children there when they were ten and five, and watched their video-trained faces go slack with bemusement.)
Now, there’s a fascinating line of sociological research showing that city winter is a time of two transformations in what the Canadian-born sociologist Erving Goffman calls the micro-order of behaviour — the largely unconscious order of small manners that shape our lives and express our feelings. First, winter creates a suspension of normal rules; next, it enforces a dramatization of normal events. We act out in winter cities. When we’re cold, we stamp our feet, we shiver — we show that we’re cold. In temperate weather we behave temperately, but in cold weather we aren’t just cold, we’re theatrical. We show each other that we’re cold even if we all already know it. (People do this in steam rooms too, in the opposite direction. You’re expected to groan and shake your torso to show you’re hot. Kids not initiated into this social rite find a visit to a steam bath with their fathers deeply embarrassing.)
And at the same time it seems that the small laws of urban life — parking regulations, rules about drinking in public, jaywalking — are discreetly suspended. It is in some way normal or expected to ritualize our condition in winter and to suspend the micro-order. In this sense we might say that winter in cities is an inherently festive time, pregnant with a festival’s two impulses: to suspend the rules and to heighten the actions. Cities in winter are natural stages for holiday theatrics. The city street in winter is intrinsically made for a show.
As the urbanization of the world gathers speed in the 1870s, what has been a solstice holiday in origin becomes a harvest holiday in realization. The new fields to be reaped are the streets and stores of the new winter city. It’s in 1867 that Macy’s in New York stays open till midnight for the first time, in a kind of unconscious commercial parody of the ancient Catholic rite of the midnight Mass. By 1875 steam-powered animated figurines are acting out imaginary medieval scenes and Christmas tableaux in Macy’s windows. L. Frank Baum, author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, begins his career as a Christmas-window designer, making miniature cities of mechanical marvels that anticipate the Emerald one. (Ogilvy’s in Montreal begins in the 1860s, though its windows come later.)
Christmas becomes a business. It’s around this time that Frank Winfield Woolworth, the creator of Woolworth’s, says bluntly to his employees: “This” — meaning December — “is our harvest time. Make it pay.” By 1888 Macy’s is promising that anything bought as late as Christmas Eve will be delivered within New York City on Christmas Day. And the next year 162,624 Christmas presents are delivered by the store in New York alone! Thanksgiving, the invented harvest holiday, is becoming the renewal feast of family life; Christmas, a once sacred holiday, has become the national harvest festival of commercial culture. (It’s in these years that Dickens makes his last tour of the United States reading A Christmas Carol. By the end of the century the New York Tribune actually has the nerve to say that Dickens didn’t care about Christmas at all until he came to America the year before Martin Chuzzlewit.)
To realize just how widespread, just how universal this largely new and largely made-up holiday has become, perhaps the best way is to go to the New York Public Library’s menu collection and look at Christmas menus from Europe and North America in the century’s closing year, 1900. If you look at Christmas menus from 1900 and compare them with menus from 1850, fifty years before, you realize that you have a kind of Christmas culinary empire that stretches across the seas. On the SS China, for Christmas of 1900 they are serving mallard duck with currant jelly and turkey with cranberry sauce. At the Russell House Hotel in Ottawa they serve roast turkey with Christmas plum pudding and brandy sauce. At the Griswold Hotel in Detroit there is roasted possum, but there is also turkey with cranberry sauce and a plum pudding with brandy and hard sauce. At the Arlington, in Hot Springs, Arkansas — in Arkansas! — they serve turkey with chestnuts and cranberry sauce and Christmas plum pudding with hard and brandy sauces. On and on . . . at the Pabst Hotel on Broadway and 42nd, right in the heart of New York City, you get stuffed turkey with chestnuts and truffles for eighty cents, with forty cents more for plum pudding with hard and rum sauces to follow.
The old winter holiday has conquered the world. In 1912 you have the first scholarly history of Christmas, with all its syncretic intertwining, its pagan sources, frankly acknowledged. Its author, Clement Miles, concludes: “At no time has so much been made of children as today, and because Christmas is their feast its luster continues unabated in an age upon which dogmatic Christianity has largely lost its hold, which laughs at the pagan superstitions of its forefathers. Christmas is the feast of the beginnings, of instinctive happy childhood.” And Miles goes on — this in 1912, right on the brink of the First World War — to survey all the people who have taken up celebration of this secularized, non-Christian festival: the robust English and the unsentimental French, and indeed the Germans, whom he calls “the sentimental children of Europe.”
Well, we all know what happened in the following two years between the robust English and the sentimental German children, and we all know how that vision of a kind of bourgeois commercial compact came apart amid the fires of nationalism and militarism. But there is no more telling or touching incident in all the stories of modern times than the story of the “Christmas truce” of 1914, a mere two years after Miles writes his too-complacent history.
The Christmas truce has a life in movies and music videos and popular memory — and it’s astonishing to discover that this is a case where the myth is absolutely true. On the first Christmas of the war, in 1914, on impulse and in a totally self-organized way, the German and British troops along the Western Front chose to celebrate Christmas by ceasing to fight, trading family photographs, playing games, and sharing what good cheer they could find. It was a kind of quiet mutiny rising out of what had become a common Christmas culture throughout Europe — a popular movement on the part of the men, and greatly discouraged by the officers. It was completely out of order, it was completely illegitimate — and it was nearly universal on the Western Front.
It wasn’t in any sense a religious impulse; the soldiers didn’t want to pray or sing hymns. They talked, they traded mementos, and they played a little football. Two photographs survive of the Christmas truce in 1914 — only two, hazy and hard to read — which show the two sides mingling together in this heartbreaking way: the pointed kaiser helmets of the German soldiers alongside the caps of the British soldiers, standing side by side, unable to understand why they would shortly have to return to slaughtering each other. In every subsequent year of the war the generals of both sides made certain that there would never be a renewal of the Christmas truce. They knew all too well what the truce meant. However silly or even sordid the commercial rites of the ever-more-secular Christmas had been in the soldiers’ early lives, it still represented values — of community, family, renewal — that were directly opposed to the murderous practice of mass warfare and to the mad nationalism that had driven Western civilization to suicide. Intellectuals thought that life had become too easy and toy-like in the soft and material years of the 1890s; the men fighting on the Western Front longed for that softness and for those toys, as the men lost on the polar ice had longed for them half a century before.
After the first World War, the pre-war Christmas becomes a source of nostalgia. That is, people look back to the Victorian Christmas, which in its heyday no one thought of as being a “Victorian Christmas” — if anything, they thought of it as a medieval Christmas — as the ideal kind. And so the iconography, the imagery of Christmas, becomes, and remains to this day, frozen as largely nineteenth-century Victorian, an inspiration in feeling. The Dickensian Christmas is in some ways a product of the Somme.
But something else rather strange begins to happen, particularly in the 1920s and ’30s, as the world recovers from the First World War, and then even more strongly in the late 1940s, accompanying
the exuberant abundance of the post–Second World War period. And it is that the study of Christmas, the description of Christmas, the analysis of Christmas passes from the hands of storytellers to sociologists, from poets to psychoanalysts, and from animated-puppet makers to anthropologists.
In the 1940s, for instance, an enormous psychoanalytic and psychological literature about Christmas begins to appear, all keyed to one new sense about Christmas — that the very pleasure one is supposed to be taking from Christmas creates impossible stress and pain and misery. This feeling isn’t entirely new. Already, back in the 1880s, the stress and strain of present-giving and, more generally, of abundance have been felt. The liberal magazine The Nation noted in 1883 that Christmas mixed “so much hope and dread — hopefulness at the thought of what we might get, and dread at the thought of all we have to give,” and the more conservative New York Tribune complained that “the modern expansion of the custom of giving Christmas presents has done more than anything else to rob Christmas of its traditional joyousness . . . the season of Christmas needs to be dematerialized.”
In the 1940s and ’50s this huge new literature rises up that asks us to explain why it is that Christmas, which is supposed to be the happiest time of year for people, is almost always the time of maximum suicides, maximum depression, maximum family misery. It’s a plain truth, and another kind of doubleness — a modern, neurotic kind to put alongside the ancient paradox of the Incarnation and the optimistic ambiguity of Victorian reform. We experience the happiest time of year as a time of maximum stress, with feelings of sadness, disappointment, confusion, depression — even suicidal impulses — more often than feelings of elation.
