Dickens was an idealist, but he was not naive. He knew that what we want Christmas to be is not what it really is. In Great Expectations, written two decades after A Christmas Carol, he depicts a real Christmas. The novel opens on Christmas Eve, with the orphan Pip terrorized into stealing food and a file to cut through the chains of an escaped convict. The Christmas greeting he receives from his abusive sister is, ‘Where the deuce ha’ you been?’ Every mouthful of his holiday dinner is grudged him, even as the adults speak empty words of charity. It is in retrospect, as an adult, that he, and the reader, can understand the real Christmas that is taking place: the food he steals for the convict, Magwitch, is his real Christmas dinner, the file his gift, and family love is expressed when Magwitch calls him ‘my boy’; charity is practised not preached when, to protect Pip from his sister, Magwitch swears he stole the food himself.
Irving, and Dickens even more so, have both been hailed as the inventors of the holiday. That this cannot be true is obvious on rereading their books, which rely on their readers’ knowledge of the many customs they do not feel the need to explain.* Instead, it is Squire Bracebridge’s love and Scrooge’s disdain for the day that reveal the importance Christmas had long assumed: the squire’s view is presented as obviously correct, while Scrooge is just as obviously ripe for conversion. One of the most telling clues to the already pervasive recognition of Christmas as a time for giving is that both books were what we today call gift books, books designed specifically to be given as presents, where the focus is on appearance as much as content. The first edition of A Christmas Carol had holly and ivy embossed in gold on its covers, while the Christmas chapters from Irving’s Sketch Book were reprinted in stand-alone editions with titles like An Old-Fashioned Christmas and Old Christmas, with added illustrations.†
Both Irving and Dickens were writing for a market that had been growing for some time. In the eighteenth century, booksellers began to publish special ranges for purchase as New Year’s gifts. Almanacs, containing weather forecasts, church holidays, tidal information and dates for planting and harvests, often interspersed with witty sayings, poems or proverbs, had been popular from the sixteenth century: Poor Robin’s Almanack in England from the seventeenth century, and Poor Richard’s in the colonies in the eighteenth, were two famous examples. These were now joined by books for children, in the eighteenth century always either moralistic, concerning religious education, or educational, all ‘very proper for Christmas and New-Year’s Gifts’, the newspaper advertisements promised. In England by the end of the century, books might be presented as a ‘Pleasant Pastime for a Christmas Eve’ (although a later offering entitled Errors and their Consequences sounds less enticing). By 1829, one children’s book tells the story of a curate who gives a book to the children of the poor parish clerk as ‘their Christmas gift’, his phrasing implying that gifts to children were routine, as routine as the gift being a book. German Christmas books took a similar path, books on proper behaviour gradually giving way to stories, history, the adventures of great men and so on. At the same period, a more elite, more feminine and much more expensive product was placed on the Christmas shelf, in Britain from 1822 and in America from 1826: the annual. These were expensive anthologies of lightweight short stories, poetry and pretty engravings, intended primarily for women and often edited by women too. By 1828, fifteen different annuals sold over 100,000 copies between them.*
While these annuals were for Christmas, they were not about Christmas. It was children’s books in the USA that began the trend: A Visit from St Nicholas was both, as was The Children’s Friend two years earlier. In the early 1840s the idea was now applied to adults, although not at first in fiction. Magazines began to publish special Christmas numbers, a practice begun by the comic magazine Punch in 1841. Dickens’s A Christmas Carol took their idea and applied it to adult literature: now not only children were the recipients of presents at Christmas, about Christmas.
The rise of print culture – of newspapers, magazines, inexpensive broadsides and chapbooks, of song sheets and printed advertising posters – combined with the growth of the new industrial world, where more people worked for cash payments and could afford to purchase these cheaper, mass-produced items. At the same time the rapidly expanding middle classes were having fewer children, and therefore, as we have seen, could concentrate more individual attention on each, leading to the development of the concept of a sheltered childhood spent protected from the brutal outside world, just as women were protected by staying in the home sphere. The increasing importance given to this private sphere and the family it contained was, in cyclical fashion, then promoted in the new books and magazines, which advertised the very items that the model home and family should own.
Christmas, as we have seen, had always been a time of spending. With no lessening in the importance of the Christmas dinner, and an additional focus on gift-giving, that now only increased. Clerks could obtain extra seasonal work ‘making out Christmas bills’ for shopkeepers, while a court in 1824 heard that one fraudster had spent his illicit gains on paying his mistress’s ‘Christmas bills for millinery, jewellery, &c.’; in another case the court was petitioned to reschedule a trial, as ‘this was the season of the year at which the expenses of the house were necessarily very large’. The New Monthly Magazine agreed, groaning that the month of January was made up entirely of fog, wind, sleet and Christmas bills.
In 1802, Queen Charlotte gave a children’s Christmas party at Windsor, with the room ‘fitted up as a fair’, and the toys to be given away set out in booths and stalls. The fairground setting might, perhaps, have been a memory of German Christmas fairs in the queen’s former home of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. Otherwise, despite the charitable intent of the evening, the fair conveyed a subliminally commercial message. Rather than Santa contributing to the commercialization of a previously pure idea of the holiday, did he instead, by bringing toys to children without charge in their homes, rather than delivering them to commercial locations like fairs, remove the sense of a business transaction from Christmas?
Whatever the case, by the end of the nineteenth century Santa was, according to one American magazine, ‘our biggest captain of industry’. As early as the 1820s, St Nicholas was being used to sell jewellery in one New York newspaper advertisement, and by the 1840s, Santa had become a regular visitor to various shops: in 1841, ‘Criscringle, or Santa Claus’ could be caught ‘in the very act of descending a chimney’ at Parkinson’s confectionery shop in Philadelphia; a few years later, the same shop became ‘Kriss Kringle’s Headquarters’. (It is unclear whether these were men in costume, or printed images.)
Initially, as we have seen, Santa was imagined in a variety of guises: he was a saint, an empress of the court of fashion, a coster. Once the image of Santa portrayed by Thomas Nast spread, however, shops began to share a fairly homogeneous image: a fat bearded older man carrying a sack, travelling in a sleigh pulled by reindeer. It was commercially expedient for a single image to predominate, fostering an immediate link in the customers’ minds between the man and the gifts that he might bring if only the customer would enter their shops.
And what were the gifts being purchased? The older view of gifts as hierarchical offerings continued, but now as presents given by parents to children, or by husbands to wives. Far less common were gifts from dependants to the breadwinner, although advertisements for hair oil and dancing pumps offer exceptions to the rule. But in 1809 in one Boston newspaper, of five seasonal advertisements, four were for children’s books and toys and one was for women’s jewellery: dependants all. Meanwhile the idea of dependants giving gifts to those who provided for them throughout the year remained unusual: one visitor who saw German children giving their parents gifts thought it was ‘very peculiar’.
Many industries understood the benefits of season-specific presents: printers of sheet music now produced collections of carols; items of clothing were promoted as suitable for Christmas parties. Other goods, with no d
iscernible Christmas content, were promoted anyway. It is difficult to imagine the joy engendered by receiving a jar of Hubert’s Roseate Powder, which ‘removes superfluous hairs’ in time for ‘Christmas festivals’. Soothing syrup for teething babies was sold as ‘A real Christmas box’. And there were advertisements where the only holiday element was the headline:
Books continued to be the most common present for children. Alice Through the Looking Glass, wrote Lewis Carroll’s publisher, ‘must come out for Christmas’. Even when they were published at other times of year, Christmas sales mattered: ‘How has the [Hunting of the] Snark sold during the Xmas Season?’ Carroll inquired. ‘That … would be a much better test of its success … than any amount of sale at its first coming out.’
Other goods with year-round sales were now presented at Christmas in a special, often spectacular, fashion. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the main Berlin Christmas market had become a sad relic of a glorious past, the haunt of sellers of cheap novelties and trinkets, supplemented by even cheaper goods hawked by street-sellers, a Tingel-Tangel (cabaret) and some not-very-covert places to gamble. By the 1870s the size of the market was further reduced, and the resort of the poorer classes, as the more prosperous moved on to patronize permanent shops, especially the new department stores, all of which invested in elaborate seasonal displays. The Konditorei, or sweet shops, placed sugar models of battles or replicas of the nearby streets and buildings in their windows. The newspapers promoted the most glamorous displays: from 1826 until 1859, Ludwig Rellstab, a journalist and critic, took an annual Weihnachtswanderung, or Christmas stroll, through the streets of Berlin, sharing his thoughts on the shoppers, the merchandise, the ambiance, with the readers of the Vossische Zeitung. By the end of the century, what had begun as a personal essay had in other hands become advertising masquerading as editorial content: journalists described shops’ toys, furniture, jewellery and other potential presents, complete with lists of prices. The trade magazine Die Reklame laid out a plan of campaign to begin each November with a ‘collective exhibition’ of merchandise that could be covered by their local newspapers under headlines like ‘Christmas Sights’, or ‘Christmas Strolls’, giving the illusion of independent journalism.
American shopkeepers started a little later, but then raced ahead. In the 1830s Broadway was New York’s premier shopping street, and shop windows were crammed with Christmas merchandise. Soon ‘window-dressing’ meant more than just piling up goods or, as had been done in Britain, adding greenery and extra lighting. Seasonal set-pieces did not necessarily include goods for sale, they just had to attract attention. In Boston, one shop window contained a Santa Claus complete with sleigh and stuffed reindeer, while a New York toyshop had steam trains running through theirs. R. H. Macy & Co., a rapidly expanding dry-goods store, was on nearby Sixth Avenue, and in 1874 it claimed to have $10,000-worth of dolls in its Christmas display. Macy’s innovation was not sheer expenditure, but creating a coherent tableau. One year it was a dolls’ croquet party; in 1876, the centennial of American independence, a colonial dolls’ outing; in 1889, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the basis for a dramatic winter scene, as Eliza was chased across the ice by bloodhounds.
The development of department stores in many major cities – New York, London, Berlin – produced a new Christmas tradition, that of going to see the Christmas windows, and soon strollers down Broadway could ‘read’ a series of stories as they passed each window: dolls sightseeing at Niagara Falls (with real water); ‘Charity’, with a well-dressed doll handing a coin to a street-sweeper doll. In Germany, the two Sundays before Christmas were named Silver and Golden Sunday, when Sunday-trading restrictions were lifted, and foot traffic increased. (A third, Copper Sunday, was added later in response to retailers’ demands.) In England, the word ‘Christmas’ had come to mean decorative greenery; by the 1890s in the USA, it meant to go shopping for Christmas presents, or, in cities, to look at the shop windows – ‘with the children [to] Macy’s to see “Christmas”’.
Even the most austere New England families did not remain immune. The poet Emily Dickinson remembered her childlike ‘transports’ brought on by the idea of Santa Claus and his sack. By the end of the century, even those on the fringes of society expected presents: in one magazine story a trapper living in the wild receives a box and automatically assumes ‘it be a Christmas gift’. Of course, the author probably had no intimate acquaintanceship with fur trappers – it was more likely that by now middle-class expectations were so ingrained as to be automatic in writer and readers both. What is not imaginary was the sense of entitlement with which many in the middle-class received their gifts. A schoolgirl in Rochester, New York, in 1898 summarized her haul: ‘I don’t think there is any use writing down all the things given me but just say that … I had everything I wanted except my gold watch’ – that is, the only gift she wrote down was the one she didn’t receive. Another teenager did list everything, but added despondently: ‘In all, I got 30 [presents]. Marie Van L. got over 70.’
Expectations of gifts, and their prominent advertising and displays, were indicative of another facet of gift-giving. It was not the gift alone, nor the giver and the recipient, that mattered. The ceremony of giving, the structure and the shape of the handover, meant as much, and perhaps more, than the object. In 1798, when Coleridge described that north German Christmas, the children kept their siblings’ presents hidden so as not to spoil the surprise before the ceremonial moment. This tells us that the presents were not wrapped. In 1848, too, in the famous engraving of Victoria and Albert’s tree, the presents underneath are entirely visible: model soldiers, including one that might be in Roman dress, a train and a doll’s house. More presents hang on the tree, some tied to the branches, others set in little baskets.
Decorations on trees in Germany were part decorative, part gift – they were attractive, and then they could be handed out and eaten. In Switzerland, Samichlaus-Züg, or ‘Santa-stuff’, included fruit, both fresh and dried, nuts, biscuits in the shape of animals, Tirggel, which were biscuits shaped in a mould and then decorated, and Lebkuchen, a widely popular honey, nut and spice biscuit. Other German tree ornaments included marzipan moulded and painted to resemble animals: squirrels holding nuts in their paws, a rabbit munching a marzipan cabbage-leaf. The Pennsylvania Germans favoured marzipan and also Matzebaum, almond-paste biscuits impressed with the outlines of animals, birds or flowers and then painted. During the Civil War, the soldiers had to make do, and the decorations of one German tree on the Union side included a soldier’s biscuit ration cut into traditional Christmas shapes, interspersed with slices of salt pork or beef.
Where edible gifts could not be strung up by themselves, they were displayed in various types of holders, such as the ‘gilded egg cups, [and] paper cornucopiae’ found on the tree of a German professor at Harvard in 1832. A cornucopia was, at its simplest, a piece of paper or cardboard rolled into a cone shape and filled with sweets, or biscuits, or nuts, or dried fruit, then hung on the branches from a string. They could be made at home for barely any cost, and as the fashion for trees grew, shops sold fancier ready-made versions, printed with angels, or Santas, or embellished with decorative borders, or constructed from special papers. In the 1880s German-imported ‘dresdens’ came into fashion, embossed boxes of pressed cardboard, lacquered to look like polished metal, in shapes that included ‘dogs, cats, suns, moons … frogs, turtles … a whole sea full of fish … a virtual zoo of exotic creatures, including polar bears, camels, storks, eagles and peacocks’, as well as items from the modern world: bicycles, skates, sleds and ships. Unlike the cornucopias, dresdens were luxury items, many costing more than their contents: in 1882, golden dresdens shaped like angels cost a whopping 12¢ each.*
The shift from cornucopias to dresdens marked a shift in presentation that was reflected in the gifts themselves. As we saw, the presents on that table in Windsor in 1848 were not wrapped, even in a royal household, just as baskets and cornucopias on
trees displayed their contents. Dresdens, however, were closed, making their contents mysterious. And in those two decades between cornucopias and dresdens, presents, too, began to be covered up.
Early mentions of gift-wrapping are rare, and difficult to distinguish from the white or brown paper shops used to protect purchases on their journey home. In the 1860s a children’s book published in Boston mentioned in passing the ‘white papered presents’ under the tree, as though everyone did it, yet Nast’s 1863 engraving of Santa Claus in the army camp shows that the soldiers’ gifts came unwrapped in their wooden shipping crates. As late as the 1880s a British children’s book describing a German Christmas felt it needed to explain, as though it would not otherwise be understood: ‘Every present is wrapped up in paper, and labelled from Mary to Jane, or Jane to Mary, as the case may be.’
The wrapped present, arriving in the middle of the nineteenth century, fits chronologically with the pervasive mid-Victorian approach to decoration more generally, one perhaps best described as Things to Put Things In and Things to Cover Things With. Partly this was a matter of taste, but coverings and boxes were also pragmatic responses to gas-lighting and coal fires. Gas was much brighter, and easier to use, than candles or lamps, but it had significant drawbacks: it damaged textiles and metals, and degraded dyes. It also left behind a sticky residue that settled on every surface; the soot from the coal then stuck to the residue, making endless daily cleaning both laborious and necessary. Hence the great Victorian cavalcade of containerization: glass jars to cover flowers and ornaments; cases for spectacles, handkerchiefs and watches; covers for matchboxes; bags or jars for tobacco; folders to hold blotting paper, or stationery, or stamps; embroidery covers, needle cases and pin cushions; bags for fabric scraps, or buttons; toilet-table covers; slipper bags, stocking bags, nightgown and lingerie bags and more.
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