Christmas

by Judith Flanders

  And many of those goods manifested themselves as items for children. Just as the public spaces where trees were placed were spaces for children, so too most considered ‘Christmas … to be the day peculiarly sacred to children’, as the American feminist and journalist Margaret Fuller wrote. This is not to say that Christmas had entirely lost its carnivalesque, rowdy feel. It was more that, as with the tree and presents, those activities too were becoming commodities to be bought and sold.

  For example, groups of young men, often workmen in the same trades, in effect self-created latter-day guilds, had annually roared around the streets of Philadelphia at Christmas, according to their many detractors, drinking and causing trouble, in particular coming into conflict with the more domesticated middle classes who observed the local custom of walking along the main streets on Christmas Day, nodding and bowing to their acquaintances as they passed. The newspapers were ostensibly on the side of the middle classes, tut-tutting over the dreadful behaviour of the working-class rowdies, yet the headlines of those very articles indicate a more ambivalent attitude: ‘Christmas Gambols’, ‘Fun on Christmas Day’, ‘Christmas Sprees’, ‘Christmas Sport’. This may have been because the middle classes, too, participated in those sprees.

  By the 1830s what had been rural belsnickling had, in the city, been transformed into costumed men with blacked-up faces marching with home-made instruments – drums, pots and kettles and other noise-makers, calling themselves ‘fantasticals’ or ‘callithumpians’.* From the 1850s they also drew on militia parades, both mimicking and mocking them, taking pseudo-military names like the Strut-Some Guards. These working-class groups were held up and found wanting by others who did very much the same thing. But the contrasting parade groups were organized not around trades, but through shared charitable aims, such as temperance, or civic institutions, such as firemen, and they were run by the men in power, not the workers. Their parades were designed to promote and enhance their own social and commercial eminence while dismissing, often violently, similar street performances by those from socially lower groups, or from those holding non-mainstream views: one 1840 volunteer militia parade was praised as ‘A brilliantly dressed, well-disciplined, obedient network of young men from good families’, even as a fife-and-drum troop with black participants was assaulted.

  Because the organizers of these approved parades were leading businessmen and merchants, often holding civic office, their parades gradually gained an aura of official sanction. By 1 January 1901, no longer could just any Philadelphia group decide when and where and with whom to march. City officials had control, sponsorship and cash, a set route, and oversight of costumes and music. Parades were now not a means of self-expression or holiday enjoyment by the workers, but a commercial event for the entertainment of the middle classes. When one magazine proclaimed that ‘Christmas is now pre-eminently the “home festival”’, with New Year’s Day the ‘away-from-home festival’, they were partially correct. It was just that public spaces, too, had come under middle-class control.

  Thus, even as increasing numbers of books and magazines nostalgically hymned the revels of Christmases past, those revels were being altered. Only in their imaginations did these middle-class authors and their readers want Christmases filled with feasting and drinking, gambling and rowdyism. They wanted, as the future historian Thomas Babington Macaulay put it in 1800, Christmases of ‘domestic happiness, of social courtesy’.

  To accomplish this, part of what had been more obviously adult entertainment was transformed into children’s. Theatres, many of which had barely been places for middle-class women, much less children, now produced winter children’s shows, and an entire genre, pantomime, based on fairytales, developed to cater to the juvenile middle-class consumer. This was a continuing trend: myths and legends were also adapted to the new child-centred nature of the day. In parts of Norway haugkallar were ancient farm protectors, spirits that had lurked near ancestral burial mounds (haugr was Old Norse for mound). From the eighteenth century haugkallar began to diminish in importance, to be replaced by nisser.* Nisser also guarded farms, but by the early nineteenth century they were domesticated: they lived in barns, ate porridge left out by the family and increasingly were depicted as child-sized. Soon these barn nisser were joined by julenisser, or Christmas elves, who brought presents for the family instead of playing pranks on them. In Sweden, household gremlins, tomten, who once had to be appeased, and had been singularly unattractive, with long noses and claws, were likewise tamed, turning into jultomten, Christmas gift-bringers dressed in sweet little hats and white clogs.† From burial mound to barn, from fearsome to mischievous, their path is comparable to that of St Nicholas.

  The shift in emphasis from adult to child was not merely socio-economic, or emotional. In part, Christmas took on its child-centred focus as adults very simply started to have less holiday time. For most of history, working hours were at the discretion of the employer, or the season, agricultural work having long fallow periods. Christmas proverbially came only once a year, but that didn’t mean it came only for one day.* Industrialization had no cycle: it needed workers on a year-round basis. In Britain, paid holidays were at employers’ discretion until the last third of the nineteenth century, and workers therefore disliked obligatory holidays. Scrooge famously refused Bob Cratchit more than a single day off, but it is unlikely that most clerks in Cratchit’s position would have wanted more, as it would have been unpaid.†

  From the sixth century Christmas had lasted twelve days, and continued to do so for those unconstrained by paid employment. Many in the nineteenth century, however, had no such luxury. A young man in Rhode Island wrote home to his family in the Midwest in 1851, wide-eyed: ‘It would be hard to distinguish Christmas Eve, or Christmas Day, from any other day … here in Yankee land. The factories all run, stores are kept open all day … There is not that display of fire works, and fireing of pistols, and guns, that there is in Hoosierdom.’ That same year, the whaling ship the Pequod set sail from Nantucket in search of the great white whale, Moby Dick, on Christmas Day: the whaling industry did not stop for holidays. (While Moby-Dick is fiction, Melville had sailed on a whaler in 1840.) In Britain, a rector in a Sussex village regularly married and buried parishioners on Christmas Day. Newspapers were printed and sold.* Other services were moderated, but not halted: by the 1840s the British postal service operated on a half-holiday basis on the 25th, reducing the number of deliveries from the usual twelve.

  Many others were obliged to work substantial overtime. All of what we today call service industries were then the province of the hundreds of thousands of men and, mostly, women working as servants in private households. (By 1891 possibly as much as a third of the population of Britain was in service.) To provide the peaceful domestic Christmas of the middle-classes, phenomenal workloads were necessary for those who served them. With the arrival of the railways, many who previously had not been able to travel to see friends or family could afford both the fare and the time. Between 1861 and 1911 passenger numbers in England at Christmas increased in some places by over 500 per cent. Thus Christmas holiday gatherings, even with the smaller families of the later nineteenth century, could be large. To provide anything from half a dozen to two dozen people with four meals a day, to keep household fires burning, lamps lit, to carry water for two dozen people to wash, and to carry it away again, to keep clean two dozen chamber pots, was a never-ending task.

  Compare the experience of Jane Carlyle, wife of the historian Thomas Carlyle, at a party in 1843:

  … it was the very most agreeable party that ever I was at in London … Only think of that excellent Dickens playing the conjuror for one whole hour – the best conjuror I ever saw … and Forster [a critic, and later Dickens’s biographer] acting as his servant! – This part of the entertainment concluded with a plum pudding made out of raw flour raw eggs – all the raw usual ingredients – boiled in a gentleman’s hat – and tumbled out reeking – all in one minute before
the eyes of the astonished children, and astonished grown people! that trick – and his other of changing ladies pocket handkerchiefs into comfits – and a box full of bran into a box full of – a live-guinea-pig! would enable him to make a handsome subsistence let the book-seller trade go as it please! Then the dancing … the gigantic Thackeray &c &c all capering like Mænades!!… after supper when we were all madder than ever with the pulling of crackers, the drinking of champaign, and the making of speeches, a universal country dance was proposed – and Forster seizing me round the waist, whirled me into the thick of it – and MADE me dance!!… Once I cried out ‘oh for the love of Heaven let me go! you are going to dash my brains out against the folding doors’! to which he answered – (you can fancy the tone) – ‘your brains! who cares about their brains here? let them go!’… when somebody looked her watch and exclaimed ‘twelve o’clock’! Whereupon we all rushed to the cloakroom … Dickens took home Thacke[ra]y and Forster with him and his wife … to finish the night THERE!

  with the behind-the-scenes record of the Christmas of Hannah Cullwick, a maid-of-all work in London at a slightly later date:

  23 December 1863

  I got up early & lighted the kitchen fire to get it up soon for the roasting – a turkey & eight fowls for tomorrow, being Christmas Eve, & forty people’s expected & they’re going to have a sort o’ play. And so they are coming tonight to do it over & the Missis has order’d a hot supper for 15 people. Very busy indeed all day & worried too with the breakfast & the bells ringing so & such a deal to think about as well as work to do. I clean’d 2 pairs o’ boots & the knives. Wash’d the breakfast things up. Clean’d the passage & shook the door mat. Got the dinner & clean’d away after, keeping the fire well up & minding the things what was roasting & basting ’em till I was nearly sick wi’ the heat & smell … We got the supper by a 1/4 to ten, & we run up & downstairs to see some of the acting – just in the passage … We laid the kitchen cloth & had our supper & clean’d away after. I took the ham & pudding up at 12 o’clock, made the fire up & put another on & then to bed. Came down again at 4 … The fire wanted stirring & more coals on & when I’d got the pudding boiling again I went to bed till after six. Got up & dressed myself then & clean’d the tables & hearth & got the kettle boiling & so began.

  24 December

  After breakfast I clean’d a pair o’ boots & lighted the fires upstairs. Swept & dusted the room & the hall. Laid the cloth for breakfast & took it up when the bell rang. Put the beef down to roast. Clean’d the knives. Made the custards & mince pies – got the dinner up. Clean’d away after & wash’d up in the scullery. Clean’d the kitchen tables & hearth. Made the fire up again & fill’d the kettle … We had supper in the kitchen & then I dish’d up for the parlour. Lots o’ sweets came from Carter’s & the jellies, & the man dish’d ’em up. We went upstairs & stood in the dining room door case & saw the acting in the other room. Mr Saunderson … came & spoke to us servants & was going to shake hands but I said, ‘My hands are dirty, sir.’… After supper was over the Master had the hot mince pie up wi’ a ring & sixpence in it – they had good fun over it … We had no fun downstairs, all was very busy till 4 o’clock & then to bed.

  25 December

  Got up at eight & lit the fires. Took the [carpet] up & shook it & laid it down again in the dining room. Rubb’d the furniture & put straight. Had my breakfast. Clean’d a pair o’ boots. Wash’d the breakfast things up & the dishes. Clean’d the front steps. Took the breakfast upstairs. Got the dinner & fill’d the scuttles. The family went up the Hill for the evening & I clean’d myself to go and see Ellen [her sister], but I’d such a headache & felt so tired & sleepy I sat in a chair & slept till five & then had tea & felt better … Had a little supper & home again & to bed at ten.

  When Lord Halifax wrote, therefore, that on Christmas Eve his family ‘used sometimes to practise self-denial for the benefit of the housemaids by not having a fire’, it seems little enough, but no doubt the maids did feel the benefit. (Although note that carefully non-committal ‘sometimes’.)

  In the 1850s in Prussia, all work was legally banned on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, and in some circumstances on 26 December, but the legislation specifically exempted domestic servants, and many more employers simply kept their workplaces open in defiance of the laws, in order that the Christmases of the middle-classes could proceed unhindered. In practice, it was places where the workers themselves went to enjoy their holidays – dance houses, bars, cabarets – that found themselves at risk of prosecution.

  In the USA, after the Revolution, the holidays of the British calendar were expunged and no efforts were made to replace them nationally. By the first third of the nineteenth century, most people observed New Year’s Day, the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving and Christmas. Thanksgiving was, however, regional, and religious, a day of prayer either of gratitude, or more specifically for deliverance from an epidemic, or famine, or war. It was often considered to be a local New England custom and, by many white Southerners, something that abolitionists might favour. Yet it was Texas, in 1848, which first made Thanksgiving a state holiday, followed by more southern states before New England formally declared the day a holiday, prompted by a campaign by the formidable editor of Godey’s magazine, Sarah Josepha Hale, herself a New Englander (and also, as it happens, the author of ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’). With the help of her campaign, and the impetus of the Civil War, it became a day dedicated to family, and domesticity, a day, in the words of President Grover Cleveland, of ‘reunion of families … and … the social intercourse of friends’.

  Chapter Nine

  Looking backwards, it is too easy to assume the nineteenth century was a time of churchgoing, pious populations, careful of their interior religious lives, outwardly practising faith, hope and charity. A visit to the USA in 1831 assured Alexis de Tocqueville that ‘there is no country in the whole world in which the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America’. Modern Europeans have shared the views of their nineteenth-century forebears.

  The figures, where they exist, tell a different story. In 1851 a census of religious attendance in England and Wales enumerated not the number of people of each denomination, nor how often they said they went to church, but the number of seats that were actually filled on one specific Sunday (Saturday for the synagogues). To the dismay of many, it emerged that just 60 per cent of the population went to church that day. Yet even that overestimated church attendance: the census enumerated seats filled – anyone attending two services that day was counted twice. All that could safely be concluded was that between a third and half the population went to church on any given Sunday. These figures echo those for church attendance in the USA in the twentieth century: in 1939, 43 percent of adults attended a weekly service; in 1998, it was 40 per cent.* The difference between being born into a religion, being a member of a congregation and actually attending a service were substantial.

  Those, however, who considered themselves only nominally churchgoing nevertheless frequently sent their children to Sunday schools, becoming wholehearted participants in the new child-centred domestic customs of the holiday. Tree decoration and visits from the gift-bringer – the Christkind, Father Christmas or Santa Claus – were approved of by the clergy, as gifts on Christmas Day drew the focus towards the religious holiday and away from the secular New Year’s Day. The evangelical movement also promoted children’s services on Christmas Day: the Congregationalist minister Alexander Fletcher, dubbed ‘The Children’s Friend’, famously held Christmas Day services for, in 1827, over 4,000 children from twenty-eight Sunday schools at his north London chapel.

  More common still was a focus on charitable acts around the holiday. From at least the eighteenth century in England, prisoners had received extra rations of beef, beer and bread on the day with, sometimes, coals for their fires, usually given in the name of a civic leader such as a mayor or sheriff, lending the increased rations an aura of patriar
chal benevolence rather than, to peeved taxpayers, superfluous luxuries. This may be why, when the Poor Laws established workhouses in Britain as a place of last resort, even then extra meat was served on Christmas Day. Also often mentioned, but impossible to measure, were individual acts of seasonal charity, like that of the politician Lord Whitworth, a figurehead lieutenant-colonel to a local infantry regiment, who gave a Christmas dinner for all 700 soldiers. As the century progressed, charity became more closely tied to domesticity. The owners of J. & J. Colman, manufacturers of mustard, starch and laundry-blue (whitener), were devout non-conformists, and at Christmas each of their employees received a roasting joint for their Christmas dinner, the size dependent on the size of their family (carefully ascertained by Mrs Colman beforehand). Into the twentieth century, other factory owners also inaugurated Christmas parties for their employees’ children, or teas, or other forms of domestic entertainment for families of work, rather than blood.

  Thus the central elements of Christmas continued to be secular. Many writers paid token homage to the nativity, but when newspaper and magazines and books are assessed, far more space was occupied by the worldly and domestic contributions to the day. The Book of Christmas gave fifteen pages to preparations such as buying food and drink, and dispatched religion in ten lines. In the USA, there was both the token acknowledgement and the lack of space given to the subject. In 1858 the San Antonio Herald appeared to forget the Christian origin of the day altogether, wishing ‘a happy Christmas to one and all whether Christian, Jew or Gentile … or of no denomination at all’. And that middle-class story of the backwoods trapper and his Christmas parcel cited in chapter 7 has him determined to keep the day ‘as it orter be kept … we’ll laugh, and eat, and be merry’.