Christmas

by Judith Flanders

  If anything, religion was grafted on to consumerism, rather than consumerism grafted on to religion, and the increasing access to mass-market goods, and consequent increased focus on Santa and gifts as the core of the Christmas experience, made that seem entirely natural. A US trade card for a dry-goods shop in the 1870s has an illustration of two children kneeling in prayer, followed by a second one captioned ‘Answer to prayer’: the children opening their presents. In the accompanying poem, the children pray to ‘Dear Jesus’ to ask for a list of gifts before adding, dutifully, ‘Bless papa, dear Jesus’.

  In 1898 the windows of one of the major New York department stores displayed a church, some three metres long, and a metre and a half high, constructed entirely from handkerchiefs. From a church made out of commercial goods to a place of commerce turning itself into a church was a small step. The department store owner John Wanamaker was a lay minister and the founder of what became the largest Sunday school in the USA. After his flagship Wanamaker’s department store in Philadelphia was rebuilt in 1911, its Great Court was decorated every Christmas as though it were a cathedral, with background music of recorded carols and hymns, and customers were handed a pamphlet of devotional texts: shopping with uplift.

  Yet a look at a new tradition, the Christmas card, reinforces how little religion was in most people’s minds. The first modern Christmas card was produced in Britain in 1843, two years after the creation of the penny post. It cannot be coincidence that the assistant to the mastermind behind the penny post was also the man who commissioned the first Christmas card: Henry Cole.* The card’s centre illustration shows three generations of a family around a holiday table, toasting the absent friend of the caption, while two subsidiary panels show charitable giving. Each card was hand-coloured, and sold for a very expensive 1s.. They were not a commercial success, but others followed.

  The first card in the USA was printed around 1850, and showed Santa with gifts, a party and a family opening their presents. Unlike Cole’s card, it was monochrome, and there was no holiday message, just ‘Pease’s Great Varety [sic] Store in the Temple of Fancy’: it was a trade card for a shop. The cards that followed were in a similar mould, trade cards that added seasonal images under phrases like ‘Joy!’ and ‘Mirth!’ It was 1875 when Louis Prang, a German immigrant who had built up one of the largest art-printing businesses in the country, produced the first American card to include printed Christmas wishes. Prang became the most successful Christmas card printer in the US, exporting to Europe as well. He drew on his art background for images, as well as his expertise in chromolithography, and also indulged in the fashionable trends for embellishment, finishing his more expensive cards with tassels, fringes, lace, feathers or spangles. Some cards contained pamphlets printed with extracts from literature, or children’s stories. Their size, and lavish finish, as well as the content made them gateway presents – gifts for people who, because they were not related by blood, or dependent on you, had not previously been given gifts.

  What is striking for those who continue to believe Christmas was ever primarily a religious holiday is the lack of religious content across all cards in English-speaking markets from their earliest days. One historian has catalogued the subjects in a collection of over 100,000 cards printed before 1890. The majority showed holly, mistletoe and Christmas pudding, Father Christmas or Santa, Christmas trees, bells and robins, food and festivity.* Next in popularity came snow scenes, bells and, as a subcategory of the village snow scene, the occasional church steeple. On Prang’s retirement towards the end of the century, German printers, who led the world in chromolithography, began to dominate the market. In their home market, their cards featured images of the holy family, or angels, or the Christkind, although very often these were included together the secular: a tree, presents, the Weihnachtsmann.

  Everywhere, food and drink were popular subjects for cards – turkeys, geese and boars’ heads, game, puddings, bottles and punch bowls; so too were family parties. In the 1870s anthropomorphic animals – animals dressed as people, or performing human activities – became fashionable. Always popular were scenes of imagined Christmases past: in medieval times, or Tudor, in country houses, on stagecoaches. German cards had alpine scenes, or villages, not necessarily in winter. Personalized Christmas cards, with photographs of the senders, were also available: one photography studio in Dundee, Scotland advertised ‘Christmas Card Portraits’ at 6s. per dozen in the 1860s. The advertisement gave no explanation, which suggests the newspaper’s readers already knew what they were. Yet even when photography made possible the reproduction of paintings of the nativity, cards with religious images remained what two historians of the subject have called ‘very rare’ or even ‘insignificant’ in number.*

  Christmas crackers preceded the arrival of Christmas cards by a few years, immediately becoming an instant new tradition. Tom Smith was a confectioner in Clerken-well, an impoverished area of London. To distinguish his sweets, he wrapped them in paper treated with saltpetre, which made a bang as they were opened, calling them ‘fire-cracker sweets’. Gradually, the sweet was replaced by a modest gift, the printed wrapper became a motto or joke and the Christmas cracker was born. Tom Smith & Co. became a dedicated cracker-manufacturer, and by the 1890s was producing 13 million crackers a year.

  Another instant tradition, more prevalent in German-speaking lands, was the Advent wreath. The wreath was simply a formalized version of the greenery that had been in use for centuries, but with a candle in the centre as the focus of a ceremony it was the inspiration of a Lutheran clergyman, Johann Wichern, who ran an inner-city mission in Hamburg. From 1833, on every Sunday in Advent, he gathered the mission-school children to light a candle and retell the nativity story as a way of raising funds. The custom spread to homes, and churches and manufacturers began to produce commercial Advent wreaths, Advent candleholders and coloured candles.

  While Advent Sunday ceremonies became known outside Germany only in the twentieth century, a later German Advent tradition moved more swiftly: the Advent calendar. Originally these were home-made calendars marking the days from the first Sunday in Advent to Christmas Day, sometimes with a Bible verse for each day. In Thomas Mann’s novel Buddenbrooks (1901), which recounts the story of a north German family from the 1830s to the 1870s, the son of the house, little Johann, counts down to Christmas with ‘the help of a calendar manufactured by [his nanny], with a Christmas tree on the last leaf’. Two years after the novel was published a Munich stationer produced the first commercial Advent calendar, and soon these became mainstream, now beginning on 1 December rather than the first Sunday in Advent, so that stock could be carried over from one year to the next. These early calendars had a Bible verse, or a pretty scene for each day, which were soon covered by flaps or pull-outs. The calendars later became secular, with jokes or sweets and small toys, or comic and television characters hidden behind the flaps.

  Other traditions took longer to move from their local origins. As the Christkind had consciously been created to replace the wild men of legend, so in north Europe was Santa Lucia. The third-century martyr had been blinded for her faith, and she was therefore the patron saint of light, bringing her gift to the darkest days of winter. In many parts of Scandinavia from the eighteenth century, on her saint’s day, 13 December, she rode out with the star boys and, as one court case heard, ‘other loose persons’. In the nineteenth century, the saint followed a pattern we can now recognize, and became more domesticated. Now the youngest girl in the household, dressed in white and with a wreath surmounted by candles on her head, greeted her family at first light with coffee and cakes. This moved in the early part of the century to Finland, with its large ethnic Swedish population, and later to other areas of Swedish emigration. Soon Swedish offices and shops were selecting a Lucia maiden; civic Lucia maidens represented their districts. The descendants, too, of other Scandinavian immigrants in the USA began to adopt the saint as well: in the 1950s, some Norwegian communities beg
an to mark Lucia day.

  These seemingly transplanted customs were often in reality freshly rooted. The emigrants themselves had frequently been eager to discard the trappings of the Old World, and it was their descendants who wanted to relearn, and reproduce, the traditions of previous generations. The Swedish-American Vasa Order was founded in 1896 to promote Swedish culture in the USA, but it was 1962 before a town such as Lindeborg, Kansas, where two-thirds of the population were of Swedish descent, held Lucia Day ceremonies, and those were prompted by the town’s chamber of commerce, to promote local shops.

  Otherwise, in the Nordic countries, Christmas remained for much of the population a more public, communal festival devoted, once again, to food and drink. Foods varied from region to region, on the coasts often lutfisk (a preserved whitefish), elsewhere a fish soup; in many areas pork products, butchered specially for the holiday; other dishes were herring salad and rice soup or pudding. Baking was an essential component, and a table laid out with piles of cakes and breads was what marked the holiday. In Norway, the stress was on the julebord, the pre-Christmas-day spread, and the koldtbord, the Christmas morning cold buffet.

  Straw, too, was a holiday marker in many Nordic areas. In earlier times, households slept on straw-strewn floors on Christmas Eve; straw figures, especially of the Christmas goat, were made; Christmas crowns, decorated straw hangings shaped like stars, or squares, or rectangles, hung from the ceiling. A Christmas sheaf, a sheaf of wheat, was placed outside. The origins of this custom are unknown: it was practised by the mid-eighteenth century, but whether it was a survival of older pagan traditions, possibly representing food for the dead, or a marker of charity in leaving food for the birds, is uncertain. The sheaf, however, continues to be reproduced routinely along with Christmas nisser on cards and holiday wrapping paper.

  This was a standard pattern. Holiday traditions and symbols frequently originated with the economically deprived before being turned into products and mass produced, becoming commodities admired, sometimes across the world, as representative of authentic folk culture. Many more pastimes which could not be straightforwardly sold – they were ideas or events rather than objects – were commodified nonetheless by being included in books and magazines, sold as the practices of simple country-folk. The nineteenth century was particularly rich in antiquarianism, and therefore equally rich in these reformatted practices. Some had elements of genuine tradition clinging to them, many more seem to have been woven out of the most tenuous threads. And then there were always a few that were simply outright fabrications, intentional or otherwise. William Hone’s Every-Day Book was a compilation of the editor’s antiquarian reading, promising an outline of ‘popular amusements, sports, ceremonies, manners, customs, and events … in past and present times’. His report, therefore, of ‘hodening’, on the Isle of Thanet, where men processed a horse’s jaw around the village, snapping its head at spectators, carefully notes that it was merely ‘supposed [my italics] to be an ancient relic’ of ‘our Saxon ancestors’.*

  Other traditions were innovations. ‘Stir-up Sunday’ was so-called from the Church of England collect read on the last Sunday before Advent, which begins, ‘Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people’. Today it is often claimed as the day Christmas puddings have always been made. Instead of being long-established, however, it was a clergyman at the end of the eighteenth century who noted the phrase; it was repeated, with a little verse, in a collection of folklore published in 1843: ‘Stir-up, we beseech thee, / The pudding in the pot: / And when we get home, / We’ll eat it all hot’, although the book’s editor, another clergyman, considered the tradition ‘profane’. After that, a few authors used the phrase to indicate the date, with no mention of puddings; a few more used it to mean the approach of the school holidays. It was only in 1870 that the bestselling novelist Rhoda Broughton used it in its current ‘old’ sense: ‘“Stir-up Sunday” is past; people have bought their raisins and suet and citron’, she wrote as though it were a commonplace.

  Less routine, but consistent over the course of the nineteenth century, were stories that attempted to pin ancient, and usually aristocratic, origins on much more mundane things. There was the Christmas joint of meat, said to have been raised to gentry status when a loin of beef was brought before (insert name of monarch here – Henry VIII, James I and Charles II were favourites), who, ‘in a merry mood’, proclaimed the beef so good, it was worthy of knighthood, dubbing it ‘Sir Loin’. (More prosaically, Old French surloigne – ‘over the loin’ – indicates the location of the joint.) Other newspaper stories regularly pulled out that old favourite, mocking foreigners, especially the exquisite comedy of their not knowing how to make a Christmas pudding, when the [name of important foreigner here] gave his cook the ingredients for a Christmas pudding, to honour a visiting Englishman, but it was served as a semi-liquid mass for ‘he had forgotten all about the cloth’ (usually followed by an exclamation point). That one was retrospectively attributed to high-ranking dignitaries in China, as well as, closer to home, the French kings Henri IV and Louis IX.

  Many other traditions were only partially fabricated. There were numerous New Year fire festivals, most of which were, at best, archaized. At Burghead, on Scotland’s Moray Firth, burning tar barrels were rolled through the streets on 11 January, using the pre-1752-calendrically adjusted New Year’s Day to indicate the supposed great age of the custom. Burghead, however, was founded only in the nineteenth century, so if this procession was older, it came from elsewhere. Similar is the Up-Helly Aa, in Lerwick, on Shetland, still celebrated today, and regularly described as having Viking origins, its curious name attributed to convoluted derivations from the Old Norse for ‘festival’. In reality the first Up-Helly Aa was organized by a temperance society in the 1870s, to keep young men away from New Year drinking; its name is dialect for up-holiday (the holiday is up, as in over). Equally, when the Revd Francis Kilvert wrote in 1877 that Herefordshire locals practised ‘the old custom of Burning the Bush on New Year’s Day … the whole valley can be seen early on New Year’s morning alight with [such] fires’, he was, undoubtedly, recording what he was told, and what he saw. But there is no record of such fires before the 1850s, and by the early twentieth century their brief era had come and gone.

  Meanwhile, in Scotland and the north of England, such mutations were changing the shape of the holiday altogether. Christmas had not officially been a holiday in Scotland from the seventeenth century, but actual practice depended on the location. The further away from the centre of government, the less likely the locals were to observe the ban. In the Outer Hebrides and the Shetlands the older, pre-seventeenth-century holiday – the long period of festivity, the special breads and cakes – had continued without a break. All the Kirk had achieved was entirely to remove religion from the day, and people had no trouble with that.

  Closer to governmental eyes, many of the ways of marking the holiday simply moved to New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, days without religious significance, and therefore not under any interdict. In some places, events resembling wassailing occurred, as children went door to door asking for ‘hogmanay’, or ‘hangmen’ – meaning the usual food, drink or cash.* One observer recorded the verse they chanted:

  Tonight it is the New Year’s Night, tomorrow is the day,

  And we are come for our right and for our ray,

  As we used to do in old King Harry’s day.

  Sing, fellows, sing Hangman heigh!

  The Merrie England reference of ‘King Harry’ suggests a nineteenth-century creation, and indeed the only pre-eighteenth-century reference to ‘hogmanay’ was as a small New Year’s gift.

  Other customs were novel, the best-known being ‘first footing’, when the luck of the household for the coming year was set by the first person to step over the threshold on New Year’s Day. As time went on, different places had different first-footing customs: women were considered generally unlucky; sometimes dark-haired men
brought luck, in others it was blond men; or the visitors carried luck in with them by bringing a gift, or speaking a set phrase – ‘May your hearth never grow cold’, ‘Please to let the new year in’ – or circling the room in a specific direction.

  Areas of Scottish immigration saw the integration of these practices to the resident populace. A schoolmaster as far south as Yorkshire recorded in 1827 that ‘we were very careful to fetch something in before any thing was carried out, so that we stand a fair chance of being fortunate’. A few years later his wife was horrified when ‘a Girl got herself into the Kitchen, but she was ordered off in a hurry, and might think herself happy to escape without a kicking for showing her unlucky face this morning’.*

  It was perhaps not such a happy holiday for all.

  Chapter Ten

  For many, New Year was a time not to hope for luck in the coming twelve months, but to pray for it. In the 1740s a congregation of Bristol Methodists initiated ‘watch-night services’ of hymns, prayer and scripture readings at full moons, when the unlit streets could be safely navigated. Gradually these moved to New Year’s Eve, becoming a time to reflect on past behaviour that had fallen short of the ideal, and commit to future improvement. By the nineteenth century many other evangelical congregations had such services, both on New Year’s Eve and now also on Christmas Eve. So too did High Church Anglicans: by mid-century, St Saviour’s in Leeds, for example, held a midnight Eucharist on Christmas Eve, complete with three-metre tree and an elaborate nativity scene.