In Indiana Calvin Fletcher, who became a Methodist in 1829, at first did not pay much attention to these services. In 1830 his only new year thought was to wonder at the quiet: ‘not a gun been fired no childrin running the street calling for New Years gifts &c.’. It was 1833/4 before he attended ‘a meeting at the methodist church … to continue until the new year comes in’. While the phrase ‘new year’s resolution’ does not appear in the Oxford English Dictionary until 1850, the concept was in practice before then.* Greville, in his memoir, summarized 1837:
I wind up this year with this result: – I have led a very idle, unprofitable life, have read very little … and have been unhappy in consequence; but I have definitely resolved to give up the turf … With hopes rather than resolutions I will begin the next year, and with the conviction that it is never too late to turn over a new leaf.
More people, however, were like Calvin Fletcher, who was a regular chapelgoer, but was also drawn to the rowdier, more carnivalesque portions of the night. In Indiana, as elsewhere, shooting and explosions were key, having originally been introduced by non-British immigrant communities. At the beginning of the century, the commanders of the Lewis and Clark expedition took it for granted that this would be part of their men’s Christmas. Lieutenant Clark wrote in his journal in 1803: ‘I was wakened by a Christmas discharge found that Some of the party had got Drunk [‘2 fought’ he added, then struck through the phrase] the men frolicked and hunted all day…’ In nineteenth-century Prussia, legislation banned shooting and other ‘loud amusements’ between 24 and 26 December. In Sweden ‘shooting in Christmas’ was traditional: the shooter crept up on his neighbours house, fired (in the air, presumably) and rushed off before he could be identified.
It is likely that German and Swedish immigrants took Christmas and New Year shooting to the USA with them, because it occurred in many regions where they migrated. The New World development was to shift from guns or gunpowder to fireworks, firecrackers and rockets.* Sometimes the newly arrived and the older residents encountered confusion as their traditions converged. A German in Houston in 1849 joined some ‘Texians’ on Christmas Eve, going house to house, firing guns and waking the neighbours. Although the custom of Christmas shooting was unknown there, once the residents understood that they weren’t under attack, they welcomed the visitors, possibly because they had cleverly brought ‘as much whisky as our saddlebags would hold’. One group commended their new German friend as he left: he was, he was told, one ‘hell of a Dutchman’.†
Philadelphia residents enjoyed the mumming of England as well as the belsnickling of the Germans from the Rhineland, and some added Scandinavian ‘Second Christmas’ celebrations, spending 26 December visiting after a quiet 25 December at home with immediate family. Their food, too, ranged from turkey and plum pudding to turkey and sauerkraut, a popular local combination. In the South and Southwest, southern European, especially Spanish, Epiphany bonfires met Mexican decorative festival lanterns, and migrated to Christmas Eve, as did bonfires in Louisiana and for miles along the Mississippi; in Texas and New Mexico they became luminarias and farolitos, little lights.
By the time the children of the first generations of immigrants were grown, the origins of many customs were no longer remembered, and to the next generation the holiday customs were not German, nor Dutch, nor Norwegian nor Spanish nor French; they were just theirs. The Norwegian-immigrant parents of the Wisconsin-born and Minnesota-raised economist Thorstein Veblen kept the holiday in Norwegian fashion, from Christmas Eve through Second Christmas to ‘Thirteenth Christmas Day’, but he and his siblings also received gifts of toys in the modern American style. Montana mining communities in the 1870s were made up of Montenegrin, Serbian, Albanian, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Russian and Cornish workers: the Orthodox celebrated on 7 January; the Slavs’ first Christmas Eve visitors scattered wheat and said, ‘Christ is born’; the Cornish paraded house to house in costume, enjoyed wassail bowls and Yule logs and hung what sounds very much like a kissing bough.*
As Christmas moved indoors and became more domestic, music remained one of the most important outdoor pastimes. In England in the sixteenth century and for part of the seventeenth, small groups of instrumentalists called ‘waits’ were employed by civic bodies to play in the street or at town events, their performances only gradually becoming confined to Christmas. In London, Westminster parish burgesses seasonally licensed bands of musicians called the ‘Ancient Wakes’ to play in the streets after midnight. Others, unlicensed, cheerfully joined in, and by the nineteenth century these midnight waits had created another pastime: complaining about seasonal music: ‘disturbing the good easy people who have a mind to enjoy sleep’, a Yorkshire schoolmaster growled in his diary in 1826, before, he went on, those ‘same disturbers have the impudence to beg of the Inhabitants to reward them, for undertaking to keep them awake’.
But in most places, such nocturnal music was welcomed. Despite the renewal of carol-writing in Britain in the eighteenth century, the middle and upper classes rarely encountered the genre, at most serenaded by a village group once a year. Even then, as Oliver Goldsmith wrote in The Vicar of Wakefield (1761/2), this was largely a characteristic of remote districts, where the residents ‘retained the primaeval simplicity of manners’, indicated by their ‘[keeping] up the Christmas carol’.
That was not the case in Germany, where the carol tradition had always been stronger than in English-speaking countries, and in 1818 developed further with one of the most famous German carols, ‘O du fröliche’, followed two years later by ‘Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht’ (translated into English as ‘Silent Night’ in 1859, and before and since into more than a hundred languages).* Both of these referred at least nominally to the nativity, whereas the equally popular carols ‘O Tannenbaum’, given new verses in 1824, and ‘Morgen kommt der Weihnachtsmann’ (‘Tomorrow the Weihnachtsmann is coming’) were about trees, toys and more toys.
In England in 1822 Davies Gilbert, an MP and antiquarian with a special interest in the history of Cornwall, published Some Ancient Christmas Carols, with the Tunes to which They were Formerly Sung in the West of England. This was not the first English carol collection – there had been many cheap reprints and broadside collections – but it was the first intended for prosperous middle-class readers, the first to bring carols into respectable domestic and ecclesiastical life, unlike broadsides, ‘written by superstitious and illiterate persons’ and thus dismissed. Gilbert included just eight carols; a second edition the following year added another eleven (of which only ‘The First Noel’ is still regularly sung). The book’s significance was not in what it contained, but in how it was viewed. Gilbert, like many scholars of his day, and Oliver Goldsmith before him, thought of carols as what The Times referred to as ‘specimens of times now passed away’, treasures that had to be ‘made safe’ and preserved as a record of a defunct tradition. William Sandys gathered his Christmas Carols, Ancient and Modern (1833) with similar intentions, but unlike Gilbert’s collection, Sandys included many that are still heard: ‘The First Noel’, ‘God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen’, ‘The Boar’s Head Carol’, ‘Tomorrow Shall be My Dancing Day’, ‘I Saw Three Ships’, ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’.
In 1826 William Hone’s popular Every-Day Book introduced carols to his middle-class readers as though they were entirely unknown. After giving a complicated (and entirely incorrect) derivation of the word carol itself, he gestured towards an ecclesiastical history: ‘Anciently, bishops carolled at Christmas amongst their clergy’, but, he added hastily, he would confine himself to ‘domestic usages’ of the form. In reality he had to, for there was only an extremely limited ecclesiastical history: the carol was a secular and demotic form. But that did not confer the respectability and gravitas Hone and other antiquarians desired. And so Hone took what was a fairly recent tradition and constructed a history for it; took what was secular and made it religious; and, most importantly, took what was working class and of the street and
made it middle-class and of the hearth and home. He was followed in this by collectors over the following decades, who rejected popular carols as being ‘deficient of interest to a refined ear’, ‘the veriest trash’ and against all ‘morality and good taste’. Sandys had acknowledged in passing that carols had survived in broadsides from London and Birmingham and a vaguely gestured-to ‘other places’ – that is cities – yet his antiquarian sensibility urged him to find their origins in the imaginary pastoral of Merrie England, more authentic somehow than the gritty reality of the proto-industrialized cities where carols had flourished. For the same reasons, African-American spirituals of the nineteenth century, such as ‘Go Tell it on the Mountain’, had to await the twentieth century to be valued by mainstream culture.
One way of taming these urban, working-class, secular songs was to incorporate them into church services. The rise in Britain of High Church Anglicanism, with its love of ritual and ceremonial, encouraged the development of choral singing, and smaller, less organized groups were replaced by what might be called corporate choral performances in which hymns were now interspersed with demotic carols. Soon there was no sense that these latter had only recently been introduced into churches. In 1872 R. R. Chope’s Carols for the Use in Church blandly stated that it had been a ‘prolonged and costly’ job ‘to restore [my italics] the use of Carols in Divine Service’. The book also happily rewrote history by stating that carols had been ‘commonly sung in churches’ in the eighteenth century (using as proof, oddly, the sentence from The Vicar of Wakefield cited above, which says exactly the opposite). At St Saviour’s, Leeds, the midnight service on Christmas Eve was prefaced by what the curate himself referred to as a ‘hymn’ – ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’.* To feed this new enthusiasm for religious seasonal songs, churchmen (and a few women) now began to write dozens of new carols: ‘Once in Royal David’s City’, with words by the wife of the Primate of Ireland; ‘We Three Kings of Orient Are’, by a rector from Pennsylvania; ‘Away in a Manger’, words possibly by a Pennsylvania Lutheran; ‘It Came Upon a Midnight Clear’, words by a Unitarian minister from Massachusetts, music by a church organist; ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’, words by an Episcopalian minister.
Other carols had more unexpected sources. ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’ had music adapted from Mendelssohn, born into a Jewish family, although baptized as a child; ‘Cantique de Noël’ (the English version is ‘O Holy Night’) was set to music by the Jewish composer Adolphe Adam. The entirely secular ‘Jingle Bells’ was composed in 1857 by a church organist, James Pierpont, but based on the chorus of a minstrel song by Stephen Foster.*
This popularizing of carols was highly successful, and not long after the publication of Sandys’ collection, carols were discussed as though they had always existed, and always been popular. A man remembering his Hampshire childhood in the 1860s recalled that they sang ‘the ancient carols of England’ (my italics), including ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’, which had been translated into English just twenty years before. In 1903 one magazine commended Oxford University for keeping alive its ‘ancient’ carol service, complete with Christmas tree and selections from the Messiah: three customs, none of which dated back more than 110 years, now all ‘ancient’. So swiftly were new traditions made old, and yet given new life.
As all these customs – sacred and secular, Christian and Jewish, white and African-American – grafted on to each other, so too the ways the days of Christmas were spent also became, in the USA, a hybrid of the many backgrounds of the population. How the holiday was observed, therefore, varied by location and population.
The South and Southwest were the regions of American Christmas partying. Food, often shared communally, was of great importance, and drink was more so. Throughout the century, many drinking saloons, taverns and inns ‘treat[ed] friends and patrons’ to free alcohol on the day. Joel Chandler Harris, whose Uncle Remus stories made him famous, set a different type of story in mountain country during the Civil War. The meal, an attempt to ‘remind them of the old days of peace and prosperity’, was described as a ‘genuine Christmas dinner’: apple dumplings, chicken pie, barbecued shote (a young pig) and mutton and turkey. There was also, as a centrepiece, a large bowl of eggnog. One woman fretted about the latter, but was reassured it would be fine ‘ef it’s got Christmas enough in it, an’ I reckon it is, kaze I poured it in myself’ – ‘Christmas’ here seeming to be a synonym for alcohol.
Eggnog was virtually the national drink in December. When Texas became a republic, Sam Houston, the new president, warned on 25 December 1836 that ‘only by continued sobriety and endeavor can a worthy republic be formed’, a speech immediately followed by dancing and eggnog – apparently sobriety was relative, not absolute, on Christmas Day.*
The young John Pierpont, later a leading abolitionist, saw southern seasonal drinking at first hand when, as a young man, he tutored the children of a South Carolina planter.† The two or three days of holiday given to the slaves, he wrote, alleviated ‘the miseries of the year’ in ‘hilarity and festivity’ as they visited, ate the holiday meat ordered by their master, and danced and sang in ‘a scene which might more than compare with the bachannal [sic] feasts and amusements in antiquity’. Their enjoyment, however, was owing to ‘Rum, sugar, & water … prepared in large tubs of 2 or 3 pailfulls, and carried about them so that each one might drink his fill.’ As the escaped slave and abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass described it, Christmas was a way for slave-owners to keep a lid on ‘the spirit of insurrection’: licensed drinking and hilarity for three days out of 365 was mandatory, and ‘Not to be drunk during the holidays was disgraceful.’
Later in the century, the emphasis shifted from adult entertainment to focus increasingly on slave children, just as it had to their owners’ children. Masters sometimes gave out presents dressed as Santa Claus, and the slave children might be invited to the ‘Big House’ to see the tree or hang their stockings. For the masters, however, these were incidental details in their southern Christmas, which was all about hospitality, parties and entertainment. The patriarchal arrangement of Irving’s Bracebridge Hall stories was regarded as a model, the benevolent squire transformed into benevolent plantation-owner, the happy villagers into happy slaves. But the reality was rowdier, and vastly less sober. Everyone drank: men, women and children all, starting with a stiff eggnog at breakfast and continuing late into the night. And, as the tales of the great open houses of Merrie England masked a more nuanced economic story, so the daughter of a Mississippi planter remembered that, on the one hand, her parents issued no invitations because ‘everybody was [just] expected’, while, on the other, she clarified that one night was for entertaining former overseers, another for ‘plain neighbours’.
In the North, too, drinking was part of the holiday, but there was already a separation between them and us, between the young men out in the street drinking and making noise and the more decorous family men with women and children at home. The changing holiday can be catalogued in the letters of John Pintard, written between 1816 and 1833. In the early years he wrote about New Year’s Eve and its ‘Bands o [sic] music, Bagpipes, Drums & fifes, boys bells &c. … till day light’, while his family marked Christmas Day only by a toast to his absent daughter and her family, from ‘your parents and Sister at their tranquil board’. By 1831 his Christmas Day was all about stockings, Santa and mince pies.
Canadian North America saw similar changes. In the maritime regions, with its Francophone Acadian population, the Old World tradition held sway: the single reference to Christmas in one New Brunswick newspaper as late as 1867 was to midnight Mass; there were no advertisements for Christmas gifts, and when the paper finally began to use the phrase ‘Merry Christmas’ it did so in English, stressing its foreign nature. The réveillon, when family and friends gathered, was held as a party in Quebec, with singing and dancing as well as food; or as a more modest family gathering after midnight Mass in the Maritime provinces on the Atlantic. In so
uth-eastern New Brunswick the Christmas dish poutine râpée, pork-filled potato dumplings, was, despite its name, in origin a German Knödel, transported to Canada by Pennsylvania settlers in the late eighteenth century. Areas with some English populations adopted the plum pudding, renaming it poutine en sac, or poutine aux raisins.* In western France, Mi-Carême had been an old woman who handed out sweets to good children in Lent (her name means ‘Mid-Lent’); by the nineteenth century in the Maritimes she had become the bearer of Christmas gifts, keeping Santa at bay until the very end of the century.
Mi-Carême at least merely moved her gifts from one Christian holiday to another; in the USA, such was the overwhelming presence of Christmas that other religions began either to take part, or create their own counter-holidays. In 1877 the Philadelphia Times reported that ‘The Hebrew brethren did not keep aloof. Christmas trees bloomed in many of their homes and the little ones of Israel were as happy over them as Christian children. One of them said: “Oh, we have the trees because other people do.”‘ ‘Other people’ became an important motivator. The Jewish holiday of Chanukah had always been a minor one.* It was not coincidental that Chanukah began to gain a more public, more secular profile, first in the USA in the late nineteenth century, as Christmas trees became widespread. German Jews in America had seen Christmas trees back home, but to Russian and Polish Jews these new objects were emblems of the America they wanted to become part of, barely a matter of religion at all. Thus Jewish theologians and educators began in the 1870s to build new traditions around this previously overlooked holiday. Jewish Hebrew-school classes laid emphasis on the story as their Christian counterparts did on the nativity; Jewish children learned Chanukah songs, as their Christian counterparts sang carols; they lit candles set in menorahs nightly for eight nights as their Christian friends decorated their trees with candles; and they received gifts on their own holiday of ‘Family gatherings, merry making, presents, feasting the poor and giving the little ones a good time’. That Chanukah’s prominence was, and continues to be, reactive, a response to Christmas, is confirmed by the fact that today in Israel it remains a secondary holiday, while in the USA, like Christmas, it is more commonly celebrated by Jews with children, and among secular or Reformed Jews, who are integrated into secular or Christian communities.
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