Christmas

views updated

CHRISTMAS

The history of Christmas in America is rich and diverse. Beginning as an occasion that was prohibited by the Puritans, it has become what is arguably the most elaborate and socially visible holiday in American culture. On the way to achieving this status, the "traditional" American Christmas has incorporated a variety of myths and traditions with both religious and nonreligious origins.

Christmas and the Puritans

The Puritan movement against the holiday began in England in the seventeenth century, when they labeled the celebration of Christmas as "pagan" and an "Antichrist's Mass" (Whitaker, 2000, p. 72). In an effort to rid England of the holiday, Puritan soldiers went so far as to invade private homes on Christmas Day and put a stop to any feasting or celebrating they encountered. When the Puritans arrived in Massachusetts in 1620, they treated December 25 as an ordinary day. However, as immigrants began to import Christmas customs to the New World, the Puritans outlawed the celebration of Christmas, along with any "such ffestivalls as were superstitiously kept in other countrys, to the great dishonnor of God & offence of others" (Woodward, 1997, p. 32). Anyone feasting or celebrating on Christmas Day, or choosing to take the day off from labor, was fined five shillings.

Stephen Nissenbaum observes the Puritans believed they had good reasons to outlaw Christmas, for at the time its celebration was characterized by a ritualistic inversion of the social order. During the holiday, the poor believed it was their right not only to call upon the wealthier members of society and demand gifts and money, but to celebrate these new acquisitions by drinking heavily and engaging in riotous behavior in the streets of the young New England cities. As Elizabeth Pleck observes, the colonial celebration of Christmas "was often celebrated as a drunken festival of carousing, begging, overeating, and masquerading" (p. 45). The Puritan law banning public celebrations of Christmas remained in place until 1681, when Charles II of England demanded its repeal.

Emergence of Christmas as a National American Holiday

Although Christmas was reinstated, Americans did not regard it as a national holiday until the early nineteenth century. Penne Restad asserts, in fact, that until that time, most Americans, regardless of geographic location or religious beliefs, did not celebrate Christmas. Those who chose to celebrate the holiday did so by keeping their own personal or subcultural traditions. For example, planters in Virginia celebrated by feasting, gambling, dancing, and hunting, emulating what they believed to be the Christmas customs characteristic of the manor-born in England. In short, across the regions of the United States, there was no nationally recognized holiday or even similarity of traditions.

The national regard for Christmas changed in the nineteenth century when the many variants of the holiday began to converge into a "more singular and widely celebrated home holiday" (Restad, p. 13). During this time, Americans began to take old traditions and combine them with new symbols and traditions, to help create the Christmas Americans know today. The strongest reemergence of the holiday began in the Northeast. The industrialized, urbanized nature of that region meant its residents began to long for the intimacy they had felt in their towns or villages prior to the proliferation of large cities. As they began looking for something to unite them with a common past, they hit upon celebrating Christmas as the solution.

By the 1850s, the newfound tradition of Christmas was making its way to the South via the railroads and increased cross-country communication. These innovations helped disseminate ideas and customs to previously isolated areas of the country. Just a decade later, the Civil War further helped solidify the status of Christmas as a national holiday. Restad attributes this popularity to an increased desire for celebrations of the family in the wake of soldiers who had left home. The holiday also brought the message of peace and goodwill, which "spoke to the most immediate prayers of all Americans" (Restad, p. 13). While the war helped to promote the celebration of Christmas, much of the actual shaping of the modern holiday can be attributed to the Northern victory. Since the North gained control of the publishing trade and became the most powerful region of the country, myths and traditions that had begun in the immigrant-rich North became integral aspects of the American Christmas.

Around the end of the Civil War, Christmas also began to reemerge as a religious holiday. The first indication of this reappearance occurred in Sunday Schools during the 1860s and 1870s. During this time, the American Sunday School Society began integrating Christmas programs into their Sunday School lessons. According to Cynthia Hart, John Grossman, and Priscilla Dunhill, the clergy had mixed feelings about these curricular materials, but became convinced that the teaching of the Nativity was a great learning tool for the children, as well as a way to boost attendance in churches.

Elements of the Victorian Christmas

Although religion began to play an important part in the Christmas celebration, the establishment of what became known as the Victorian Christmas is attributed to Charles Dickens. Beginning in 1867 and 1868, Dickens began reading his popular work A Christmas Carol in sold-out theaters, with audiences of up to 35,000, painting the picture of "a glowing warmth of the family circle" (Hart, Grossman, and Dunhill, p. 75). The popularity of Dickens's tale contributed to the strong emergence of Christmas as a family holiday in Victorian times. This new emphasis on the family was supported by the widespread adoption of the Christmas feast, which typically required several weeks of preparation, and resulted in dinners of three or four hours in length with up to eight courses (Hart, Grossman, and Dunhill, p. 75). A family Christmas program, in which celebrants would contribute tableaux, recitals, and music for entertainment, and would participate in group sing-alongs and parlor games, followed the family dinner. Such games included snap dragon, a game where players tried to retrieve raisins out of a dish after the rim was set on fire, as well as blind man's bluff, drop the handkerchief, musical chairs, charades, and reenactments of historical events.

Christmas Symbolism

During the nineteenth century, many myths and rituals definitive of the modern Christmas celebration began to emerge. One of the most prolific and enduring symbols of the American Christmas is the image of Santa Claus. Joe Woodward argues that the original character of Santa Claus is largely based on the Catholic Saint Nicholas. He asserts that a combination of Saint Nicholas's alleged generosity toward children, combined with the fact that his death fell just nineteen days before Christmas, makes him the most likely model for this figure. Although the Puritans had attempted to suppress interest in Saint Nicholas (as well as all other saints), the character reemerged under the names of "Father Christmas" and "Kris Kringle" in England and Germany, respectively.

Woodward dates the broad dissemination of the Santa Claus figure to the American public to 1809, when Washington Irving included the character in a collection of Dutch-American tales entitled The Knickerboeker History (1995). Publication of this book seemed to greatly enhance the popularity of Santa Claus, because shortly after, a children's book entitled The Children's Friend featured a character called "Santeclaus" driving a sleigh pulled by reindeer. While these pieces of literature helped to introduce Santa Claus, Woodward maintains the Santa Claus myth we know today really captured the attention of the American public in 1822, when Clement C. Moore wrote the poem "The Night Before Christmas." The article states that this poem introduced the "eight tiny reindeer" concept along with the description of Santa Claus that was fashioned after Moore's childhood memories of white-bearded Dutch merchants who carried leather bells and wore red coats. While the concept of Santa Claus was now firmly entrenched in the minds of Americans, the final step in the visualization of the Santa Claus image occurred forty years later during the Civil War, when the cartoonist Thomas Nast drew the jolly, portly, costumed version of Santa Claus that became the standard for future journalistic and commercial depictions.

A second major symbol of the American Christmas is the Christmas tree. While this artifact was already in existence as far back as the 1300s, Hart, Grossman, and Dunhill attribute its inclusion in the American celebration to a custom imported by German settlers in Pennsylvania. Pleck observes that by the 1830s, neighbors were invited to see the trees decorated by German families. By 1848, the Christmas tree was a commodity in Pennsylvania markets. However, the success of the tradition is attributed to a New York merchant, Mark Carr, who began selling Christmas trees on the New York City docks in 1851. Hart, Grossman, and Dunhill report that less than thirty years later, there were as many as 400 tree merchants in New York City alone, with tree sales amounting to up to 200,000 a year.

Soon to follow the popularity of Christmas trees was Christmas tree decoration. Penne Restad states that the early Christmas tree decorations were homemade items, consisting of strings of nuts, popcorn, and beads. However, it was not long before an entire industry devoted to Christmas ornaments emerged in the United States. In 1870, merchants began to import large quantities of German ornaments and sell them in the marketplaces. Such items as wax angels and metal and glass-based decorations, which were vastly different from the original homemade food-based ornaments, began to dominate the Christmas trees of Americans. Most ornaments were based on popular styles and materials of the time, but some aspects of the Christmas tree decoration also have religious origins. Woodward attributes the custom of lighting the Christmas tree to Martin Luther, who fixed candles onto his fir tree to "remind children of heaven" (1997, p. 34). He adds that the tradition of placing a star atop the tree was meant to symbolize the Bethlehem star that the Magi followed on Christmas Eve.

Another Christmas tradition that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century was that of exchanging Christmas cards. A New York storeowner named R. H. Pease created the first American-made Christmas card in the 1850s (Restad). However, the expansion of the Christmas card custom was largely due to the entrepreneurial efforts of Louis Prang, a German immigrant. In 1870, Prang owned approximately two-thirds of the printing presses in America and first distributed the cards at the 1873 International Exhibition. After this event, he added a Christmas greeting to the cards and introduced them to America in 1875. Restad observes that the increased mobility and urbanization of America meant people viewed Christmas cards as adequate substitutes for the more time-consuming traditions of Christmas letters and visits.

The 1870s and 1880s similarly saw the rise of the American gift-giving tradition at Christmas. Prior to these decades, gifts had played only a small role in family Christmas celebrations. Personal gifts became regarded as a way to sort out and maintain personal relationships; likewise, gifts were used as a means of offering charity to the less fortunate. The blossoming of gift popularity led to a divide between store-bought and homemade gifts, and this discrepancy ultimately led to the introduction of another tradition: gift wrapping. In short, the wrapping of presents heightened the experience of receiving a "special something," and also helped to transform the gift from an ordinary commodity that anyone could buy to an item that would be properly regarded as a gift.

Another popular holiday tradition is the singing of Christmas carols. Ian Bradley states that Christmas carols were suppressed by the Puritan regime, only to be rediscovered in Victorian times. Moreover, a voluminous amount of new carols were written during this era. Many of these carols were written with more than religious themes in mind. For example, a popular theme of Victorian carols was moralizing, through such lyrics as "Christian children all must be, mild, obedient, good as He" from Cecil Frances Alexander's carol "Once in Royal David's City" (Bradley, p. 42). It was during the Victorian era that the sentiment for a "white Christmas" became popular, through Christina Rosetti's "In the Bleak Mid-Winter," which added snow to the Nativity story.

Other Christmas myths that remain somewhat popular include hanging mistletoe and holly wreaths. Woodward observes that the hanging of mistletoe began as a Dutch fertility symbol; subsequently, the English borrowed both the tradition and the meaning and brought it to America. The holly wreath is derived from religious origins, which according to Woodward symbolized Christ's blood, placed into a wreath to symbolize Gods' eternity.

Christmas Shopping

Despite the growing popularity of Christmas, gifts, cards and wrappings, the creation of the holiday shopping season is attributed to something else entirely besides the Christmas Spirit. Richard Henderson observes that, while there was a large surplus of mass-manufactured goods at the beginning of the nineteenth century, sluggish economic times meant there was essentially no market for them. Thus, leaders of the Industrial Revolution felt compelled to devise ways to boost sales that would permeate the consciousness of Americans who were just beginning to embrace the tenets of consumer culture. Henderson credits Philadelphia merchant John Wanamaker, founder of one of the first department stores in the United States, as being the driving force for the proliferation of commercial Christmas gifts, through the invention of new advertising media as well as innovative retailing techniques. Prior to Wanamaker's efforts, holiday gifts had been given more commonly at New Year's, but there was no real organized effort by retailers to encourage people to exchange gifts.

Other innovations in technology also helped to encourage people to purchase items beyond the traditional gifts of Bibles and decorative books that had dominated the early decades of the 1800s. Henderson credits the inventions of lightbulbs and plate glass, which were used to create window displays, with the development of the pastime of window shopping. This activity, he argues, helped lure shoppers into the stores, increasing their desire for mass-marketed goods. Moreover, the advent of cast iron as a building material allowed retailers to create much larger retail establishments than ever before, with more room for displays. All of these factors combined to help encourage consumers to embrace the concept of Christmas shopping as real and important ritual work.

Controversies Surrounding Christmas

As Christmas became reconfigured as more of a commercial holiday, two objections to this transition arose. The first was from religious conservatives, who argued it was important to "put the Christ back in Christmas" (Pleck, p. 44), and to focus on making the celebration one that focused on heavenly virtues such as charity and sacrifice, rather than more earthly desires. The second controversy emerged as the nation began to engage in a dialogue around the issue of what it means to live in an increasingly multicultural, multiethnic society. John Leo argues that the underlying Christian theme of Christmas means those who embrace other religions such as Judaism and Islam—as well as those who do not share a European heritage—feel excluded from such a culturally pervasive celebration. Elizabeth Pleck asserts that Jews have responded by elevating Hanukkah, a relatively minor holiday that occurs around the same time as Christmas, to a more elaborate holiday. Leo asserts that, rather than trying to include these new religions, civic authorities have taken steps to eliminate any religious theme or allusion to Christmas. Such measures include the banning of Christmas trees, Nativity scenes, and poinsettias in public places, and banning religious themes in workplaces. Moreover, the pervasiveness of Christmas has led to a reemergence of the debate on religion in schools, and even the banning of holiday celebrations from the curriculum by some educators.

Even as the commercial and religious aspects of Christmas and the holiday season are rescinded in schools and workplaces, those same themes seem to have become more entrenched in the media. Both Elizabeth Pleck and Jeremy Lott contend that portrayals of Christmas in films have become "a normal part of the holiday hustle and bustle" (Lott, p. 45). Christmas movies now encompass all film genres, from children's movies to comedy to religion to drama. Moreover, producers in both the television and film industry have even satirized the commercialism that drives their own business. Lott offers the film Jingle All the Way, which jokes about parents fighting over the "hot toy" of the Christmas season, as an example of this phenomenon.

In summary, Christmas in America has had a long and often controversial history. No doubt the Puritans would be dismayed at the way Christmas has captured the American consciousness—and checkbook—with a vengeance. The celebration of Christmas has affected many segments of American society, including religion, tourism, shopping, entertaining, and media offerings. Moreover, many of its traditions—such as decoration of trees and gift wrapping—have contributed to the growth of other holidays. Finally, Christmas has become one of the central engines driving American consumer culture today.

See also: Easter