The Battle for Christmas Read online

  THE SEDGWICK CLAN was the leading family in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, a small town located in the Berkshire Hills in the rural western part of the state. The family patriarch, Theodore Sedgwick (1746–1813), moved to the area from Connecticut before the Revolutionary War, and afterward he became an imposing political presence, serving first in the Massachusetts legislature and later in the U.S. Congress, where he advanced from the House of Representatives to the Senate. In 1799 Theodore Sedgwick moved back to the lower house, to be elected its Speaker. In 1802 he was appointed to the Massachusetts Supreme Court. Always a staunch political conservative, Sedgwick was a leading opponent of Shays’s Rebellion, the populist uprising that swept through Massachusetts in 1786–87, and he became an active member of the Federalist Party under the new constitution of 1787.

  Theodore Sedgwick had ten children, born between 1775 and 1791, and seven of the ten lived to reach adulthood. His four surviving sons entered adulthood between 1800 and the early 1820s. Three of these sons became lawyers; two of them moved to New York City to pursue their practice. None of the children achieved anything like their father’s power, although Theodore, Jr., did get himself elected to the Massachusetts state legislature (he also became a Democrat and an antislavery reformer during the 1830s). The most prominent and influential of Theodore Sedgwick’s children, though, was not any of his sons but his youngest daughter, Catharine Maria Sedgwick (1789–1867). Catharine Sedgwick became a professional novelist and short-story writer—indeed, one of the most popular American authors during the 1820s and ’30s.41 Along with all her siblings, she rejected Calvinist orthodoxy and became a committed Unitarian.

  The Sedgwicks were hardly a typical American family. But as patrician as they may have been, they were not terribly wealthy (not in the same league as a man like Clement Clarke Moore, for example). In financial terms, the children of Theodore Sedgwick could best be described as belonging to the prosperous upper-middle classes. Furthermore, their fundamental conservatism (and their rural base) acted as something of a brake on the family’s temptation to enmesh themselves in a consumerist Christmas.

  The correspondence of the original family patriarch, Theodore Sedgwick, covers almost exactly the same period as Martha Ballards diary (see Chapter 1). Except for a single letter from 1776, the holiday-season letters begin in the mid-178os, and Theodore himself died only months after Martha Ballard did. Despite the differences in the social status of the Sedgwicks and the Ballards, the pattern of holiday rituals observed by the two families turns out to be somewhat similar. Christmas and New Year’s are mentioned casually in the correspondence, in the form of seasonal salutations, especially in letters Theodore Sedgwick received from his friends. Theodore’s wife, Pamela Dwight Sedgwick, noted the holidays more frequently than did Theodore himself, wishing her husband a “joyful Christmas” in 1792 and opening a letter to him two years later by noting that “It is a most beautiful Christmas morning.”42 Domestic presents do not enter the picture.

  Theodore Sedgwick preferred to observe the season with alcohol. On January 2, 1784, his old friend and political crony Henry Van Schaack wrote him a characteristically jocular letter centering on a cask of wine. Van Schaack called Sedgwick a “drinking devil” and promised that when the two men met “We will eat & drink & be merry.”43 In fact, during the Christmas season Sedgwick and all his old friends characteristically wrote to one another in this fashion, under the guise of “good old boys.” The convention endured well into Sedgwicks middle years, even though by then he was a member of the U.S. Congress and claimed to have forsworn such behavior. On January 9, 1795, he thanked another friend for his “New Years wishes” and inquired, “Where did you eat your beef stake? I suppose you gluttonized at the Tavern, and drank a little, and swore a little and gambled a little. But with all these wicked things I should have been glad to have participated not in them but in your mirth and good humour.” And on December 23, 1799, Henry Van Schaack wrote to Sedgwick: “We dined at Judge Silvesters this day and demolished 3 bowls of the wine you sent.”44

  As much as anything else, Sedgwick and his friends used such festivities as a male ritual, implicitly based on the exclusion of women. When Sedgwick served in Congress during the 1790s, he wrote frequently and disdainfully of the “ladies’ parties” that he was invariably pressed to attend during Christmas week in Philadelphia.45 But along with women, it was children who were excluded from Theodore Sedgwick’s holiday festivities. In all the scores of surviving letters written during this season over the years between Theodore and his wife and their seven children, there is no indication until the very end that the Sedgwicks observed the season with any special domestic celebration at their house in Stockbridge. It was Pamela Sedgwick who would write to her husband—enviously, it seems—“This is a season of great festivity to you.” But for her own part she had nothing to report.

  Before 1804, Theodore never once so much as mentioned the holidays in his letters to his children. In that year, he finally wished them all “many happy new years.” Apparently such greetings were more appropriate for Sedgwick’s old friends than for his own children. (By this time Sedgwick’s youngest child was 13 years old, and the others ranged in age from 16 to 28.) In any case, each year from 1804 until his death eight years later, Sedgwick invariably used the approaching New Year to lecture them about the need for critical self-reflection. On December 24, 1804, he wrote his sons a long moralizing letter warning them of the dangers of dissolute behavior, especially gambling at cards, an activity that had long been associated with the Christmas season. But nowhere in all this correspondence is there any hint of domestic celebration. Nor do such hints appear in the surviving letters written in these years by second-generation Sedgwicks themselves, whether to their father or to one another.

  It was not for lack of interest. Theodore Sedgwick’s children (along with their mother) keenly felt the absence of holiday festivity, at least when they were in their teens. But what they yearned for, it seems, was parties and dances, not domestic rituals—for precisely the kind of activities that Theodore Sedgwick experienced (and scorned) as a congressman in Philadelphia. As early as 1798, Pamela Sedgwick wrote about the loneliness of being in Stockbridge during the holiday season:

  We have little Matter to communicate as we live without seeing much company and know very little of what passes in our Neighborhood. The girls generally find amusement in conversing upon and scaning [scanning] the characters of their male acquaintances[.] [T]hey have very few Parties and have had but two Balls this winter. They think this want of amusement [is] the dearth of all Pleasure. They think Stockbridge the most Intolerable Place in the world and would Prefer Greenland or Zambly[?] to staying here.46

  The holidays did not go wholly unacknowledged in Stockbridge. On New Years Day, 1805, Catharine M. Sedgwick (then 16 years old) used the bulk of her morning “to discharge my domestic duties, and greet my neighbors with the salutations of the New Year.” And that afternoon her privacy “was interrupted by the most unwelcome and vexatious visitors.” Although we have no way of knowing why these particular guests seemed so “vexatious,” the Sedgwicks were the squires of Stockbridge, and it should come as no surprise that Catharine accepted such holiday visits from the townsfolk as part of her “domestic duties.”47

  December 1805 found Theodore Sedgwick’s 20-year-old son Henry in Albany, New York. He reported to his father the public rituals of the season there, rituals that openly embraced the kind of interclass begging rituals that may not have characterized Christmas in rural New England:

  The holydays, our great season of festivity have this day commenced…. It is an undoubted fact that a considerable number of pennies has been given to the boys & servants, and I am credibly informed that this liberality has sometimes amounted to the sum of sixpence. Astonishing if true!48

  But Theodore Sedgwick responded to his son’s letter merely by noting that “another year has passed,” and the occasion was a fit one to “retrospect.”49 On
ly in the final year of the patriarch’s life does any sign of change appear. On January 1, 1812, Theodore Sedgwick’s married daughter Eliza S. Pomeroy wrote to her brother Henry D. Sedgwick that “Pappa … gives a New Year feast” for some guests, and that she and her seven children would participate. And she added, “The little ones are as happy and playful as lambs.”50

  By decade’s end, the tide had begun to turn. Theodore Sedgwick’s children were beginning to wish one another a merry Christmas and a happy New Year, and to report Christmas dinners and New Year’s parties.51 In the mid-181os two of the Sedgwick sons, Henry and Robert, had moved to New York City, where they set up a joint law practice. Their sister Catharine, now an aspiring writer, lived with them. But it was not on account of their departure from New England that things were beginning to change. Henry Dwight Sedgwick was married by this time, into a distinguished Boston family (his wife, Jane Minot Sedgwick, was the daughter of a prominent Boston judge). During their courtship, in 1816, he wished her a “merry, merry Christmas,” confident that this would cause his New England fiancée no offense. Indeed, Jane Minot’s Congregationalist family had been celebrating Christmas in Boston for years. In December 1817, the first year of her marriage, Janes brother wrote to her that “[o]ur Christmas was a merry one,” adding that he had dined “with some young people.” And three years later Jane Sedgwick herself wrote to her sister Louisa Minot of her nostalgia for the “mince pies and plum puddings” they had all formerly dined on “at this merry season.”52 In the same letter she conveyed a New Years greeting to her sister-in-law—and included Louisa’s children in the greeting: “A happy New Year to you dear Louisa, & William, & to all yr good little children.” This was the first time a member of the Sedgwick family had incorporated young people into their holiday wishes.53

  STILL, no presents were involved in any of these interchanges. The first evidence that any of the Sedgwicks received (or offered) a holiday present was in January 1823, when Catharine M. Sedgwick received in the mail a gift from one of her friends (sent as a “little token of my affections”). The first present involving family members came a year later, and in the third generation of the family, when the two children of Theodore Sedgwick, Jr. (the eldest Sedgwick son, and the inheritor of the family manse in Stockbridge), wrote their father a charming note—entirely in French—apologizing for not having bought a present for him.54

  It was two holiday seasons later, in 1825, that we find the first direct evidence of a commercial gift exchange within the Sedgwick family. For that evidence we can thank Catharine M. Sedgwick, who was living in New York with her brothers Henry and Robert and their families, and who had recently achieved acclaim as an author. Catharine had published her novel A New England Tale in 1822, and she was already taking on a role that would endear her to the rest of the family, that of the affectionate aunt who reported in vivid detail all the goings-on within the clan, and especially among its children, all of whom loved her dearly. Catharine Sedgwick took great pleasure in making her nieces and nephews happy, and she was very good at it. And it was to her that all her siblings would invariably turn for advice or comfort.55

  Unmarried herself, Catharine Sedgwick spent much of her free time in devoted attention to other people, and in passing along news to other members of the Sedgwick clan. On December 28, 1825, she reported to her 5-year-old niece and namesake Katherine that “Jane and Fanny both got dolls from their Aunt Speakman for a Christmas gift.” She described the scene vividly: “Jane’s was a wax doll with eyes that open and shut—and it looked so much as if it was alive that Jane thought it really was and screamed ‘It is alive! It is alive!’”56

  With this gift we suddenly find ourselves hurled into the orbit of a modern Christmas. The doll is ornate, high-tech, designed to impress, and was obviously purchased at a shop (and, just as obviously, it is expensive).57

  In the second half of the 1820s, Christmas came on in a rush. In 1827 little Kate Sedgwick’s parents (they lived in Lenox, a village several miles from Stockbridge) “kept Christmas … in Episcopal style.” In Stockbridge itself, on New Year’s Day the rest of the family gave presents to the children, who “received with the most entire satisfaction the simplest offerings, finding in their own happy hearts the best New Year’s gifts.”58 The two teenage children of Theodore Sedgwick, Jr., were in New York that same day, visiting their city kin. Their mother reported the presents they had received, along with details of the prices paid (and even a suggestive hint about the shopping excursion during which the gifts had been purchased):

  Theodore’s present [i.e., her present to their son Theodore III] … consisted of some very ornamental things for the table, to the amount of $11. I got them [at] a great bargain, the first price asked was $16. Sister Catharine [Catharine Sedgwick], who was with me, thought them as beautiful & cheap as any thing she had ever seen. I wish you could have seen how much they were admired. Sister Catharine presented Theodore with a beautiful cameo breast pin, & decorated Maria [Theodores sister] with flowers, & Sister Elizabeth [Robert’s wife] had kindly provided a very pretty present for both Maria & Theodore, a little article combining a purse, card-case, & tablet—a convenient affair which they both wanted.59

  Finally, that same year (1827), Robert Sedgwick and his wife, Elizabeth, set up an elaborate new ritual for their two young children (ages 2 and 3), complete with stockings—and Santa Claus. The year 1827 was the very year that Clement Clarke Moore’s 1822 poem was finding its way into print in newspapers published in New York and other American cities. It is striking how quickly the Sedgwicks adopted this ritual (and we can be sure that their children would later assume that it went back forever!):

  Nothing could exceed the joy of the children on New Year’s morning, when awakening with the first dawn of light, they jumped up eagerly to examine their stockings, which, certain of “Santa Claas[’]” bounty, they had had suspended the evening before from the bed post—and which, according to their anticipations were full to overflowing.60

  The next Christmas season these same children (now ages 3 and 4) received an even more elaborate bounty, which their mother characteristically described in loving detail:

  They received a great many beautiful presents, among which Lizzy had a Mahogany bedstead and Bureau, and a wax doll, whose eyes would open and shut. The Bureau, which is a gift from her father, is really a curiosity. It is more than half a yard square, and has three drawers[,] which are sufficiently deep to hold all her dolls clothes now. And to be useful as she says for her ornaments and Curiosities hereafter[,] [“]when she is a big lady.”61

  By the next year, 1829, Santa Claus had managed to reach the Massachusetts branch of the family. In the little village of Stockbridge, Henry and Jane Sedgwick’s children “were awake before day light to feel for their stockings & examine what Santa Clas [sic] had put into them—8c I have heard but one [ongoing] peal of merriment from them ever since.”62

  Santa Claus reached the Lenox Sedgwicks, too, that year, but there his bounty was disappointing to Catharine M. Sedgwick’s favorite niece Kate, now 9 years old, who conveyed to her aunt the hope “that Santa Claus has given you at least as many presents as he has me, for he only gave me four.” (Kate’s four presents included a pair of books, a “neat brown pocket book which mother gave, & sixty-eight cents from father.”)63

  In New York, that same day, Elizabeth E. Sedgwick was able to note casually to her father that her two children “had as usual a quantity of beautiful presents at New Years [emphasis added].”64 And the next year, 1830, she used the same phrase, but went on to include some details:

  New Years day as usual was a most joyous day to the children. They were loaded with presents from all their friends—whips, tops, dolls, guns, books, tea cups, &c. Never was any thing like it. And never was such happiness.65

  The implication here was that each year’s bounty had to outdo all preceding ones. As it happens, there exists a wonderfully charming account of the excesses of gift giving, in the
form of a description of that same scene, taken literally out of the mouth of one of the very children who were on the receiving end of those gifts. For this account we are indebted to Lizzys aunt, Catharine M. Sedgwick. On January 2, 1831, Catharine Sedgwick penned a document that purported to transcribe the exact words of her little niece Lizzy Sedgwick (now 6 years old, and the oldest of five children). The transcription took the form of a letter from Lizzy herself to her cousin Kate—Catharine Sedgwick’s favorite niece. It is a charming account, worth quoting in full (and diligent readers will be rewarded with a passing reference to a cockroach made out of sugar).

  When I went to bed New Year’s eve I felt inclined to jump up & run about but I was afraid of waking Haddy [her infant sister, Henrietta]. I moved continually and wanted to jump. I didn’t have much sleep that whole night. When we were all dressed we prepared to go into Mama’s room to get our New Year’s presents & Aunt Kitty [i.e., Catharine Sedgwick] came down to see us. I had mine in a bag & it felt pretty heavy. First I took out something tied in a paper. I found it was a candlestick snuffer & extinguisher. I then took out a box & opened it & found some sugar-men, some candy a cockroach-sugar also & some cherries (sugar!). I then pulled out a case & asked Papa to open it for I found it difficult. There was a microscope in it—larger than yours. ([Here Catharine Sedgwick interrupts in her own words:] I was going to add the italicised words when Lizzy with great delicacy said ‘No I should not like to say that Aunt Kitty.’) Then came the Token for 1831 [a Gift Book], from a gentleman I never saw nor heard of (Mr. Collins, a friend of her father) a large beautiful French box from Mama I forgot to mention, &c some sugar-plums. After wards I went upstairs & Aunt Kitty gave me a chocolate lamb, very pretty. As we were looking over [her 2-year-old sister] Sue Ridley’s basket we heard a squeaking noise[.] I was frightened for I tho’t it was one of the children—it was doleful & funny too! I turned round & found it was Ell [her brother Ellery, age 5] blowing a trumpet. He had besides a magic lanthorn[,] sugar men, a whip, candy, a corn-[stick?]. Then for Sue’s basket—tea-things & a sauce-pan, a beautiful doll stiffly & fashionably dressed (& I dressed her[:] CMS)[,] a cunning mouse & a French bag of sugar.