The Battle for Christmas Page 22

  It should not be surprising, then, that the nineteenth-century Americans who began to celebrate the new domestic Christmas needed, just as much as our own generation, to believe that the holiday gift exchange was rooted in something deeper and more “authentic” than the dynamics of the marketplace. To do their job, Christmas presents had to obfuscate their commercial origins.

  Some presents—Gift Books and Bibles, for instance—had their own ways of accomplishing that. And for other presents the practice of gift-wrapping could be an effective technique. One newspaper tried an appeal to ancient history, claiming that even “Greek and Roman babies” had been given “expensive toys” by their parents, so that it was unnecessary to think of fancy commercial presents as a recent invention, a raw product of the modern economy—they were burnished by the sands of antiquity.87

  But it was Santa Claus who was able to provide this kind of reassurance best of all. Santa was even more effective than ancient history; he stood outside history. And from a parent’s perspective, the mystery of St. Nicholas effectively short-circuited any childish queries about where all the presents came from. We might say that Santa became an anticommercial symbol at the very moment he was used for commercial purposes. Better yet, we might say that it was precisely because he was such an effective anticommercial icon that he could become such an effective commercial icon. The two roles were quite compatible with each other. In fact, they were different sides of the same coin. Both the commercial and the anticommercial Santa were functions of the new domestic Christmas. (Here they stand in glaring contrast to another Santa Claus—the carnival Santa explored in Chapter 3, that “whoreson” who “boused it” and flirted with the girls, and with whom the domestic Santa Claus was not comfortable at all.)

  Santa’s Workshop. This picture was one of several colored illustrations that Thomas Nast prepared for book-length editions of “A Visit from St. Nicholas.” Notice that Santa’s workshop contains only hand tools, and no machinery. This picture appeared in 1869. (Another Nast portrayal of Santa’s workshop, from the early 1870s, shows the old fellow using needle and thread to make a hand-sewn stocking—at a time when almost every middle-class household had a sewing machine.) (Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society)

  The domestic Santa did the job in several different ways. His old “Dutch” origin was one of these, of course. The very fact that the Santa Claus ritual could be seen as ancient and unchanging offered a powerful symbolic link to an earlier and seemingly noncommercialized folk culture.

  Just as important were the actual details of the Santa Claus ritual itself. To begin with, the presents came from Santa Claus, not from the parents—and therefore not from shops. Santa mediated magically between parent and child—between the buyer and the recipient of the gifts. His presence was what took the gift out of the realm of commerce—in the eyes of parents, perhaps, as well as children. To phrase this in a more contemporary fashion, we might say that Santa “mystified” consumption.

  He also mystified production and distribution. One of the great mysteries of Santa Claus was that he managed to provide presents for all children, everywhere. And he made them all himself—he was the producer of his own gifts. Finally, of course, he was the distributor, a distributor who managed to disburse his presents one house at a time. How Santa managed to do this was often the first skeptical question that children asked; but that he did so (and that the how of it all is a great mystery) must be a part of the parents’ answer.

  And Santa’s presents are as good as handmade. Clement Clarke Moore’s poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” never described the actual manufacture of Santa’s presents—nor did the structure of the poem leave any space in the text that would invite professional illustrators to do so. But illustrators found the room anyway. Beginning in the late 1860s, the most popular illustrated editions of “A Visit from St. Nicholas” began to provide pictures of “Santa’s workshop,” pictures that always presented it as a place of household production, where only old-fashioned hand tools were in evidence. Even though this was the very apogee of the Industrial Revolution, Santa’s workshop was never violated by the presence of machinery.

  In short, Santa Claus managed to reconcile opposites. He customized mass production. He maintained a personalized relationship with his enormous mass market—after all, his clientele was all but universal. And he did it all from motives that were in no way entrepreneurial. Santa Claus magically combined what in reality had now become a series of separate roles: He was simultaneously the gifts’ producer, distributor, seller, purchaser, and giver. In a new age of commodity production, what Santa Claus was able to offer—what he offered to grown-ups—was the moral equivalent of a world that had never wholly existed in the first place. It was the fading world of the household economy.

  * In a sense, Gift Books picked up where almanacs left off, as popular reading for Americans. There are some striking parallels. Both genres were annuals: They appeared each year as part of a series, with the same title, format, and organization; in both cases the only thing on the title page that changed from one year to the next was the year itself. Almanacs themselves were often filled with “literary” material (though this was usually more “oral” and “folk” in nature than the literary material found in Gift Books), and they even contained illustrations. Finally, both genres were sold during the Christmas season. (Indeed, the first commercial Christmas present I have encountered was an almanac.) But for all that, the differences between the two genres were even more striking (which is why Gift Books are not ordinarily linked with almanacs). First, almanacs were produced primarily for adult male readers, while Gift Books were more often produced for female or youthful readers. And second, almanacs were intended to provide not just entertainment but also information that was of “public” use (e.g., dates of court sittings, a calendar, even weather predictions), while Gift Books were intended to provide “culture”: literature, art, moral values—bourgeois values. Those differences suggest transformations far more significant than the term genre might suggest.

  CHAPTER 5

  Under the Christmas Tree: A Battle of Generations

  INTRODUCTION: FROM DISORDER TO SELFISHNESS

  EVERY SOLUTION generates its own problems, and the child-centered consumer Christmas was no exception—particularly for people who found such a celebration most appealing. The concern those people came to feel was actually rooted in broad issues of child-rearing within the new middle-class family, but it came to a head in their fears about what a child-centered consumer Christmas might do to their children’s character. This chapter will examine the intersection of a new way of celebrating the holiday with just those broader cultural issues. It will suggest that the introduction of Christmas trees represented an effort to cope with the problems posed by the child-centered Christmas.

  In about 1830 the literature of Christmas in America began to change. Before that date it dealt chiefly with questions of social disorder. Afterward a new concern emerged, an anxiety about private selfishness and greedy consumerism, especially as those issues affected children. Young people themselves had previously been seen as a source of disorder at Christmas, along with the poor (“Do not let your Children and Servants run too much abroad at Nights,” as that 1719 Boston almanac had warned). As part of the process by which middle-class young people were separated from the “lower orders” of society, they were created as “children” (a process explored in Chapters 3 and 4). But consequently they now began to be seen as easy prey to materialism, superficiality, and selfishness. Middle-class Americans were becoming concerned that the holiday season was an infectious breeding ground for juvenile materialism and greed. Consumerism was coming to supplant chaos as the new problem of the holiday season. The battle for Christmas was beginning to change from a physical struggle that pitted the classes against one another into a moral one that divided the generations.1

  That is the context in which the Christmas tree became an American holiday tradition. In fact,
it was what lay at the heart of the emerging middle-class interest in the rituals of Christmas in Germany, of which the Christmas tree was the preeminent example. As we shall see, these rituals were associated with children who were not selfish, and for whom Christmas was an opportunity to give as well as to receive.

  There is a belief among those who care about such things that the Christmas tree was spread throughout American culture by German immigrants. There is some truth to this. But, much like the notion that Santa Claus was brought to these shores by the Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam, such a belief also conforms to our desire to see our Christmas customs as rooted in something old-fashioned and authentic, in ancient folkways untainted by the marketplace. But Christmas trees became widely known in the United States during the mid-1830s, almost a decade earlier than any broad-based immigration from Germany can be said to have occurred.

  As it turns out, the most important channels through which the ritual was spread were literary ones. Information about the Christmas tree was diffused by means of commercial literature, not via immigrant folk culture—from the top down, not from the bottom up. It was by reading about Christmas trees, not by witnessing them, that many thousands of Americans learned about the custom. Before they ever saw such a thing, they already knew what Christmas trees were all about—not only what they looked like, but also how and why they were to be used.

  I shall deal, one by one, with each of the sources through which Christmas trees were introduced into middle-class American culture during the 1830s. Each source, as we shall see, reveals in turn a different element with which this ritual was associated: first, the element of surprise; second, that of folk authenticity; third, unselfish children; and finally, parental control

  Who were the writers who introduced the Christmas tree into American culture? The evidence suggests that, much like the Knickerbockers who devised Santa Claus, these writers constituted something of a distinct set. Like the Knickerbockers, the members of this set were genteel and cultured. But they were part of an emerging upper middle class that laid no claim to preserving an aristocratic social order. In contrast to the Knickerbockers, too, they lived mostly in New England and Philadelphia, not New York, and the church of their choice was Unitarian rather than Episcopal. And instead of being politically reactionary, they tended to stand somewhere on the progressive, reformist side of the issues that were coming to divide Americans in the 1830s. This is not to say that the members of this set were of a single mind on every matter. After 1830, as we shall see, they were divided over the emerging antislavery movement, and also over issues of child-rearing. But in any event they used culture rather than politics as an instrument to influence the social order. They employed their cultural authority—a combination of literary skill and access to the most popular channels of print—in a strenuous effort to deal with what they feared were the corruptive cultural effects of consumer capitalism, especially on the young. The Christmas tree played a serious if relatively minor role in that larger project.

  SOME CHRISTMAS TREES

  Little Charleys Christmas Tree

  There is no document about the Christmas tree that corresponds to Clement Clarke Moore’s verses about Santa Claus. Instead, there are only various legends that describe how the Christmas tree came to America. One of these legends is about Hessian soldiers during the American Revolution (it dates the real event too early); another is about Queen Victoria and her German-born husband, Prince Albert (it dates the event too late).

  What is probably the most famous of the legends, and the one with which we shall begin, has it that the first American Christmas tree was set up in Massachusetts, in 1835, by Charles Folien, a German immigrant who had become an American citizen and a Harvard professor. The source of that legend is a popular book written by a very famous British visitor to the United States, a woman named Harriet Martineau, who happened to witness the Follens’ tree while she was touring New England. As Martineau wrote, “I was present at the introduction into the new country of the German Christmas-tree.” Though this was not the first American Christmas tree, it is certainly true that Charles Folien set up a Christmas tree in Martineau’s presence for his son and namesake, an endearing 5-year-old whom everybody called “little Charley.” It is time to visit the scene.

  The tree (actually the top portion of a fir or spruce) had been placed in the front drawing room of the house. A toy hung from every branch, and when Martineau arrived Charles Folien and his wife were just adding the seven dozen little wax candles. As little Charley and two older companions approached the house, the adults quickly closed the door to the front drawing room and moved into an adjacent room, where (as Martineau put it) they sat around “trying to look as if nothing was going to happen.” After the visitors were served tea and coffee, a round of parlor games was played in an effort to distract the children’s attention from the front drawing room, where Charley’s parents were now busy lighting the candles. (The element of surprise was crucial here, and as we shall see it was something that distinguished the Christmas tree ritual from other modes of presenting children with their gifts.)

  Finally, the double doors were thrown open and the children poured in, their voices instantaneously hushed. “Their faces were upturned to the blaze, all eyes wide open, all lips parted, all steps arrested. Nobody spoke, only Charley leaped for joy.” After a few moments the children discovered that the tree “bore something eatable,” and “the babble began again.” The children were told to take what they could from the tree without burning themselves on the candles. (Martineau reported that “we tall people kept watch, and helped them with good things from the higher branches.”)

  After the children had eaten their fill of the edibles, the evening continued with dancing and mugs of “steaming mulled wine.” By eleven, all the other guests had gone home; little Charley was in bed; and Harriet Martineau herself was left alone with the boy’s parents, Charles and Eliza Folien. It had been a delightful evening, and Martineau concluded her account by predicting that the Christmas tree ritual would surely become an established American tradition.2

  KARL FOLLEN’S STORY

  Harriet Martineau’s story of little Charley Follen’s Christmas tree was accurate enough, even if this was not the first American Christmas tree. But in an important way the story was misleading. For when Martineau reported the episode, she placed it in a context that implied that she had simply stumbled upon it during the course of her travels. The episode appeared as part of a catchall chapter in Martineau’s book, a chapter she called “Hot and Cold Weather,” about seasonal phenomena in New England.

  Martineau’s evening with the Follens was anything but an accident of travel, and it hardly took place as part of the ordinary New England seasonal cycle. Martineau and the Follens had met only a few months earlier, but in the course of those few months they had become fast personal friends and political allies in a cause that was changing the course of their lives. Harriet Martineau had gone to visit the Follens that evening to chart their mutual plans at a moment of crisis, a crisis that was forcing them to make a difficult choice between their personal principles and their professional careers. The issue that precipitated the crisis was nothing less than the movement to abolish slavery in America. It is a story that bears telling in some detail.

  IF CHARLES FOLLEN HAD not died in 1840 at the age of 43 (in the explosion of a steamship), he would in all probability be remembered today in connection with something more important than the American Christmas tree. Even as it stands, however, Follen’s career is fascinating. Somewhat like Thomas Paine before him, he was a radical on two continents. Even before coming to America in 1825 in his late twenties, Follen had been exiled from Germany, and then from Switzerland, for his revolutionary activities.

  Karl Follen, as he was named at birth, was no simple product of German folk culture. He was a scion of the German elite, the son of a respected judge—almost the German equivalent of Clement Clarke Moore. But early in his life Follen
moved in a very different direction than Moore. He became a youthful revolutionary, a representative of the emerging liberal nationalist movement in Germany. As a university student, Follen authored an incendiary political song and was actually arrested for complicity in a political murder (he was acquitted). Appointed a member of the faculty at the University of Jena in 1820 (at the age of 24), Follen continued his political activities and was forced into exile in Switzerland, where he received another professional position; but four years later he was compelled to flee once again (in the face of new charges that he had organized a revolutionary cell). This time Follen found refuge in America. He arrived in New York, having learned English during the voyage and bearing letters of introduction from another European revolutionary, the aged Marquis de Lafayette, who suggested that he try to find employment in the Boston area. Follen followed that advice, and headed for Cambridge.3

  Even before he arrived on New England soil, Folien stopped off in New York to meet a woman we have already met, the writer Catharine Maria Sedgwick, whose novel Redwood was the first book he had read in the English language. Catharine Sedgwick obviously admired Follen’s intelligence and culture, his gentility, and his republican principles. The following summer she invited him to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, to meet the rest of the Sedgwick clan. Then, that fall, Sedgwick introduced Folien to one of her oldest and most intimate friends, Eliza Cabot of Boston. Two years later Folien and Cabot married, and in 1830 they had a child, who was christened Charles after the English version of his father’s name.4