The Battle for Christmas Read online

  As it happens, that story was reprinted in the United States the same year it was published in Europe. Its American venue was The Athenaeum, a cosmopolitan literary magazine published in Boston by Unitarians and devoted to reprinting the latest European literary work. The story itself was trivial (even though it, rather than Catharine Sedgwicks 1835 story, may represent the first reference to Christmas trees that was published in the United States). Still, two things about it have a bearing on our story. What matters first is the story’s plot. It deals with the redemption of a sinful mother by her selfless young child—a child who, like Jesus himself, was born on Christmas Eve (the story is titled “Christmas Eve; or, The Conversion”). The other point that matters is the place where the story was printed—in an organ of New England Unitarian culture.

  UNITARIANS, CHRISTMAS TREES, AND THE CHARACTER OF CHILDREN

  The two points are interrelated. By now it should be clear that the Christmas tree was spread throughout the United States in large measure by committed Unitarians. It is time to ask what their agenda was. Why did members of this group care so much about Christmas trees? Answering this question takes us along two important literary paths. The first starts with a famous British writer; the second, with a controversial Swiss educational reformer. Both paths run chiefly through the channels of Unitarian culture. And both constantly refer to the theme of selfless children.

  Coleridge’s Children: The Ratzeburg File

  The British writer was Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), the Romantic poet and essayist. Coleridge happened to spend the 1798 Christmas season in the German town of Ratzeburg, located near Hamburg in the northern part of Germany. He had gone to Germany three months earlier, shortly after making a professional decision that changed the shape of his career—he had just decided against pursuing a career as a minister in the Unitarian Church. (In addition, Coleridge had recently completed what would prove to be his two greatest poems, “Kubla Khan” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”) The 26-year-old poet spent much of the season socializing with the local elite and fending off invitations to attend their frequent holiday dances.35 But in the midst of these revels he witnessed a domestic Christmas tree, accompanied by a ritual that “pleased and interested” him so much that he published an account of it eleven years later, in a magazine he was then editing in England (the piece was published in time for the 1809 Christmas season).

  The tree that Coleridge saw was, as we might expect, the top of an evergreen fastened onto a table in one of the parlors in the house to which he had been invited, and there were lighted candles attached to its branches. But that wasn’t what most “pleased and interested” Coleridge. What really impressed him was a more important twist—for in the ceremony he witnessed, it was the children who gave presents to their parents, and not the other way around. Coleridge detailed the procedure:

  For three or four months before Christmas the girls are busy [working], and the boys save up their pocket-money, to make or purchase these presents. What the present is to be is cautiously kept secret, and the girls have a world of contrivances to conceal it….

  Those, then, were the presents that were placed under the Christmas tree, to be opened on Christmas Eve “with kisses and embraces,” in a ceremony that Coleridge found deeply moving:

  Where I witnessed this scene, there were eight or nine children, and the eldest daughter and the mother wept aloud for joy and tenderness; and the tears ran down the face of the father, and he clasped his children so tight to his breast—it seemed as if he did it to stifle the sob that was rising within him.—I was very much affected.36

  Coleridge did not realize it, but this ritual seems to have been a strictly local one, conceivably even limited to the single household in which he observed it. He afforded only brief mention to the more standard ritual that took place the following day—the familiar ritual in which the parents gave presents to their children.37

  Coleridge’s account left something of a wake in the United States, a wake that I have come to term “the Ratzeburg file.” Coleridge originally published his Christmas recollections in 1809, in a short-lived magazine he edited called The Friend. The bound magazine was republished in London three times during the 1810s, and an American edition appeared in 1829 (in Burlington, Vermont). Catharine Sedgwick, for one, read the book no later than January 1836 and perhaps earlier.38

  Actually, Coleridge’s account of the Ratzeburg Christmas tree had been printed as a separate item in the United States back in 1824, in the official journal of the Unitarian Church in America, the Christian Register, published in Boston.39 Six years later parts of the account reappeared, without attribution, in a children’s book written by another Unitarian, Lydia Maria Child. Child, a novelist and an abolitionist, was best known at the time as the author of a cookbook, The New England Frugal Housewife. For the 1830 Christmas season she published a juvenile Gift Book, The Little Girls Own Book. This volume contained a collection of games, puzzles, and riddles. It is the last item in the book, titled “A Custom Worthy [of] Imitation,” that is of interest to us here. For it was nothing other than a paraphrase of Coleridge’s report—except that Child did not refer to the Christmas tree itself but only to what we might think of as the central element in the ritual, the generational reversal in the gift exchange. (Child did not refer to Coleridge, either, or to Ratzeburg itself; instead, she implied that the ritual characterized Germany as a whole.)

  In Germany the children all make it a rule to prepare Christmas presents for their parents and brothers and sisters. Even the youngest contrive to offer something. For weeks before the important day arrives, they are as busy as little bees contriving and making such things as they suppose will be most agreeable.

  The great object is to keep each one ignorant of the present he, or she, is to receive, in order to surprise them when the offering is presented. A great deal of whispering, and innocent management is resorted to, to effect this purpose; and their little minds are brimful of the happy business.40

  Another version of the same account appeared the very next year, 1832, in Keene, New Hampshire, in a children’s primer authored by one J. K. Smith, Juvenile Lessons; or The Child’s First Reading Book. One of the reading lessons in this book was titled “Christmas Presents.” This lesson began: “The children in the North part of Germany, have a custom which pleases me much. It is usual with them to make little presents to their parents at Christmas time.” The lesson went on to tell its young readers: “For some time before this happy day, the girls are as busy as so many bees, and the boys are careful to save every cent of their pocket money.” It then added confidentially: “They are very careful to keep all their plans secret; for they do not wish to have their parents know the pleasant surprise they are preparing for them, till the time arrives.”

  The evening before Christmas, they obtain leave to light one of the parlors, and here the presents for their parents are laid out with great care. When all things are ready, the parents are called in, and the dear little creatures present their gifts. It is a delightful scene of kisses and embraces, and frolick.

  Smith concluded by expressing a hope that “the boys and girls in America would make such a good use of Christmas eve, and Christmas day.”41

  The same item reemerged one last time, at the very end of the decade, in 1840, in a children’s religious magazine, Youths Companion. Like the earlier reprintings, this version, too, was published in New England. But whereas the earlier examples had been associated with Unitarians, the magazine in which this one appeared was published by their old opponents, the evangelical Congregationalists. This Congregationalist version actually came closest to Coleridge’s original account. The Christmas tree reappeared in it, and so did the town of Ratzeburg itself. In this story a group of children are discussing a new kind of Christmas ritual they have happened upon. One of the children explains:

  “I was reading something about it in one of papa’s books, the other day…. The person who wrote the
account said that it is the custom at Ratzeburg, in Germany, to set up a branch of a yew tree near the wall, and fasten to the boughs little combustible things, pieces of candle wrapped up in colored papers. Then all the presents are tied to the branches, and all the children are called in…. [B]y and by they set fire to the little candles, and the branches begin to burn and crackle, which makes grand fun.”42

  With that, the Ratzeburg file comes to an end. It is intriguing to watch the way the whole process worked. First, each writer in turn learned about the ritual not from personal observation but from reading another writer’s account. (The author of the 1840 version actually acknowledges as much: “7 was reading something about it in one of papas books, the other day.”) American readers were learning that this ritual was performed in “Germany” (or at least in “North Germany”), and that it was presumably part of an old and widespread tradition. But when we actually trace the process, what we find is that the source of all the reports is what a single visitor to one small town observed on just one occasion, and in a single household.

  But why was it so important for Americans to believe that this was an old and widespread German custom? The answer surely has to do with the one element in Coleridge’s report that was included in every item in the Ratzeburg file: the appearance of children who were behaving unselfishly at Christmas—children who had freely chosen to give presents as well as to receive them. This was a point that would have struck a responsive chord in people who worried that the affection they lavished on their children at Christmas—and especially the gifts that were meant to symbolize this affection—were causing those same children to become self-centered and materialistic—in other words, spoiled.

  Pestalozzi’s Children: A Feast of the Feelings

  To child rearing, then. This was a subject of real practical concern to many Americans in the 1830s, and it was especially acute for the very Unitarians who are the focus of this chapter. In addition, the subject was one on which, by the 1830s, they found themselves increasingly divided.

  Child-rearing practices were linked to theological beliefs. Whether parents chose to beat their children, for example, or lavish attention on them at Christmas was linked to whether they believed in original sin. A central tenet of early-nineteenth-century Unitarians—and one that distinguished them from both the old-style Puritans and the majority of evangelical “New Lights”—was the belief that human beings were not born for damnation. Puritans and most evangelical Protestants, in contrast, believed that people were inevitably stained at birth by an original sin that corrupted them at their very core by causing them to be willful and selfish. Such a defect was so deep-seated that it could be removed, if at all, not by any act of will, no matter how strenuous (because the will itself was part of the problem), but only through a free gift of divine, arbitrary, and irresistible grace. To repeat: The will itself—that which a person wished to do—was corrupted; it could serve only to resist the process of divine cleansing. Puritan-minded parents, and their nineteenth-century successors, therefore felt that it was their obligation to break a child’s will as early as possible.

  Unitarians, on the contrary, believed that the will should be trained rather than broken; it might be imperfect, but it was not fundamentally corrupt. Unitarians strenuously believed that human beings were responsible—utterly responsible—for their own actions. Children therefore required constant and painstaking parental training that would enable them to learn to conquer their natural inclinations, and do so by the sheer force of their own will. Such training should at all costs avoid physical punishment, even outbursts of rage—which led only to fear. It had to be based, instead, on the firm, patient, and imaginative use of moral instruction, accompanied by assurances of parental love. The historian Philip Greven has written that the goal of this kind of child-rearing was “self-control rather than self-annihilation.” And he quotes the Reverend Theodore Parker, himself a Unitarian minister (and a prominent abolitionist): “Men often speak of breaking the will of a child; it seems to me they had better break the neck. The will needs regulation, not destroying. I should as soon think of breaking the legs of a horse in training him, as [of breaking] a child’s will.” In other words, a child needs to make use of its will in order to function as an effective adult.43

  By now it may seem almost inevitable that a member of the Sedgwick clan should have authored a story—a Christmas story—that demonstrates this very point. In 1833 Elizabeth Dwight Sedgwick of Stockbridge, Massachusetts (the wife of Catharine Sedgwick’s youngest brother and, incidentally, a granddaughter of the Reverend Jonathan Edwards), published a Christmas story in a very popular Gift Book, The Pearl. The story’s subtitle was “The Christmas Box.”

  In this tale a caring father decides to use Christmas as an opportunity to teach his four children to overcome their particular temperamental failings. Instead of putting presents in the stockings they have hung up, St. Nicholas leaves each child nothing except an individually composed poem that points, affectionately but firmly, to his or her characteristic failing—a readiness to lie, a quick temper, a lack of perseverance, and selfishness. St. Nicholas adds the promise that he will return the following Christmas to check up on the children’s progress. (The son inclined to dishonesty grumbles, “‘I know I’ll get something from old Nicholas another year, by hook or by crook.’”) After a year in which the children struggle, assisted by their father’s constant reinforcement, to conquer their weaknesses, at the next Christmas St. Nicholas does, indeed, bring each child a handsome gift. But he arranges the gifts in such a fashion—this is carefully described—that they cannot be located or opened without an actual demonstration of the particular virtue that each of the children has spent the previous year cultivating. (For example, before the selfish child can receive his presents, he is first obliged to give them away to his siblings—and through an ingenious contrivance he actually does so of his own free will!)44

  Elizabeth Dwight Sedgwick emphasizes that constant parental attention is required if this kind of training is to succeed. The children in her story are educated at home, by both parents; and even outside of school hours there are regular walks and periods of conversation, storytelling, and reading aloud. Each evening concludes with a children’s game in which the parents themselves participate. The author puts it plainly: “either one parent or the other was with the children nearly all the time.” A variety of tactics were employed, as needed: “Sometimes a soft answer turned away his wrath; sometimes a word in season averted the coming storm; occasionally a little ridicule thoroughly mortified him—and still more the serious displeasure of his father, which, because he loved him dearly, he dreaded more than any thing human, would put him for a time effectively on his guard.” After one especially bad outbreak of temper, for example, the father told his child: “‘You are always wishing to grow up a man, that you may become your own master; but your master I fear you will never be. That temper of yours is your master, and a hard master.’”45

  But Mrs. Sedgwick is quick to add a statement about the need to recruit a child’s own will as an ally in the process of child-rearing: “All these [tactics] together, however, would have been of little avail, had he not felt a strong determination in his own mind to conquer his bad habits.” And to help create such an inner determination, the father’s Christmas strategy played a key role: “The epistles of St. Nicholas, trifling as they may seem, were of positive use in turning the minds of the children to the subject of improvement in a single particular.” In other words, the hope of receiving their Christmas presents at the end of the year provided a strong internal incentive for character development.46

  To be sure, this was a “judgmental” Christmas that Elizabeth Dwight Sedgwick proposed here. But it was not quite the old-style ritual we have encountered earlier. St. Nicholas leaves no birch rod for the children, no pieces of coal. Nor does physical punishment have any place in the repertoire of tactics that these parents employ to train their children. (Physical pu
nishment would have been far easier, and less labor-intensive, but for these Unitarians it would have produced children who behaved well only out of fear and not as a result of the self-control that could come only from inner strength.)

  Such child-rearing strategies involved walking a thin line. On the one hand, they meant that children had to be taught complete self-mastery, the overcoming of all weakness. But at the same time they made children the constant focus of parental attention. Children raised in such a fashion would find it inevitable to assume that they were the center of a family’s existence. Such a strategy invited the very indulgence it was intended to control.

  On one occasion Elizabeth Dwight Sedgwick’s own sister-in-law, Elizabeth Ellery Sedgwick of New York (the woman who enjoyed receiving New Year’s visitors), revealed that very fault line. In the summer of 1835, while on vacation in the countryside, the latter Mrs. Sedgwick mused over the meaning of a lovely outing she had just taken with her young children. A simple ride in a horse-drawn wagon had put the children into “ecstasies” of good humor. “It is astonishing,” she began (writing to her husband in the city), “that when the fresh and innocent natures of children require so little, to make them overflow, that more efforts are not made for their happiness.” But this thought immediately provoked doubts: “Is it, that youthful privations fit them better for the losses and crosses of After Years? Do Indulgencies of a wise kind necessarily prepare the way for that most odious appendage of character, Selfishness?” Mrs. Sedgwick concluded by precisely articulating the Unitarian dilemma: “I wish I could determine how nicely to adjust the scales, so as to preserve the balance between restraint and indulgence—for on the due proportion of each, how much does the character depend?”47