The Battle for Christmas Read online

  That same year, Tully made an even more dramatic gesture to signify his incorporation of English popular culture. At the end of his 1688 almanac Tully added a series of monthly “prognostications,” all of them satirical and most of them bawdy or scatological. For example, he concluded his prognostication for the month of March by announcing that if it failed to come true, the reader should “light tobacco, or make bum-fodder with our Observations” (in other words, use the pages of his almanac to wipe their asses). For February, Tully wrote:

  The Nights are still cold and long, which may cause great Conjunction betwixt the Male and Female Planets of our sublunary Orb, the effects whereof may be seen about nine months after, and portend great charges of Midwife, Nurse, and Naming the Bantling.

  Tully’s prognostication for December was a verse that opened by referring to the feasting that would take place during the Christmas season:

  This month the Cooks do very early rise,

  To roast their meat, & make their Christmas pies.

  And it went on to associate this feasting with the social inversion of rich and poor.

  Poor men at rich men’s tables their guts forrage

  With roast beef, mince-pies, pudding & plum porridge.

  In prose, Tully added: “This month, Money & Rum will be in great request; and he that hath the first shall not need fear wanting the latter.”32

  THE OVERTHROW of the Dominion of New England in 1689 put a stop to this flurry of popular culture, and it ushered in two decades in which there is little in the public record about Christmas. That changed in 1711, when the Reverend Cotton Mather of Boston recorded some disturbing news in his diary for December 30: “I hear of a number of young people of both sexes, belonging, many of them, to my flock, who have had on the Christmas-night, this last week, a Frolick, a revelling feast, and Ball [i.e., dance]….” The very next year Mather denounced the holiday in a sermon, published immediately after its delivery under the title Grace Defended. The biblical text on which he based his sermon, drawn from the Epistle of Jude, showed what was on Mather’s mind: The text he chose was an attack on certain early Christians who had deceitfully “crept into” the early Christian church, using religion as a cover for sexual license, “giving themselves over to fornication”—“ungodly men, turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness.” (Mather substituted the word “wantonness.”)33

  Christmas in a New England Almanac. The December page from John Tully’s notorious 1688 Boston almanac. Along with weather predictions, Tully brazenly (and in capital letters) named Christmas and the Anglican saints’ days. (Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society)

  Mather returned to the same topic in 1713, in a treatise titled Advice from the Watch-Tower. This new treatise cut a broader swath than Grace Defended. It dealt with a whole battery of practices that were threatening to subvert New England culture from within. The treatise ended by presenting “a Black List of some Evil Customes which begin to appear among us.” Along with Christmas—and gambling with cards and dice— Mather’s “black list” included partying on Sunday evenings (and even during the intermission between the two Sabbath-day sermons); running horse races on such solemn occasions as funerals, training days, and public lectures; turning weddings into drunken “revels;” and holding cornhuskings that were little more than excuses for “riot.”34

  There was a pattern here: All these practices involved young people who were appropriating serious social occasions as opportunities for bouts of drinking and sex. (In his section on cornhuskings, Mather warned young people: “Let the Night of your Pleasure be turned into Fear.”) It was in just such a context—positioned between the drinking of toasts and riots at cornhuskings—that Mather placed the subject of Christmas. “Christmas-Revels begin to be taken up,” he reported, “among some vainer Young People here and there in some of our Towns.”35 It was bad enough, Mather argued, that Christmas was not divinely ordained, but what was “offensive” about it “most of all” was that it was being abused just as the weddings and the cornhuskings were abused—an occasion on which, as Mather put it, “Abominable Things” were done. Clearly, those abominations had mostly to do with sex.

  Mather’s charges are confirmed by demographic data. Social historians have discovered that the rate of premarital pregnancies in New England began to climb early in the eighteenth century, and that by mid-century it had skyrocketed. (In some New England towns almost half the first children were born less than seven months after their parents’ marriage.) What makes the demographic data especially interesting is that this sexual activity had a seasonal pattern to it: There was a “bulge” in the number of births in the months of September and October—meaning that sexual activity peaked during the Christmas season.36

  Misrule in New England Almanacs

  Mather’s charges are also buttressed by—once again—the evidence of almanacs. Almanac makers sometimes included monthly verses along with aphorisms (in prose or verse) that were interlineated at particular dates, along with the astronomical and astrological data, and the tides and weather observations. The December page sometimes included implicit references (occasionally explicit ones) to the Christmas season, and much of this material dealt with food and drink. In his notorious 1688 almanac John Tully wrote that in December “Money and Rum will be in great request.” But even as early as 1682, a Boston almanac written by the thoroughly orthodox William Brattle contained a verse for the December page that referred to all the drinking that went on during that month (“sack” refers to sherry, and “tubs” to kegs):

  This month, ’twill rain such store of sack (each night)

  That any man that tubs doth empty quite,

  And leave abroad [i.e. outdoors], and then the next day view,

  He’ll find them full of pure good sack: It’s true.37

  (In other words, if people drink up all their sherry each day and leave the cask outside overnight, the next morning it will be magically full.) Brattle’s verse may have referred to a popular belief about magical rebirth and renewal at the time of both the solstice and Christmas, but what matters more is that he seems to have assumed that December was indeed a month of heavy drinking. The same double allusion to intoxication and solstice can be found in an almanac printed in Boston in 1714, placed by the dates December 28–31: “By strong Liquor and Play / They turn night into day.” And here, from that same almanac, is the verse that heads the month of December:

  Strong-Beer Stout Syder and a good fire

  Are things this season doth require.

  Now some with feasts do crown the day,

  Whilst others loose their coyn in play….38

  In 1702 the Boston almanac-maker Samuel Clough reported (disapprovingly, to be sure) that December was a time when men of the lower orders—“Coasters and Boat-men”—gathered in taverns to gossip and drink:

  Some ask a Dram when first come in,

  Others with Flip or Bounce begin;

  Tho’ some do only call for Beer,

  And that i’ th’ morn is but mean chear.

  And in 1729 Nathaniel Whittemore warned simply: “Extravagancies bring Sickness.”39

  New England almanacs occasionally addressed the sexual barriers that were breached by the license (and the cold temperatures) of the Christmas season. Thus in 1749 Nathanael Ames wrote (at December 15–17):

  This cold uncomfortable Weather,

  makes Jack and Jill lie close together.

  On a similar note, George Whetens almanac for 1753 noted in a quadruple rhyme: “The weather that is cold[,] that makes the maid that is old for to scold for the want of a Bed-fellow bold.”40

  But most common of all were the references to interclass eating and drinking—the familiar social inversion in which the low changed places with the high. At one extreme was John Tully’s 1688 verse that Christmas was a season when “poor men at rich men’s tables their guts forrage.” Another Boston almanac, this one by Nathaniel Whittemore for the year 1719, contains an interestin
g piece of advice interlineated at the dates December 18–21. It warns householders about a practice we can recognize as another familiar element of the wassail ritual (once again, “abroad” means outside): “Do not let your Children and Servants run too much abroad at Nights.”41

  A Warning for Late December. Christmas is not named in this December page from Nathaniel Whittemores 1719 Boston almanac, but between the dates December 18 and 21 can be found, in italics, an admonition to householders: “Do not let your Children and Servants run too much abroad at Nights.” (Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society)

  Several decades later, Nathanael Ames’s almanac for 1746 put at the dates December 20–23 a concise but rather cynical description of interclass merriment (the words recall the 1679 Salem Village wassail, when old John Rowden was visited by four young men who came “to call for pots”):

  The Miser and the Sot

  together they have got,

  to drink a Pot.42

  A “Yankee Doodle” Christmas

  Finally, even closer to the center of New England popular culture, there is the eighteenth-century song that can almost be regarded as the first American national anthem. “Yankee Doodle” was not a single song but a variable cluster of verses, all composed in a meter that could be sung to a version of the still-familiar tune. What all the verses have in common is that they are about backcountry manners.43 (Most of these verses are unknown today, but all are written in the same meter, the meter of the line Yankee Doodle goes to town, riding on his pony.) Several of the verses dealt with sexual antics:

  Two and two may go to Bed,

  Two and two together;

  And if there is not room enough,

  Lie one a top o’to’ther.44

  A number of “Yankee Doodle” verses refer to such seasonal events as election day or cornhusking (a “frolic” at which “[t]hey’ll be some as drunk as sots”).45 One of these seasonal verses is about Christmas. “Christmas is a coming Boys,” the verse begins:

  Christmas is a coming Boys,

  We’ll go to Mother Chase’s,

  And there we’ll get a sugar dram [i.e., rum]

  Sweetened with Mêlasses.

  And the verse continues by shifting from alcohol to sex:

  Heigh Ho for our Cape Cod,

  Heigh ho Nantasket,

  Do not let the Boston wags

  Feel your Oyster Basket.46

  Cotton Mather himself could not have stated the issue more tellingly.

  CHRISTMAS ENTERS THE CULTURAL MAINSTREAM, 1730–1800

  A Temperate Christmas

  Christmas was becoming respectable, too. Even orthodox Congregationalists were beginning to concede that the observance of Christmas would be rendered less obnoxious if the holiday were celebrated with piety and moderation, purged of its seasonal excesses. The first New England clergyman to make such a concession, at least implicitly, may have been Cotton Mather himself. In his 1712 anti-Christmas sermon Mather paid only token attention to the purely theological arguments against the holiday—that it was man-made and not divinely ordained.47 “I do not now dispute,” Mather said, “whether People do well to Observe such an Uninstituted Festival at all, or no.” And he continued with a statement that shows how far he had moved from a position of strident Puritanism: “Good Men may love one another, and may treat one another with a most Candid Charity, while he that Regardeth a Day, Regardeth it unto the Lord, and he that Regardeth not the Day, also shows his Regard unto the Lord, in his not Regarding of it…”48 In other words, live and let live: On the issue of observing Christmas, there was room for legitimate differences among people of goodwill.

  What Mather went on to emphasize was the manner in which Christmas was commonly observed—as a time of drunken revels and lascivious behavior. (That was “a thing, that there can be no doubt about.”) Cotton Mather’s father, Increase, would have readily agreed with his son’s angry warning about the bad things that went on at Christmas. But he would never have gone along with Cotton Mather’s idea that it was possible for good Christians to differ in “candid charity” about observing the holiday at all. For Increase Mather, as for other seventeenth-century Puritans, the licentious fashion in which Christmas was commonly practiced was just an intrinsic expression of its non-Christian origin as a seasonal celebration; the holiday was “riotous” at its very core. For Cotton Mather, writing a generation later in the early eighteenth century, the essence of the holiday could be distinguished, at least in principle, from its historical origins and the ordinary manner of its celebration.

  From a modern perspective, the difference between Mather pere and Mather fils may seem trivial. The young people whom Cotton Mather addressed in 1712 may not have noticed the difference themselves. But it mattered nonetheless. Cotton Mathers concession, small as it was, left little room to contest the legitimacy of any movement that managed to purify Christmas of its seasonal excesses. And such a movement was not long in coming about.

  Signs of change began to emerge in about 1730. Once again, some of the best evidence comes from almanacs. In 1733 James Franklin printed the following couplet on his almanac’s December page: “Now drink good Liquor, but not so, / That thou canst neither stand nor go.” Of course, the most famous of all eighteenth-century American almanac-makers was James Franklins younger brother Benjamin. Raised in New England (and trained as a printer by James), Benjamin Franklin became the century’s preeminent exponent of moderation, sobriety, and self-control. In 1734, in the second number of his almanac, Poor Richard, Franklin applied that philosophy to the Christmas season. The December verse, written in the voice of “Poor” Richard Saunders’s wife, Bridget, chastised a husband who “for sake of Drink neglects his Trade, / And spends each Night in Taverns till ’tis late.” But on the same page, in an interlineation placed at the dates December 23–29, Franklin made it clear enough (in a rhymed but characteristically Franklinesque piece of advice) that he was no hater of Christmas: “If you wou’d have Guests merry with your Cheer, / Be so yourself, or so at least appear.” And similarly in 1739: “O blessed Season! lov’d by Saints and Sinners, / For long Devotions, or for longer Dinners.”49

  The emphasis on temperate mirth intensified at mid-century, when Nathanael Ames (New England’s most popular almanac-maker) began to mix calls for charity and cheer with admonitions against excess. In 1752 Ames offered his first warning: “Bad times, Dull-Drink and clouded Minds make heavy, listless, idle bodies.” And in the 1760s similar warnings came thick and fast. Ames’s verse for December 1760 was a warning against getting drunk. His 1761 almanac included a similar piece of advice: “The temperate man enjoys the most delight, / For riot dulls and palls the appetite.” And in 1763: “The temperate Man nor ever over feeds / His cramm’d Desires with more than Nature needs.” In 1764 dietary strictures actually took over Ames’s entire almanac, constituting the subject matter for the accompanying material in all twelve months of the year.50

  What Benjamin Franklin and Nathanael Ames were calling for was a Christmas that combined mirth and moderation. Both of these men were shopkeepers—versatile, thrifty, and self-made.51 What they were trying to do was actually similar to what the Puritans had done a century earlier: to restructure people’s work habits by having them do away with periodic binges. But unlike the Puritans, their strategy did not entail the elimination of Christmas. Instead, they were spreading the idea—a new idea—that Christmas could be a time of cheer without also being a time of excess.

  Christmas in the Household of Martha Ballard, 1785–1811

  The single best personal account of what such a “moderate” Christmas season may have been like can be found in the diary of Martha Ballard, the Maine midwife whose social world has been painstakingly and brilliantly reconstructed by the historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. For twenty-six years, between the ages of 50 and 76, Martha Ballard recorded her daily activities as wife, mother, midwife, and resident of the Maine community of Hallowell. During the twenty-six years between 1785 a
nd 1811, Ballard chose seven times in her diary to name December 25 as Christmas. In six other years, she had reason to omit such a reference: She was occupied in delivering someone’s baby; December 25 was just another working day for her.

  But Martha Ballard’s diary also makes it clear that December 25 was just another working day in any case, even when she was not delivering babies—and even when she named the day as Christmas. In 1788, for example, Martha’s husband, Ephraim, was away from home on business; Martha herself stayed home, finishing “a pair of Stockins” for one of her daughters. In 1807 (“it is Chrismas day”), she noted laconically, “I have done a fortnit’s wash.” And on December 25, 1811, the final Christmas of her life, the 76-year-old woman reported simply: “I have done hous wk Se knit Some.”52

  The younger generation in Hallowell observed Christmas more actively than Martha Ballard herself did. In 1801 Martha reported nothing special for herself on December 25, but she wrote that her two unmarried children celebrated the day in the company of two members of the opposite sex: “Ephm & Patty kept Christmas at Son Lambards, his partnr [was] Polly Farewell [and] hers [was] Cyrus.”53 (Sure enough, a couple of years later Ephraim Ballard, Jr. and Polly Farwell got married.) Some years earlier, two of the Ballards’ young live-in servants likewise took Christmas as an opportunity for courtship: On December 23, 1794, “Dolly & Sally went to a daunce [dance] at mr Capins, were atended by a mr Lambart and White.” (The previous day they had prepared for this event by purchasing at the local shop “a pair Shoes & other things.”) But Martha Ballard quickly reasserted her control over this frolicsome pair: On Christmas Day itself, she reported, “Dolly & Sally have washt, Scourd my puter & washt the Kitchen.”54