The Battle for Christmas Read online

  Christmas may have been a time of work for Martha Ballard, but what is equally striking is how often that work involved the preparation of special meals for the season. It is on this very point that her diary is most revealing. On December 24, 1788: “Dan’l Bolton & his wife Dined here, we made some mins Pies.” Three years later, Ballard spent the entire week from December 21 to December 27 staying at the home of one Mrs. Lithgow, a young woman who was waiting to deliver her first baby (which would be born on Christmas Day itself). But on December 23, the pregnant woman and her midwife turned to other tasks: “I helped mrs Lithgow make Cake & Pies….” On December 31, 1802, New Year’s Eve, Martha was at home and “made pumpkin and apple pies.” A year later she recorded that her son Jonathan (together with his wife, Sally, and their six children) dined at their parents’ house on “puding and roast spare rib.”55

  On two occasions Martha Ballard actually went shopping for her New Year’s dinner, and she recorded her purchases in such detail as to make it clear that she was planning to cook a special holiday meal. On December 31, 1791, she shopped in three places and came home with what are unmistakably the ingredients for special cakes and pies: almost ten pounds of sugar, one pound of raisins, a pound of ginger, “2 half muggs,” and a pint and a half of rum. And in 1808 Ballard reported on December 28 that her husband went shopping for almost the same ingredients: “[M]r. Ballard went to the Settlement, brot home 1 gl’n Molases, ½ [gallon] N E rhum, ¼ do Ginger, ¼ lb Allspice, a bottle of Slolens Elxr.” Ballard spent the next two days cooking with what were almost certainly these very items: “I Bakt mins pies” on December 29; and on December 30: “I have Bakt Mins and Apple Pies….” (On New Year’s Day she reported, “Sons Jona, Ephm & wife Supt with us … at home. Childn here….”)56 We can probably assume that the family consumed at least part of what Ballard—she was then in her mid-seventies—had spent the previous two days preparing for them.

  During Martha Ballard’s old age, such feasts may have been occasions of reconciliation within this family (as Laurel Ulrich has shown, the Ballards had gone through a period of intergenerational alienation and conflict). It appears that in the last five years of their mother’s life, Martha’s children began to bring her New Year’s presents—presents that invariably took the form of special food for the dinners in which they themselves partook. It was in 1807 that this ritual seems to have taken place for the first time: “Son Ephm made us a present of 12½ lb Beef, Son Town [a present] of a fine Goos & 2 wings; they both sleep here [in other words, they stayed to eat].”57 A year later the ritual was repeated, and this time Martha concluded her entry for the day with a clear expression of her own reaction: “Jan. 1, 1808: Son Lambard Conducted his wife and Henry to See me … they made me a present of a Loin of muttun, Some Sugar, Butter and Bread. Son Ephms wife Came here, Jona[than’]s wife also. She brot me 2 Pumkin pies. O happy has this year began and So may it proceead….”58 On at least one occasion during this period, Martha appears to have reciprocated. On December 23, 1808, she “bak’t apple & Squash pies & brown bread,” and sent a couple of the pies to one of her daughters, along with “a Stake of fresh Pork.”59

  What Martha Ballard’s entries make strikingly clear is that for the Ballard family the celebration of the Christmas season was deeply embedded in the normal rhythms of seasonal activity. In any traditional rural society, late December was ordinarily the time when animals were slaughtered, when there was food and drink aplenty and (for men, at least) the opportunity to relax after the labors of the harvest. Martha Ballard and her neighbors might very well have been baking “mins pies” at this time even if there were no special holidays to mark the occasion. A supply of mince pies, if properly stored, would last through much of the winter. Even the “presents” (of food) that her children brought her after 1806 were part of a normal, ongoing exchange of goods and services that characterized life in communities of this sort.

  There was nothing about those presents that marked any real departure from the ordinary dynamics of life in Hallowell. Above all, the presents were not intrinsically commercial. The goose, beef, and mutton, the bread and butter, the pumpkin pies—these were nothing more than the things that Hallowell families raised or produced in the normal course of events. Only the special ingredients that went into making cakes and pies—the sugar, ginger, allspice, and rum—involved a commercial transaction. But this suggests only that Martha Ballard’s Hallowell community had links to the broader Atlantic world and was not some isolated backwater whose economy operated at a level of subsistence production.

  The Transformation of New England Almanacs and Hymnals

  Martha Ballard’s diary records a single present of a commercial nature. On December 29, 1796, she noted that “Daniel Livermore made a present of an Almanack to my Son Cyrus.”60 We cannot know what prompted Livermore to make such a gift, or just which almanac he chose (there were many), but of one thing we can be sure: The almanac would have noted that December 25 was Christmas.

  There is a story here. As far back as the seventeenth century, and even among devout Puritans, there had never been complete unanimity about the need to deny that Christmas could be an occasion for legitimate religious observance. In England, in 1629, no less prominent a Puritan than John Milton wrote a Christmas poem, “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity.” The poem began by announcing (almost defiantly, given the political context in which it appeared), “This is the month, and this the happy morn….”61 In Boston itself, on December 18, 1664, the young minister Increase Mather felt it necessary to deliver a sermon reinforcing the colony’s official policy. The day after Mather delivered it, he was confronted by three of the wealthiest members of his own church, who demanded that he discuss the subject further with them. In his diary Mather recorded the argument with tantalizing brevity: “Discoursed much about Christmas, I Con, they Pro.”62

  Such evidence is scarce. But there is another kind of record that is much easier to come by and has broad implications—once again, the printed almanac. As we have seen, seventeenth-century almanacs were purged of all the traditional red-letter days that marked the seasonal calendar in English society (except, of course, for the countercultural almanacs that John Tully produced in the period of direct English rule from 1687 to 1689).

  But there was a pair of exceptions to the ordinary rule. In the almanac for 1669, quietly placed at this date, in small italic letters, can be found the Latin phrase “Christus Natus” [i.e., Christ born]. And exactly ten years later, the 1679 almanac indicated, in English, “Our Saviorborn.”63

  These two almanacs, like every book published in New England during the period, were printed on a press owned by Harvard College. The authorities must have noticed the insertions and allowed them to be made. A small notation in an almanac or diary may not seem very important today. But in the context of seventeenth-century New England, this gesture would have been charged with meaning. It was such small things that signaled to contemporaries the shifting lines between what was open for public debate and what was not.

  Those lines shifted more clearly after 1700. During the 1710s, several almanacs named Christmas (one of them written by Edward Holyoke, a future president of Harvard). And in the 1720s James Franklin published several more.* 64 By 1730 the hegemony of the government of Massachusetts in the matter of almanacs was fading. From that point on, the dominant role in determining whether the holiday was named was played not by official preferences but by the forces of the market, in concert with the personal predilections of individual almanac-makers. Before 1730 or so, it was not wholly safe to publish an almanac that named Christmas or the Anglican saints’ days. After 1730, it was safe. Over the next thirty years, some writers chose to name Christmas in their almanacs, and others chose not to.

  But after 1760 it was exceptional not to name Christmas. The last major holdout, Nathanael Ames, named Christmas in 1760, and when he did so he added an explicit religious verse (“This is a Time for Joy and Mirth / When we consider
our Saviour’s Birth”). Ames went further still that year: He incorporated all the saints’ days in the Anglican Church calendar. It was a major change, and the newspaper advertisements for the 1760 Ames almanac made a point of noting that it contained, “besides what is usual, The Feasts and Fasts of the Church of England.”65 The year 1760 was also when Ames began his systematic campaign—described earlier—to take the gorging and drunkenness out of the Christmas holiday. The timing of Ames’ decision to name Christmas thus provides still another indication that the holiday became accepted into mainstream New England culture only as it was purged of seasonal excess.

  The change is confirmed by the experience of Connecticut almanac-maker Roger Sherman. Sherman published a series of almanacs from 1750 to 1761. Every one of these almanacs listed Christmas and the saints’ days. But in 1758 Sherman felt obliged to publicly defend his practice. He had learned, as he wrote in the preface to that year’s almanac, “that some good People in the Country, dislike my Almanack, because the observable Days of the Church of England are inserted in it.” Sherman, a good Congregationalist, denied that he had Anglican leanings. He insisted that his almanac was not intended as an expression of personal belief; rather, “my Design in this Performance is to serve the Publick.” Everybody was free to observe such days or not, and no harm would be done as long as the physical space in the almanac taken up by naming the red-letter days “does not crowd out any Thing that might be more serviceable.”66

  Sherman’s words concealed his real point. After all, the “good People in the Country” who “disliked” the practice were themselves members of the “Publick.” What Sherman was really alluding to was not religious freedom but market demand. His words suggest that the old Puritan preference for a “reformed” almanac remained just important enough to warrant a rhetorical response, just as his actual practice reveals that such an old-fashioned preference was no longer widespread enough to require anything but a rhetorical response. “Reformed” almanacs were still being published in 1758, but only four years later they would be gone, gone for good. By the 1760s the naming of Christmas and the saints’ days seems to have offended such a small group that it would not pay to produce even a single almanac for them. The Puritan buying market seems simply to have evaporated.

  WHAT WAS true of almanacs was equally true of another immensely popular form of culture in early New England, the hymnal. During the seventeenth and well into the eighteenth century, most New England congregations used the so-called Bay Psalm Book, a rhymed version of the Old Testament Psalms, with additional hymns taken from various biblical sources (this was the first book published in New England). None of these hymns dealt with the Christmas story.

  But by the 1750s the Bay Psalm Book had largely been replaced in New England churches by a pair of new verse translations of the Psalms, both of which contained Christmas hymns. The first of these had been written late in the seventeenth century by the English poets Nicholas Brady and Nahum Tate. (Tate was then England’s poet laureate; he is best known today as the librettist of Henry Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas.)67 Brady and Tate’s New Version of the Psalms contained a hymn that told the story of the Nativity. (Written by Nahum Tate, this hymn is still popular today. It begins with the lines “While Shepards watch’d their Flocks by Night, / All seated on the Ground, / The Angel of the Lord came down / and Glory shone around.”) The New Version was first printed in Boston in 1713. It was reprinted three times between 1720 and 1740, and some forty times more between 1754 and 1775.68

  The other version of rhymed psalms and hymns that replaced the old Bay Psalm Book was written by the great English hymnist and religious poet Isaac Watts (1674–1748). Watts published not one but two Christmas hymns; both (like Tate’s) were rhapsodic accounts of the Nativity. Each was called “The Nativity of Christ,” and each placed the Nativity “today”—which would have made the hymns almost impossible to sing at any time other than the Christmas season.69 Watts’s religious verse became the steadiest of what David Hall has termed “steady sellers.” One New Englander who grew up toward the end of the century later recalled that as a youth “I could recite Watts’ version of the Psalms from beginning to end, together with many of his Hymns and Lyric Poems.”70

  After 1762 no Congregationalist hymnal published in New England failed to include a hymn for Christmas. What makes the change especially suggestive, of course, is the way it parallels the transformation of New England almanacs. In both cases, Christmas was hardly to be found before 1720; after 1760 it could not be avoided.

  THESE HYMNALS were printed with texts only, and they could be sung to any tune that fit the meter. In fact, the earliest religious music to be printed in New England first appeared in 1698. Thereafter a familiar pattern emerged. In the first half of the eighteenth century, none of the religious “tune books” published in New England had texts that referred to the Nativity. But in 1760 (that year, again!) a tune book published in Boston included the music and words to a “Hymn on the Nativity,” composed by Englishman William Knapp to the familiar text of Nahum Tate. Other Christmas music composed by Englishmen appeared throughout the decade. In all, during the 1760s nine different Christmas songs were published in New England.71

  Beginning in 1770, a new set of Christmas songs began to appear—songs written by native New England composers. The most famous of these Yankee composers, William Billings of Boston, composed Christmas music for each of the tune books he published between 1770 and 1794; there were eight such Christmas pieces in all, several of them extended contrapuntal “anthems.”72 Three of these pieces (and part of a fourth) were settings for the hymns by Isaac Watts and Nahum Tate. The texts of the others were written by Billings himself.

  William Billings, “An Hymn for Christmas” (1770). The first of Billings’s eight Christmas pieces. The words, taken from Nahum Tate’s hymn “While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks by Night,” are indicated only by the opening phrase of each line—perhaps the singers were already acquainted with the text. The hymn’s subtitle, “Charlston” (i.e., Charlestown), probably names the congregation for which Billings first wrote the piece. (Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society)

  Billings was hardly alone. All told, during the last two decades of the eighteenth century, seven different New England composers published original Christmas music. And Christmas pieces by English composers continued to be routinely included in the anthologies of sacred music that appeared with accelerated frequency in the 1780s and ’90s. One of the most important of the new tune books, Isaiah Thomas’s 1786 Worcester Collection of Sacred Harmony, even contained the “Hallelujah Chorus” from Handels Messiah! And another composer, Daniel Read, published an unattributed arrangement of a second chorus from Messiah, “Glory to God in the Highest,” together with his own version of the several recitatives that precede this chorus (beginning with “There were angels abiding in the fields”).73 Between 1760 and 1799 at least thirty different Christmas songs were published in New England. It is safe to say that the decades after 1760 saw a veritable explosion of Christmas music in the region.

  A Devotional Christmas

  Beginning in about the middle of the eighteenth century, even some orthodox Congregationalist ministers began to confess their desire to observe Christmas, along with their regret that it carried too much unacceptable baggage, social as well as theological. (Their ambivalence is similar to the feelings about this holiday experienced by many contemporary American Jews.) One of these ministers, the Reverend Ezra Stiles, reflected on the quandary that would be faced over the coming years by an increasing number of Congregationalist clergymen (Ezra Stiles himself would later become president of Yale). On December 25, 1776, Stiles confided to his diary:

  This day the nativity of our blessed Savior is celebrated through three quarters of Christendom …; but the true day is unknown. On any day I can readily join with my fellow Christians in giving thanks to God for his unspeakable gift, and rejoice with them in the birth of a Savior. Tho’ [
i.e., if] it had been the will of Christ that the anniversary of his birth should have been celebrated, he would at least let us have known the day….74

  In 1778 Stiles specified the nature of his own reservations: “Without superstition for the day I desire to unite with all Christians in celebrating the incarnation of the divine Emmanuel.”75 In fact, as president of Yale, Stiles permitted his students to attend Christmas service (as Edward Holyoke had done at Harvard a generation earlier).76

  Ezra Stiles was a theological liberal. But there were several more conservative Congregational ministers who left records of their attraction to Christmas in their private diaries. The Reverend Ebenezer Parkman of Westborough, Massachusetts, was one of these. For twenty years Parkman had been going about his ordinary business each December 25; he had even been chiding his neighbors for attending Christmas services in a nearby Episcopal Church. But suddenly, in 1747, Parkman revealed that he himself was tempted to join them: “God grant that I and mine may be happy partakers this Day with all those who Sincerely celebrate the Nativity of Jesus Christ!” Eight years later, in 1755, Parkman expanded on his earlier entry: He wrote that he had once again “had some serious Thoughts on the Day, as kept by many in Commemoration of our Lords Nativity.” And he expressed the “desire to be one with all of them that are one with Christ, and who avoid the Superstitions and Excesses of this Day, and Serve the Lord in sincerity [italics added].” The caveat was crucial: Like Ezra Stiles, Ebenezer Parkman wished to celebrate Christmas with those people who did so “in sincerity,” not with those who did so with “Superstitions and Excesses.”77

  The Reverend David Hall was minister to the central Massachusetts community of Sutton for sixty years, from 1729 until his death in 1789. Born in 1704, Hall was a “New Light,” an evangelical supporter of the Great Awakening during the 1740s. Hall began to keep a diary in 1740, but it was not until 1749 that he chose to refer to Christmas. When he did so, it was with enthusiasm: “[T]his day, as tis apprehended, the Saviour was born[,] w[hic]h was to be glad tidings of Great Joy to all people…. I’ll join to sing a Saviours love for there’s a Saviour Born.” And he added, in a further indication of what it was that really worried all these New England ministers, “Would to God more notice was taken of the day in a suitable manner [italics added].”78