The Battle for Christmas Read online

  The Unitarians were close behind. Compared with Universalists, Unitarians were more genteel, and (for all their theological liberalism) more socially conservative. And there were also more of them, especially in Boston. As a formal institution, the Unitarian movement was not organized until 1825. But by the early 1800s ministers who were inclined to doubt the trinity of the Godhead (and, by implication, the divinity of Christ) had come to dominate the Congregational churches in Boston. In fact, for most of the first decade of the nineteenth century, not a single church within Boston’s town limits remained in Trinitarian hands. So bad was the situation from an orthodox point of view, that in 1809 a group of theologically conservative ministers from neighboring communities found it necessary to establish a new church in the heart of Boston that would serve as a beachhead of orthodoxy, a kind of mission church on hostile turf. (The new Park Street Church was soon dubbed “Brimstone Corner,” after its first minister preached a sermon titled “The Use of Real Fire in Hell.”)89

  Unitarians were calling for the public observance of Christmas by about 1800. They did so in full knowledge that it was not a biblically sanctioned holiday, and that December 25 was probably not the day on which Jesus was born. They wished to celebrate the holiday not because God had ordered them to do so but because they themselves wished to. And they celebrated it in the hope that their own observance might help to purge the holiday of its associations with seasonal excess and disorder.

  In 1817 a concerted two-pronged effort got under way to transform Christmas Day in Boston: by holding services in the local churches and by closing down its businesses. Within three years that effort would fail, but for the moment it was waged hard and with the support of influential citizens. The local press helped out, blanketing the town with publicity. The following report was typical:

  Many Christians of the Congregational denomination in this town, have for a long time been desirous, that the anniversary of the nativity of our blessed Saviour should be marked by some religious observance of the day, and by a general abstinence from secular concerns. In consequence, some of the churches of that denomination will be open for public worship….

  That was one prong of the campaign. A second local paper described the other prong, announcing that “Gentlemen of business in State-street” had “circulated a paper” to their colleagues. Those who signed the paper pledged themselves “to close their places of business, provided the same engagement should be signed by the principal part of the gentlemen on that street.” The circulators of this paper had received “the signatures of about seven eighths of the gentlemen on the street, and of nearly all to whom it was offered, including all who have the government of public offices.”90

  The businessmen appear to have kept to their pledge. One rural merchant who was in town on a buying trip noted in his diary that “[t]he inhabitants of Boston introduced the suspension of business for the first time, with a view to commemorating this day in Religious Exercise.” He added that “but little business could be done,” and that he had been forced to reload the goods he had brought in to sell that day.91

  The crusade was renewed the following year. For a week before Christmas, the newspapers were filled with letters and editorials calling for the general observance of the day as a religious holiday.92 One woman pointed out an additional reason. “Christmas is now generally observed as a holiday,” she wrote (i.e., a holiday in the de facto sense). “Our children and domestics claim it as such.” She added that “[s]chools and public places are closed … and generally the day is spent in idleness, and with regret I may add, by many in revelry and dissipation.” Opening the churches, she implied, would help reduce both the idleness and the dissipation. Another citizen turned the same point on its head, arguing plausibly that if Bostonians abandoned their regular business on December 25, “it would become only another reason for dissipation, for frolic and insobriety.”93

  Services were held in five reformed churches on Christmas Day, 1818 (in addition to the Catholic and Episcopal churches). These included three Congregational churches as well as a Universalist and a Methodist one. Services were held in the central Massachusetts town of Worcester as well, in the Congregational church led by Aaron Bancroft (father of historian George Bancroft). That same year one Boston newspaper published, without comment, the 1659 Puritan law banning the celebration of Christmas in Massachusetts.94 No comment was needed, since everyone would have caught the point: We’ve come a long way since those days.

  A long way, indeed. That year, 1818, even the staunchly Trinitarian Congregationalist paper in Boston, the Recorder, indicated its approval. The Recorder was the organ of the Park Street Church—“Brimstone Corner.” But its editorial began: “We are happy to learn that it is the intention of many persons to observe Christmas day, this year, in a more solemn manner than they ever yet have done….”It even went on to imply that the Park Street Church itself should join in: “We are … decidedly in favor of the measure, and hope divine service will be performed in all our churches.”95

  And so again in 1819. A letter to one newspaper declared that “all the banks, public offices, &c. will suspend business,” and expressed the hope that “every merchant and liberal minded man will also follow the example, and observe Christmas more universally, if possible, than Bostonians did the last year.” By this time the movement had reached as far as the rural New Hampshire town of Amherst, whose newspaper printed an impassioned editorial arguing that Christmas was more important than Thanksgiving.96

  But the movement ran out of momentum that very year (religious services were held only at the two Universalist churches and at the Old South Church). Many businesses did remain closed that year, although by 1823 one paper reported with amusement that several shops only appeared to be closed—their window shutters were fastened, but “their doors kindly opened to all who would take the trouble to lift the latch.” The newspaper that reported this development went on to express its pleasure that “no law, either civil or divine,” actually required “the observance of the feasts of the papal and episcopal churches,” and to deplore the fact that Boston’s businessmen felt unable to “pursue their occupations openly.”97

  Actually, this movement seems to have been part of a larger counterattack. Early in 1820 a religious magazine published in Boston assaulted the idea of making Christmas a public holiday. But its argument had nothing to do with theology, with the dating of Christ’s birth. The magazine acknowledged that December 25 was a time of “rejoicing, and of religious ceremonies” for many Christians. The problem lay with other kinds of behavior: “an immense majority of those, who celebrate the day, make it an occasion of indulgence and profane mirth, and of almost every species of licentiousness.” In any case, within only a few years the movement to close the shops and open the churches was dead. In 1828 the Boston Statesman noted with regret that “few places of business were closed yesterday, and none but the churches of the Episcopal order, we believe, were opened….”98

  As it turned out, the years 1817–19 were to represent a historical high-water mark in the religious celebration of Christmas in Boston. To this day New England’s Unitarian, Baptist, and Methodist churches are ordinarily closed on Christmas Day, along with its Congregational and Presbyterian ones.

  What happened was that in New England, as elsewhere, religion failed to transform Christmas from a season of misrule into an occasion of quieter pleasure. That transformation would, however, shortly take place—but not at the hands of Christianity. The “house of ale” would not be vanquished by the house of God, but by a new faith that was just beginning to sweep over American society. It was the religion of domesticity, which would be represented at Christmastime not by Jesus of Nazareth but by a newer and more worldly deity—Santa Claus.

  * If there was any point at which the two modes of celebrating Christmas—as carnival and as pious devotion—managed to intersect, if only in theory, it was here. The Gifts of the Magi, too, represented the high-in-status wa
iting on the low—three kings paying homage to an infant lying in squalor. (But of course that ritual simultaneously represented the low bringing gifts to the high—mere mortals paying homage to a deity.)

  * James Franklin was often a thorn in the side of the Massachusetts authorities. In 1722 he featured a front-page poem in praise of Christmas in his newspaper, the New England Courant (the legislature’s efforts to suppress the Courant a decade earlier are reported in Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography). In his 1729 almanac, James Franklin included a belief originating deep in popular lore—that Christmas was a season when witches and evil spirits could do no harm, when bad spells would have no effect: “This month [December] is a great Enemy to evil Spirits, and a great Dissolver of Witchcraft, without the help of Pimpernal, or Quicksilver and Yellow Wax [these were supposed to be counterspells that would protect against witchcraft]…. Some Astrologers indeed confine this Power over evil Spirits to Christmas Eve only; but I know the whole Month has as much Power as any Eve in it: Not but that there may be some wandering Spirits here and there, but I am certain they can do no Mischief, nor can they be seen without a Telescope.” In fact, William Shakespeare reported a similar belief in Hamlet (Act I, Scene 1), where a minor character speaks the following lines upon hearing a cock crow: “Some say that ever ‘gainst that Season comes / Wherein our Saviour’s birth is celebrated, / This bird of dawning [i.e., the cock] singeth all night long; / And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad, / The nights are wholesome, then no planets strike, / No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm, / So hallow’d and so gracious is that time.” (To this, Hamlet’s friend Horatio responds noncommittally, “So have I heard and do in part believe it.”)

  CHAPTER 2

  Revisiting “A Visit from St. Nicholas”

  INTRODUCTION: JOHN PINTARD’S HOLIDAY SCARE

  THE CHRISTMAS SEASON was always an important occasion in the life of John Pintard, a prominent New York City merchant and civic leader of the early nineteenth century. As Pintard went to bed on the evening of December 31, 1820, he was looking forward to the schedule he had carefully laid out for the celebration of New Year’s Day, the season’s end. First he would get up early for a private chat with his daughter, who was married but still lived in the household. Next there would be a devotional morning service at a nearby Episcopal church. The middle hours of the day would be devoted to an extended round of “ceremonial and friendly visits” with acquaintances and colleagues around the city. Finally, in midafternoon Pintard would return to his Wall Street home, where the entire household would, as he put it, “assemble round our festive boards” for a “little family party”—a meal of venison and other holiday dishes that had been prepared weeks in advance, and punctuated by a series of toasts “drunk with all affection and old fashioned formality.”

  Pintard managed, the next day, to get through most of the activities he had planned, but only after his night’s sleep had been interrupted—not once but twice. First, in the middle of the night, with the household sound asleep, Pintard’s daughter was awakened when she heard “someone take [a] key and deliberately open the door.” The family knew that New Year’s Eve marked the peak of rowdy Christmas revels in New York, so Pintard had reason to fear the presence of an intruder. He roused his wife (“mama,” as he referred to her in a letter written very early the next morning). “I threw on my clothes in haste, and down we sallied [to investigate,] found the back parlor door ajar, but nothing out of place.” As it turned out, the noise was only a false alarm—the family’s black servant had merely arisen early in order to light a fire in the study. So Pintard returned to bed. But no sooner had he fallen asleep than he was roused again, this time by bands of loud revelers marching down Wall Street and directly outside his house, banging on drums, blowing fifes and whistles, and all the while loudly proclaiming the New Year. The revelers did not leave, and in fact kept Pintard up for the rest of the night: They “interrupted all repose until daylight, when I arose, leaving mama … to take a little rest till nine, when I shall call [her].”1

  What this little episode reveals is two incompatible styles of celebrating the holiday season. One of them, that of John Pintard, was a daytime affair, genially formal, and quiet. The other, that of the revelers in the street, was nocturnal, aggressively public, and just as noisy as they could make it. It was, in short, carnival. The two styles came into conflict in Pintard’s household only two years before Pintard’s friend Clement Clarke Moore wrote his poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas”—the account of a rather different kind of nighttime visitation during the Christmas season. The connection is not artificial, for John Pintard himself played a role in the development of Christmas as we know it today. One might even say that his role was that of John the Baptist to the figure of Santa Claus that Moore would soon perfect.

  MISRULE AND CAPITALISM IN EARLY-NINETEENTH-CENTURY NEW YORK

  A generation earlier, in 1786, a newspaper in a nearby community pointed out the same contrast between the different fashions in which New Yorkers celebrated the season: “Some good people religiously observe it as a time set apart for a most sacred purpose,” some by “decently feasting with their friends and relatives.” But others observe the holiday by “revelling in profusion, and paying their sincere devotion to merry Bacchus.” The newspaper went on to rephrase the contrast in metaphoric terms: “in several churches divine service [was] performed,” while “the temples dedicated to the service of merriment, dissipation and folly, were much crouded [sic]; where the sons of gluttony and drunkenness satiate their respective appetites.”

  The scene with these gentry generally concludes about midnight, when they sally forth into the streets, and by their unmeaning, wild, extravagant noise, disturb those citizens who would rather sleep than get drunk.2

  Chapter 1 of this book argues that traditional Christmas misrule did not ordinarily pose a significant threat to the social order or to the authority of the gentry class. In fact, it actually served to reinforce the existing order of things by providing a sanctioned opportunity for the poor to let off steam; it was a safety valve that allowed them to express resentments in a fashion that was generally apolitical. Indeed, the form that misrule commonly took—that of inverting the ordinary social structure rather than simply ignoring it—may have served to confirm the legitimacy of the status quo. After all, what the patron received from his clients in return for his gifts was their goodwill—something that had a great deal of value, indeed, in the dynamics of a paternalist order.

  But this would change as paternalism itself came to wither away as a dominant form of social relations. In England much of the change took place during the eighteenth century. E. P. Thompson has argued that in eighteenth-century England it was the upper classes themselves who severed the paternalist bonds that allowed the rituals of misrule to operate as a safety valve. Both the gentry and the established church abandoned their control over holiday rituals; these now became purely “plebeian” cultural expressions. (The Boston Anticks discussed in Chapter 1 offer a good example of what Thompson had in mind.) In this new setting, rituals of misrule began to assume a more clearly oppositional form. Thompson describes these eighteenth-century protests as a kind of political “theater,” directed at the gentry “audience” before whom it was “performed”—something less than a full-fledged radical movement but more than sheer, unfocused rowdiness.3 For example, in eighteenth-century England there appeared a kind of late-night serenade on New Year’s Eve known as the “callithumpian band”—possibly derived from the Greek word calli-(for “beautiful”). But the music these bands played was hardly beautiful. It was meant to be loud and offensive, characterized by “beating on tin pans, blowing horns, shouts, groans, catcalls,” and it was performed as a gesture of deliberate mockery; the general term in England for such things was “rough music.” (This was not wholly new; “rough music” is simply the British term for what in France was called “charivari.” But the callithumpian bands seem to have directed
their “rough music” against those who seemed to be claiming too much dignity or abusing their power.)4

  By the early nineteenth century, with the spread of wage labor and other modes of capitalist production in England and the United States, what I have chosen to call the “battle for Christmas” entered an acute phase. For some urban workers, the Christmas season no longer entailed a lull in the demand for labor; their employers insisted on business as usual.5 (It was this impulse that Charles Dickens would caricature in his character Ebenezer Scrooge.) For other urban workers, the coming of winter brought the prospect of being laid off, as the icing-up of rivers brought water-powered factories to a seasonal halt. December’s leisure thus meant not relative plenty but forced unemployment and want. The Christmas season, with its carnival traditions of wassail, misrule, and callithumpian “street theater,” could easily become a vehicle of social protest, an instrument to express powerful ethnic or class resentments. Little wonder, then, that the upper classes displayed little interest in making the season a major holiday. Before the mid-1820s the holiday was mentioned only cursorily in British and American newspapers.6 The turn of the nineteenth century may have marked a historic low point in the celebration of Christmas among the elite.

  LET US return, then, to New York City, where John Pintard’s neighborhood was subjected to the rough music of a callithumpian band in 1821, and where our modern American Christmas was invented, the following year, with the composition of Clement Clarke Moore’s poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas.” New York in the early nineteenth century was a fast-growing place. As late as 1800, the urbanized part of the city covered only a small area at the southern tip of Manhattan Island, well to the south of what are now the numbered streets. But the size of the city’s population had begun a rapid, almost geometrical increase—from 33,000 in 1790 to 200,000 in 1830 and 270,000 just five years later. In order to accommodate the rapid increase in population, the city in 1811 started implementation of a plan to construct a regular grid system of numbered streets (and avenues) that would crisscross the entire island. (As we shall see, this plan would have an effect on Clement Clarke Moore.)