The Battle for Christmas

Acclaim for
S
TEPHEN
N
LSSENBAUM’S
The Battle for Christmas

Stephen Nissenbaum received his A.B. from Harvard College in 1961, his M.A. from Columbia University in 1963, and his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1968. He has taught at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, since 1968, and is currently professor of history there. He has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Antiquarian Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the Charles Warren Center at Harvard. In addition, he was James P. Harrison Professor of History at the College of William and Mary, 1989–90. Active in the public humanities, he has served as member and president of the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, and as historical advisor for several film productions.
The Battle for Christmas
was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in History in 1997.

A
LSO BY
S
TEPHEN
N
ISSENBAUM

Salem Possessed:
The Social Origins of Witchcraft
(with Paul Boyer, 1974)

Sex, Diet, and Debility in Jacksonian America
Sylvester Graham and Health Reform
(1980)

The Pursuit of Liberty:
A History of the American People
(with others, 1984, 1990, 1996)

EDITOR

The Great Awakening at Yale College
(1972)
Salem-Village Witchcraft:

A Documentary Record of Local Conflict
in Colonial New England
(with Paul Boyer, 1972, 1993)

The Salem Witchcraft Papers:
Verbatim Transcripts of the Legal Documents
of the Salem Witchcraft Outbreak of 1692
(with Paul Boyer, 1977)

Nathaniel Hawthorne
,
The Scarlet Letter and Selected Writings
(1984)

Preface

1.
New England’s War on Christmas

2.
Revisiting “? Visit from St. Nicholas”

3.
The Parlor and the Street

4.
Affection’s Gift: Toward a History of Christmas Presents

5.
Under the Christmas Tree: A Battle of Generations

6.
Tiny Tim and Other Charity Cases

7.
Wassailing Across the Color Line: Christmas in the Antebellum South

Epilogue: The Ghosts of Christmas Past

Notes

Acknowledgments

T
HIS BOOK
had its beginnings more than twenty years ago, when I delivered a speculative scholarly paper titled “From ‘The Day of Doom’ to ‘The Night Before Christmas.’” In that paper I dealt with the striking parallels between the best-known American poem of the 1600s and 1700s and the best-known American poem of the 1800s and 1900s. The earlier poem was about God’s wrath, the later one about the goodwill of Santa Claus—but somehow the two were engaging in a kind of dialogue with each other.

Actually, though, it is clear that the book began earlier still, with my childhood fascination for “The Night Before Christmas,” whose verses I recited over and over when December came around. For me, growing up as I did in an Orthodox Jewish household, this was surely part of my fascination for Christmas itself, that magical season which was always beckoning, at school and in the streets, only to be withheld each year by the forces of religion and family. (I once decided that Christmas must mean even more to America’s Jewish children than to its Christian ones.) I can remember, one Christmas Day, putting some of my own toys in a sack and attempting to distribute them to other children who lived in my Jersey City apartment house: If I couldn’t
get
presents, at least no one stopped me from giving them away, and in that fashion at least I could participate in the joy of what, much later, I would come to think of as the “gift exchange.”

Much later came soon enough. By the late 1980s I had been a professional historian for some twenty years, and I was also regularly engaging in the nonacademic aspects of my trade. In 1988 I found myself
involved in the development of a teacher-training program sponsored by Old Sturbridge Village, the living-history museum in central Massachusetts. The theme we decided to focus on with the teachers (they taught grades 3–8) was
holidays
. Remembering that paper I had written more than a decade earlier, I figured young children might be intrigued by seeing unfamiliar things in “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” that most familiar of poems. (“Mama in her ’kerchief and I in my cap …”? “Away to the window … and threw up the sash …”? “A
miniature
sleigh”? “Eight
tiny
reindeer”?) So I volunteered to take on Christmas myself.

Preparing for my session, I made a series of startling discoveries that precipitated me into writing this book. To begin with, in an essay by the preeminent modern scholar of St. Nicholas, Charles W. Jones, I learned that “Santa Claus,” far from being a creature of ancient Dutch folklore who made his way to the New World in the company of immigrants from Holland, was essentially devised by a group of non-Dutch New Yorkers in the early nineteenth century. (This discovery tied into another new notion I was acquainted with in a different context, that of “invented traditions”—customs that are made up with the precise purpose of appearing old-fashioned: the idea, for example, that every Scottish clan had its own unique tartan plaid—which turns out to have been the product of a nineteenth-century effort to romanticize the valiant Scots.)

Second, from reading a biographical sketch of Clement Clarke Moore, the author of “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” I realized that the history of his best-loved poem was intertwined with the physical and political transformation of New York City during the early nineteenth century. Moore, it turned out, was a wealthy and politically conservative country gentleman who found himself at war with the encroaching forces of New York’s commercial and residential development at the very time he was writing his undying verses about the night before Christmas.

It was my third discovery that helped make sense of that curious convergence. The Christmas season itself was undergoing a change, I learned. From the writings of several obscure nineteenth-century folklorists, along with contemporary historians Peter Burke and Natalie Zemon Davis and Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, I discovered that Christmas had once occasioned a kind of behavior that would be shocking today: It was a time of heavy drinking when the rules that governed people’s public behavior were momentarily abandoned in favor of an unrestrained “carnival,” a kind of December Mardi Gras. And I found that in the early nineteenth century, with the growth of America’s cities, that kind of behavior had become even more threatening, combining carnival
rowdiness with urban gang violence and Christmas-season riots. (My key guides here were essays by the great British historian E. P. Thompson and one of his American disciples, Susan G. Davis.) Given the changed historical circumstances of the nineteenth century, I began to understand the appeal of a new-styled Christmas that took place indoors, within the secure confines of the family circle.

Those discoveries became the basis of much of the first three chapters of this book. Before long, I found myself exploring other issues, issues that stemmed from what I was learning about the creation of a new-styled domestic Christmas: At what point, and in what fashion, did Christmas become commercialized? What happened to family relationships on this holiday, when children became the center of attention and the recipients of lavish gifts? (After all, before our own day, weren’t parents supposed to have avoided at all costs such gestures of intergenerational indulgence?) So I began to think about Christmas in the context of the larger history of consumer culture and child-rearing practices. Once again, I came up with some rather unexpected findings, findings that drove me to the conclusion that where Christmas was concerned, the problems of our own age go back a long way. The Christmas tree itself, I discovered, first entered American culture as a ritual strategy designed to cope with what was already being seen, even before the middle of the nineteenth century, as a holiday laden with crass materialism—a holiday that had produced a rising generation of greedy, spoiled children.

Those issues became the subjects of
Chapters 4
and
5
. The remaining two chapters, about Christmas charity and Christmas under slavery, respectively, resulted from two very different circumstances. I had intended, from an early point, to write about Dickens’s novella
A Christmas Carol
, that other classic text of the holiday season (along with Moore’s poem). But when I reread Dickens’s book (for the first time in many years), I was led to explore the intricate and not always proud history of face-to-face Christmas charity, especially as it related to impoverished children. As far as Christmas under slavery is concerned, it was my students at the College of William and Mary, where I taught during the 1989–90 academic year, who provoked my interest in that subject. The documentary materials several of these students brought to me proved to be something of a revelation. I glimpsed a picture of Christmas under slavery that oddly resembled the pre-nineteenth-century carnival celebration I had discovered at the beginning of my work. As I struggled to achieve a deeper understanding of the slaves’ holiday, I realized that with this topic my project had come full circle and it was time to stop.