The Battle for Christmas (36 page)

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.”
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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:

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.

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.
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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!)
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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.’”
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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.
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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 punishment 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?”
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The difficulty in making this kind of determination was compounded by a new strain of thinking that emerged after 1830, largely within the Unitarian community itself. This strain (more broadly considered, it was a local expression of the movement known as Romanticism) took the Unitarian argument about child-rearing substantially further than was initially intended. It suggested that the natural impulses of children were not flawed, after all, and that those impulses should not be suppressed but actually encouraged and indulged. In this new and controversial view, it was children who offered adults a model for emulation, and not the other way around. Children were not imperfect little adults; rather, adults were imperfect grown-up children. The seeds of perfection lay within each child, like the unopened buds in a plant; and the ills of society were produced by corruption and artifice within society itself, and not by the child’s own natural impulses. The English Romantic poet William Wordsworth (a friend of Samuel Taylor Coleridge), put the idea in a nutshell in a classic phrase: “The Child is father to the Man.”

In the United States, the most famous early expression of this new philosophy came from the pen of Ralph Waldo Emerson, himself a former Unitarian minister (he left the pulpit in 1831). In his very important 1836 essay “Nature,” Emerson wrote that the best people were those who “retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.” The “wisdom” of a man’s “best hour” was no better than “the simplicity of his childhood.” As Emerson summed it up, “the sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and heart of the child.”
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(By the 1860s, when this radical notion had succeeded in transforming the way thousands of Americans treated their children, the now-aging Emerson looked back on the change with a certain irony. He opened an essay about the reformation
of New England life in his own time by reporting a witty aphorism: “‘It was a misfortune to have been born when children were nothing, and to live till [adult] men were nothing.’”)
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These Romantic ideas of childhood had obvious implications for educational practices, implications that were most influentially articulated in the work of the European educational reformer Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746–1827). Pestalozzi, a German-speaking Swiss whose name is unfamiliar today except to students of intellectual and educational history, was well known in the second quarter of the nineteenth century—as well known as, say, John Dewey a century later. In his most influential writings,
Leonard and Gertrude
(1781) and
How Gertrude Teaches Her Children
(1801), Pestalozzi stressed above all the importance of mothers in childhood education. He suggested that “feelings of love, confidence, and gratitude, and [even] the habit of obedience,” are characteristics that “originate in the relationship established between the infant and its mother.”
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(In retrospect, we can view Pestalozzis ideas as part of the larger process by which moral authority within middle-class households shifted away from the father and into maternal hands, and by which the teaching profession itself became essentially women’s work.)