The Man Who Invented Christmas (12 page)

There might have been practical reasons for men less fortunate or upright to blow off some steam from time to time, but that was of little concern to such church leaders as Bourne and Mather. They may well have understood that the beginning of the winter season was the time when wine and beer were finally fermented and ready to drink, and when meat and game could finally be slaughtered without the fear of spoilage. And of course, who could fail to understand a common man’s wish for a bit of bounty and the chance for some fooling around when he spent most of his year grubbing just to stay alive?

But in the eyes of Bourne and Mather and those with similar views of the practice of Christianity, things had simply got out of hand. Father Christmas, an elderly folk figure that had developed as an avuncular emblem of the celebration, was now painted as a blasphemous icon, and these libidinous urges of his fellow-travelers, natural as they might have been, were no different from the natural inclinations of the beasts. If not controlled, they would lead man to his moral and spiritual ruin. Christmas, then—characterized “by mad Mirth, by long Eating, by hard Drinking, by lewd Gaming, by rude Reveling”—must be brought under control.

When Oliver Cromwell and his Puritan adherents took over the government of England in the mid-1600s, they did so with a vow to cleanse the country of its wickedness and excess. Ornate cathedrals, for instance, were no longer seen as testaments to God’s power and magnificence, but as temples to human pretention. The lengthy seasonal celebrations leading up to major holidays only encouraged intervening lapses of piety and would have to be eliminated. More effective in reminding man of his proper relationship to his creator would be the steady, day-by-day and week-by-week focus on one’s behavior and responsibilities, a practice that would be punctuated every Sabbath day by stern leaders like Mather, conducted in utilitarian “meeting houses” where distractions could be held to a minimum.

As for Christmas, which had been given over utterly to “carnall and sensual delights,” Parliament put it into law in 1644 that December 25 was from then on to be a day of fasting and repentance. Such legislation led to discontent and even rioting in rural corners of the land, but the ban on Christmas would stay in place until Charles II returned in 1660 and the monarchy was restored.

Things might have been bad for Christmas in England in the mid-seventeenth century, but in the United States, conditions were even worse. Puritans had gone so far as to expunge the names of days of the week like Thursday (Thor’s Day) and Saturday (Saturn’s Day) from their calendars (replacing them with simple numbers) because of their pagan associations. Though Massachusetts was the only colony that had made the observation of Christmas illegal, there was no formalized celebration of the holiday by church or state throughout New England.

In all colonial records, according to Nissenbaum, there appears only one instance of scofflaws flaunting the Massachusetts decree. In 1679, four young men from Salem village were spurned by orchard owner John Rowden when they came caroling, seeking a cup of a fine pear wine that he produced. When they had finished their singing, one of the men called out to Rowden, “How do you like this, father? Is this not worth a cup of perry?”

“I do not like it so well,” Rowden answered, and added, “Pray begone.”

His suggestion led to a riot in which his assailants “threw stones, bones, and other things” at him and his house, keeping up their assault for an hour and a half, during which they “beat down much of the daubing in several places,” stole several bushels of apples from a storage bin, and broke down a considerable length of fence. A “wassail gone bad,” Nissenbaum terms the incident.

If the case was a rare one to reach the courts, the anti-Christmas laws soon came to be honored more in the breach than in the observance, and over time, both in the colonies and in England, it became obvious that an outright ban was a tool of limited reach. In 1684 the Puritan-dominated charter of Massachusetts was revoked by the mother country and a government headed by Edmund Andros, an Anglican, was put in its place. One of Andros’s first actions was to permit the celebration of a number of seasonal festivals, including Christmas, by anyone or any group wishing to do so.

But in England as well as the colonies, the new watchword for such celebration was “moderation.” Even Mather and his followers might have been more inclined to suffer the celebration of Christmas—despite the fact that it had not been divinely ordained—if it were not for the “Abominable Things” that were done in its name. By the mid-eighteenth century, almanac makers such as Nathanael Ames and Benjamin Franklin were speaking out in favor of seasonal celebrations like Christmas, so long as they were enjoyed without excess. At this same time, the traditional Bay Psalm Book, a rendition of the Old Testament psalms used by most New England congregations and containing no reference to the birth of Christ, was being replaced by two new versions containing Christmas hymns.

In England, despite the return of Charles II to the throne, the ferocious opposition of Cromwell and his Roundheads to the holiday had sapped something of its vitality. Also, the advances of Enlightenment thinking had weakened adherence to all subjective belief systems, traditional religions and pagan practices included. Doubt had begun to enter the modern mind, and if the hold of the Puritans had begun to slip, the power of Zeus and his Titans and Father Christmas had been reduced to just about nothing at all.

“Enlightened” men were reasonable men, not sentimental ones, and they were not to excuse themselves to a month or so of drinking and licentiousness for the sake of a pagan custom. As the diaries of Samuel Pepys attest, while Christmas had made something of a comeback in the years following the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the season was no longer the excuse for a monthlong binge. Pepys writes of working late on Christmas Eve, and even on Christmas Day as well, though he did attend church services in the morning and evening. He also partook of the custom of a hearty Christmas meal, including such dishes as roasted pullet, “a mess of brave plum pudding,” a shoulder of mutton, and mince pie.

Though the best-known entries in Pepys’s diaries record his observations on the Great Plague of 1665 and the London Fire of 1666, his recollections of everyday life of the times are one of history’s most valuable guides to the period. Quite an earthy character, who was willing to speak candidly of his carnal escapades with serving girls, Pepys nevertheless does not attribute such behavior to any license of the Christmas season. He does, however, speak of his participation in a pale vestige of the Christmas ritual of misrule that had persisted into the Restoration period—a parlor game (Bean & Pea) during which guests would draw lots and “become” one or another member of the royal court and play their chosen role for the evening.

Related to such amateur theatricals were mummers’ plays, vestiges of the practice of mumming, often staged impromptu in public houses, on the streets, and in private homes. Presentations by “guisers,” or groups of performers in costume, went on the year-round, but they were particularly popular at the Christmas season, when the storylines, such as they were, tended to feature Father Christmas. Though no manuscripts of such plays survive, this re-creation by a modern scholar, Roderick Marshall, provides a sense of what they might have been like. “In comes I, Old Hind before, I comes fust to open your door…. Welcome or welcome not, I hope old Father Christmas will never be forgot,” go the opening lines, as the familiar folk-figure laments his fallen fortunes and reminds his audience that “Christmas comes but once a year, And when it comes, it brings good cheer, Roast beef, plum pudding, strong ale, and mince pie, who likes that better than I?”

In
Dickens’s Christmas,
the noted British actor Simon Callow describes the character of Father Christmas in mummers’ plays as the prototype of the modern Santa: typically fat, with his backside and belly stuffed with straw, and, though old and bearded, nonetheless vigorous. He distinguishes himself from his current counterpart by carrying a sword and dragging a tail, attributes that suggest the roots of the character in the Devil figure in medieval morality plays, and to the Devil’s own predecessor, Pan, the libidinous font of vitality in pagan myth.

Still, if a few remnants of the pre-Puritan celebration of Christmas had survived, by the late 1700s the holiday had become a pale shadow of its former self, cloaked in piousness, sometimes celebrated in public, but rarely at home, shorn of domestic application almost entirely. Traces of the “old” tradition survived, but in tiny villages and distant corners of the English countryside, where enlightenment had not found its way, and among common folk who were not all that anxious to shed every vestige of faith and superstition.

And yet there were also a few literary figures who thought that such traditions deserved reexamination by a modern world, a world that—in its pursuit of progress and the almighty pound—was becoming increasingly sterile, mechanized, and soulless. With the publication of such historical romances as
Waverly
(1814),
Rob Roy
(1818), and
Ivanhoe
(1819), Scotland’s Sir Walter Scott had done yeoman’s work in resurrecting an appreciation for his country’s legendary past and its heroes. The books may seem clumsy and overly earnest to modern readers, but they were enormously popular in their day, and Scott’s death in 1832 left a void in the public consciousness that was waiting for someone like Dickens to fill.

Working this sentimental vein at more or less the same time as Scott was the American-born author Washington Irving, who had moved to England to help salvage his family’s business fortunes after the War of 1812 was settled. Irving proved a far better writer than a businessman. He stayed in Europe from 1815 to 1832, touring the nooks and crannies of the Continent and producing a series of stories, observations, and sketches that transformed local customs, legend, and folktales into literary gold. He had similar success with material illustrating traditional folkways in the United States.
The Sketch Book of Geo
ff
rey Crayon,
published in 1819–20, contained the stories “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and proved enormously popular.

One of Irving’s major subjects in
Geo
ff
rey Crayon
is Christmas, and he begins one chapter with the declaration, “Nothing in England exercises a more delightful spell over my imagination, than the lingerings of the holiday customs and rural games of former times.” Those vestiges of a bygone era, Irving continues, “recall the pictures my fancy used to draw in the May morning of life, when as yet I only knew the world through books, and believed it to be all that poets had painted it; and they bring with them the flavor of those honest days of yore, in which, perhaps, with equal fallacy, I am apt to think the world was more homebred, social, and joyous than at present.”

Irving posits that it is a false progress indeed that robs mankind of its deeper sources of contentment: “Many of the games and ceremonials of Christmas have entirely disappeared, and, like the sherris sack of old Falstaff, are become matters of speculation and dispute among commentators,” he says. “They flourished in times full of spirit and lustihood, when men enjoyed life roughly, but heartily and vigorously; times wild and picturesque, which have furnished poetry with its richest materials, and the drama with its most attractive variety of characters and manners.”

It is a damnable place his contemporaries found themselves in, Irving suggests: “The world has become more worldly. There is more of dissipation, and less of enjoyment.” And yet there is hope to be found in the celebration of Christmas, with its emphasis on family love, gift-giving, and festivity: “The preparations making on every side for the social board that is again to unite friends and kindred; the presents of good cheer passing and repassing, those tokens of regard, and quickeners of kind feelings; the evergreens distributed about houses and churches, emblems of peace and gladness; all these have the most pleasing effect in producing fond associations, and kindling benevolent sympathies.”

In Irving’s works, excited descriptions of Christmas Eve parties and Christmas dinners abound, most of them in comfortable rural settings where there are still hints of the libidinous tomfoolery that was said to swell the birthrate of every September in England until the Puritans toppled the throne and put their collective foot down: “The mistletoe is still hung up in farmhouses and kitchens at Christmas; and the young men have the privilege of kissing the girls under it, plucking each time a berry from the bush. When the berries are all plucked, the privilege ceases.”

Irving’s sentiments regarding the joy and fellow-feeling brought about by Christmas could not have fallen on any ears more predisposed to hear them than those of Charles Dickens. In an essay, Dickens once wrote of how the sight of one of those “new German toys,” i.e., a Christmas tree—freshly popularized by Queen Victoria’s Bavarian husband, Prince Albert—surrounded by a crowd of excited children aroused in him the veritable reexperience of his own childhood celebrations of the season. “I begin to consider,” Dickens says, “what do we all remember best upon the branches of the Christmas Tree of our own young Christmas days, by which we climbed to real life.”

And what he remembers of his own early days is not always pleasurable. Though there were toys enough scattered throughout his earliest recollections, some of them had a demonic effect on the imagination of the youthful Dickens, including a jack-in-the-box that particularly troubled him: “[an] infernal snuff-box, out of which there sprang a demoniacal Counsellor in a black gown, with an obnoxious head of hair, and a red cloth mouth, wide open, who was not to be endured on any terms, but could not be put away either; for he used suddenly, in a highly magnified state, to fly out of Mammoth Snuff-boxes in dreams, when least expected.”

But in the main, Christmas for the young Dickens was a time that encouraged his imagination to soar, when, as he puts it, the most significant of the “decorations” of the holidays of his youth were the books and legends that he came to read and hear at that time. At Christmas, it seemed to him, “Oh, now all common things become uncommon and enchanted to me. All lamps are wonderful; all rings are talismans.”