Christmas Read online

  Americans also began to innovate by recreating the idea of a public tree, a tree erected and decorated for the benefit of all. Initially these trees were put up by groups affiliated to churches, with tickets sold for the benefit of the church or other charitable organization, as with the York bachelors. As early as 1830, a Dorcas Society, also in York, had what the local newspaper described as a ‘famous’ tree as the centrepiece for their Christmas bazaar.* Fairs to raise funds for the abolitionist movement also advertised trees. Gradually, from the fund-raising side of religion, they moved to the educational, as Sunday schools began to erect trees from the late 1840s. Soon trees came to be considered essential parts of a religious Christmas display, but they were open to private enterprise too. The Goodridge Brothers, barbers and shopkeepers in York, as grandsons of a slave woman and a white man, may have been involved in abolitionist causes, but tickets to view their 1840 tree were advertised without any reference other than the commercial.

  Christmas trees were swiftly becoming symbols of something intangible and indefinable: partly of middle-class domesticity, but partly expressions of nationhood. The tree took on national status after New Hampshire-born President Franklin Pierce chose to have one in the White House in 1856. In the next decade many more were exposed to trees during the Civil War, when soldiers were garrisoned with people from other parts of the country. Even in wartime, the trees remained domestic symbols, especially as expressed by Harper’s Weekly, the country’s most widely circulated magazine at the time.

  Many purchased the magazine for its extensive coverage of the war, in which the illustrations of Thomas Nast were prominent. Nast (1840–1902) was the creator of the American political cartoon and the first to use an elephant to represent the US Republican party. Political cartoonists generally have a shelf-life: once the events of the day are forgotten, so are they. Nast, however, has lived on, as the originator of the twentieth – and so far, the twenty-first – century’s image of Santa Claus.

  Santa had taken a little while to get there. In his Knickerbocker History, Washington Irving describes how St Nicholas behaved – rattling by horse and wagon over rooftops and going down chimneys to place presents in stockings, laying his finger to the side of his nose in a gesture beseeching silence before he left – but he doesn’t describe his appearance. Others had their own views. In 1815 the New York Evening Post ran a ‘proclamation’ from Santa Claus, signed, ‘Santa Claus, Queen and Empress of all handsome girls … Queen and Empress of the Court of Fashions’, followed by approval from this ‘good, delightful, charming’ woman’s husband, St Nicholas. (This gender-swap never became popular.) Another version appeared in a North Carolina newspaper of the 1850s, which said he was a ‘coster’ [costermonger, or street-seller of fruit and vegetables] who breathed fire on bad children through a keyhole.

  The Children’s Friend in 1821 contained the first illustration of ‘Old Santeclaus’: a tiny bearded young man, driving a tiny reindeer-drawn sleigh beside a towering chimney. Clement Clarke Moore filled in some gaps. His ‘St Nick’ is an elf with a ‘little round belly’, who wears fur, smokes a pipe and carries a pedlar’s pack filled with toys. (In a direct borrowing from Irving, he also puts ‘his finger aside of his nose’.) In the first illustrations of the poem, in 1848, Moore’s saint wears old-fashioned Dutch clothes, but although still small and round, he is no longer an elf. His appearance then became established: in The Lamplighter, Maria Susanna Cummins’s bestseller (only Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold more copies in its first year of publication), ‘the veteran toy-dealer’ continued to wear his fur cap and smoke his Dutch pipe.*

  Thomas Nast changed all that. Nast was born, like so many other figures that populate Christmas, in Germany, in Landau. Many have suggested that he drew on childhood memories of Pelz Nichol for his iconic illustrations. However, Nast left Germany at the age of six, so his memories would have been hazy at best; furthermore, the Christmas gift-bringer in Landau in the early 1840s was not Pelz Nichol; and, finally, Nast grew up in New York exactly at the period when the St Nicholas of Irving, Paulding and Moore was becoming established – surely a likelier source of inspiration.

  It was also in New York that Christmas was becoming increasingly child-centred, as seen in the softening of the stern bishop into a ‘jolly old elf’. Perhaps the rowdy street portions of the holiday, the older topsy-turvy traditions when apprentices shook free of their masters, were being replicated after a fashion as children replaced their parents as the day’s star performers. Now the man with the sack, a toy-pedlar, and therefore of the working class, was, like the apprentices of former times, going house to house, but instead of demanding money, he was freely giving things without payment. Possibly Santa-as-benefactor appealed to Nast, for as a cartoonist, he revelled in unmasking political corruption and the oppression of the poor.

  Nast’s first Christmas spread for Harper’s, in 1862, was not of Santa, nor of St Nicholas, but of soldiers separated from their families, a domestic reading of Christmas that was only to grow in importance in the Civil War. The following year his first Santa Claus was sheer Union propaganda. ‘Santa Claus in Camp’ wears a stars-and-stripes outfit, but he is not the focus of the engraving: the Union soldiers filling the page are. And while a banner reads ‘Welcome Santa Claus’, it is secondary to a much larger American flag. Yet here, too, the domestic theme resonates. Santa hands out gifts for the soldiers – socks, toys – that act as reminders of home and children. In case the point was not clear, the next engraving was entitled ‘Christmas Eve 1862’, and showed a woman at home praying over her sleeping children, herself overlooked by a picture of a man on the wall wreathed in holly, presumably the soldier in the next picture, who in turn stares at a portrait of a woman and children. And, in little vignettes binding together the divided family, Santa climbs down a chimney, and then flies over the camp, tossing out presents. The following year, the same theme of families divided and united continues, as ‘Furlough’ shows a couple kissing under mistletoe as their children dance about them in front of a tree. Around them, roundels stress the central aspects of the season: a snowy winter scene, Santa coming down the chimney, children emptying their stockings, a Christmas dinner – and, oh yes, a tiny nativity scene.

  In these early depictions, Nast’s Santa does not bear much resemblance to our image today. He is very short, often little bigger than a child. He is dark, and wears dark fur hats that cover much of his forehead, leaving little of his face visible. Later he has a Dutch-style long-stemmed pipe. In 1866 he is still elf-sized, standing on a chair to reach a tabletop, while his ledger with the names of good and bad children is larger than he is. But now he has a workshop, and lives in a northerly ice palace, and his beard has grown bushier, and whiter.* The Children’s Friend shows him in a sort of Cossack fur hat; other illustrators gave him a tall peaked hat, or a cloth cap with a tassel. His round cheeks and white-fur-trimmed suit took longer to establish, becoming a signature of Nast’s Santa only in the 1880s. Nast continued to be influenced by current events. His journalistic crusade against the corrupt New York politician ‘Boss’ Tweed might perhaps have influenced his depiction of Santa, with his overhanging balcony of a belly, while the cartoonist himself allowed that his Santa’s rosy face came from Bacchus, the mythological god of wine, and his rich furs from the plutocratic slum-landlord and Tweed-supporter, John Jacob Astor.

  Nor was the colour of Santa’s clothes yet settled. In 1837 the painter Robert Weir, a friend of Irving, had painted Santa in a red cloak worn over a dark Dutch suit, and brown boots.† In 1856 the British Mother’s Journal dressed him in ‘his yellow Christmas coat’, the ‘his’ suggesting that the writer thought yellow was the traditional colour. Nast’s engravings of the 1860s and 1870s were in black and white, and so all that is possible to say is that Santa’s clothes were dark.

  By now, Santa had become substantially different from all other Christmas gift-bringers. He had no religious associations, unlike St Nicholas or the Christkind; he had
no punitive role – he might threaten to withhold presents from bad children, but he never actually did so, nor did he carry implements of punishment; he was no longer an outsider, as the various earlier sidekicks and wild men had been; and he brought substantial gifts, not just fruit and nuts. He is perhaps a reversed-out image of Christ, almost a photographic negative: Santa is fat (Christ is almost always depicted as a thin man); he is old (on 25 December Christ is, of course, a newborn); he wears red (white); lives at the North Pole (Middle East); is married (single); owns a factory (is a carpenter) that produces luxury goods (turning water into wine is arguably as close as Christ got). In short, Santa had become the god of hedonistic enjoyment, the exact opposite of the man who preached that it is ‘easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God’.

  And to bring his largesse, Santa had, from nearly the beginning, a great sack for his presents, whether from St Nicholas’s sacks of gold, or the pedlar of The Children’s Friend. As early as 1826, on New Year’s Day, New Yorkers’ formal holiday visits were disrupted. Normally, genteel society paid calls on their friends, pausing for a drink and taking a single ‘cookey’ for the road. But on this day, two men were spotted with ‘a large bag, on one side of which was a full-length portrait of Santa Claus’, into which they were stowing great handfuls of cookies. Order was restored, however, when it was realized that their ultimate destination was a local orphanage. Because by the 1820s, ‘Carousals’, as The Times referred to the drunken revelry of the past, were no longer enjoyed in the streets, and the holiday was spent as a family ‘round a warm and comfortable hearth’.

  * * *

  The king of the family hearth, and of charity, of the new Christmas of children, was, of course, Charles Dickens. In A Christmas Carol (1843), which has often been described as the book that ‘invented’ Christmas, the domestic hearth, and the fires that cook the Christmas dinner, represent all that is good in the season.*

  Dickens, and A Christmas Carol, were heavily influenced, as so many were, by Washington Irving. Not, in this case, his Knickerbocker History, but by a book that has been more or less forgotten, the unenticingly titled The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. Irving’s family business had suffered during the War of 1812, and in 1815 he set off for Europe in an attempt to establish trading connections. As his Knickerbocker History is an imagined history of an idealized past New York, so The Sketch Book (1819) is an imagined past England, told in the persona of a middle-aged American visitor.

  At Christmas the narrator visits Bracebridge Hall in Yorkshire, where he is welcomed by an Olde Worlde squire who cleaves to Christmas customs ‘daily growing more and more faint’: the squire feasts his tenants, who play games and dance, there is mumming, a Lord of Misrule, holly, ivy and mistletoe, mince pies and roast beef, a boar’s head and home-brewed beer and parlour games, and everyone is endlessly happy.

  The book was as successful as the Knickerbocker History had been, going through at least seventeen editions on both sides of the Atlantic over the next half-century. Apart from the sheer joie-de-vivre of the writing, Irving tapped into the new passion for antiquarianism. But because the book was written as a travelogue, the knowledge that it was fiction vanished as quickly as had the satire of his history of New York. British readers understood that it did not describe their own Christmases, but typically thought that it was an accurate description of Christmases past, while American reviewers took the book as straightforward reportage.*

  Yet by looking backwards, Irving somehow managed to help create the Christmas of the future, the Christmas of modernity.

  Chapter Seven

  To our twenty-first-century eyes, Washington Irving and Charles Dickens are not modern; they represent the Good Old Days. But it is in Dickens, especially, that Christmas first meets the modern world. Indeed, it is Dickens who showed the world that modernity and Christmas are eminently suited to each other.

  In his first novel, The Pickwick Papers (1836/7), Dickens sends his characters to spend an idyllic old-fashioned Christmas in the country: the focus is on Christmas Eve, not the day itself; they drink punch and tell ghost stories; the single ‘carol’ is a song about spring – in short, the holiday is about country hospitality, food and drink and merriment, all for adults. In the same year, the essayist Leigh Hunt wrote on ‘The Inexhaustibility of Christmas’, listing the accompaniments to the holiday of which he thought no sensible person should ever tire: he gave food twelve entries; games thirteen; pastimes such as carols and waits six; home-based pastimes six; greenery three; drink three; mischief a possible two; money or gifts the same; theatre and cards one each.* What is notable when compared to the past is how little space he gives to drinking, and to street or outdoor rowdy events.

  ‘Old Christmas Festivities’, from William Sandys’ Christmastide, its History, Festivities, and Carols (1852).

  A book on Christmas through the centuries, published in 1852, presents this change in graphic form. Two illustrations, ten pages apart, show ‘Old Christmas Festivities’ and a modern ‘Christmas Tree’.

  The former is set in what looks like a pub or a tavern – there is a keg of beer on the floor, alongside discarded tankards, and the crowd, predominantly male, raise their drinks to toast a kissing couple under an enormous bunch of mistletoe or a kissing bough. There are few children visible, one of whom, the potboy, is working. In the second image, we are transported to a middle-class urban drawing room: the focal point, the ceiling-high tree, stands on an expensive-looking carpet, while the stylishly wallpapered walls are hung with paintings. Most of the people in the room are women or children, with only a scattering of men, and there is no drink visible. Instead there are presents, toys and what appear to be sweets are being offered around.

  ‘The Christmas Tree’, William Sandys’ Christmastide, its History, Festivities, and Carols (1852).

  Irving’s Bracebridge Hall and Dickens’s Pickwick Papers were male events. The squire organized the Bracebridge festivities; the Pickwick Christmas barely nodded to women: female servants provide food and drink and maintain fires; middle-class women mostly look decorative. A Christmas Carol, by contrast, presages a Christmas Yet to Come. The Ghost of Christmas Past shows Scrooge the Christmas party overseen by his old employer, Fezziwig; the Ghost of Christmas Present takes him to the dinner hosted by his nephew Fred. But at the emotional core of the book, the Cratchits’ Christmas dinner, Bob Cratchit’s only contributions are to take Tiny Tim to church, to make the punch and to propose a toast. It is Mrs Cratchit who takes centre-stage: ‘In half a minute Mrs. Cratchit entered – flushed, but smiling proudly – with the pudding … blazing.’

  In the original edition, this was not illustrated; by 1876, however, one US edition devoted half its illustrations to the Cratchits, while some adaptations cut the novella down to this single episode. In theatre, too, it became central, with one production ending with a tableau:

  Music: curtains at back are drawn, disclosing ‘A Christmas Picture’. In the centre, the GHOST OF XMAS PRESENT, seated as before with his torch raised, red fire blazing … R. of CHRISTMAS PRESENT, MRS CRATCHIT, with a pudding in her hands; MARTHA [Cratchit] at her R., with TINY TIM in her arms. Two of the children opposite to them, looking at the pudding. TINY TIM … ‘God bless us every one!’

  Note that Bob Cratchit is nowhere to be seen, much as the March sisters’ father, in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868/9), was also absent in the book’s opening Christmas scene. ‘Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents’ is the famous first line, but while the absence of presents occupies several pages, the absence of the girls’ father is dealt with in a solitary sentence. And when Mr March returns, at a later Christmas, he is introduced as ‘another Christmas present for the March family’ – he has become something to be handed over, rather than the organizer of the holiday, its Squire Bracebridge.

  The Marches celebrate at home, as a nuclear family, only briefly calling on neighbou
rs and making charitable excursions. In this they echo the characters in A Christmas Carol: the Cratchits too have no relatives visiting; Scrooge’s nephew Fred has lost his mother, but if his father is living, he goes unmentioned, as do his wife’s parents. And while the ball given by Fezziwig, the young Scrooge’s employer, in theory depicts the old paternal style of Christmas entertainment, in reality it is held at his place of work – in other words, it is an office party.

  This is the new world, of offices, of travel, of working late and trying to get home in time for Christmas dinner (Martha Cratchit makes it just in time). Three years after Dickens’s book was published, a letter to The Times suggested that railway companies should offer special holiday fares, to allow ‘a large class of individuals confined … in offices, counting-houses, warehouses, shops, &c.’ to travel home for Christmas. Yet at the same time, trains were generally metaphors for the alienation and urbanization of the new industrial world – an anti-holiday symbol. The illustrator George Cruikshank depicted this contaminating force graphically: ‘Oh my beef, and oh my babies!’ despairs the lady of the house as a train bears down on her table, with both her children and her Christmas pudding under threat from modernity.

  In the face of this, A Christmas Carol permitted a new way of thinking about Christmas. No longer did it have to be the Christmas of Olde England, where the Irvingesque squire was in his manor house and all was right with the world. Now it could be a Christmas where working people travelled home by public transport from counting-houses and offices, where charity was the remit of the rising middle classes, not of the gentry taking care of their own tenants. Dickens took the changes to industrial society – office and factory work, urban poverty and want, food that was bought in shops, not grown in kitchen-gardens, cooked in laundry-coppers and commercial cookshops, not by servants in great halls – he took this new consumerist society, and through Scrooge’s ‘conversion’, he turned it into a sacred duty. Following his lead – cooking the turkey, playing games, drinking toasts, or buying a toy for your child – became the quasi-religious observances of the new middle-class domesticity.