Christmas Read online

  Dreidels, children’s Chanukah toys, are prime examples of this type of assimilation. These four-sided spinning tops were originally Anglo-Irish, and known as teetotums. They had letters printed on each side: T for ‘take’, H for ‘half’, P for ‘put down’, and N for ‘nothing’. A gambler spun the teetotum and the side that ended face up represented their winnings. Teetotums became popular in Germany, both for adult gamblers and as children’s toys. In the USA, the Hebrew initials of a sentence that summarized the holiday, Ness Gadol Haya Sham, ‘A great miracle took place there’, replaced the gambling letters, and holiday games were constructed to fit.

  By the early decades of the twentieth century American newspapers carried advertisements for Chanukah presents and Chanukah food (fried foods more generally, latkes, potato pancakes, more particularly, were traditional, as a symbol of the sacred oil). Aunt Jemima pancake flour promised it was ‘the best flour for latkes’, while Crisco shortening combined ‘Hanukkah tastes and Modern Science’. As with Christmas, decorations could be store-bought or home-made: pipe-cleaner stars, paper chains of menorah or dreidel shapes. Magazines advised on holiday recipes (a salad of cottage cheese and fruit moulded into the shape of a menorah sounds particularly memorable).

  Even as traditions in the USA drew from a range of cultures, so the Christmas of Britain was cohering. Christmases that had been quite different – Jane Carlyle and Hannah Cullwick’s Christmases, both spent at parties, bore no resemblance to each other – began to mirror each other more closely. The rich and the poor, the upper and the working classes had different resources, and the time they had to devote to the holiday was different. But by the end of the nineteenth century, for the first time, their aims aligned. A child living on a small farm in Hampshire, the son of a London architect and the titled widow of a colonial governor and Irish landowner all had holidays that included meals of turkey or beef, mince pies and plum pudding; a tree, if not always at their house, then at school or at a friend’s or neighbour’s house, plus greenery and decorations; presents, often in stockings; carols, at home or at school treats or parties; and various incidentals such as crackers and cards.

  The working poor, too, partook of as many of these established traditions as they could afford. Trees were a luxury that they could not aspire to, both because of the expense and because their living spaces were simply too small. But greenery, cotton-wool ‘snow’, paper chains hanging from the ceiling – some form of decoration was considered a minimum. And as early as the first two decades of the nineteenth century, Christmas preparations had occurred even in lodging houses, where lived those who could not afford to do more than rent day to day, or at best week to week. In the kitchen of one such lodging house, an ambitious resident prepared a Christmas dinner of ‘a very fine turkey, a beautiful plum pudding, and a handsome piece of pickled-pork’ in the communal copper more regularly used for laundry.

  To feed all these people, high and low, butchers’ Christmas displays resembled solid ‘walls of fat beef [and] wildernesses of plucked turkeys’, the meat transported by ‘railroads groaning’ with fowl and game. As the century rolled on, it was more than trains. It was steamships, it was refrigeration, it was modernity itself that delivered Christmas: the meal of Olde England was composed of beef from Argentina and Australia, turkeys from Europe and Canada; dried fruit from the Middle East; fresh fruit from all the ports of Europe, from the Canary Islands and the Azores, as well as Canada and the USA; nuts from Europe and from Turkey; puddings made with sherry and madeira from Spain, doused with brandy from France. These ingredients, and the meals they produced, became not English or European or American. They were just Christmas, an old holiday brought to each home by modernity.

  Chapter Eleven

  Modernity was to hit twentieth-century Christmas hard, transforming it – not beyond recognition, but using the new forms of film, television and radio to create new traditions, traditions that, just as others had before them, would immediately become old.

  Perhaps the most important modern tradition was that Christmas was inviolable: whatever was happening in the world that was wrong, according to this new thinking, Christmas would bring it to a halt for a period of peace and companionship. This grew out of what became known as the Christmas truce, in the first winter of World War I.

  War and the holiday had become entwined earlier in the century, when a newspaper campaign encouraged patriotic readers to send chocolates to British troops fighting in the Boer War. Such was the success of this venture that Princess Mary’s Sailors’ and Soldiers’ Christmas Fund was established – headed symbolically by royalty, with government approval, but in reality privately funded – sending each serving man a box of cigarettes and tobacco (sweets for non-smokers), and a card ‘from’ the king. So great was public enthusiasm that at one point both rations and ammunition were held back to enable these gifts to be shipped. During World War I, German newspapers also promoted Liebesgaben. One typical image shows officers at the front receiving these ‘gifts of love’ in a tidy, dry, well-lit space carefully decked with Christmas cheer: a small tree placed atop a box of ammunition, a holly wreath hanging nearby. There is no mud, no rats, no lice, nor unburied dead.

  The seeds of the truce may have been sown at Messines in Belgium, where in 1914 a Bavarian regiment was encamped in the ruins of a monastery. Some of the men set up trees in the building’s bombed cellar and, on 23 December, hung Christmas lights along their trenches, where they could be seen by the opposing forces. In a separate incident on Christmas Eve, members of the British Royal Flying Corps dropped a Christmas pudding over the German lines at Lille, reciprocated with a bottle of rum from the Germans soon after. For the truce was not a single incident, in a single place. Instead, gradually, on Christmas Day 1914, the rank and file shared their views on the chance to call a temporary halt to the licensed slaughter that had by then been underway for nearly half a year. Behind one trench a sign offered ‘YOU NO FIGHT, WE NO FIGHT’. Elsewhere men simply called ‘Come over!’ to replies of ‘Come over yourself!’ On the whole, it was generally the Germans who led the way. The German army was at that date militarily far more favourably placed, with much less to lose; and their trees and decorations provided their opponents with a visual reminder of the holiday. And then there were their carols. On Christmas Eve a Saxon regiment sang carols and folksongs along a candle-lit trench, and as each candle was lit, the British cheered. ‘Stille Nacht’, ‘O Tannenbaum’ and ‘O du fröliche’ came from the Germans, while the British responded with music-hall numbers, or traditional airs: ‘The Boys of Bonnie Scotland’, ‘Where the Heather and the Bluebells Grow’, ‘We Are Fred Karno’s Army’ and ‘My Little Grey Home in the West’. ‘Good King Wenceslas’ was sung, as was ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’ and ‘The First Noel’, but the British choices were far more secular than the Germans’.

  Listening to singing, admiring Christmas lights in the dark, was one thing; in the cold light of day, actually breaching the physical gap between the front lines required greater daring, and took longer to occur. But gradually, trench by trench, in one location after another, especially along the Flanders front, men emerged from their positions to speak to those who, a day before, they had been doing their best to kill. An unspoken set of rules came into force: the dead could be collected; no attempts would be made to strengthen fortifications in areas that would otherwise have been under fire; and if a shot was heard, it would be taken as an act of aggression only if both sides agreed that it was one.

  The main activity was sombre, not celebratory: the gathering of bodies from no man’s land, where they had lain, putrefying, without hope of recovery. While there was more than one report of football matches played by the two sides, these were almost entirely secondhand, seen by a friend, rather than seen by the speaker. What did occur was fraternization, men exchanging small gifts of food and drink, swapping badges, buttons or flashes from their uniforms as souvenirs. Boxing Day saw more of the same, despite the unease of comman
ders on both sides, worried that present friendliness would inhibit future bloodshed, or that concepts of patriotic sacrifice and duty would be nullified by exposure to basic humanity. Christmas spirit for those in command was treason. And so the fighting resumed, although on occasion preceded by a warning from one side to the other: ‘Be on guard tomorrow. A general is coming to visit our position. For reasons of shame and honour, we shall have to fire.’

  The truce lasted a day or two, and the generals ensured it was never repeated; its mystique, however, was felt for longer. As late as 1989 the BBC comedy series Blackadder simply assumed, correctly, that the elements of the truce – the carols, the football – were part of British general knowledge, and could be utilized without explanation. (‘Remember the football match?’ ‘How could I forget? I was never offside!’) Appropriately, the Blackadder sketch omits all mention of religion, which played as little a part in the truce as it has in the holiday itself over the years.

  This can be seen, in a different way, in 1936, when the New York department store Lord and Taylor planned to accompany its Christmas window displays with recorded music. Religious music was rejected: ‘This is Lord & Taylor’s, not St Patrick’s Cathedral.’* And by the 1950s, Wanamaker’s, the department store that had for years turned itself into a proto-cathedral every December, was advertising ‘Christmas isn’t Christmas without a Day at Wanamaker’s’. Instead, Christmas and department stores were, in the twentieth century, entwined in a wholly new way, as two holiday traditions – the Christmas of street entertainment and the Christmas of homes and children – came together.

  Seasonal window displays became part of civic rather than commercial life, the unveiling accompanied by bands, speeches and perhaps a visit either from a local dignitary such as the mayor or from a celebrity. In the USA in the first half of the century, Christmas windows were crucial to advertising, their importance lessening only as growing suburban developments and out-of-town shopping centres reduced the passing foot trade. In Britain, Selfridge’s windows in London’s Oxford Street were initially the seasonal draw, but this was gradually transferred from a single shop to the street as a whole. As windows diminished in importance, ‘turning on the Christmas lights’ became a ritual community event. It always took place in a shopping street, yet somehow it was cleansed of its commercial origins.

  Most of the subjects chosen for both window displays and lights were based on children’s books or entertainment: circuses or giant doll’s houses, tea-parties or picnics; Little Women, or Alice in Wonderland, Dr Seuss or Disney characters. Children were after all the main recipients of Christmas presents, and the commercial decision to look to the children was a sensible one. Or to the child in all of us, because most prominent in the displays was a sense of nostalgia, to evoke in adults memories of their own childhoods, or of simpler times, real or imagined.

  Unlike the subjects on display in the windows, inside the stores Santa’s Grotto, or Winter Wonderland, or the House of Santa, all maintained a single-minded focus on the gift-giver himself. While there had been variations on this idea from at least the 1880s, the promotional possibilities of a shop visit from Santa continued to expand, especially after shops moved to malls. In 1956 Dayton’s department store in Minneapolis moved from its downtown location to a shopping centre, and its Christmas windows turned inwards, becoming decorations and displays that customers walked past as they entered the store. These were sometimes child-focused – one Baltimore department store reproduced a miniature version of Disneyland – but as frequently they were intended as a prompt to adult nostalgia: Dickens, or Grandma Moses, or Currier and Ives, or colonial-era displays.*

  At their core, however, was Santa, by now firmly established as a red-suited, white-bearded man surrounded by elf-helpers who led the children, one by one, to share their Christmas-present hopes with Santa, while parents took photographs (or, later on, the elves did). The humourist David Sedaris describes his own experience, even if heightened for comic purposes, working in the 1980s as an elf at Macy’s in New York’s Herald Square, where, he estimated, up to 22,000 people came through SantaLand daily, walking past ‘ten thousand sparkling lights, false snow, train sets, bridges, decorated trees, mechanical penguins and bears, and really tall candy canes’ to reach Santa’s house. All of it was ‘cozy and intimate, laden with toys. You exit Santa’s house and are met with a line of cash registers’.

  The commercial nature of SantaLand was obvious. By contrast, the new twentieth-century tradition of the pre-Christmas parade maintained a veneer of celebration and carnival. Today in North America, Macy’s remains the most famous, and while its early planners referred to it internally as a ‘Christmas parade’, publicly it has always been Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, possibly precisely to remove this aura of the cash register from an event that marked the start of the Christmas shopping period. Macy’s, however, was not the first department-store Christmas parade, nor was it an American innovation. Instead, the parade developed north of the border, originally in Toronto, at Eaton’s chain of department stores.

  Eaton’s had been using Santa in its advertising from the 1890s; from 1903, their Toronto store had a visit from Santa each December. In 1905 an advertisement announced which train Santa would arrive on, inviting customers to meet him at the station. Such was the response that the following year the trip from the station to Eaton’s was rendered more dramatic, with Santa in a carriage pulled by white horses and with four trumpeters alerting passers-by to the august visitor within. By 1911 the short trip from the station had come to take two entire days as it wound around the city under banners promoting ‘Toyland at Eaton’s’, followed by store employees – and Eaton’s owner – in procession. As the years rolled on, each parade offered something new to top the previous visit: reindeer from Lapland, a twenty-piece band, or floats carrying characters from nursery rhymes. One year Santa sat atop a giant fish (the reason for this, if there was one, is lost to history), on another, more comprehensibly, on an iceberg surrounded by polar bears. In 1919 Santa shunned the train for a more thrilling arrival by plane, which was filmed and screened in cinemas.

  By now department stores in the USA were taking note. In 1920 Gimbel’s in Philadelphia had already plugged into their city’s nineteenth-century parade tradition by establishing its Christmas version, followed by Hudson’s in Detroit a few years later. Then in 1924, Macy’s hired Tony Sarg to dress their Christmas windows, which had long been famous for the mechanical ingenuity of their displays. Sarg was a puppeteer, the owner of a small show-cum-museum where marionettes performed a miniature adaptation of Dickens’s Old Curiosity Shop. Under Sarg’s direction, circus performers and animals together with shop employees marched from 145th Street to Macy’s on 34th Street to drum up publicity for what was still considered the central component of the promotion, the big Christmas window reveal. Over the next few years, as the parade became ever-more elaborate, interest in the windows declined, especially after the introduction of giant balloon puppets that could be seen even from the back of a crowd.

  Department-store window displays were static, and the consumer was a passive viewer: parades encouraged not merely spectating, but participation. In Winnipeg, 350 children competed in a talent show, vying for places in the Eaton’s parade. In Montreal such was the community’s engagement that by 1937 the Eaton’s parade drew somewhere between a quarter and a third of the population. In 1952 the Toronto parade was televised and in 1959 Macy’s once more followed suit. The cameras, unlike reporters on the ground, could not pick out the detail of the window displays, and so the parades became all-important. In towns and cities without department-store parades, community organizations – the Guides, Boy Scouts, Rotary and Lions Clubs – established their own parades in an echo of these more famous ones, heard about on the radio if not seen in cinemas or television.

  Despite many parades’ nominal association with Thanksgiving, their purpose was plain: in Macy’s parade, the final float was always Santa’s, ma
rking the start of Christmas shopping.* Religious and patriotic groups complained about Macy’s parade: the day, they protested, should be about religion and remembrance of the nation’s history. Macy’s bowed to pressure, rescheduling the parade in the afternoon, after church services and family meals. This timing, however, conflicted with the American football games that from the late nineteenth century had been played on Thanksgiving afternoon, and so the parade was swiftly returned to its morning slot – sport: 1, religion: 0.

  These parades were but a faint echo of the earlier holiday street carnival, now ordered, given a purpose in the name of commerce, even as the commerce was covered with a thin patina of children’s entertainment and patriotism. Merely scrape the patina, however, and the commodity market was visible. From its establishment in the nineteenth century, Thanksgiving had fallen on the final Thursday in November. In 1939 that was 31 November, compressing the run-up to Christmas into three weeks. A consortium of chambers of commerce and retailers campaigned to have the date made more shopping-friendly, and in 1941 it was officially established that henceforth Thanksgiving was to be on the fourth Thursday of November, which ensured it was never after 28 November, allowing at least four weeks of shopping.* The parades simply lent a vestige of drama to the exchange of cash.