Christmas Read online

  So too did the US Christmas Clubs, which in more institutional form copied the older British goose clubs, or Christmas clubs, or coal clubs. Those had been informal arrangements, often centred on a pub, where people made small payments through the year in order to save for a Christmas luxury. In 1910 this idea was embraced by US banks: by 1912, more than 800 banks had joined in, and at the height of the Depression, more than 12 million people had a Christmas Club account. Christmas Club accounts were no different from savings accounts (except that they almost uniformly paid lower rates of interest), yet 10 per cent of the population thought it was worth keeping their Christmas money separately. Partly, no doubt, that was to ensure that the money was not spent on other items, or on emergencies; but part was that the separation – even the lower interest rate – did for this commercial transaction what parades were doing for department stores, what gift-wrapping was doing for purchased gifts: bestowing on a commercial transaction an uncommercial aura.*

  While the carnivalesque was thus being institutionalized, stray reminders of the old topsy-turvy traditions continued to survive in odd places. In the British army, to this day it is customary for senior officers to serve the Christmas meal to the junior ranks, as well as, in some regiments, waking them up with ‘gunfire’ (tea laced with rum – a twenty-first-century relic of both Christmas shooting and drinking). But this was the exception, not the rule. As we have seen, adults, in whatever position, were no longer the focus of Christmas; children were. And it had become women’s work to manage the day. In the 1880s stories and magazine illustrations showed men bringing home presents, or organizing the Christmas turkey, as Scrooge had done for the Cratchit family forty years earlier; by the 1900s the images were of women shopping, women cooking, women decorating. Men’s work was to contribute the money and possibly carry the tree home. Women had become the family repositories of Christmas: they organized and planned, they decorated, shopped, wrapped and cooked. And they also carried the emotional focus of the day.

  Christmas dinner was no longer only about the turkey, but was a focus of many traditions, drawing together commodities and cash transactions, goods and services, and using them as a way to express family connection and love. Families frequently find they have, through a process of repetition and ritual use, imbued commercial, purchased goods with emotion. The ‘good’ dishes, used only on this day, might be no more expensive than the ones in use daily, but they are good because they were once grandmother’s. The ornaments for the Christmas tree might be cheap mass-produced ones, but they are given meaning when parents annually reminisce about buying the ugly neon Santa on their honeymoon as they watch their child hang it up. The order of the events, too – presents on Christmas Eve or Day? Before or after church? Turkey or beef, lunch or dinner? – all these decisions, once repeated, turn cash purchases into emotion. Even watching the same films on television every year becomes part of the ritual. Or it is conversation and jokes: ‘it is customary for my father to mention six or seven times how much his wife’s relations eat, how much more they come for a visit than his family, and how much money it costs him’.

  Such rituals could be both private and communal at the same time. In Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, Christmas Eve became a day for couples to become engaged; radio stations ran an ‘Hour for the Betrothed’, with background wedding music. In the English-speaking world, nativity plays performed by small children developed for similar reasons in the 1920s and 1930s, as another external expression of the increasing family-centred status of the day.

  This focus on family is also visible in the development of Kwanzaa, the holiday of African-American identity created in 1966 by the activist and academic Maulana Karenga. While Chanukah was a minor festival that gained importance owing to its calendrical proximity to Christmas, Kwanzaa was created ex nihilo deliberately to coincide with the Christian holiday. Lasting a week from 26 December, its concerns are family and community, each day concentrating on one of seven principles: unity, self-determination, collective responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity and faith. As in both the Christian and Jewish midwinter holidays, candles are lit (here red, black and green, to represent the African people, their struggle and their deliverance) in a ritual candelabra called a kinara. Again paralleling Christmas and Chanukah, while the purpose is emotive and spiritual, the effect is commercial. Trade fairs are held to supply merchants with Kwanzaa products: cards, books, stationery, mugs and candles, straw mats that symbolize African heritage, drinking cups for ancestral spirits, kente cloth, or shawl-wraps inspired by Ghanaian textiles. Cookery books draw on the culinary traditions of the African diaspora, from the Caribbean and South America as well as Africa and North America, for new ‘traditional’ Kwanzaa recipes. Magazine articles explain how to produce Kwanzaa decorations, while accompanying advertisements display items to shop for. And again, as with Christmas, people meet to eat, drink and exchange gifts in groups that expand and contract from family to friends to community.

  And in all these holidays, family means children: by 1988 just over half of the respondents to a British survey said family was the most important part of the day, while another 18 per cent said it was watching children celebrate (which also must mean family: watching strangers’ children has never been a holiday event). Speaking to a Swedish sociologist, one woman made plain the focus: she was ‘almost obliged’ to go to her daughter’s for Christmas Day, she said, as her grandchildren wouldn’t feel they’d had ‘a proper Christmas if there was no one there as a spectator’. Perhaps domestic Christmas Day customs are like an indoor Macy’s parade in miniature – if they aren’t observed, there’s really no point.

  Chapter Twelve

  By the twentieth century, the central, most obvious, symbol of the Anglo-American Christmas had become Santa Claus, who continued to evolve to meet changes in society. He travelled by train, and later by plane and car; he used the telegraph to keep track of good children, and soon the telephone too; he was stymied as central-heating reduced the number of chimneys. In 1982, on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post, he transferred his ledgers onto a first-generation PC.

  Yet however modern he became, he kept his values of ‘love and generosity and devotion’, against those who ‘have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age’. That was the response, in 1897, to a letter from an eight-year-old girl to the New York Sun, asking if there really was such a person as Santa Claus. Francis Church, the paper’s editorial writer, famously replied under the headline, ‘Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus’, in a column that proved so popular it was reprinted every year until the paper went out of business in 1950.

  That is fitting, because business has almost from the start been Santa’s business, financing entire newspaper empires with his advertising. Santa sold pipe tobacco, alcohol, fountain pens, breakfast cereal, razors, shaving foam and brushes, soap, socks, soup and spoons. One of the earliest extended campaigns to make use of Santa was that of the Wisconsin-based White Rock mineral-water company, which ran advertisements from 1915 to 1925 showing Santa at home, at work, making deliveries. Although White Rock was merely carbonated water, it was used as a mixer for alcoholic drinks. Gradually, therefore, as the advertisements ran during Prohibition, White Rock became a synonym for alcohol, and Santa reverted to the old Christmas, advertising an adults-only item.

  Santa Claus advertises White Rock mineral water in Life magazine, December 1923.

  As coloured printing became less expensive in the 1880s, Santa’s red suit had become the standard, and White Rock’s advertisements had reinforced many of the other visual motifs established by Nast: the fur-trimmed jacket, the belt, the boots. From the beginning of the twentieth century, though, one of the most influential series of images of Santa was not an advertisement but the cover of each year’s Christmas issue of the Saturday Evening Post, America’s best-selling journal. J. C. Leyendecker, one of its most successful cover artists, produced a long series of Christmas images, many of which
drew on Washington Irvingesque images of the holiday: waits, squires, stagecoaches and other quasi-historical elements. But in 1912 the artist’s first Santa for the magazine was unexpectedly modern: not a ‘real’ Santa at all, but a charity collector dressed up, a thin man wearing a red robe rather than a suit, his everyday trousers visible underneath. Real people dressing up as Santa persisted when Leyendecker’s slightly younger colleague, Norman Rockwell, produced his first Post cover four years later: a man in a costume shop checks a Santa hat and beard in a mirror as a shop assistant looks on. Later Leyendecker’s Santa, like Nast’s, went to war, this time in a World War II uniform rather than the stars and stripes, although his leather fly-boy jacket was the now standard red. In contrast to Rockwell and others, Leyendecker’s Santa continued to draw on Clement Clark Moore’s elf-like creature, and was always less than adult-sized. Rockwell’s Santa was the one that embodied the modern archetype: he was fat, bearded, worked at the North Pole, kept ledgers, made toys and crossed the skies above suburban tracts to deliver his gifts.

  But nothing did more to influence the image of the gift-bringer than an advertising campaign by Coca-Cola that ran from 1931 to 1964, and again in the 1980s and 1990s. In the campaign’s second year, Coca-Cola hired Haddon Sundblom, an American of Swedish descent, who became its principal designer for the next three decades. These advertisements spread, like the drink itself, across the globe, promoting what had become the standard image: a white-bearded man wearing a red jacket trimmed with white fur, belted across a substantial belly, red trousers and black boots and, frequently, a red pointed cap with white fur trim. And Sundblom’s Santa was almost always shown in a domestic setting: either at home in the North Pole, or in the homes of those receiving his presents.

  Sundblom’s Santa popularized Santa’s dress and appearance, not because he was the first, or original, but because the advertisements ran for so many years, in so many places. And yet, even as Santa’s image became fixed, new details emerged, to become fixed in their turn. One of the most widely recognized changes was barely noticed as such, and many would have sworn that, on the contrary, it had been in place all along. As we saw, the reindeer pulling Santa’s sleigh had arrived simultaneously with Santa, in 1821, in The Children’s Friend. In 1823, in A Visit from St Nicholas, Clement Clarke Moore had named them: ‘Now, Dasher! Now, Dancer! Now, Prancer, and Vixen! / On, Comet! On, Cupid! On, Dunder and Blixem!’* But of Rudolph there was still no sign: he was only born in 1939, just as the world was about to slide into war once more.

  Rudolph was a commercial innovation: in 1939, Robert L. May, a copywriter working for the retail chain Montgomery Ward, produced a pamphlet for customers’ children. It began, in couplets following Clement Clarke Moore’s rhythms:

  ’Twas the day before Christmas, and all through the hills

  The reindeer were playing, enjoying their spills.

  In May’s story, the reindeer ostracize their regrettably red-nosed fellow deer:

  Ha ha! Look at Rudolph! His nose is a sight!

  It’s red as a beet! Twice as big! Twice as bright!

  until one Christmas, Santa’s rounds are disrupted by a dense fog. When he stumbles into Rudolph’s bedroom and sees his shining nose, he asks him for help, and so, in Ugly Duckling fashion, the story ends with the bullying reindeer watching as

  The funny-faced fellow they always called names,

  And practically never allowed in their games,

  Was now to be envied by all, far and near.

  For no greater honour can come to a deer

  Than riding with Santa and guiding his sleigh.

  The Number One job, on the Number One day!

  The retailer gave away nearly 2.5 million copies, serving its commercial purpose, but the story had no further impact until, ten years later, May’s brother-in-law, Johnny Marks, a songwriter, set it to music. It was recorded by Gene Autry, the ‘Singing Cowboy’, reached number one in the charts and sold millions.

  By this time, the commercial, secular Christmas song had become as important in the American market as secular carols had been in the nineteenth century. By the early decades of the century, the music industry had begun to appreciate the holiday period as a driver of sales: in 1905 one popular vaudeville performer had great success with ‘Christmas Time at Pumpkin Center’, a sentimental appeal to vanishing rural America. More and more households bought radio sets in the 1920s, increasing the audience for popular music more generally, and seasonal songs in particular, and so professional tune-writers set to work. During World War II such songs made a patriotic contribution, reminding servicemen far away of their families at home. Who knew more about such longings than immigrants and the children of immigrants? Some of the most famous, and most enduring, Christmas hits were therefore written by Jews. In 2014 ASCAP, the organization that collects US songwriters’ royalties, produced a list of the twentieth century’s most successful holiday songs. No songs from before 1934 made the top thirty, and only two in the top twenty were written after 1959. Of all thirty, half had at least one Jewish contributor, and just three in the top ten were written by Christians.

  Meanwhile, Christmas adapted in other ways to wartime, as both sides in the conflict (although not officially atheistic Russia) rewrote aspects of the holiday to support their cause. In 1939, even before the USA had entered the conflict, CBS radio’s war correspondent introduced himself: ‘from Finland, the country where our legend of Santa Claus and his reindeer first began’. Santa had previously been said to live in an ice palace, sometimes at the North Pole. His new residence in Finland was political, establishing the bona fides of a nation currently being bombed by the Soviet Union, and only weeks away from its establishment as a puppet regime. Similarly, after the German invasion of the Netherlands a Dutch propaganda newsletter included a photograph of St Nicholas visiting the good children of New York. This conflated new Dutch St Nicholas traditions – the mayor of Amsterdam greeting the saint as he arrived from Spain, and parades with Zwarte Piet – which had become popular only in the 1920s, with their wartime ally’s own Christmas customs.

  Hollywood did its part too. Irving Berlin originally wrote ‘White Christmas’ as a song about a man in sunny California: ‘The sun is shining, the grass is green … / There’s never been such a day / in Beverly Hills, LA.’ Soon, however, the opening was dropped, and it became a song about the lost Christmases of the singer’s youth. Then it was included in the wartime film Holiday Inn, combined with images of Lincoln and Roosevelt, munitions factories and troops marching off to fight for the right to celebrate Christmas at home: Christmas and patriotism all wrapped up together in a neat holiday package.

  German propaganda use of Christmas dated back to the defeat of Germany in World War I. The post-war uprising that led to the dissolution of the German Empire included a Weihnachtskämpfe, a Christmas struggle, between the German army and socialist forces on 24 December 1918, helping create the idea in Germany that pre-war Christmases were the real Christmas, while new, modern Christmases were sham, plastic facsimiles. In the 1920s the rising tide of nationalism, with its emphasis on the origins of the Volk, the people, drew together a number of traditions said to be survivals of the real Germany (read, the undefeated Germany), including ‘ancient national Christmas customs’ from the ‘age of our primordial pagan fathers’. At the same time, some innovations of the twentieth century – electricity, radio, new modern cookers installed in modern social-housing – were acceptable, even welcomed, not as novelties in and of themselves, but as tools to replicate the supposedly ancient rituals of the holiday: lighting trees, playing carols, cooking traditional meals. At the same time, some traditions, authentic as some of them may have been, were diminished. The Christkind became less prominent than the Weihnachtsmann, a secular figure whose recent arrival – his first mention was in a poem in 1847 – made him more adaptable.

  In 1933, the year that Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, Heinz Steguweit, a World War I veteran and, from Ma
y of that year, a member of the Nazi Party, wrote Petermann Makes Peace, or, The Parable of German Sacrifice, rewriting the story of World War I’s Christmas truce. In Steguweit’s version, the soldier Petermann erects his tree behind the trenches to the accompaniment of carols, only to be killed by an Allied soldier as a sniper shoots out his tree’s lights one by one. The real Christmas, kept alive by real Germans, ran the not very subtle message, was under threat.

  Yet in reality, Christmas symbols and Christmas ideas travelled freely across political divides. In the nineteenth century in Germany, as we saw, many institutions sought to display some simulation of domesticity at Christmas, often by erecting a tree. In the USA a more public version of the tree was created. The first may have been at the 1885 New Orleans Exposition, a decorated fourteen-metre hemlock. In 1912, in Madison Square Park, in New York, a bigger tree – over twenty metres high – formed a dramatic backdrop to a Christmas Eve concert. The idea gained recognition in other cities and towns: by 1914 Austin, Texas had a tree outside its capital building, again a focus for bands, choirs and child-singers. In New York the Madison Square Park tree was replaced first by a tree in Times Square in 1926, and then by one at Rockefeller Center.*

  Soon the public tree was not about domesticity, but about politics. In the USA it stood as an emblem of the Progressive politics of Theodore Roosevelt and of social reform more generally. Even for those who did not support the political aims of the Progressives, for one night the notion of uniting rich and poor met with general approval. In 1923 the White House moved its tree outside: the tree-lighting, and thus the holiday, had become national, and political, events. In the same decade, in the Weimar Republic, public trees were named Weihnachtsbäume für alle, Christmas trees for all those who could not afford their own. Under the Nazis, the tree was reimagined as a survival of the traditions and spirit of the Volk. Members of the SA, the Nazi paramilitary unit, took their formal oaths of allegiance beneath them, swearing: ‘We promise, on this holy Yule night, to fight tirelessly for the holy struggle of our Volk.’ The tree was a ‘Symbol of National Unity’, as each region of the country took turns to send a tree to stand outside the Ministry of Propaganda in Berlin. Across Germany trees were also the spot designated for charitable handouts. In Washington in 1941, a blackout had been imposed after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December, but the Christmas lighting tradition was considered sufficiently important to morale for the ceremony to go ahead. (In an additional propaganda coup, Churchill was in attendance.)