Christmas Read online

  What is as interesting is the phrase that followed that description: ‘and under it was a neat model of a farmhouse surrounded by figures of animals’. The Moravian Brethren were one of the oldest Protestant denominations, dating from the fifteenth century. By the 1730s the Moravians were at the forefront of the Protestant missionary movement, including, in 1741, travelling to the newly christened Bethlehem in Pennsylvania and, not long after, to North Carolina. These Moravian communities, and their Central European heritage, were an important source of Christmas traditions in the New World. The Brethren in Bethlehem in the middle of the eighteenth century erected ‘several small pyramids and one large pyramid of green brushwood’, laden with candles, apples and ‘pretty verses’. And, as with Queen Charlotte, the description continued: ‘Close by were to be seen the Bethlehem stables, with the oxen and the asses, as also, the shepherds.’

  The nativity scene, or crèche, or presepio, or Krippe, had been a feature of Christmas in Catholic countries since Francis of Assisi was said to have created one in 1223. His was a ‘living’ scene, where real people and animals posed against the background of a cave to replicate the story of the nativity, but inanimate models, made of wood, clay, paper, or other materials, quickly became more common. By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries nativity scenes were seen across northern Italy, from the Tyrol down to Modena.

  The Jesuits created the first one recorded north of the Danube, in Prague in the later sixteenth century. Three areas of Germany became particularly famous for Krippen: Bavaria, Saxony and Silesia, the latter also being one of the main embarkation-points for many of the Moravian Brethren who travelled to Pennsylvania. And, like the Catholic communities they had been surrounded by in the Old World, the Moravians had a strong cult of the infant Jesus, which, together with nativity scenes, went with them to the New. There they were transformed into ‘Putzes’.

  Putzen in German means to clean or to polish, but in sixteenth-century Saxon dialect it also meant to decorate, especially churches, although not solely at Christmas. In Pennsylvania, Putz became the word for a local form of decorated nativity scene.* In the early days, the tree, the pyramid and the Putz were sometimes interchangeable, and today it can be difficult to say exactly what was on display, as when one Pennsylvania diarist recorded in 1818: ‘This afternoon Herman took apart and put away his beautiful pyramidal Christmas Putz’.

  The Moravians, coming from post-Reformation Germany at a time when the carol genre was flourishing there, may also have brought Christmas carols with them. In England, too, by this period, carols were slowly re-emerging from their enforced Puritan sleep. In 1694 the poet laureate, Nahum Tate, had published A New Version of the Psalms of David, Fitted to the Tunes used in Churches, which included his most famous work, the lyrics of ‘While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks by Night’. While not everyone approved of what was considered to be a shocking lack of gravity in the lyrics, the carol was widely popular.† Soon English carols were being written across the religious spectrum: in 1739 the Methodist Charles Wesley wrote the words to ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’ (Mendelssohn’s tune, adapted by another Englishman, had to wait another century); the following year, an English Roman Catholic in France produced ‘Adeste Fideles’ (the English version, ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’, also appeared in the following century). And in 1742 the London music world was introduced to what has now become a Christmas favourite, Handel’s Messiah, but which was then usually performed at Easter. (Only the first section concerns the nativity; the next two tell the Easter passion story; and the final moves on to universal redemption.)

  Outside of London, and the educated classes, carols were even more popular, but they were not new. In Britain, ballads and traditional carols had long circulated in chapbooks, broadsides and other cheap publications of the working classes, but they were only now receiving middle-class attention. ‘The Holly and the Ivy’ provides a prime example of the difficulties of pinning these popular ballads down to a specific time or place. Until the words and music were recorded in the early twentieth century, its sole printed source was a broadside dating from 1864, itself claiming to be a reprint of an older broadside dating back ‘about one-and-a-half centuries’, which places its origins at the beginning of the eighteenth century, making it very early. We have no evidence that that earlier printing was the first, however, and the carol might therefore be even older. The refrain, ‘The rising of the sun, / And the running of the deer, / The playing of the merry organ, / Sweet singing in the choir’, makes no sense, and one modern scholar has dismissed it as ‘Olde Englishe trumpery that a canny broadside publisher of 1710 might have strung together.’ But our information comes entirely from that 1864 broadside. Was there really an earlier broadside, and if so, was the printer correct in thinking it to be 150 years old? It might have been more recent; it might have been older. Or, of course, there might have been no earlier broadside at all, and the 1864 printer might have invented it to give his own innovation an air of legitimacy.

  As in Britain, so too in the colonies. Although carols were becoming popular in Catholic Latin America at this time, in the first half of the eighteenth century, religious ‘tune books’ in Protestant New England included no holiday music until 1750, when one Boston tune book included an English hymn based on the nativity story. Another half dozen or so followed in the next decade, and by 1770 many colonial clergy and church organists were producing Christmas songs of their own. In the slave states, Christmas music was developing independently among the black populations, with spirituals like ‘A-Rockin’ All Night’ and ‘The Angel Band’ possibly dating to the eighteenth century (although they might be somewhat later). By the end of the century, seasonal spirituals were widely sung in the United States.

  Spirituals were typically more concerned with the nativity – with the spiritual, indeed – than the carols of the local white populations, which, as in Britain, focused on food and drink, especially the items that had become, if not available to all, an ideal that all hoped for – turkey, plum pudding and mince pies. Several of the more successful British cookbooks of the century were printed in Virginia from the 1740s onwards, and thus their traditional holiday eating pattern became assimilated in the American South. The North followed the same path. In 1786 in New York, despite her Quaker upbringing, the wife of the Secretary of the Continental Congress served a Christmas dinner with ‘as good mince pies & as fat a turkey as you can procure’.

  It was not all imitation: the cultural melting-pot of the new USA also produced many novelties. American Cookery was published in 1796 in Connecticut, its author probably from New York state, since she included a recipe for ‘A Christmas Cookey’, the first time a biscuit was designated as specific to the holiday. The word cookey, or, today, cookie, a sweet biscuit, is from the Dutch coeckje (in modern spelling, koekje), little cake, and cookies were, in New York City, a New Year’s item. John Pintard (1759–1844), a merchant who in the nineteenth century was to have profound influence on the developments of other holiday elements (see pp. 101–4), remembered the custom in his youth: ‘New Year was … most boisterous & … began at Midnight, Drums beating Firing of Guns, huzzas, & [visitors] calling at friendly doors, to congratulate the family & get a New Years dram & cookey.’

  In the German communities, too, small gifts were exchanged at year end, as had been traditional in the immigrants’ homelands, the items often purchased in the Christmas markets that had been common in Germany since the Middle Ages. The first holiday market in Germany had been held in Cölln (now part of Berlin), and from the mid-fifteenth century had sold honey-cakes, while several Swiss towns had a Chlausmarkt around St Nicholas’s Day. Berlin later had a famous Weihnachtsmarkt between 12 December and the end of the year. By 1796 its 250 booths sold everything from textiles to toys, gold and silver trinkets, wigs, carved wooden objects, clothes and Nascherei, holiday cakes or sweet things more generally; behind these were smaller, humbler stalls offering boots, shoes, baskets, household goods and
cheap books.

  Books, particularly books for children, were soon expected ‘Christmas and New-Year’s Gifts’ – the two holidays linked together made a standard phrase. In 1789 a Boston publisher translated a French children’s book, L’Ami des enfants (1782/3), as The Children’s Friend, with stories detailing the daily life of middle-class children. In ‘Les Etrennes’ (‘New Year’s Day Gifts’), the Parisian children receive New Year’s gifts of cake, candied fruit, sweetmeats, toy soldiers, counters for board-games, china figurines, a microscope and a watch. In the Boston edition, the story-title became ‘The Christmas-Box’, but the gifts remained the same: apparently New England children were comfortable with the idea of these expensive seasonal presents.

  Gift-giving, and gift-receiving, were indicative of changes not merely to holiday customs, but to society more generally. Urbanization and industrialization meant that increasing numbers had moved from small, densely interwoven villages and towns to vast cities of strangers, making the immediate family the primary unit of private life. As child mortality declined, parents were able to invest more personalized attention in each individual child, even as the professional and middle classes expanded, allowing the children to stay out of the workforce longer. At the same time, the ideas of thinkers such as John Locke filtered into those same middle classes. Locke, in Some Thoughts Concerning Education, suggested that good men and women were made, not born: ‘Nine parts of Ten are what they are, Good or Evil, useful of not, by their Education’. Toys therefore became a threefold conduit from parent to child: they were a means of educating young owners with their parents’ values; they were expressions of parental love; and their purchase was a symbol of parental success.

  Giving toys was also traditional, in that it maintained hierarchical gift-giving practices: the gift was given by a social superior (the parent) to an inferior (the child) in both age and status. Parson Woodforde’s presents to his nieces and nephews were little different from the tips he gave the baker’s boy: cash, or occasionally ribbons, or on one occasion an almanac, another a green silk gown he had inherited from ‘my poor Aunt Parr’. One can similarly imagine poor Aunt Parr, had she not died, handing on the unwanted gown to her maid.

  Such gifts from parents, or other relatives, were frequently known too by the same name as servants’ tips: Christmas boxes.

  Some Boys are rich by Birth beyond all Wants,

  Beloved by Uncles, and kind good old Aunts;

  When Time comes round a Christmas-Box they bear,

  And one Day makes them rich for all the year.

  But gifts were also increasingly exchanged among friends. On the Lewis and Clark expedition, the first government-sponsored expedition of discovery, covering more than half of the USA as the company trekked from Missouri to Oregon in 1805, Lieutenant Clark ‘rcved a present of a Fleeshe Hoserey [fleece hosiery, or stockings] vest draws [a vest and drawers, or long underwear] & Socks of Capt Lewis, pr. Mockerson [a pair of moccasins]’ and a basket from his men, and a ‘Doz weasels tales … & Some black roots’ from some of the indigenous people living nearby. In return, the expedition leaders divided up their tobacco between their men as Christmas presents, giving handkerchiefs to those who didn’t chew. And while weasels’ tails presumably did not feature heavily in many people’s Christmas lists, it is noticeable that otherwise the gifts were items of utility: socks, slippers and underwear, which would all become staples of Christmas gift-giving.

  Clark and company exchanged their gifts in the new style, on Christmas Day, not at New Year. One of the first advertisements in Britain to promote a Christmas gift was printed in 1728: an anodyne necklace, for a teething baby. By 1743 an anthology of stories, jokes and other light fare was advertised with the subtitle, ‘A Christmas-box for gay Gallants and good Companions’, and the most common Christmas gift for children became books, including in the 1750s Nurse Truelove’s Christmas-Box or, The Golden Play-Thing for Little Children, published by the pioneering children’s publisher John Newbery. (This one in particular was soon also a staple of advertisements in colonial newspapers.) Nor was the gimmicky, vulgar Christmas publication an invention of the twentieth century: in 1760 and 1761, The Boghouse Miscellany was advertised widely (right).

  After the death of her small son in 1773, the author, society hostess and bluestocking Elizabeth Montagu dismissed Christmas outside of fashionable London as entirely ‘for the young’. By the end of the century, advertisers thought so too, and as well as books, a few advertisement for toys began to appear, like ‘the Talisman; or, Christmas Conjuror, a new diverting game, in a real Mahogany Box’, although at 1s. 6d., it was a toy for the wealthy.

  Across the Atlantic, the earliest advertisements were also for books, both educational and religious, such as a 1738 catechism, ‘very proper for a New-Year’s Gift to Children’. It took another few decades for such advertisements to become common, but by 1770 one New York newspaper had broadened both its audience and gift-giving, promoting jewellery, snuffboxes, toothpick cases, and backgammon and chess sets as ‘proper Presents to and from Ladies and Gentlemen at this Season’.

  And as gifts were becoming more widespread, it made sense, therefore, that the traditional bringers of gifts should also gain prominence. And that is exactly what happened.

  Chapter Six

  By the eighteenth century, personifications of the season were commonplace. The British Isles had variations on Father Christmas, usually an elderly man known for eating and drinking to excess rather than for giving gifts. Elsewhere, however, these figures tended to bring good things with them, and were already more oriented towards children. The Christkind visited in German-speaking lands, although he was unknown in neighbouring countries, and in 1711 Louis XIV’s German sister-in-law, Liselotte von der Pfalz, was upbraided for suggesting he be introduced to the French court: ‘You want to bring us your German customs to spend more money,’ her husband accused. German-speakers also welcomed the visits of St Nicholas and his helpers, as did the Dutch, their home country giving birth to the most famous gift-bringer in the West over the past two centuries, Santa Claus.

  Or perhaps not. The standard story of Santa Claus runs as follows. St Nicholas of Myra was bishop of the Lycian Greek town of Myra (now Demre, in Turkey) in the fourth century, although it was The Golden Legend, a compilation of the lives of the saints written by a Genoese churchman around 1260, that established most of his story. In that telling, the bishop is said to have tossed three bags of gold through an impoverished nobleman’s window to provide dowries for his three daughters so that they would not be sold into prostitution. A later legend told of a wicked innkeeper who murdered, cut up and salted the bodies of three schoolboys, to serve as meat in his inn, a dastardly plot that was foiled by the saint. Elsewhere he was said to have rescued ships from winter storms. Drawing on these themes, St Nicholas over time became the patron saint of sailors, and, particularly, of children. His saint’s day, 6 December, became the day on which schoolchildren were rewarded or punished for their year’s work, or were given a holiday, and his attributes included sacks, to represent the bags of gold. By the sixteenth century in the Netherlands, on the eve of his saint’s day, figures of St Nicholas went from house to house, accompanied by his servant, Zwarte Piet, to catechize the children, rewarding those who had been good with sweets, those who had been bad with switches, or lumps of coal.

  And from there, the story continues, Dutch emigrants to New Amsterdam, later Manhattan, took St Nicholas with them, and their version of the saint’s name, Sint Nicolaas, was rendered by the city’s English-speaking population as Sinterklaas, then corrupted to Santa Claus, to be immortalized in Clement Clarke Moore’s 1823 poem, ‘A Visit from St Nicholas’, better known by its opening lines:

  ’Twas the night before Christmas, when all thro’ the house

  Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;

  The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,

  In hopes that St Nicholas soon would be t
here …

  Except that here we must stop and rewind, for little in this story actually happened. It is likely that the fourth-century Bishop of Myra never existed: the first mention of him comes two hundred years after he supposedly lived. By the sixteenth century, however, while he visited the Netherlands every December, there are difficulties in getting him from there to North America.

  From 1624 New Netherland, the North American Dutch colony, was governed by a treaty with the Dutch Republic, the seven Dutch provinces that had freed themselves from Habsburg domination. And that treaty established the Protestant Reformed Church as the official church of the New World territories – a church that permitted no recognition of saints, nor of saints’ days. Furthermore, while the territory was politically and legally Dutch, its inhabitants were as ethnically mixed as those of modern-day New York: of the region’s approximately 3,500 residents, as many as 2,000 may have been English, and many more were of German or Scandinavian origin. By the end of the seventeenth century, as little as 2 per cent of the population of the city was actually Dutch.

  So, no saints’ days, and Dutch traditions most likely practised by no more than a tiny minority. Instead of deriving from folklore, therefore, or quaint colonial customs, or religion, the American emergence of Santa Claus was rooted in late-eighteenth-century politics, in the formation of clubs and societies based around ethnic or cultural groups, which came together to promote themselves and their fellow immigrants: a St Andrew’s Society for Scots immigrants, St David’s for the Welsh, St Patrick and St George for the Irish and the English. In 1786 a mostly Irish group called itself the Sons of St Tammany. (Tamanend had been a Lenni-Lenape chief when European colonists first established Philadelphia, so the choice of name was a jab at the British.)