Xmas In America

First, Christmas as we know it in America didn't really get started until the 1820's. It wasn't widely celebrated until the 1860's, and didn't become an official national holiday until 1870. So the "observance" of it (whatever that means) is not all that old. (For a bit of perspective, A Christmas Carol was published in 1843, and many scholars today attribute the "revival" of Christmas celebrations in England to Dickens). And from almost the moment the holiday was observed as a holiday, it was connected to commerce. So the connection between Christmas and shopping, in America, is as old as Christmas in America itself.

The other matter is:  there was no single "church" in America (still isn't).  Christmas in Europe came directly from Rome and really wasn't widespread there until the 11th century (another story entirely), so most of what we think of as "traditional Christmas" is from medieval Europe (not that there's anything wrong with that!), and a lot of it in this country traces back to Tudor England.

We'll get to that.

The first important point is that Christmas didn't enter this country via the Roman Catholics (who gave us the word, after all).  Christmas was banned by the Puritans, who pretty much hated it.  But what they hated was not what Scrooge hated:  they didn't hate Christmas trees (that didn't show up until the 19th century here, anyway) or greens and garland, or even Santa Claus.  The Puritans hated the raucous nature of Christmas; oh, and that the word itself referred to the "Christ Mass," which was much too "Romish" (their word) to tolerate in the New World.

But I need to put that in context, so bear with me a moment.  As I said, most of the celebrations of Christmas we have today (in America, anyway) have roots in Tudor England and the court of Henry VIII.  There was gift giving even then, but gift giving was engaged in only among the peerage, and  Henry expected the best gifts to come to him. He was rather how you imagine Donald Trump to be on Christmas morning: his gifts are to others are small, what he expects to receive is large.  Gifting to family and friends was far in the future from Henry; adult to child giving further away still. Today Christmas is for children, first and foremost. The root of that is one I'm interested in tracing.

Henry’s Christmas celebrations also lasted for 12 days and included many feasts (mostly because the food was available and food storage almost nonexistent. Use it or lose it was the rule for much of Europe for centuries). It included the “Lord of Misrule,” usually a courtier given license to lead the drinking and carousing and general carrying on. That doesn’t reach back to Rome, either. But Puritans in America, like Increase Mather, tried to argue that it did.

In the Apostolical times the Feast of the Nativity was not observed....It can never be proved that Christ was born on December 25....The New Testament allows of no stated Holy-Day but the Lords-day...It was in compliance with the Pagan saturnalia that Christmas Holy-dayes were first invented. The manner of Christmas-keeping, as generally observed, is highly dishonorable to the name of Christ.

--Increase Mather, 1687.  

“If it had been the will of God that the several acts of Christ should have been celebrated with several solemnities, the Holy Ghost would have made known to us the day of his nativity, circumcision, presentation in the temple, baptism, transfiguration, and the like.” . . . . “This opinion of Christ’s nativity on the 25th day of December was bred at Rome.”

Also Increase Mather.

He's not wrong about that date for Christmas Day.  And his connection of Christmas to Saturnalia is where many an armchair historian and scholar has determined that's exactly what history says (it isn't.)  The salient point for us is that Christmas in America had little or nothing to do with the Church (or any church), and a great deal more to do with commerce.  I can explain that rather simply (this isn't a lecture, after all), by pointing to the figure of Santa Claus.

Take it as accurate the Santa Claus from from the Danish figure Sinterklaas, who in turn comes from St. Nicholas (whose feast day is Dec. 6; we'll get there, too).  I have a picture of Sinterklaas, and it hardly resembles the figure of Clement Moore, Thomas Nast, or Haddon Sondblom (the artist of the '50's and '60's Coca-Cola Santas of my childhood.)  Sinterklass is depicted astride a regal white horse, bedecked with golden bridle and all the trimmings, as it flys through the sky (sans wings, not unlike the reindeer).  Sinterklaas sits regal and proud in the saddle, a tall, lean man wearing a Bishop's mitre and carrying a golden crozier.  Hardly the "jolly old elf" Moore says he saw in his living room. But Sinterklaas is a Catholic figure, a saint and the very picture of a Prince of the Church.  Santa Claus is a creature of mythology ("elf") who comes as a kind and trustworthy peddler, taking care of  Christmas for Mom and Dad and (especially) the kids.  Who are presumed to be "good" without having to prove it (post-Romanticism has been good for children, by and large). In the latest very American iteration, toy stores in "Red One" (the newest Xmas movie about Santa) all have "portals" to the North Pole, the better to deliver the toys which are provided to the children.  Or...something.  It's all about commerce, anyway, which is hardly what Sinterklaas was about.

Our American Christmas, in brief, was never about Advent and scriptures and taking care of the poor, which is one of the lessons of the Christchild being born in a feeding trough ("manger" is the nicer euphemism).  Although now we make the former saint kneel beside the Babe,  in tacit recognition that Santa Claus has eclipsed the "reason for the season."  Which it was in Europe; but never really was in America.

The fact is, Christmas as we know it and celebrate it in America, is pretty much an invention of the market place, and has only and ever tangentially been related to Christmas as a religious observance, as the "Christ Mass" held to honor the birth of the Savior. It's more like the two celebrations occur coincidentally at the same time of year, than that one is a vulgar and degrading corruption of the Platonic ideal of the other. Once you understand that, the picture becomes much clearer; or perhaps darker.

If you want to understand how Christmas got started in America, consider the example of the European Feast of Fools. As New Advent says, it was "a celebration marked by much license and buffoonery." Scholars again differ on the reach and importance of this festival; some crown it as a n important "release valve" of the tensions and pressures of feudal society. Others, like Michel Foucault, downplay it. It was limited to northern France and a few other regions of Europe, and always opposed by the Church. The lesson for us is that this 'feast' was a folk celebration, not a church one, and its irreverence was tolerated by the Church because they couldn't stop it, more than it was encouraged as a way of reminding the peasants of their place in the hierarchy (a comparison to Christmas in the slave holding South will prove instructive here, if I remember to mention it again). Christmas, too, was a folk celebration, one more honored in the British South (thanks to the presence of the Episcopal church) than in Puritan New England (where it was officially banned for a time, in at least some of the New England states). Restad's history presents Christmas as largely a folk celebration, in contrast to Thanksgiving, which was vigorously promoted in the 19th century by Sara Josepha Hale, who did more than any individual to promote Thanksgiving as a national holiday (ironically, the objections to it were on church/state grounds. It was argued that a national day of giving thanks would violate the First Amendment, an objection that was finally obviated by the times, when Lincoln established what later became the holiday) Aside from the religious entanglement objection, Thanksgiving was regarded as more of a "New England" celebration than a national one, for much of that century. Christmas, on the other hand, crept into public celebrations from many lands and many hands, and was early on largely disconnected from any religious observance, and while promoted as connected to the Christchild, was really no more dependent upon Church sanction than it is now. The idea, in other words, that there was a "pure" Christmas observance in America once upon a time, which the marketplace or the public square corrupted, is as false as the idea that the Christmas celebration we know now descended in an almost unbroken line from the Roman Saturnalia. It just happens that people like an excuse to exchange gifts and eat a lot of food, and especially for people from a northern European culture, winter is a jolly good time to do that.

Christmas that year, not one to look forward to, was one we should alway look back on.

That's the opening sentence of "Looking Back on Christmas" by William Owens.  I don't know if it's memoir or fiction, but it's become one of my favorite Christmas stories.   It's the story of a family gathering in rural Texas on Christmas Eve.  The family gathers, then sits down to dinner, and after dinner:

After the first table [old Texas tradition my family carried on with in my childhood:  the men ate first, then retired, and the women and children ate.  Yeah, my wife was appalled by that, too, and it was long before we were married that she encountered it.] the men and the bigger boys built up a big fire in the pasture between the house and the front gate.  Then, while the women stood on the front porch to watch, Uncle Charlie gave the little children firecrackers and showed them how to shoot them.  He put a paper fuse against a live coal.  When it had lighted he threw it away from the fire into the dark.

"Don't ever let one go off in your hand," he said, "And don't throw it close to nobody.  Somebody might get hurt."

While we went through the firecrackers he had given us, the men made a trip back to the kitchen.  This time they brought the jug with them and set it in the back end of a wagon.  They brought out more fireworks, and Monroe had the sack of powder in his coat pocket.

"Time for a roman candle," Uncle Charlie said.

He took a long red roman candle and went to the fire.

"You all watch now," he said, "I'm gonna hold it like I was aiming to shoot the gate."

Charlie runs into the dark and let's the candle shoot balls of fire, then he gets Othal to join him in a roman candle battle.  Full disclosure:  I once did something similar with my cousin, although in summer, not winter.  We used plastic tubes from his golf bag to launch bottle rockets at each other.  We didn't even have the excuse of alcohol, we were just young and dumb.

Anyway, you get the flavor of the celebration.  Firecrackers going off, then roman candles being fired at each other in close range.  Then when those are exhausted and everyone's tired of running around and through the house:

Uncle Charlie was not ready for the fun to be over.  He went up the steps and across the front porch.  Aunt Niece was standing in the door, with the lamplight behind her.  He lifted her chin with his fingers and went on past her, to the chimney corner where he kept his double-barreled shotgun.  Then he came out with the gun under his arm and a box of shells in his hand.

Near the fire, he loaded both barrels and set the stock against his shoulder.

"You aiming at the gate?" Othal asked.

"You got to aim at something."

He fired, and after the first blast we heard shot rattle against the gate.

"Got it first shot," Othal said, and ran for his own gun.

In no time at all, five guns were blazing away at the gate, and the little children were running for hiding places under the house.  I shivered at the sound, but felt safe, for their backs were to us and they were aiming at the gate.

Then Othal came running around the house, loading and firing as he ran, and some of the others took after him.  The women had run inside, but I could hear them telling the men to stop.  Too scared to stay under the house, I crawled out and started for the door.  In the darkness I can straight into Otha's knees, and he let a double-barreled blast go off right over my head, leaving a burning flash in my eyes and a ringing in my ears.

The gate was "a wide, heavy gate made of oak timbers fourteen feet long and an inch thick."  However, the next morning:  "We went to look at the gate, and found it half hanging from the posts, with the timbers drilled and splintered by shot."  The story ends this way:

Uncle Charlie came in with a backstick for the fireplace.  My grandmother was waiting for him.

"You ruint the gate," she said.

"I reckon we did."

He laughed and the light in his blue eyes showed he was not sorry.  She frowned and went out to the front porch.

Aunt Niece came in, with a peeled orange in her hand.

"Christmas gift," he said to her.

She went up to him and stuck a slice of orange between his teeth.  They were both laughing without making a sound, and once he leaned over and kissed her.

"I had me some Christmas," he said.

Not so long ago, that story.  It wasn't just in the 1800's that Christmas was a lot different.  But I cite it because this is precisely the celebration of Christmas the Puritans despised.  And frankly, when Christmas Day is spent either in the glow of unbridled lust (wanting goods is as lustful as wanting sexual congress), or the afterglow of "Now what?", I think we could do with a bit more of a raucous Christmas celebration.  Sometimes I think we vanquished the Puritans, and still the Puritans won.

The interesting thing about Christmas in America is that it's always been a glorious bastard, a jackdaw of a project grabbing "Christmas trees" from Germany (related to the "Paradeisbaum" of the medieval German morality plays) and decking the halls and boar's heads and feasting from England (which may or may not be related to, or even influenced by, Druidic practices. It's always seemed like a bit of a stretch to me to go from kissing under the mistletoe directly back to Frazer's "golden bough"). Carols were a medieval creation coming, per Restad, from pagan folk dances that people liked and simply "Christianized" (like most things, the Church couldn't beat 'em, so it joined 'em), although many of the carols we know today are products of the 18th and 19th centuries (so it goes). The idea of caroling, IOW, is much older than most of our carols. As Restad points out, Christmas in America was cobbled together from European bits and pieces, and the parts that fit in America stuck, and the parts that didn't fell away.

We forget, too, that America initially had no holidays. Europe had them because of the church, which was universal throughout the different countries of Europe, and because of local customs. But without a universal church, or established local customs, America went, for almost a century, without any national holiday which all citizens could claim as their own. Ironically, again, that holiday became Christmas; but not because all Americans were, or were even presumed to be, Christians.

Stephen Nissenbaum argues that the American Christmas was formed more by Clement Clark Moore's poem than any other single source. Accepting his position arguendo, what is most notable about "The Night Before Christmas" is that it creates a holiday and the celebration of it, without ever getting closer to religion than the word "Christmas" (which the Puritan New Englanders despised as a "Romish" word, but which, by Moore's day, had lost almost all religious connotation). This was more a feature than a bug in the 19th century. Dicken's Christmas Carol comes closer to invoking the religious reasons for the season, but he does it mostly in terms of Victorian sentimentality, than in terms of any church doctrine. Penne Restad points out that Christmas was grabbed onto by merchants in America almost as soon as it emerged as a public celebration. The emergence of the holiday coincided with a renewed interest in the power and importance of domesticity, an interest probably prompted by the Industrial Revolution and the quick acceptance by Americans of the ideals of the Romantic movement (especially the importance of children as children). Personally, I think it was a combination of Romanticism and the Pietistic movement of the 17th century, which effects lingered long in a Protestant dominated culture, but Restad makes clear the connections between the desires for domestic values and the importance of a uniting holiday, one everyone could gather into despite cultural ("Germany" as we know it, for example, didn't exist in the 19th century. We often overlook how many cultural differences there were between Europeans, differences that carried over into America) and doctrinal differences. In this sense, Christmas was the first truly "American" holiday. Grafted onto European roots, without doubt; but made a holiday both observant Christians and non-Christians (and yes, there were some, even in the 19th century!) could engage in. It's not at all insignificant that Christmas in America began almost as a religious observance almost anyone could join, and quickly became a public holiday everyone could revel in. And aside from the Puritan's objections to the holiday's Catholic roots, it was the revelry they objected to almost as much.





Where were we then? Oh, yes: Christmas has always been two things at once, especially in America. It's never been a particularly religious holiday, so much as it's been a holiday named for and celebrated around a religious observance (which is still more honored in the breach than in the keeping). Christmas became, almost as soon as it was universally celebrated, a celebration of hearth and home, of domesticity (to this day, does a Christmas tree remind you first of Rockefeller Center, or of your childhood home?) Restad shows us that the Christmas tree itself became an American custom because it came with stories of German families gathered around a small tree on a table top, revealed in all its decorations and offerings of presents by the parents to the excited children. It was the American twist that the tree got bigger and bigger until it had to scrape whatever ceiling it was placed under from the floor on which it had to sit. Some things truly never change.

And I have to add here:  that's a problem in its own right, though probably not the one you are thinking of right now:

In their comprehension of poverty and its solutions, most Americans moved little beyond Dickens. They believed their Christmas generosity praiseworthy. Charles Dudley Warner thought the present American Christmas to be "fuller of real charity and brotherly love, and nearer the Divine intention" than earlier Christmases. The New York Tribune found the holiday "hearty and generous-minded, [full of] good-cheer and open-handed hospitality." "Nowhere in Christendom," it contended, "are the poor remembered at Christmas-tide so generously as they are in American cities, especially in our own."

In this show of self-congratulation, Americans persisted in seeing poor relief as a matter of individual action to be undertaken on much the same terms as gift-giving within the circle of family. That is, Christmas was the time to give. The best and largest gifts went to those closest to the circle's center. The lesser gifts, in descending order of value, went out to relatives and acquaintances of decreasing importance. The worthy poor, as the outermost members of the larger community family, received gifts too, though the least valuable of all the gifts given.

Penne L. Restad, Christmas in America, p. 139, 140

Perhaps I should explain who the "worthy poor" were:

A sense that there were those who were worthy of relief and those who were not qualified the attention devoted to poverty relief [after the Civil War], though. Children almost always deserved aid, as did honest women. Seldom did the same plea go out for men. A seasonal article on the New York Tribune implored the public to provide for poor children. In 1877, it reminded readers that most Americans were "Christian people," and advised them to try their best to keep children from being deprived at this time "when they think that all good gifts and gladness come straight from Him whose birthday it is." At the same time, the paper advised the sympathetic to ignore plain street beggars.

As Restad notes:

The sentimentalization of "worthy paupers" at Christmas time, whether in fact or in fiction, did not bring into question the essential structure of the market economy that had, if only indirectly, produced their poverty. Instead, it imbued destitute women and vagabond children with admirable qualities that existed apart from materialism, perhaps even as substitues for tangible wealth. It also aroused the sympathies of readers by giving a face to poverty, and placed the means of solving the problems of hunger and homelessness in the hands of individuals.(p. 135)

I've learned to look to history for lessons in how we got here, and to understand culture as a genetic inheritance (metaphorically speaking) almost as pre-determined as eye color or gender. we think what we think and act the way we act in part because of who our ancestors were, and what they passed on as important and valuable. The "worthy poor" is an interesting category, especially at this season of the year, when even the most unbelieving among us is encouraged to reflect on the lessons of the man who grew up from the Christchild. Well, perhaps lessons is not the right word. As Bob Cratchit puts it to his wife, speaking of his youngest son:

"Somehow he gets thoughtful sitting by himself so much, and thinks the strangest things you ever heard. He told me, coming home, that he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see."

We don't, after all, want to be reminded that Jesus never put a faith test before someone before Jesus would speak to them, and the one time it is recorded that he did, the Syro-Phoenician woman rebukes him quite accurately. We still prefer our Jesus be more like us, and to start him up from childhood that way, every new year.

I'm well aware of the John Cheever story  about Christmas being a sad season for the poor. First it crossed my mind as just a good post title; then I reflected on how much it represents that American ideal that individual actions can alleviate poverty for the "worthy poor." I can't think of a story that illustrates that better than Cheever's. It's not really a question of generosity, even, because that question gets down to the issue of ownership in the first place. Restad notes in her history of Christmas in America that it was the affluence and abundance produced after the Civil War that led people to think of widening the circle of their gift-giving, to begin to include at all the "worthy poor." Hard to condemn such compassion, and any critique of it looks just like that: condemnation. But there were other voices, even in the 19th century, even in America:

People nowadays interchange gifts and favors out of friendship, but buying and selling is considered absolutely inconsistent with the mutual benevolence which should prevail between citizens and the sense of community of interest which supports our social system. According to our ideas, buying and selling is essentially anti-social in all its tendencies. It is an education in self-seeking at the expense of others, and no society whose citizens are trained in such a school can possibly rise above a very low grade of civilization
-- Edward Bellamy

The ultimate aim of production is not production of goods but the production of free human beings associated with one another on terms of equality.
-- John Dewey

I confess that I am not charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other's heels, which form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable lot of human beings
-- John Stuart Mill

The gross national product includes air pollution and advertising for cigarettes, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors, and jails for the people who break them ... It does not allow for the health of our families, the quality of thier education, or the joy of their play.
-- Robert F. Kennedy

We must recognize that we can't solve our problems now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power....[What is required is] a radical restructuring of the architecture of American society.
-- Martin Luther King, Jr

There was a story about a Christmas yard display in Detroit that was too political for some of the neighbors. And generally that's our line on Christmas: we want to reserve it "for the children," and of course, that's still how we think of the "worthy poor," as children. Hard to think of men as children, so they get excluded from the "worthy poor" very easily. We also don't like quotes like those above associated with our Christmas revels. Fair enough. But perhaps even at Christmas we could look again at the ideas of scarcity and abundance, and consider again whether charity really means merely scraping the crumbs off our tables, or if it means something more.

Christmas is a sad season for the poor; but that doesn't mean it has to be; or that our charity has to be based on sorrow, either.

So is our Christmas ruined by all this commercialism? Depends on whether or not you agree with Linus about "what Christmas is all about." I like his answer, personally. But that's the answer for some of us; it isn't, and doesn't have to be, the answer for all of us. Let it be unto you according to your...well, faith, is how the German E&R Church concluded that blessing. But this isn't necessarily a matter of faith. So let it be unto you according to your best interest. Keep Christmas as it best suits you. And may it be a blessing unto you. Now, and into the ages.