The Battle for Christmas (25 page)

Most Philadelphia shopkeepers emphasized the variety of gifts they had in stock and—in a tacit acknowledgment of the hardness of the times—the wide range of prices for which they could be bought. A jeweler made the point as well as anyone: He had rings as costly as $25 each, but also as cheap as 25 cents (the same was true of his earrings, breast pins, gold and silver pencil cases, and so on). This jeweler even offered violins for sale—at anywhere from “$i to $40.”
¹²

Businessmen went to great lengths to persuade Philadelphians to visit their shops. Beginning with the 1840 Christmas season, a fierce competition developed among the city’s confectioners, who devised the idea of baking immense cakes that would be displayed in their shop windows on December 23—“mammoth cakes,” they were termed. Customers could purchase pieces of the cake to take home. One of these cakes weighed in at 250 pounds; another was twice that size. The following year the stakes went up: One confectioner titled his ad “L
ARGE AND
E
XTRA MAMMOTH
F
RUIT
C
AKE—NEARLY
1000
POUNDS
.”
¹³
Another confectioner concluded his ad with a verse:

Confectioners also created an even more widespread fad: caramelized sugar and chocolate molded into a variety of improbable shapes, and crafted to appear real. One report, from Philadelphia, referred to lavish Christmas displays of candied “mutton chops, sausages, boiled lobsters, pieces of bacon, cabbages, carrots, loaves of bread, &c. all made of sugar, and colored to the life.”
¹⁴
More common shapes included various kinds of animals as well as oversize insects such as beetles, spiders, and—for some reason these were a special favorite—cockroaches.

There is a paradox here. Christmas presents were almost by definition luxury items—and luxuries are the first things that people give up when times are hard. But there was also another side to the same coin, a countervailing impulse that made many people vulnerable to splurging at Christmas, even in hard times. Businessmen knew that Christmas was the one time of the year when people had long expected to buy and consume things they did not need, even if they could not really afford to. A New York newspaper, the
Herald
, had played on this point two years earlier, when the depression was just coming on. Despite the state of the economy (what the writer of one article coyly termed “the rumored hardness of the times”), Christmas presents were readily available, and everyone should purchase something—at the very least, a present for the “one being that they love.” Forget the depression for a little while, this writer counseled: “Who is there, that is not ground into the very dust by biting poverty, that would hesitate, at this hallowed season, to bestow a souvenir upon this one beloved object—this cherished flower of affection?”
¹⁵
This writer was well aware of how vulnerable his readers were to the call for spending even beyond their means “at this hallowed season.”

It was potent fuel. Christmas had long been a special ritual time when the ordinary rules of behavior were upended. It was a time when people let strange things happen to their sense of what was acceptable behavior,
their sense of limits. Christmas was (and still is) a time to let go of ordinary psychological restraints, to shift into an inner state in which it became possible to do what was otherwise unthinkable. What made that sort of indulgence objectively possible in an agricultural society was, as we have seen, the cycle of the seasons, in which December was a time of leisure and a season of plenty—plenty of food and drink. It was a time when consumption—overconsumption—was expected. It was a time to gorge on the best food and drink—not just bread and beer but “cakes and ale.” It was a time to splurge, until the hard freeze of winter, and with it the constraints of ordinary existence, set in once again.

For many people living in America (and Western Europe) in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, that seasonal rhythm was less powerfully imposed, less all-defining, than it had once been. Urbanization and capitalism were liberating people from the constraints of an agricultural cycle and making larger quantities of goods available for more extended periods of time. But that change was very recent; and memories of the behavioral rhythms of the old seasonal cycle were still fresh. Late December was still associated with letting go, with splurging, with overindulgence in luxuries that were hardly available at all during the rest of the year.

In early-nineteenth-century America, however, Christmas had to contend with another countervailing force. This had to do not with seasonal rhythms but with cultural predisposition. Most Americans of the Jacksonian period were predisposed to distrust luxury and excess. Even where buying luxury goods was economically possible, it was ideologically suspect. During and after the War for Independence, Americans had been taught that indulging in luxury was frivolous—that it was a vice associated with the decadent aristocratic nations of Europe. The American Republic had to be more abstemious than that if it was to survive and prosper. Buying luxury goods amounted, therefore, almost to a subversive political act, the kind of small gesture that could jeopardize the future health of the Republic. Consumer capitalism and civic virtue were not commonly associated with each other in early-nineteenth-century America.

Once again, Christmas came to the rescue. For this was one time of the year when the lingering reluctance of middle-class Americans to purchase frivolous gifts for their children was overwhelmed by their equally lingering predisposition to abandon ordinary behavioral constraints. Christmas helped intensify and legitimize a commercial kind of consumerism.

Producers and merchants were not slow to grasp these connections. They recognized that it was possible to exploit the season by offering a
plethora of “fancy” goods, luxury items of precisely the kind that few people were willing to purchase at any other time of the year: books, toys, jewelry and fancy clothes, candy and cake. After all, one of the defining characteristics of an effective Christmas present was that it
was
a luxury, not something that satisfied a practical need. As Horace Greeley put it in an 1846 editorial, a Christmas gift should never be “a matter of homely necessity.”

A commercial Christmas thus emerged in tandem with the commercial economy itself, and the two were mutually reinforcing. On the one hand, the new economy made possible that now-familiar development—the commercialization of Christmas. On the other, Christmas itself served to fuel the general process of commercialization. It was the thin end of the wedge by which many Americans became enmeshed in the more self-indulgent aspects of consumer spending. (To be sure, it has recently become clear that the “consumer revolution” was actually a long process, one whose beginnings historians now place back in the colonial period, even before the American Revolution.
¹⁶
But the process accelerated sharply around the beginning of the nineteenth century.) Christmas was used to lubricate the “demand side” of a dynamic commercializing economy. Much as Christmas alcohol helped release one sort of ordinarily forbidden behavior, so Christmas advertising helped release another sort. In this way Christmas became a crucial means of legitimizing the penetration of consumerist behavior into American society.

As it happened, publishers and booksellers were the shock troops in exploiting—and developing—a Christmas trade. And books were on the cutting edge of a commercial Christmas, making up more than half of the earliest items advertised as Christmas gifts. (The very first commercial Christmas gift I have encountered was the almanac that Martha Ballard’s son-in-law received from one of his acquaintances. See
Chapter 1
.) In fact, even before books were actually labeled as Christmas presents in the newspapers, they were being marketed for that purpose.

Mason Locke Weems (“Parson” Weems), a bookseller and writer who is remembered today for inventing the legend of young George Washington and the cherry tree, distributed his own books as Christmas presents in 1810—including the popular biography of Washington in
which the cherry tree story first appeared. That year he advertised that he would offer a deep discount to buyers “who take several copies of Washington and Marion [another biography] for Christmas Boxes to their young relations.”
¹⁷

Even in New England, and as early as 1783, the publisher Isaiah Thomas inserted on Christmas Day in his Worcester, Massachusetts, newspaper an ad titled “Books for little Masters and Misses, proper for
NEW YEAR’S GIFTS
.” A year later Thomas ran a similar ad, headed “
CHILDREN’S BOOKS
…. Very proper for parents &c. to present to their children as New-years gifts, &c.” (He inserted these ads on December 25, probably because the term “New Year’s” covered the two holidays together.)
¹⁸
Then, in 1789, Thomas went a step further: He published a little children’s book,
Nurse Truelove’s Christmas Box
(“Christmas box” was a term for a Christmas gift). The text of this book actually concluded with a promise from “Nurse Truelove” herself—she was something of a cross between Mother Goose and Santa Claus—“to make a present of another book by way of
New Years Gift
, (which will be published soon after
Christmas)
.” As a parting shot, “Nurse Truelove” added an explicit ad for Isaiah Thomas’s Worcester bookshop: “In the mean time, if you should want any other little Books, pray send to Mr.
Thomas’s
, where you may have the following” (what followed was a list of children’s books that Isaiah Thomas had on hand). Thomas was using the special associations of the Christmas season with luxury spending to get children (and their parents) into his shop.
¹⁹

It was in the 1820s that publishers began to cultivate the Christmas trade in a systematic fashion. In 1826, for example, the Boston booksellers Munroe and Francis printed a special Christmas flyer—207 children’s books, ranging in price from
6¼
cents to 40 cents each. Two years later the same booksellers circulated another flyer; this one was headed “Christmas and New-Year … Presents for the Coming Season.” Four densely printed pages in length, it listed the better part of a thousand items.
²⁰

But it was not just by heavy advertising that the book trade acted as the shock troops of a commercial Christmas during the 1820s. The most important step it took in that direction was to invent a new kind of product, in the form of a new literary genre that was specifically linked to the Christmas season. The genre was the “Gift Book”—a mixed anthology of poetry, stories, essays, and (frequently) pictures. Gift Books were always published at the very end of the year, just in time for sale as Christmas
presents. Whenever one of them sold well, a new number bearing the same title would be brought out a year later (giving rise to an alternative name for the genre, “literary annuals”).

Gift Books first appeared in Europe at the beginning of the decade and were taken up in the United States in 1825, when the Philadelphia publishers Carey & Lea brought out
The Atlantic Souvenir
. The preface to this volume defined the new genre as a specific combination of sentiment, season, and content:

Of course, the genre had no more suggested itself “naturally” than was the practice of buying Christmas presents really an “old custom.” Still, within a very few years American Gift Books had proliferated wildly. And their proliferation followed a clear pattern, one that was unprecedented in the history of American publishing. Gift Books were available at every price range and for every conceivable market—demographic, religious, political, and cultural. Some Gift Books consisted entirely of poetry; others were humorous
(The Comic Annual)
. There were Gift Books for children (in fact, for boys and girls separately), young men, mothers, Jacksonian Democrats, proponents of temperance and abolitionism, even members of men’s clubs
{The Masonic Offering
and
The Odd Fellows’ Offering)
. In other words, publishers had managed to divide the market for Gift Books into highly specialized niches—identified by class, age, ideology, and cultural temperament. They had managed to achieve an astonishing degree of what modern economists now refer to as
market segmentation
.

And an equally high degree of market
penetration
. From the time they were introduced in 1825, Gift Books were sold in almost every corner of the nation and advertised in newspapers throughout the American hinterland. What was especially remarkable about this market penetration was the way it was organized: Virtually every American Gift Book was published in one of only three places, in the cities of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. And this was in an era when the publication of other kinds of books was still being carried out on a strikingly decentralized basis. (In fact, books were often printed in towns so small that nowadays they would not even support a local newspaper.)
²¹
Gift Books had a nationwide distribution that was based on a highly centralized mode of production.
Here again, they were on the cutting edge of economic change in the United States.