The Battle for Christmas (30 page)

What is it?
“They [the children] are delighted [with your gifts]—but do explain the use of Bessy’s present from Aunt Kitty—we none of us know.”
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Useless trifles
. (It was Catharine Sedgwick who usually made this point.) “The children had their usual harvest of… dolls, tea-sets[,] soldiers, horses, & furniture of every description—every useless thing….”
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Hint, hint
. “If you are at a loss for something to bring Sara you may get her a copy of’Drake’s Poems.’ I see them advertised, & I heard her express a wish for it. But perhaps you have thought of something else. I only mention this lest you be at a loss.”
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Keeping accounts straight
. “Will you tell your mother I gave $2.50 for the port-folio, & $3.25 for the ring[,] Vs for the candy so that I have of the $8, 2.04 subject to her order. I can’t send your acc’t for the knives were bo’t by my agent & he has not rendered it but the expenditure will not exceed the am’t you sent. Your candy is ⅛.”
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Guess who gets to do the shopping?
Here Catharine Sedgwick is writing to her sister Frances Watson: “I meant to have written you a longer letter, but Robert has just given me some money to buy toys for the children & you know what an arduous affair that is.”
⁷⁸
And here is Catharine Sedgwick writing to her niece Kate: “I had enough to do buying my own presents & your Aunt Lizzy’s for our own bevy—the Sedgwicks, the Wares, Eben’s wife, &c.—but it is worth some trouble to light up a smile of pleasure even if it be as transient as the moment that gives it birth.”
⁷⁹
And Jane Sedgwick writing to Catharine Sedgwick with a request for help: “I will divide with you the N[ew] Years gifts to Roderick’s children to the amount of $3 if you will take the trouble to get things.”
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Finally, here in a single letter are seven different problems, some familiar, some new. The letter was written in 1830 by Catharine Sedgwick to accompany (and to explain) the gifts she was exchanging that year with the Lenox branch of the family (I have numbered and named each of the problems as they cropped up). 1.
Not what she asked for:
“Your friend Joseph got the music for me but he made a mistake in the Swiss Waltz & I hope will change it in time….” 2.
Did it arrive in time?
“Do let me know if you rec’d. your merino in time for Albany.” 3.
Dont open it before you’re supposed to:
“I hope you will not open your little N[ew] Year matters till 1831.” 4.
Already has improbably:
“Nelson I know is one of Charley’s heroes, but I am afraid he already has the book. If so let me know it, & send it to the library at S[tockbrid]ge.” 5.
Implicit apology for conventional presents:
“I got the cravat for your father because I know he partie[ularl]y likes black cravats of no. 1 quality—& what can be more appropriate to your mother who is the very personification of modesty—the queen of all the bees—than a work-basket.” 6.
Be careful opening it:
“You must unpack the basket carefully, or you will break the sugar toy: there is some of Mrs. S’s
candy at the bottom for you & Charley.” And 7.
What do you do with it?
“The beautiful toy which your Aunt E. sends to you & Charley you will have to
study out
. The figures must be placed in the little blocks Scbro’t on the scene according to the book….”
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E
NOUGH
, then. It is time to ask what we can make of all this. Clearly, things had come a long way in a very short time. One change was economic: It is difficult to imagine any of this happening even a couple of decades earlier, because before the early 1800s there were few commercial children’s toys available for purchase in the United States. The other change was psychological: Surely the Sedgwick children had always been loved, but until 1820 they had not been indulged during the holidays (nor presumably at any other time). Indeed, Catharine Sedgwick expressed lingering ambivalence about the new treatment through the 1820s and even beyond; that was why she described most of the 1833 presents as “every useless thing,” with the exception of “some such solid articles as an umbrella to Ell’, & solid books of solid History.” That was also the meaning of her little homily about the decay of the wax doll.

Taken by itself, the experience of the Sedgwick family would be merely provocative. This was, after all, just a single family, and a prosperous one at that. But the Sedgwicks’ collective experience mirrors exactly the pattern that we have seen in the data provided by urban newspaper advertisements and the history of the book trade. The key decade for the Sedgwicks was the 1820s, and especially the years from 1825 to 1829. At the beginning of the decade, the holiday season meant, at most, festive semi-public dinners in which children might participate (this feasting is reminiscent of what had been happening in the Ballard family of rural Maine only a few years earlier). At the end of the decade, the typical Sedgwick Christmas entailed an elaborate set of rituals, centered on giving lavish purchased gifts to the children of the family. These rituals were part of a new world of consumerism, a world that had hardly existed before but which had now sprung up with sudden urgency. To read a letter describing any one of the Sedgwick Christmas holidays after 1825 is to read a letter that might have been written in our own time.

It was the figure of Santa Claus that permitted the Sedgwicks, and many other Americans, to enter the world of commercial gift-giving so quickly and completely. As early as the mid-1820S, Santa Claus was beginning to be employed to sell Christmas goods. The first such usage I have encountered comes from the proprietor of a New York jewelry shop, in the form of an advertising flyer composed in elaborate verse form. The scene is set on Christmas Eve (shops were generally open then, and often on the morning of Christmas Day itself). The narrator is a prospective customer seeking a present for a lady friend:

But it was during the early 1840s that Santa Claus became a common commercial icon, a figure used by merchants to attract the attention of children to particular shops. Santa Claus was barely twenty years old by then, and he had been a figure of national scope for fewer than fifteen years. In fact, the first popular visual image of Santa Claus was published in 1841, in a New York paper. But in 1842 that very picture was appropriated by a shop in Albany, which used it as part of a newspaper advertisement. The picture, in double column, was labeled “Santa-Claus in the act of descending a chimney to fill the children’s stockings, after supplying himself with fancy articles … at Pease’s Great Variety Store, No. 50 Broadway, Albany.” Three years later the same picture was being used to accompany the ad of a confectioner’s in Cincinnati.
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Santa Claus, 1841
. This handsome woodcut, from 1841, was the first visual representation of St. Nicholas to be widely distributed (an earlier picture had appeared in 1830 in the
Troy Sentinel
, the same newspaper in which Clement Moore’s poem first appeared).
Brother Jonathan
, into whose chimney this Santa is about to descend, was a weekly New York paper. According to the caption, the scene is set on New Year’s Eve.
(Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society)

Back in 1841, a shopkeeper in Philadelphia managed to attract thousands of children to his shop by adding a life-size model of Santa Claus that was apparently based on that same picture. One newspaper reported the delight this figure caused among youthful passersby:

Another local paper fleshed out the picture, noting that “his hand [was] full of toys and his face covered with a broad smile—just that benevolent expression that those who love children ever wear.” In fact, the figure was so lifelike that “no lad who sees it, will ever after accuse pa or ma of being the Kriss-Kringle who filled his stocking. That such a person exists will be most indelibly fixed upon their memories.”
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Commercial Santa
. In 1842, just a year after the publication of the woodcut shown opposite, the picture was appropriated for commercial purposes by an Albany merchant named Pease, whose name and address have been added to the bottom of the sack of toys that Santa is carrying on his back (at right, above). Two years later, a newspaper in Cincinnati carried a redrawn version of the same picture (at left), which was printed sideways simply because the merchant in question had paid for only a single-columned advertisement. The text of his advertisement read, in part: “Come at last! Important Arrival. The little people of this big city will doubtless be rejoiced to learn that the sterling old Dutchman, Santa Claus, has just arrived from the renowned regions of the Manhattoes, with his usual annual budget of Nick-Nacks for the Christmas Times. Look upon his back and shoulders, and you will get some idea of the curiosities and niceties that he has brought out this year; and in addition to all these, he has some altogether superior, hidden in his wallet, not to be seen till day before Christmas. The old gentleman has taken up his head-quarters this year at
LOUDERBECK’S
, on 4th street, between Main and Sycamore…”
(Both illustrations: courtesy, American Antiquarian Society)

Accusing Pa or Ma of being Kriss Kringle! From the beginning, it seems, parents found it difficult to convince their children that it was truly Santa Claus who brought their presents. But what matters just as much is that (then as now) they found it necessary to work so hard to do just that. What was it that made the pretense so important? Why did parents need to pretend that Santa Claus was real, and to deny that the presents really came from family members themselves? The answer is that Santa Claus had an extraordinary ability (in spite of his early commercialization) to disguise the fact that most of the presents he brought were commodity productions.

Like other Americans, writers, editors, and advertisers in the second quarter of the nineteenth century liked to pretend, or even believe (as most Americans nowadays continue to do), that Santa Claus represented an old-fashioned Christmas, a ritual so old that it was, in essence,
beyond
history, and thus outside the commercial marketplace.

We now know that this was mostly a myth, and that Santa Claus was all but invented in the early nineteenth century (and that the world of seventeenth-century Holland in which he had previously appeared was itself prosperous and highly commercialized). But the very people who chose to adopt the Santa Claus ritual, from the 1820s on, were willing to believe that he was a figure of great antiquity, and that in introducing him into their own households they were carrying on an authentic, ancient, and unchanging Dutch folk tradition. That was what they read, year after year, in the newspapers and magazines. Such people knew in one way, of course, that Santa Claus was not real. But in another way they did believe in his reality—his reality as a figure who stood above mere history. In that sense, it was adults who needed to believe in Santa Claus.