The Battle for Christmas (38 page)

Of course, Mr. and Mrs. Selwyn are plotting a surprise: “They had been planning a Christmas celebration a few evenings before, and they thought of following the German custom in making it a surprise, by keeping the preparations a secret.” They have made their preparations in the drawing room, which is ordinarily kept locked and off-limits to the children (who therefore “had no suspicion of the treat their kind parents had in store for them”). Young Mary is “a little disappointed that her mother had said nothing about a party, but she consoled herself by counting how many presents she expected to get.”
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Christmas Day brings Mary one disappointment after another. The family goes through its standard rituals, but none of these yields a single present. First, Mary tries an old game: “Before sunrise …, Mary and her brothers were up and dressed, and ran into their parents’ room, to catch them by calling out ‘Christmas gift’—knowing that, according to the old custom, if they could say it before their parents, they were entitled to a present.” This tactic fails to produce any results. Later that morning, the family goes to visit their grandfathers country estate, “where they always dined on Christmas day.” But on their arrival the children are once again disappointed—“there were no presents on the table.” Again they console themselves, this time with the thought that “they would get them after dinner,” and again they are disappointed. At last, toward evening, the family sets out for home. On the way, “little Mary … burst into tears,” sobbing that she had “‘never spent such a dull Christmas in her life…. Christmas is almost over, and I have not had a single present to-day.’” Finally, Mr. Selwyn chimes in: “‘I am sorry, my daughter, to see that you have so little fortitude in bearing disappointment.’” He gently but firmly expresses disappointment in her behavior: “‘every effort that has been made by your kind relatives, to amuse you and make you happy, has been entirely lost, merely because you could not have every wish gratified.’”
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That is the bad news. The good news begins as soon as the Selwyns reach their own house. Now the children are told to dress up. They are led to the parlor, where they are delighted to find “a little party of their young friends, who had been invited by Mrs. Selwyn.” The children play party games (these include “Chair of Criticism,” “Cross Questions and Silly Answers,” and “Ladies’ Toilet”). It is in the midst of these that the denouement is reached. Mr. Selwyn asks the children to come with him to the drawing room. The scene is just what we have come to expect: a Christmas tree.

The trick has worked. By evening’s end little Mary Selwyn has experienced the most delightful Christmas of her young life—and she has been taught an important lesson at the same time. The key, even more than the Christmas tree itself, is the element of surprise that accompanies it. The Selwyns, we are told, were “following the German custom in making it a surprise, by keeping the preparations a secret.” (It is indeed the case, in Christmas-tree references from the 1820s and 1830s, both in stories set in America and in reports from Germany, that Christmas trees are invariably set up in a room that is normally off-limits to the children—the library, the parlor, or, as here, the drawing room.
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)

In real life, obviously, the surprise factor would be effective only once or twice; after that, the children would surely catch on. But even after the surprise was gone, the ritual would retain a lingering utility: It would continue to keep virtually total control of the gift exchange in the hands of the parents—control of the time and place, and of the knowledge of how many gifts there would be and what they were. Frequently, permission for the children to enter the till-then secret room is signified by the ringing of a bell (in one instance, the children cannot enter until the third time the bell is rung!).

In this 1836 story, we might say, the Christmas-tree ritual was explicitly represented as a tactic by which the parents might seize total control of the gift exchange. The main part of the tale consists of a series of disappointments for its little “anti-heroine”—moments at which her expected presents do not appear. The first of these moments is especially striking. It is when the children “catch” their parents “by calling out ‘Christmas gift’—knowing that, according to the old custom, if they
could
say it before their parents, they were entitled to a present.”
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(This is a ritual we will encounter again in
Chapter 7
, where it will be performed by slaves in the antebellum South.) But now the old ritual leads to nothing. It is only at the very end of the day, after several more such disappointments (and when the children have ceased to expect anything at all) that the carefully orchestrated surprise of the Christmas tree is sprung.

The difference between the ritual of crying out “Christmas gift” and that of waiting for the “Christmas tree” is the difference between children playing the role of active agents in the gift exchange and their assuming the passive role of silent, grateful recipients. The Christmas-tree ritual, as it was introduced to American reading public, was designed to render children completely passive participants in the process. (Just so, as we will see in the next chapter, were new rituals of Christmas charity designed to make poor people themselves passive recipients of largesse.)

The Christmas-tree ritual had another lingering effect. That effect was a hidden one—hidden, I suspect, even among those who had adopted the ritual. It was to manipulate children’s behavior, perhaps even their feelings, in a new way. At the end of the story we have just examined, “The Christmas Tree,” there is a kind of explanatory epilogue in which the father, Mr. Selwyn, places his new ritual in historical context. When he himself was a child, Mr. Selwyn tells his children,

A generation earlier, in other words, it would have been easy to deal with a girl ilke little Mary Selwyn; if her parents were trying to teach her a lesson, she would have received her just desserts from the Belsnickle. But Mr. and Mrs. Selwyn are just as interested in their daughter’s inner life as they are in her actual behavior. They want her to learn how to control even her selfish expectations. (Mr. Selwyn tells her at the very end that “‘you ought to submit with cheerfulness to your situation’”—to “submit” rather than to nag; and to do so “with cheerfulness.”) They want her to be truly, spontaneously grateful. Not only is young Mary to make no demands for presents, she is not even supposed to harbor any
desire
to receive them.

As a practical matter, of course, that was impossible. What was possible was only concealment. Stories like “The Christmas Tree,” if
they were actually put into practice, secretly encouraged children to behave hypocritically—to pretend they didn’t know or care what their parents were really planning. Ultimately, the effect of such stories was to encourage children to deny (even to themselves) their own selfish feelings, or else to feel guilty about having them. Children were being encouraged to feign, first to their parents and then to themselves, both selfless indifference and spontaneous joy; to act as if they enjoyed their presents only because they were expressions of love—because they were “affections gift.”

Beginning in about 1840, yet another kind of Christmas story began to appear. This kind of story was about children who were already perfect in the Romantic, Pestalozzian sense, children who did not need to be taught a lesson about selflessness because they were utterly unselfish by nature.
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At the very least, these children were willing, even eager, to sacrifice their own Christmas gifts to make other children (or even grown-ups) happy. On occasion they were willing, even eager, to sacrifice their very lives. Perhaps the best-known of these stories is Louisa May Alcott’s classic novel
Little Women
(1868). This book opens with an extended Christmas sequence in which the four young title characters voluntarily give their Christmas presents to an impoverished neighboring family.
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Louisa May Alcott herself was the daughter of Bronson Alcott, the radical Pestalozzian Transcendentalist—and a man who had raised his children in the Pestalozzian fashion.

Little Women
was of course a tremendous best-seller, but by the time it was published in 1868 these issues (along with the Christmas tree itself) had thoroughly permeated middle-class American culture. But as it happens, another associate of Bronson Alcott’s had addressed a wide audience on similar matters a full generation earlier. This was Margaret Fuller, the first great female American intellectual figure. Back in 1835, Fuller had assisted Alcott in running his radical Temple School, and it was she who actually wrote the controversial 1836 book,
Conversations with Children, On the Gospels
, that had caused so many conservative Unitarians (including Harriet Martineau) to take offense. Fuller had also been among the very first American intellectuals to devote serious study to German language and philosophy.
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In 1844 Margaret Fuller was living in New York and trying to support
herself by writing for Horace Greeley’s successful new newspaper, the
New York Tribune
. It was she who authored the Christmas editorial that appeared in the
Tribune
on December 25, 1844, an editorial read by thousands of people. Fuller wrote:

Here Fuller retold two German Christmas legends. The first was about “St. Hermann Joseph,” a lovely child who one day offered an apple to a church sculpture of the Virgin and child—and the sculpted young Jesus “put forth its hand and took the apple.” From that time forth, “little Hermann” took every gift he received and carried it “to the same place. He needed nothing for himself; but dedicated all his childish goods to the altar.” The second legend was about “the holy Rupert,” a young prince who gave away his possessions whenever he saw a suffering child. One cold day Prince Rupert gives away his coat, stops and falls asleep on the road home, and has a dream. (He dreams of a mild old man who bathes a group of children in a river and then places them “on a beautiful island, where they looked white and glorious as little angels.” One of these children turns out to be little Jesus, who is wearing the coat that Rupert had given him.) Upon waking, Rupert takes ill from having stayed out in the cold without a coat. He dies, and at last he is able to join the band of little children he has helped.

Margaret Fuller acknowledged that these stories were legends—Catholic legends, at that—but she insisted that they were useful, good legends, and Protestants should not reject them. “The thought of Jesus, as a child, has great weight with children who have learned to think of him
at all.” That is, the child Jesus can become a model for modern children. “In earlier days, the little saints thought they imitated the Emanuel by giving apples and coats [i.e., like Hermann and Rupert]; but we know not why, in our age, that esteems itself so enlightened, they should not become also the givers of spiritual gifts….” If children were taken seriously (and educated properly) at home, they could save the world. If they were not, the fault lay in the parents:

Margaret Fuller spent part of her own Christmas Day that year visiting the inmates of the city’s asylum for deaf and dumb children. The experience, she reported three days later, was one of personal “edification and delight.” The children at the asylum put on a theatrical performance for the visitors, a performance that demonstrated that they were capable of expressing intense and authentic emotion. Fuller wrote: “It was gratifying to see the faces of so many children of eternal silence radiate with intelligence, and evincing a knowledge and elevation of sentiment which it would seem impossible, thus benighted, to acquire.”
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