The Battle for Christmas (46 page)

In other words, it was not the
poverty
of the South’s black population that chiefly unsettled the New York newspaper writer. What really bothered him was the potential consequences of that poverty—consequences that might even involve racial violence. Southern whites were filled with “vague apprehension” about what might happen; for their part, the region’s black population was making demands—“demands that yield not to reason.” Those unreasonable demands were for social and economic justice. And the effect was a dark uncertainty: “Neither side knows what is coming. The blacks will not accept freedom as a substitute for food, and the whites are fearful of the excesses to which famine-stricken ignorance not seldom yields.”

It was Christmas that underlined this grim situation. Not only had Christmas been a time of charity and generosity on the part of white people in the slave South, it had also been a season of special joy for the slaves themselves—a time when the “bond of sympathy” between the races was most evident. The picture of harmonious Christmases under slavery offered an instructive contrast to the present state of things:

It may seem insensitive for a Northern newspaper to argue that former slaveholders in the South required more sympathy than did unemployed workers in the North. And even that insensitivity might seem to pale in the face of the paper’s cynical use of Christmas as a way of pointing out the social benefits of slavery to black people. Still, this Northern newspaper was not alone in noting that the Christmas season was a time of special resonance in the slave South. For decades, Southerners themselves
had been doing the same thing, and they would continue to do so for several decades more. And what makes the point even more striking is that it was made by black as well as white Southerners.

Many African-Americans wrote about their experience of Christmas under slavery, and it is difficult to avoid sensing the importance they attached to this holiday in clarifying what they had to say about slavery itself. Three of the best-known individuals who had been raised as slaves chose to focus an entire chapter of their autobiographies on a discussion of Christmas. Writing from very different positions on the ideological spectrum, both Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington described Christmas under slavery as an occasion on which slaveholders systematically degraded African-Americans by encouraging them to get drunk. And Harriet Jacobs, in her fictionalized autobiography,
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
, poignantly described a Christmas she spent as a fugitive hiding in the crawl space of a house in Edenton, North Carolina, trying to evade an owner who desired to make her his concubine.

The fact that slaves themselves took their Christmas experiences so seriously suggests that we might, too. Indeed, by exploring the meaning of this holiday in a slave society, we can deepen our understanding of what happened when a familiar set of rituals were practiced under conditions of
extreme
inequality. For these rituals do turn out to be familiar, though they emerged from the very different world of early-modern Europe. The examination of Christmas rituals in a slave society therefore provides an intriguing lens through which we can view similar rituals in the peasant cultures of European society. It allows us to see more clearly how Christmas rituals there, too, could serve as underpinning for enormous inequalities of power and wealth. It brings us, in a sense, full circle from the place where we began.

When we think of Christmas in the Old South we commonly think of elegant dinners and romantic plantation balls. Just as Washington Irving’s evocative stories about Christmas on the fictional English estate at Bracebridge Hall helped define the image of a traditional Christmas for generations of Americans, so, too, did scores of postbellum Southerners write nostalgically of what Christmas had once been like in old Dixie. Several Southern writers actually used Irving’s sketches as their models. One even
attempted to convey the flavor of a typical Christmas dinner in colonial Virginia by quoting
verbatim
a passage from Irvings picture of Christmas dinner at Bracebridge Hall!
²

The romantic associations of Christmas in old Dixie are misleading not only because they usually ignore the experience of the slaves but also because they misrepresent the experience of white people. Like the inhabitants of early-modern Europe, or of any agricultural society in a nontropical climate, planters in the antebellum American South took late December as their major season of heavy eating, boisterous drinking, and letting off steam. The harvest was complete, there was relatively little work to be done, and plenty to eat and drink. Once again, the parallels to Washington Irving are telling. Irving’s account of Christmas at Bracebridge Hall, like the myth of Christmas in old Dixie, retained the drinking; but the drunkenness was gone. The elaborate paternalist rituals of the gift exchange remained, but the aggressive stepping out of ordinary behavioral bounds and social roles had been forgotten. Wassailing was preserved, but it had been transformed from a rowdy begging ritual into jolly songs of goodwill.

But Christmas meant carnival in the antebellum South. As early as 1823 a rural white Southerner attacked the Christmas season for being a “general scene of dissipation and idleness.” Some folk spent the time making “rough jokes.” “Apprentice boys and little negroes” fired guns and crackers. And everyone—“parents, children, servants, old, young, white, black, and yellow”—drank hard. “And if you inquire what it is all for, no earthly reason is assigned …, except this, ‘Why man! It is Christmas.’”
³

At the time, everybody commented on how much Southern whites drank during the Christmas season. Northern visitors (especially those of a temperance bent) were particularly offended by it. One of them claimed that “[sjudden calls for the doctor to attend cases of delirium tremens … were numerous during Christmas.” But Southerners reported it themselves, in diaries, letters, and newspapers. It is clear that people—women among them—commonly began drinking at breakfast. Amanda Edmonds of western Virginia did so year after year in the late 1850s and 186os. In 1861 the first thing she did in the morning was to have “a joyful eggnog drink—I really got tight. The first signs of Christmas that I’ve seen.” Nor was the drinking restricted to adults, as one Northerner reported: “The good cheer of the occasion descended almost to dissipation, and I, unaccustomed to the conviviality that prevailed, looked on with apprehension, when egg-nog, punch, and toddy were freely served to the children.”
⁴

The drinking was still going on in Norfolk, Virginia, in the 1870s, where the local newspaper regularly commented on the number of arrests made for disorderly conduct on December 25. Part of the reason was that alcohol (and food) was being served gratis, in an unmistakable example of the “open house” long expected of British landlords and tavern keepers at Christmas. Even the local newspaper was offended: “The various barrooms and restaurants in the city treated their customers to egg-nog, apple toddy, lunch, &c.”

The alcohol did its usual work, releasing the inner spring of ordinary behavioral constraint. “During the entire day crowds of men and boys paraded the streets—the former drinking at every bar they saw, and the latter firing crackers and torpedoes and blowing those inevitable horns.”
⁵
Noise-making was another essential ingredient of the Southern white Christmas, especially the firing of guns (and firecrackers, their symbolic representations). As early as 1773 one visitor recorded in his diary that “I was waked this morning by Guns fired all around the House.” Two generations later, the practice was still so common that the young Robert E. Lee was able to allude to it when asking a recently married woman friend a rather personal question about her wedding night: “Did you go off well like a torpedo cracker on Christmas morning?”
⁶

The noise-making and the drinking were part of a larger picture, in which normal behavior was forgotten and normal social relationships were turned on their heads. Young women like Amanda Edmonds were permitted to step outside their gender roles and get drunk first thing in the morning; and young men were permitted to step outside their age roles and act as if they dominated space ordinarily allotted to their elders. This is how one Southerner described the scene in 1868:

The writer may not have realized this, but less than a century earlier the British would have given it another name: They would have called it wassailing.

William Nevison Blow, whose family had been the major landowners in an isolated county of antebellum Virginia, remembered from his boyhood the way Christmas transformed virtually every social relationship. The holiday would begin on Christmas Eve, with the preparation and consumption of eggnog. Then, at midnight, the boy would hear the sudden eruption of gunfire from every direction, and the responsive howling of many dogs. Soon “the [entire] County is awake and Christmas has come.” Christmas Day itself would begin with early-morning eggnog and culminate in a semidrunken fox hunt. This was no ordinary fox hunt but a promiscuous episode of misrule that attracted men and boys from the entire county—rich and poor, white and black: “the word Christmas is a talisman that levels all barriers.”

The fox was all but irrelevant to this hunt. The hunters, perhaps 100 in all, along with their 200-odd dogs, constituted a collective mob of noisy revelers, “yelping, howling, shouting, singing and laughing.” By midafternoon the exhausted participants would conclude the hunt and begin the first of an extended series of Christmas dinners that would go on for two full weeks. Each day was structured like the first—a hunt followed by a dinner, each accompanied by alcohol. But with every passing day the leveling process was taken even further. On the second day of Christmas, some of the fox hunters, instead of returning to their homes, would spend the night at the house where they had taken their dinner. Then, the next morning, that group would leave together “to continue the hunt, dine, sleep and dance with another member of the hunt and move on, so that at the end of a week they have visited half a dozen neighbors and find themselves twenty miles from home.” What resulted was a generalized open house that obliterated the boundaries of individual families and reconstituted the entire county as a single vast household.
⁸

As in the North, such practices came under scrutiny, though less sharply. By the 1840s, and probably earlier, the Southern-plantation gentry had begun to reform their Christmas customs—to replace open houses with more exclusive parties for invited guests. But even among the gentry this change was slow and imperfect. Susan Dabney Smedes, the daughter of a Mississippi planter, remembered that her family’s plantation house “was crowded with guests, young people and older ones too,” and that “no one in the neighborhood invited company for Christmas Day, as, for years, everybody was expected at Burleigh [plantation] on that day.” But it is not wholly clear whom Smedes meant by the word “everybody,” since she quickly added that her father held a second party as well, this one intended specifically for the lower orders: “On one of the nights during the
holidays it was his custom to invite his former overseers and other
plain neighbors
to an eggnog-party [emphasis added].”

In fact, Mr. Dabney used the preparation of the eggnog as a ritualized display of paternalist condescension: “In the concoction of this beverage he took a hand himself, and the freedom and ease of the company, as they saw the master of the house beating his half of the eggs in the great China bowl, made it a pleasant scene [even] for those who cared nothing for the eggnog.”
⁹
Here was a quintessential ritual of Christmas social inversion, where the “master of the house” graciously makes a symbolic gesture of deference to his dependents: by inviting them into his house; by publicly helping to prepare the food he serves them; and by offering them a dish that was lavish, rich, and special. (Besides getting people drunk, eggnog was a luxury item, a blend of special ingredients—whiskey, eggs, sugar, and fresh cream.) We shall encounter another instance of the highly formalized preparation of eggnog, and for the same ritual purpose—although the recipients of that ritual will not be white.

The resemblance between Christmas in the antebellum South and Christmas in early-modern Europe is clear enough. Present in both cases is the same carnival atmosphere, the intense (and extended) season of public revelry, the lifting of ordinary behavioral constraints, the stepping out of ordinary roles in the social hierarchy, the face-to-face giving of presents by the high-in-status to their poorer dependents. But there is one striking difference between Christmas in these two societies: In the antebellum South, the axis along which all these holiday rituals were practiced was, above all, that of
race
.