The Battle for Christmas (56 page)

One way to help clarify that point is to look for living expressions of carnival here in the present—not in hidden corners of our society but right where we encounter it in our ordinary lives. Are we really prepared to romanticize carnival behavior when it disturbs our own sense of civility or our personal privacy? It is one thing to lament the suppression of wassail, the Wren Boys, or John Canoe, but it may be quite another to feel comfortable with the aggressive begging that has returned to our cities and towns or with the deliberately offensive speech and manners of middle-class young people who are busy probing and transgressing the limits of acceptable behavior. The blues may be an expression of modern carnival, but so is the sound of young men—whether black or white—driving slowly down city streets with boom boxes blaring from open car windows. And for those of us who happen to reside in academic communities, so is the sound of postexamination festivities at the nearby fraternity house.

It is intriguing to force ourselves to think of such
Animal House
celebrations as modern carnival, or even as a latter-day form of street theater, youthful mockery directed in part at the workaday adult world whose privileges and burdens present-day young people are uncertain whether to envy or fear. And it is useful to force ourselves to think of those young people—at least the ones who attend high school or college—as the modern equivalent of peasants and apprentices, the “children and servants” who once “went abroad nights” in late December. There is something more than a purely symbolic connection linking the two groups. Students, more than any other members of middle-class society, live by a task-oriented seasonal rhythm marked, just toward the end of the calendar year, by a period of intense labor (not bringing in the harvest but studying for final exams); and that in turn is followed, just at Christmas, by an extended period of strenuous release and aggressive leisure. But to recognize that connection with the past does not make the
Animal House
scenario more endearing.

So it will not do to think there is a usable line, whether historical or aesthetic, dividing invented traditions from real ones. But neither does this mean that we cannot and need not make judgments. If this book has argued, on the one hand, that traditions are constantly changing and that
the domestic Christmas idyll is surprisingly new, it has also argued that most of the problems we face at Christmas today—the greedy materialism, the jaded consumerism, the deliberate manipulation not only of goods but also of private desires and personal relationships into purchasable commodities—are surprisingly old. They date, in fact, to the emergence of the domestic Christmas itself. And they were being publicly debated, and lamented, as early as the 1830s.

This, too, is difficult to accept. It is natural to believe that the issues we face today are new ones—issues of unprecedented complexity the likes of which have never been encountered. The problems we associate with Christmas, in particular’—the loss of authenticity, the decline of pure domestic felicity into an exhausting and often frustrating round of shopping for the perfect gifts—are the very problems we most easily associate with the facts of modern economic life, with advanced technologies of production and marketing. Even people who fervently believe in market capitalism sometimes blame it for cheapening Christmas. But what this book has suggested is that there never was a time when Christmas existed as an unsullied domestic idyll, immune to the taint of commercialism. It has argued that the domestic Christmas was the commercial Christmas—commercial from its earliest stages, commercial at its very core. Indeed, the domestic Christmas was itself a force in the spread of consumer capitalism.

That may be the case because domesticity and capitalism themselves, “family values” and accumulative, competitive ones, have been deeply interlinked from the very beginning, even when they have appeared to represent alternative modes of feeling (or seemed to be in conflict with each other). For there is that other kind of “Christmas blues,” the middle-class blues that bespeak our disappointment in the family itself for its failure to provide the yearned-for intimacy that is its especial role and trust at Christmas. But to fulfill that role, to satisfy that yearning, how much finally depends—at both ends of the gift exchange—on the selection of just the right presents! As purchasers, how often do we end by using money as a substitute for what we fear is insufficient thoughtfulness and sensitivity?—by deciding, at the end of a lengthy shopping excursion, to buy expensive presents for our loved ones simply because we cannot think of that one simple gift that would be modest in price but perfectly intimate in effect.

It is just this circumstance that may help to explain why, in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, such rituals as Santa Claus and the Christmas tree (or stockings or gift wrapping) took such rapid and profound hold on the imagination of those who created a new domestic
Christmas. Perhaps the very speed and intensity with which those essentially new rituals were claimed as timeless traditions shows how powerful was the need to keep the relationship between family life and a commercial economy hidden from view—to protect children (and adults, too) from understanding something troublesome about the world they were making. In our own time, a century and a half later, that protection may be an indulgence we can no longer afford.

1.
James H. Barnett,
The American Christmas: A Study in National Culture
(New York: Macmillan, 1954), 19–20; Edward Everett Hale, “Christmas in Boston,”
The New England Magazine
n.s., I (1889), 356–357; Francis X. Weiser,
The Christmas Book
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1952), 48–49. See also Hale’s autobiography,
A New England Boyhood
(New York, 1893), 117. The idea that Christmas was universally rejected by the Puritans, and that it was not practiced in New England until the nineteenth century, has been casually accepted in virtually all the relevant scholarship. This is even true of the best article on the subject: Ivor Debenham Spencer, “Christmas, the Upstart,” in
New England Quarterly
8 (1935), 356–383. See also Katherine van Etten Lyford, “The Victory of the Christmas Keepers,”
Yankee
(Dec. 1964), 76–77, 102–105; and Katherine Lambert Richards,
How Christmas Came to the Sunday-Schools: The Observance of Christmas in the Protestant Church Schools of the United States
(New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1934). A recent and notable exception is Richard P. Gildrie,
The Profane, the Civil, and the Godly: The Reformation of Manners in Orthodox New England, 1679–1749
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994).

2.
Increase Mather,
A Testimony against Several Prophane and Superstitious Customs, Now Practiced by Some in New-England
(London, 1687), 35.

3.
An Anglican minister in northern England, writing as early as 1725, acknowledged the pagan origins of these practices. Yule logs and candles, for example, were for pagans “an Emblem of the Sun, and the lengthening of Days,” and they originated in an effort “to Illuminate the House, and turn the Night into Day.” But he speculated that it became associated with the Nativity for Christian reasons—“a Symbol of that Light which was that Night born into the World.” He argues that light has been associated with many things, and that one of these is that it has become “an emblem … of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Henry Bourne,
Antiquitates Vulgares
(Newcastle, 1725), 127, 128, 130, 134. The best account of the non-Christian origins of Christmas rituals remains Clement A. Miles,
Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan
(London, 1912; reissued as
Christmas Customs and Traditions: Their History and Significance
(New York: Dover Publications, 1976), 159–360 passim.

4. Miles,
Christmas Customs and Traditions
, 173–174. According to the Reverend Henry Bourne, many in England and Scotland continued the season as late as Candlemas (Feb. 2). Bourne,
Antiquitates Vulgares
, 156.

5.
See, for example, John Ashton,
A Right Merrie Christmasse: The Story of Christ-Tide
(London and New York, 1894), 6–8, 45, 246–250. The situation was similar in colonial America; see Barnett,
The American Christmas
, 9, 11.

6.
I. Mather,
Testimony
, 25. For perspectives on the world of carnival, see Peter Burke,
Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe
(New York: Harper and Row, 1978), 199–203; Mikhail Bakhtin,
Rabelais and His World
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968); and Peter Stallybrass and Allon White,
The Politics and Poetics of Transgression
(London: Methuen, 1986), 171–190.

7.
Ashton,
Right Merrie Christmasse
, 125–126.

8.
I. Mather,
Testimony
, 36; Cotton Mather,
Grace Defended: A Censure on the Ungodliness, By Which the Glorious Grace of God, Is Too Commonly Abused
(Boston, 1712), 20. Increase Mather cited earlier authorities to confirm his point: “‘[T]he Feast of Christ’s nativity is attended with such profaneness, as that it deserves the name of Saturn’s Mass, or of Bacchus his Mass, or if you will, the Devil’s Mass, rather than to have the holy name of Christ put upon it.’” William Perkins argued that “the Feast of Christ’s Nativity (commonly so called) is not spent in praising God, but in Revelling, Dicing, Carding, Masking, Mumming, and in all licentious Liberty for the most part, as though it were some Heathenish Feast of Ceres or Bacchus.” (I. Mather,
Testimony
, 36.) For the Puritan war on Christmas in England, see Chris Durston, “Lords of Misrule: The Puritan War on Christmas, 1642–60,”
History Today
35 (Dec. 1985), 7–14; and David Underdown,
Revel, Riot, and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 160J-1660
(1985), 256–268. See also Gavin Weightman and Steve Humphries,
Christmas Past
(London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1987), 38–53.

9.
Bourne,
Antiquitates Vulgares, x
(“scandal”), 153–154, 156 (40 days of Christmas drinking), 147–149 (mumming), 139–141 (caroling).

10.
For various inversion rituals, see John Brand,
Observations on the Popular Antiquities of Great Britain
(rev. by Sir Henry Ellis, 3 vols., London, 1849), I, 7–28, 415–531 passim; Ashton,
Right Merrie Christmasse
, passim; W. Carew Hazlitt,
Faiths and Folklore of the British Isles, A Descriptive and Historical Dictionary
(2 vols., 1905), I, 68–71, 119–125; II, 392–393, 437–438, 619–620.

11.
I. Mather,
Testimony
, 35.

12.
François Maximilien Misson,
Travels in England
, quoted in Hazlitt,
Faiths and Folklore
, 120–121, and in Brand,
Popular Antiquities
, I, 495. Misson added: “In the taverns the landlord gives [i.e., gives away, for free] part of what is eaten and drank in his house that and the next two days: for instance, they reckon [charge] you for the wine, and tell you there is nothing to pay for bread, nor for your slice of Westphalia [ham].” See also a 1570 account in Barnabe Googe, “The Popish Kingdom,” quoted in Brand,
Popular Antiquities
, 1, 13.

13.
Robert Herrick,
Hesperides
(London, 1648); quoted in Brand,
Popular Antiquities
, I, 71–471; also Ashton,
Right Merrie Christmasse
, 75.

14.
To add a touch of sexual banter, the song opens with a demand that the “prettiest maid” [i.e., maiden] in the house “roll back the pin … [and] let us all in.” One version of the “Gloucestershire Wassail” is in Brand,
Popular Antiquities
, I, 7–8. A recorded version of this song, performed in the appropriate spirit, can be found on the album
The Second Nowell: A Pageant of Mid-Winter Carols
, vol. 2 (John Roberts, Tony Barrand et al.), Front Hall Records.

15.
Ashton,
Right Merrie Christmasse
, 225 (“invited into the house”). For the Scottish version of wassailing, called Hagmena (or Hogomany), see Ashton,
Right Merrie Christmasse
, 217.

16. See Burke,
Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe
, 199–203; Natalie Zemon Davis, “The Reasons of Misrule: Youth Groups and Charivaris in Sixteenth-Century France,” in Natalie Zemon Davis,
Society and Culture in Early Modern France
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), 97–123.

17.
Money
, Dec. 1991, 82.

18.
Ashton,
Right Merrie Christmasse
, 34–35.

19.
John Taylor,
The Complaint of Christmas
, quoted in Durston, “Lords of Misrule,” 11.

20.
Ashton,
Right Merrie Christmasse
, 27 (1644 law), 34–37 (popular resistance to the suppression).

21.
David D. Hall,
Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgement: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England
(New York: Knopf, 1989), 10.

22.
William Bradford,
Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620–1647
(New York: Knopf, 1952), 97.

23.
For examples of occasional instances of the emergence of popular customs (including a citation to the first instance of Christmas disorder to be examined below), see Hall,
Worlds of Wonder
, 210–211.

24.
For a fine account of Marblehead maritime culture, including a subsequent conflict over the celebration of Christmas, see Christine Leigh Heyrman,
Commerce and Culture: The Maritime Communities of Colonial Massachusetts, 1690–1750
(New York, W. W. Norton: 1984), 216–302.

25.
Records and Files of the Quarterly Courts of Essex County
(8 vols., Salem, 1911–1921), II, 433. Hoar’s age is from ibid., IX, 208. William Hoar’s occupation as a fisherman is ibid., VI, 401.

26.
The Hoar clan’s activities are reported ibid., VII, 43–55, 81, 181–183. For a modern account, see Barbara Ritter Dailey, “‘Where Thieves Break Through and Steal’: John Hale Versus Dorcas Hoar, 1672–1692,” in
Historical Collections of the Essex Institute
, vol. 128 (1992), 255–269.