The Battle for Christmas (6 page)

Finally, even closer to the center of New England popular culture, there is the eighteenth-century song that can almost be regarded as the first American national anthem. “Yankee Doodle” was not a single song but a variable cluster of verses, all composed in a meter that could be sung to a version of the still-familiar tune. What all the verses have in common is that they are about backcountry manners.
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(Most of these verses are unknown today, but all are written in the same meter, the meter of the line
Yankee Doodle goes to town, riding on his pony.)
Several of the verses dealt with sexual antics:

A number of “Yankee Doodle” verses refer to such seasonal events as election day or cornhusking (a “frolic” at which “[t]hey’ll be some as drunk as sots”).
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One of these seasonal verses is about Christmas. “Christmas is a coming Boys,” the verse begins:

And the verse continues by shifting from alcohol to sex:

Cotton Mather himself could not have stated the issue more tellingly.

Christmas was becoming respectable, too. Even orthodox Congregationalists were beginning to concede that the observance of Christmas would be rendered less obnoxious if the holiday were celebrated with piety and moderation, purged of its seasonal excesses. The first New England clergyman to make such a concession, at least implicitly, may have been Cotton Mather himself. In his 1712 anti-Christmas sermon Mather paid only token attention to the purely theological arguments against the holiday—that it was man-made and not divinely ordained.
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“I do not now dispute,” Mather said, “whether People do well to Observe such an
Uninstituted Festival
at all, or no.” And he continued with a statement that shows how far he had moved from a position of strident Puritanism: “Good Men may love one another, and may treat one another with a most Candid Charity, while he
that Regardeth a Day, Regardeth it unto the Lord
, and he that
Regardeth not the Day
, also shows his
Regard unto the Lord
, in his
not Regarding
of it…”
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In other words, live and let live: On the issue of observing Christmas, there was room for legitimate differences among people of goodwill.

What Mather went on to emphasize was the
manner
in which Christmas was commonly observed—as a time of drunken revels and lascivious behavior.
(That
was “a thing, that there can be
no doubt
about.”) Cotton Mather’s father, Increase, would have readily agreed with his son’s angry warning about the bad things that went on at Christmas. But he would never have gone along with Cotton Mather’s idea that it was possible for good Christians to differ in “candid charity” about observing the holiday at all. For Increase Mather, as for other seventeenth-century Puritans, the licentious fashion in which Christmas was commonly practiced was just an intrinsic expression of its non-Christian origin as a seasonal celebration; the holiday was “riotous” at its very core. For Cotton Mather, writing a generation later in the early eighteenth century, the essence of the holiday could be distinguished, at least in principle, from its historical origins and the ordinary manner of its celebration.

From a modern perspective, the difference between Mather
pere
and
Mather
fils
may seem trivial. The young people whom Cotton Mather addressed in 1712 may not have noticed the difference themselves. But it mattered nonetheless. Cotton Mathers concession, small as it was, left little room to contest the legitimacy of any movement that managed to purify Christmas of its seasonal excesses. And such a movement was not long in coming about.

Signs of change began to emerge in about 1730. Once again, some of the best evidence comes from almanacs. In 1733 James Franklin printed the following couplet on his almanac’s December page: “Now drink good Liquor, but not so, / That thou canst neither stand nor go.” Of course, the most famous of all eighteenth-century American almanac-makers was James Franklins younger brother Benjamin. Raised in New England (and trained as a printer by James), Benjamin Franklin became the century’s preeminent exponent of moderation, sobriety, and self-control. In 1734, in the second number of his almanac,
Poor Richard
, Franklin applied that philosophy to the Christmas season. The December verse, written in the voice of “Poor” Richard Saunders’s wife, Bridget, chastised a husband who “for sake of Drink neglects his Trade, / And spends each Night in Taverns till ’tis late.” But on the same page, in an interlineation placed at the dates December 23–29, Franklin made it clear enough (in a rhymed but characteristically Franklinesque piece of advice) that he was no hater of Christmas: “If you wou’d have Guests merry with your Cheer, / Be so yourself, or so at least appear.” And similarly in 1739: “O blessed Season! lov’d by Saints and Sinners, / For long Devotions, or for longer Dinners.”
⁴⁹

The emphasis on
temperate
mirth intensified at mid-century, when Nathanael Ames (New England’s most popular almanac-maker) began to mix calls for charity and cheer with admonitions against excess. In 1752 Ames offered his first warning: “Bad times, Dull-Drink and clouded Minds make heavy, listless, idle bodies.” And in the 1760s similar warnings came thick and fast. Ames’s verse for December 1760 was a warning against getting drunk. His 1761 almanac included a similar piece of advice: “The temperate man enjoys the most delight, / For riot dulls and palls the appetite.” And in 1763: “The temperate Man nor ever over feeds / His cramm’d Desires with more than Nature needs.” In 1764 dietary strictures actually took over Ames’s entire almanac, constituting the subject matter for the accompanying material in all twelve months of the year.
⁵⁰

What Benjamin Franklin and Nathanael Ames were calling for was a Christmas that combined mirth and moderation. Both of these men were shopkeepers—versatile, thrifty, and self-made.
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What they were trying to do was actually similar to what the Puritans had done a century
earlier: to restructure people’s work habits by having them do away with periodic binges. But unlike the Puritans, their strategy did not entail the elimination of Christmas. Instead, they were spreading the idea—a new idea—that Christmas could be a time of cheer without also being a time of excess.

The single best personal account of what such a “moderate” Christmas season may have been like can be found in the diary of Martha Ballard, the Maine midwife whose social world has been painstakingly and brilliantly reconstructed by the historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. For twenty-six years, between the ages of 50 and 76, Martha Ballard recorded her daily activities as wife, mother, midwife, and resident of the Maine community of Hallowell. During the twenty-six years between 1785 and 1811, Ballard chose seven times in her diary to name December 25 as
Christmas
. In six other years, she had reason to omit such a reference: She was occupied in delivering someone’s baby; December 25 was just another working day for her.

But Martha Ballard’s diary also makes it clear that December 25 was just another working day in
any
case, even when she was not delivering babies—and even when she named the day as Christmas. In 1788, for example, Martha’s husband, Ephraim, was away from home on business; Martha herself stayed home, finishing “a pair of Stockins” for one of her daughters. In 1807 (“it is Chrismas day”), she noted laconically, “I have done a fortnit’s wash.” And on December 25, 1811, the final Christmas of her life, the 76-year-old woman reported simply: “I have done hous wk Se knit Some.”
⁵²

The younger generation in Hallowell observed Christmas more actively than Martha Ballard herself did. In 1801 Martha reported nothing special for herself on December 25, but she wrote that her two unmarried children celebrated the day in the company of two members of the opposite sex: “Ephm & Patty kept Christmas at Son Lambards, his partnr [was] Polly Farewell [and] hers [was] Cyrus.”
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(Sure enough, a couple of years later Ephraim Ballard, Jr. and Polly Farwell got married.) Some years earlier, two of the Ballards’ young live-in servants likewise took Christmas as an opportunity for courtship: On December 23, 1794, “Dolly & Sally went to a daunce [dance] at mr Capins, were atended by a mr Lambart and White.” (The previous day they had prepared for this event by purchasing at the local shop “a pair Shoes & other things.”) But
Martha Ballard quickly reasserted her control over this frolicsome pair: On Christmas Day itself, she reported, “Dolly & Sally have washt, Scourd my puter & washt the Kitchen.”
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Christmas may have been a time of work for Martha Ballard, but what is equally striking is how often that work involved the preparation of special meals for the season. It is on this very point that her diary is most revealing. On December 24, 1788: “Dan’l Bolton & his wife Dined here, we made some mins Pies.” Three years later, Ballard spent the entire week from December 21 to December 27 staying at the home of one Mrs. Lithgow, a young woman who was waiting to deliver her first baby (which would be born on Christmas Day itself). But on December 23, the pregnant woman and her midwife turned to other tasks: “I helped mrs Lithgow make Cake & Pies….” On December 31, 1802, New Year’s Eve, Martha was at home and “made pumpkin and apple pies.” A year later she recorded that her son Jonathan (together with his wife, Sally, and their six children) dined at their parents’ house on “puding and roast spare rib.”
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On two occasions Martha Ballard actually went shopping for her New Year’s dinner, and she recorded her purchases in such detail as to make it clear that she was planning to cook a special holiday meal. On December 31, 1791, she shopped in three places and came home with what are unmistakably the ingredients for special cakes and pies: almost ten pounds of sugar, one pound of raisins, a pound of ginger, “2 half muggs,” and a pint and a half of rum. And in 1808 Ballard reported on December 28 that her husband went shopping for almost the same ingredients: “[M]r. Ballard went to the Settlement, brot home 1 gl’n Molases,
½
[gallon] N E rhum,
¼
do Ginger,
¼
lb Allspice, a bottle of Slolens Elxr.” Ballard spent the next two days cooking with what were almost certainly these very items: “I Bakt mins pies” on December 29; and on December 30: “I have Bakt Mins and Apple Pies….” (On New Year’s Day she reported, “Sons Jona, Ephm & wife Supt with us …
at home. Childn here…
.”)
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We can probably assume that the family consumed at least part of what Ballard—she was then in her mid-seventies—had spent the previous two days preparing for them.

During Martha Ballard’s old age, such feasts may have been occasions of reconciliation within this family (as Laurel Ulrich has shown, the Ballards had gone through a period of intergenerational alienation and conflict). It appears that in the last five years of their mother’s life, Martha’s children began to bring her New Year’s presents—presents that invariably took the form of special food for the dinners in which they themselves partook. It was in 1807 that this ritual seems to have taken
place for the first time: “Son Ephm made us a present of
12½
lb Beef, Son Town [a present] of a fine Goos & 2 wings; they both sleep here [in other words, they stayed to eat].”
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A year later the ritual was repeated, and this time Martha concluded her entry for the day with a clear expression of her own reaction: “Jan. 1, 1808: Son Lambard Conducted his wife and Henry to See me … they made me a present of a Loin of muttun, Some Sugar, Butter and Bread. Son Ephms wife Came here, Jona[than’]s wife also. She brot me 2 Pumkin pies. O happy has this year began and So may it proceead….”
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On at least one occasion during this period, Martha appears to have reciprocated. On December 23, 1808, she “bak’t apple & Squash pies & brown bread,” and sent a couple of the pies to one of her daughters, along with “a Stake of fresh Pork.”
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What Martha Ballard’s entries make strikingly clear is that for the Ballard family the celebration of the Christmas season was deeply embedded in the normal rhythms of seasonal activity. In any traditional rural society, late December was ordinarily the time when animals were slaughtered, when there was food and drink aplenty and (for men, at least) the opportunity to relax after the labors of the harvest. Martha Ballard and her neighbors might very well have been baking “mins pies” at this time even if there were no special holidays to mark the occasion. A supply of mince pies, if properly stored, would last through much of the winter. Even the “presents” (of food) that her children brought her after 1806 were part of a normal, ongoing exchange of goods and services that characterized life in communities of this sort.

There was nothing about those presents that marked any real departure from the ordinary dynamics of life in Hallowell. Above all, the presents were not intrinsically commercial. The goose, beef, and mutton, the bread and butter, the pumpkin pies—these were nothing more than the things that Hallowell families raised or produced in the normal course of events. Only the special ingredients that went into making cakes and pies—the sugar, ginger, allspice, and rum—involved a commercial transaction. But this suggests only that Martha Ballard’s Hallowell community had links to the broader Atlantic world and was not some isolated backwater whose economy operated at a level of subsistence production.