The Battle for Christmas (70 page)

UMass has also helped by sending me students from whom I have learned. I always like to teach what I’m studying about, and this project was no exception. In what I hope (and believe) was a mutually beneficial arrangement, many of the students in my three Christmas seminars, both
undergraduates and graduates, in the process of fulfilling their own course requirements unearthed material that found its way into this book. These students include Wesley Borucki, Shelley Freitag, Richard Gassan, Carrie Giard, Kevin Gilbert, Bill Hodkinson, Susan Ouellette, and Melissa Vbgel; as well as Patrick Breen and Sandra D. Hayslette (at The College of William and Mary). To these and other students I owe a gargantuan debt.

And also to colleagues. Writing this book has reaffirmed my faith that a community of scholarly inquiry does indeed exist. In the process of pursuing their own projects, other scholars have occasionally come across Christmas materials, and when they became aware of my project these scholars were generous in giving or sending me the citations—unsolicited mail I was always overjoyed to receive. These colleagues include Robert Arner, Burton Bledstein, Richard D. Brown, Martha Burns, Milton Cantor, Barbara Charles, Patricia Crain, John Engstrom, William Freehling, David Glassberg, Jayne Gordon, Charles Hanson, Barry Levy, Conrad Wright, and Ron and Mary Zboray. Finally there is Dale Cockrell of William and Mary’s Music Department, who has been doing splendidly exciting work along a parallel track (I look forward to his forthcoming book on blackface minstrelsy). Helpful ideas came from Burt Bledstein, Dick Brown, Sue Marchand, and Michael Winship. It was my mother, Claire Willner Nissenbaum, who named for me the meter in which Clement Moore composed “A Visit from St. Nicholas;” her scrupulous concern for and delight in language have affected me even more than she may know.

Other colleagues did other forms of service. Ronald P. Formisano, James A. Henretta, and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich wrote letters that helped me receive the fellowship support which made it possible for me to write this book. James Henretta also brought this project to the attention of Jane N. Garrett, who became my editor at Knopf. I thank all of these people for their early faith, and I thank Jane for her great and continuing enthusiasm; I am proud to be counted among her authors. And speaking of Knopf, let me also thank two painstaking proofreaders, Eleanor Mikucki and Teddy Rosenbaum, and, most of all, Melvin Rosenthal, whose unerring eye and endless patience have made this book more accurate as well as more readable.

It is the mark of a good friend to be willing to say critical things. Christopher Clark and Robert A. Gross, who read my draft manuscript in its entirety, were such good friends (they also happen to be remarkably good historians). Chris Clark persuaded me to redo
Chapter 6
—and
showed me how. Bob Gross has been on intimate terms with this project from the beginning, and a trusted and valued friend for much, much longer. (It was Bob, loyal as always, who first suggested the possibility of my going to William and Mary for a year.) R. Jackson Wilson made several characteristically shrewd (and simple) suggestions when this book was in its formative stages. Jack has been true for more than thirty years. I will never attain the purity of his literary style, but I value his friendship even more. Finally, although David Tebaldi has never read a word of this manuscript, his presence informs it nonetheless. As executive director of the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities (which I once served as president), David has been a tireless example to the people of Massachusetts—and to me personally—of how scholars and non-scholars together can confront intellectually serious issues. Like Jack Wilson, Bob Gross, and my old collaborator Paul Boyer, David Tebaldi has been a model for my most important commitment as a writer and teacher: that complex ideas do not need to be expressed in complicated language.

Dona Brown knows more than I do about history and other things that matter. It was she, at the very beginning, who helped me see how “The Night Before Christmas” played a complex riff on the larger ritual of the carnival Christmas, and she who continued at each step to make better sense of what I was thinking (even though she invariably insisted that she was simply repeating what I had just said). All the while, she made sure I used the writing of this book as a way to keep exploring my own sense of what it means to be Jewish. Dona, you are my muse, and my darling.