The taming of Christmas
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THE PURITANS of early Massachusetts had no use for Christmas. "Whosoever shall be found observing any such day as Christmas or the like," declared the General Court in 1659, "either by forbearing of labor, feasting or any other way . . . shall pay for every such offense five shillings, as a fine to the county."
The law lasted on the books for 22 years, and resistance to the holiday continued for a century longer, until Puritanism evolved into a less rigid creed. That transformation is extensively documented, but it is less well known that Christmas itself changed in ways that made it more broadly acceptable to people in Massachusetts and nationwide.
This year, as economic anxieties dampen the festival of good cheer and consumerism that modern America has come to know, it is intriguing to remember how much Christmas evolved to fit the changing circumstances of the time.
The Massachusetts Puritans, eager to stamp out this behavior, made sure that Dec. 25 was an ordinary day. Their yearly almanacs noted that courts were in session and other business was conducted. But the spirit of disorder could not be contained, as Cotton Mather, the famous Puritan clergyman, noted in 1711: "I hear of a number of young people of both sexes, belonging, many of them, to my flock who have had on the Christmas night this last week a Frolick, a revelling feast, and Ball."
By 1750, Anglicans and members of other less rigorous denominations had moved into Massachusetts. The almanacs referred to Dec. 25 as Christmas, and young people began to mimic the riotous behavior of their English cousins on a more elaborate scale. Wealthy Bostonian Samuel Breck reported on the depredations of the Anticks, masked revelers who forced their way into homes - wassailing without the music. "The only way to get rid of them," he wrote, "was to give them money and listen patiently to a foolish dialogue between two or more of them."
Nissenbaum, professor emeritus of history at UMass-Amherst, attributes the calming of Christmas to a campaign by New York aristocrats to wean the tumultuous industrial proletariat from holiday mischief. A leader of the movement was John Pintard, who sought to find a tradition to encourage Christmas celebrations to turn toward the family. In 1810, he imported and publicized an Old Dutch custom that children received gifts on Dec. 6, the feast day of St. Nicholas. But the austere saint didn't catch the popular imagination, and in 1820 Pintard's holiday slumber was disrupted by a riotous clamor outside his Wall Street mansion.
Then, in 1822, Clement Clarke Moore, whose family owned land that now comprises the Chelsea district in Manhattan, put the St. Nicholas legend into verse as a gift to his children. He equipped St. Nick with a sleigh, a paunch, and a friendly demeanor, and moved the gift-giving to Dec. 25. The poem "A Visit from St. Nicholas," with its evocative first line " 'Twas the night before Christmas. . .," popularized the holiday as a child-centered family day.
In 1816, one of his sons, Harry Dwight Sedgwick, was wishing his fianc??e a "merry, merry Christmas." In 1823, daughter Catherine noted that she had gotten a holiday gift in the mail from a friend. In 1825, Catherine reported that two of her nieces "both got dolls from their Aunt Speakman for a Christmas gift." In 1927, Robert Sedgwick and his wife put stockings filled with gifts on the children's bedposts as a gift from Santa Claus. (Clement Moore's poem had by then circulated throughout the country.)
By 1932, Charles Sedgwick wrote with embarrassment that he returned to his home in Lenox on Dec. 24 to find "the whole house quite gay with Christmas presents . . . I have not as yet got one for anybody." He probably didn't forget again. Christmas as we know it today had vanquished the lords of misrule.
