Christmas was Never Christian

Bill McKibben, Hundred Dollar Holiday: The Case for a More Joyful Christmas.

This book, and the church-based campaign it grows out of, is not an exercise in nostalgia, a search for some  perfect and uncorrupted Christmas in the past to which we can return. Christmas has been, and always will be, a product of its time, shaped to fit the particular needs of people, society, and faith in particular moments of history. 

And nowhere is that clearer than at the very beginning.

The Gospels offer no clues whatsoever to the date of Jesus' birth, not even to the season. And the earliest Christians worried little about such matters. 

Expecting an imminent Second Coming, they kept their hearts fixed firmly on the future. 

As the church aged and grew, however, some began to try and pinpoint the date of the Savio's birth. The guesses ranged all over the place, as Penne Restad points out in her Christmas in America. 

Clement, Bishop of Alexandra, chose November 18; Hippolytus  declared that Christ must have been born on a Wednesday, the same day God created the sun. Other authorities picked March 28 or April 19 or May 20. It was only in the fourth century that December 25 emerged as the date for the Feast of the Nativity a date that on the old Julian calendar marked the winter solstice, the longest night of the year. It happened not because church leaders had unearthed some new clue, but because they needed to compete with the pagan celebrations that marked that dark season. Wild Saturnalia began on December 17 and continued through the first of January; the Emperor Aurelian declared that December 25 would in particular be observed as the feast of the Invincible Sun, the solar god Mithras. A couple of decades later, when the Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity, he built the Vatican atop the very hill where the Mithras cult worshipped the sun, and may himself have instituted the new  holiday. 

In any event, veneration of the Sun was quite intentionally replaced by veneration of the Son. And the switch certainly worked. Christmas spread around the  Roman world (and into Scandinavia, where it combined with the Norse Yule feast). By the end of the thirteenth century, Restad notes, all of Europe marked Jesus’ birth. But success came at an ironic price. The old elements of the pagan midwinter rites never completely dropped away “the solemn  celebration of the Nativity always overlay a foundation of revelry, abandon,  blowout. And who could blame folk? The midwinter feast was a rational response  to the lives they lived. As the preeminent Christmas historian Stephen  Nissenbaum points out in The Battle for Christmas,  December was a major…in the agricultural calendar of the  northern nations, the moment between gearing down from the harvest and gearing  up for the planting. There was lots of meat from the just-slaughtered animals,  and the wine and beer from that year’s crop of grapes and grain had just fermented. 

In this life of extremely hard work and frugality, this season was  the sole exception there was no other time of year, for instance, to eat fresh  beef and pork, since animals couldn’t be killed till the weather was cold 

enough to keep the meat from rotting, and any meat that was going to be saved  for later would have to be salted. “Little wonder, then, “writes Nissenbaum, that this was a time of celebratory excess.”

The rowdiness took many forms. Strong drink fueled every kind of  merrymaking using only the list provided by Puritan minister  Cotton Mather, we find Reveling, Dicing, Carding, Masking, and all Licentious  Liberty. Men dressed as women and women as men; Christmas caroling often  meant bawdy songs; as Nissenbaum points out, there were vast numbers of  illegitimate births in September and October, clear evidence of the Christmas  debauch of the year before. On these shores Christmas and rowdiness have been  connected from the start. One eighteenth-century British traveler reported  attending a ball in Alexandria, Virginia, where the elegant company stayed all night, “got drunk, and had a fight”; in the nineteenth century, great  explosions and gunfire were popular frontier celebrations, with one Missouri lad remembering how he and his friends had saved all the hog bladders from the  butchering, inflated them, and then “pope ones them with paddles” on Christmas  Day. Even in the twentieth century we have the Christmas office party, perhaps  our last link to those old celebrations (and appropriately enough, since the  fast-paced and hierarchical life of the office is our last faint link to the  brutally hard work of the medieval era).

The wild abandon of Christmastime led the Puritans to try and  ban the celebration. For a century in New England revelers faced a fine for “keeping Christmas” within the borders of the domain. But it  wasn't just the boisterousness of Christmas celebrations that increasingly  annoyed the better class of people throughout Christendom. As Nissenbaum  points out, the revelry had a particular character: this was the one moment of  the year when people who still lived in great poverty turned the tables on their  feudal masters who usually dominated their lives. The various lords were  expected to offer the fruits of the harvest to the peasants (i.e., to almost  everyone), and the peasants were more than willing to show up and demand them.  Thus began the tradition of wassailing—bands of boys and young men would walk  into the halls of the rich to receive gifts of food, of drink, even of money. 

It was a sort of wild trick-or-treat. One wassail song went like this:

We've come here to claim our right.

And if you don't open up your door,

We’ll lay you flat upon the floor.

But once the wassail bowl was safely in hand, the men and boys  would drink to the health of their masters’ “in a way, the whole business helped legitimize the basically un- fair life of a serf. It was, like the  wild revelry, an understandable response to the life that people found  themselves living “a chance for the powerless poor to blow off steam and for  the rich to buy goodwill (and buy it cheaply). And if you make sure and leave  the garbage man a Christmas tip, partly from sheer good cheer and partly so your cans won’t be scattered across the lawn all year, then you hear a faint echo  of this practice.

That kind of Christmas, however, depended on that kind of world “stratified by class but bound by geography and tradition. And as the  economy changed, that world vanished. As cities grew and factories replaced  farms, the powerful people in society no longer knew the mass of poorer men and  women who worked for them, and so the custom of Christmas revelry grew  increasingly threatening. It was one thing for your tipsy serfs to knock on the door demanding a roast beef dinner; it was another, as Nissenbaum points out, to  have “bands of roaming young street toughs traveling freely and  menacing wherever they pleased. Instead of a pause in the agricultural cycle,  these young men now often faced seasonal unemployment. Disguised, as in the old  days of mumming, sometimes beating on drums and kettles, these gangs would  invade the rich districts of American cities and then sometimes  head on to the black neighborhoods where they would trash churches and beat up  passersby. The “beastly vice of drunkenness among the lower laboring classes  is growing to a frightful excess, “fretted an upper-class New Yorker in the early 1800s. Thefts, incendiaries, and murders “which prevails “all arise  from this source.”

And so, more or less self-consciously, a group of upper-class  New Yorkers set out to reinvent the holiday, an effort that proved to be of far  more long-lasting importance than the earlier Puritan effort to stamp out the  celebrations entirely. Washington Irving was one key figure; in 1820 he  published to great acclaim his Sketch Book, which  included Rip Van Winkle and the Legend of Sleepy Hollow, but also five Christmas  stories. Set in an English manor, Bracebridge Hall, they nostalgically recalled  the earlier agricultural Christmases with their roaring fires and horse-drawn  carriages and tables groaning under the feast, which “brought the peasant and  the peer together, and blended all ranks in one warm generous flow of joy and  kindness.” Popular as the stories were, however, as Nissenbaum points out,  â€œWashington Irving’s vision did not exactly offer a practical model for  anyone who was tempted—and many must have been—to celebrate  Christmas in this fashion.” The task of inventing a “traditional”  Christmas more appropriate to modern lives was left to others, especially  Clement Clark Moore.

Moore, an extremely rich professor of Hebrew, grew up on a rural  estate called Chelsea. Present-day New Yorkers will know the spot as . . .  Chelsea, the part of Manhattan that stretches from Nineteenth Street to  Twenty-fourth Street and from Eighth Avenue to Tenth Avenue. Indeed, Ninth  Avenue was dug smack through the middle of his estate in 1818, right about the  time he was writing “A Visit from Saint Nicholas,” which is the poem we know  as “The Night Before Christmas.” Moore did not take kindly to the changes  going on around him; as Nissenbaum discovers, he believed that the city was  being taken over by a conspiracy of “cart-men, carpenters, masons, pavers, and  all their host of attendant laborers.” And he feared that the mob would  abolish all the old elite life of New York: “We know not the amount nor the  extent of oppression which may yet be reserved for us.” So it comes as no  surprise that Moore didn’t care for the character of urban Christmases. And in  his beloved poem, he manages to offer an alternative—the figure  of Santa Claus, of Saint Nick. Santa was distantly related, of course, to the  Saint Nicholas born in third-century Turkey (a creature so pious that even as an  infant he somehow knew to refrain from suckling his mother on fast days). By the  Renaissance, says Restad, he had become “the favorite saint of nearly  everyone.” His good image survived even the Protestant reaction against  saints, especially in Holland. And since Moore, a member of the New-York  Historical Society, was interested in the city’s early Dutch heritage, it’s  no wonder that that’s where he, like Washington Irving before him, turned for  his figure of Christmas.

But there was no Santa Claus tradition in this country—no  reindeer, no sleigh, no coming-down-the-chimney—until Moore invented it. And,  as Nissenbaum notes, what was most interesting about his invention was that  Santa Claus was not an authority figure, not a bishop or a patriarch. Unlike the  mitred and robed Saint Nicholas, he was just a right jolly old elf with  twinkling eyes, rosy cheeks, and the famous shaking belly. Not only that, he  looked “like a peddler just opening his pack”—that is, like a lower-class  tradesman. And yet he invaded your home not to cause trouble,  demand food, and shake up the social order, but to leave presents! What a guy!

Better yet, even as the new Santa reversed one social order, he  left another intact. Since parents had to buy and wrap the presents that Santa  Claus supposedly delivered to their children, the old idea of Christmas as a  time to take care of the weaker, the dependent, was preserved. Grown-ups could  have their cake—the feeling of goodwill that comes with being a beneficent  lord—and not have to worry that some ruffian was going to steal it. So Santa  Claus, and the rituals of giving presents, served to bring Christmas inside the  home where it was safe. Very slowly but surely, the Christmas chaos in the  streets subsided, replaced by the happy riot of gifts inside. As Nissenbaum points out, “this is not to say that the rowdy Christmas season simply  disappeared”; for decades, he discovers, the December newspapers were filled  with reports of out-of-control street revels. But they also were crammed with  editorials welcoming the season of peace. And the tide was running in the  direction of the living room and away from the street. “Let all avoid taverns  and grog shops for a few days at least, and spend their money at home,”  advised the New York Herald in 1839. “Make glad upon one day the domestic hearth,  the virtuous wife, the smiling, merry-hearted children, and the blessed  mother.” A new Christmas had been born, again appropriate to the needs of the  day.

That new Christmas was greeted with the greatest enthusiasm by  the emerging class of American entrepreneurs, who saw in it a source of vast  potential wealth. Consider the story Restad tells of F. W. Woolworth, who one  year allowed himself to be persuaded to stock some German-made glass Christmas  ornaments at his small store. In two days they had all been sold, and Woolworth  â€œwoke up.” He was soon making regular visits to Germany, and ordering  fifteen hundred gross of ornaments at a time (and remarking idly on the poverty  of the bauble-makers, who might command a wage of three dollars per week). By  the end of the nineteenth century, his Christmas trade alone netted Woolworth  half a million dollars. “This is our harvest time—make it pay,” he  instructed his managers. There was a similar boom in Christmas cards—at one  time, writes Restad, the “top event” of the New York art season was an  annual competition sponsored by the chief lithography company for the next  year’s card designs.

And of course there were the presents. Though  historians can find newspaper ads for holiday gifts back nearly to 1800, the  great boom followed this reinvention of the holiday as a family celebration. The  department stores then emerging in the big cities started the custom of dressing  their windows to attract the throngs of shoppers, who were now able to walk the  streets without fear of reveling gangs. As early as 1867, Macy’s was staying  open till midnight on Christmas Eve. Bookstores sold enormous numbers of ornate  â€œgift books” that publishers produced each fall. Toy stores, able to count  on a guaranteed profitable season, began to spread across the land. Advertisers  offered extensive catalogues of their wares—The Game of Pope and Pagan, The  Game of Cup and Ball, Jack Straws, Dr. Busby’s Cards; already the list was  long enough to torture any child. As Nissenbaum points out, as early as 1845  there was even a children’s game about the process of Christmas shopping  itself, “the laughable game of ‘What d’ye Buy.’ ” Special candies  poured forth from the confectioners, special songs from the sheet music  companies. In a way, writes Nissenbaum, the new celebration of Christmas served  as a way to educate Americans, traditionally distrustful of luxury and excess,  to the joys of buying things they didn’t strictly need. “It  was the thin end of the wedge by which many Americans became enmeshed in the  more self-indulgent aspects of consumer spending . . . a crucial means of  legitimizing the penetration of consumerist behavior into American  society.”

But as might be expected, this new Christmas had no sooner  solved one set of problems—rowdyism—than it began to be accused of creating  another—selfishness. Almost from the start, many people worried at least a  little that Christmas was getting out of hand. And almost from the start there  were a few cranks and scolds, of which I suppose I must count myself as a  contemporary version, who insisted loudly that the holiday was too commercial.  Mostly, people worried that their children were being spoiled, that in  Nissenbaum’s words “the holiday season was an infectious breeding ground for  juvenile materialism and greed.” (He quotes from as early as 1829 a letter  from a nine-year-old to her aunt expressing the hope “that Santa Claus has  given you at least as many presents as he has me, for he only gave me four.”)

And one of the responses to those fears, oddly enough, was the  spread of the Christmas tree. When I was growing up in Lexington, Massachusetts, we always purchased our tree from the stand set up by  the Follen Unitarian Church—a church named for the progressive scholar who  helped introduce the custom of Christmas trees to the country. Karl Follen (who  changed his name to Charles when he hit these shores) was exiled from Germany  for liberal political activities. He was successful on his arrival, earning a  professorship at Harvard in German literature, but again his politics plagued  him—he was too radical an abolitionist for the proper Bostonians, and he lost  his job. That very Christmas, however, a visiting British writer and fellow abolitionist, Harriet Martineau, watched as he decorated  his tree with dozens of wax candles and then, like a magician unhatting a  rabbit, ushered in his son, Charley, and some friends. “Their faces were  upturned to the blaze, all eyes wide open, all lips parted, all steps arrested.  Nobody spoke, only Charley leaped for joy.” She may not have actually seen the  first American Christmas tree, but thanks to her widely read accounts, it became  the first famous one.

And as Nissenbaum makes clear it was no accident that  progressive Unitarians like Follen tried to spread the custom of the tree across  the nation. The abolitionists weren’t just interested in protecting slaves;  they were also often particularly concerned with that other group of weak and  defenseless Americans: children. They did not share the Puritan conviction that  children were deeply stained at birth by original sin and needed to have their  will broken. Instead, the Unitarians were convinced children should be trained  to develop their wills, to become strong enough to resist their impulses.  Unitarian parents didn’t spank, they didn’t scream. They combined love and  moral instruction—and apparently no little guilt. The Christmas tree ritual, as it was prescribed by these men and women, was a way to train their young. Instead of the old ways of getting presents (at the dinner table, or by rushing into a parents’ bedroom early in the morning to demand a gift), the parents would now take total control of the process. They would set up the tree in a closed room, and arrange the presents beneath it, and finally spring the surprise, ushering in their offspring to see the glorious sight. Good children weren't supposed to demand presents; they were supposed to play “the passive role of silent, grateful recipients.” They were learning “to control even their selfish expectations.”

If this early instance of politically correct parenting sounds slightly bizarre, it clearly made little real difference to the culture of Christmas. Most American children were perfectly happy to add the blazing tree to the list of annual treats, and perfectly happy to be normal, slightly selfish human beings about the pile of packages beneath. More to the point, the Unitarians, and indeed the rich and the middle class, represented only a minority of Americans—most of our forebears were still spread out around the country’s farms or packed into its city slums. While the literary classes were fretting about Christmas materialism, most Americans were still enjoying the holiday enormously —enjoying, among other things, all the stuff. 

Indeed, Christmas was quickly becoming the one great American festival, the only holiday that was both religious and legal. Louisiana, in 1837, was the first state to declare Christmas a legal holiday; by 1860, fourteen more states from Maine to California had joined the list.

More and more the festival was national in character, gradually losing the distinctive touches that had marked a Pennsylvania German or a New York Dutch celebration. Thomas Nast began drawing the Santa Claus we know in the 1860s, and soon decided that his workshop was at the North Pole (before, he had rather mysteriously simply appeared in his sleigh). Elves followed, and Mrs. Santa Claus; Santa in a few short decades had become the center of the holiday (to the point, Restad reports, that one Pennsylvania father in 1893 actually decided to come down his own chimney dressed in red and surprise his children; stuck halfway down, he began to scream, which so frightened his family that they fled the home. Neighbors had to tear the chimney down to rescue him). Santa’s canonization was complete by 1897 when the editor of the New York Sun, Frank Church, penned his famous letter to wee Virginia, who had written to ask if there really was a jolly old man with a white beard and black boots who appeared to distribute toys. “Virginia, your little friends are wrong” when they doubt Santa, he wrote. Absent Santa, “there would be no childlike faith, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence.”

Christmas changed much less in the twentieth century than in the nineteenth—most of our rituals and customs still stem from the burst of invention in the decades either side of the Civil War. But the sheer scale of Christmas has grown enormously, as the advertisers and merchants have grown ever more adept at their marketing. Jo Robinson and Jean Coppock Staeheli speculate in their book, Unplug the Christmas Machine, that once U.S. factories had geared up for World War I, they feared peace would be followed by excess capacity. The newly developing art of advertising—the psychological insinuation that went well beyond the old listings of goods—helped insure that didn’t happen; indeed during the 1920s the country went on an unprecedented binge of luxury consumption.

Ellis Gimbel organized the first Thanksgiving Day parade to promote his department store in 1920; Santa on a fire truck brought up the rear. Macy’s started its competing extravaganza four years later, all in an attempt to instill the idea of a Christmas shopping season that stretched from late November. So successful were they that, during the Depression, the big department store owners actually persuaded FDR to move Thanksgiving back a week to insure a month-long window for undistracted shopping. A Santa Claus school operated in the town of Santa Claus, Indiana, by the 1930s; soon its graduates formed the National Association of Professional Santas. If there was much danger that anyone would still be paying undue attention to the stable in Bethlehem, the media soon produced one new Christmas story after another, from Rudolphthe Red-Nosed Reindeer (published by the Montgomery Ward department store) toFrosty the Snowman. By my childhood in the early 1970s there was an absolutely unvarying and ironclad lineup of Christmas TV specials, the syrupy scenes of the Charlie Brown gang, Bob Hope, John Denver, and dozens more all punctuated by Santa flying in and out atop a Norelco cordless shaver.

As I said before, grousing about Christmas is almost as old a tradition as celebrating it. Nissenbaum quotes the opening of a Christmas story that Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote in 1850: “Oh dear,” moans one character.“Christmas is coming in a fortnight, and I have got to think of presents for everybody! Dear me, it’s so tedious! Everybody has goteverything that can be thought of. . . . There are worlds of money wasted at this time of year, in getting things that nobody wants, and nobody cares for after they are got.” By 1894, reports Restad, the editorialists of the New York Tribune werecomplaining that “the modern expansion of the custom of giving Christmas presents has done more than anything else to rob Christmas of its traditional joyousness. . . . Most people nowadays are so fagged out, physically and mentally, by the time Christmas Day arrives that they are in no condition to enjoy it. As soon as the Thanksgiving turkey is eaten, the great question of buying Christmas presents begins to take the terrifying shape it has come to assume in recent years. . . . The season of Christmas needs to be dematerialized.”

That criticism, however, didn’t strike very deep. For whatever reason, this newly invented, consumptive Christmas continued to serve the needs of Americans—probably because it was appropriate to a time of slowly growing wealth, and slowly increasing leisure. And it fit, roughly, with the various theologies of prosperity and success that dominated American Protestantism. The cornucopia—the bottomless stocking—of the American Christmas was emblematic of our way of life. So for a long time, Christmas brought considerable joy to most people: one has only to read the accounts of prairie Christmases along the frontier, of Christmases in the encampments of our various bloody wars, of Christmases in the slave quarters of the old South, to understand the enduring power of the holiday. It’s only in relatively modern times, I think, that the grumbling about Christmas has become less good-natured, only in recent years that significant numbers of people have begun to rather dread its approach. The spell cast in the mid-nineteenth century is wearing off, and it’s time for a new burst of invention. That’s what this book is about.

But as we consider new forms of celebrations, it’s important to repeat one strand from this brief history: there’s no uncorrupted celebration from some distant and pure time in the past that we can simply return to. Christmas has always been a concoction. So if we want to remake it in our image, we must first figure out what problems in our individual lives and in our society we might address by changing the ways we celebrate. We need to search ourselves for clues as to how we might remake this holiday.