The Battle for Christmas (24 page)

In
Kriss Kringle’s Raree Show
we see in action the battle between the two cultures of Christmas—going out into the loud streets and staying quietly at home. But the battle is not really joined. Reading is presented here not so much as an attractive alternative to misrule as a mini-version of it, one in which the rowdy adventure went on inside one’s head. Here the two forms of behavior, the two cultures of Christmas, seep into each other. Reading the book promised the adventure of theatergoing, and even showed it, and a little of its misrule, led by plebeian Kriss Kringle. It was possible to experience the excitement of the theater without leaving home—and without posing (or risking) any real danger. But that, perhaps, has always been the promise of reading itself.
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By the 1840s the police in Philadelphia and other American cities were regularly on the lookout for gatherings of unruly boys, and ready to throw them in jail. That was one prong in the assault against Christmas misrule.
Kriss Kringle’s Raree Show
is a very poor book, but it does show us something of the second prong in that same assault—something that other, better books did far more effectively. One of those was the famous Christmas story “The Nutcracker,” authored by the German writer?. T. A. Hoffmann and first published in 1816. Here a proper young girl has an extended fantasy of misrule in which her world turns crazily upside down. “The Nutcracker” ended up becoming, in the hands of Peter Tchaikovsky, a brilliant and popular theatrical spectacle, while
Kriss Kringle’s Raree Show
was quickly forgotten. But both the trite Philadelphia book and its far more ingenious German counterpart shared a single purpose: to offer youthful readers a secure yet exhilarating Christmas treat—a carnival of the mind.

M
AKING CHRISTMAS
an indoor family affair meant enmeshing it in the commercial marketplace. As long as the Christmas gift exchange was still a matter of wassailing from peasants to landlords, from poor folk to rich ones, the gifts themselves most often took the form of food and drink—the landlord’s best food and drink, served within his house. Such gifts were not “presents” in the modern sense of being purchased in the commercial market. Oftentimes, indeed, they were manufactured within the household itself, and from grains cultivated by the same peasants who were now receiving them back in the form of “cakes and ale.”

When the gift exchange was brought inside and limited to the family circle, such gifts no longer made sense. The wife and children of a prosperous man already ate the household’s best food; they were already living in the family manor. What made Christmas special for
them
had to be a different sort of gift, the sort of gift that soon became known as a Christmas “present.” And that was precisely the kind of gift that could most conveniently be procured through a
purchase
.

The actual change was not that simple, of course. In the latter part of the eighteenth century, as we have already seen, ordinary households sometimes held special Christmas dinners, dinners that might include (as they did for the Maine midwife Martha Ballard—see
Chapter 1
) a few special ingredients—sugar, spices, rum—that were purchased in local shops. Or shopkeepers might provide some finishing touch for a handmade Christmas present: In 1769, for example, Joseph Stebbins paid a shopkeeper in Deerfield, Massachusetts, for “coolering [dyeing] a pare of Mitt[en]s for [his] wife.” Presumably the mittens themselves had already been knitted, probably at home, perhaps by Mrs. Stebbins herself. (We can infer that the newly dyed mittens were probably intended as a Christmas gift because the transaction took place on December 22.)
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We might think of such transactions, in which shops played a small but crucial role, as “semi-commercial.” They may have been commonplace, though evidence on this score is extremely difficult to come by—buried in manuscript account-books. But things would begin to change soon after 1800.

I
T IS COMMONPLACE
, nowadays, to hark back to a time when Christmas was simpler, more authentic, and less commercial than it has become. Even professional historians have tended to write about the pre-twentieth-century Christmas in that way. Generally when people muse along these lines it is to associate the noncommercial holiday with the years of their own childhood, or perhaps the childhood of their parents or (at most) their grandparents.

As it happens, such musings have been commonplace for a long time—for more than a century and a half. Consider the theme of a short story dating back to the middle of the nineteenth century, a story that commented on the profusion of presents bought and sold during the holiday season—and the trouble many comfortably-off Americans had in finding something meaningful to give their loved ones at Christmas. The author of the story was soon to become America’s best-known writer—Harriet Beecher Stowe. When Stowe wrote her Christmas story in 1850, she had not yet written
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
, although that great novel was beginning to take shape in her mind. But what was also in her mind that year were the problems posed by Christmas shopping.

“Oh, dear!’ “sighs one of the characters in the opening lines of this story. “Ohristmas is coming in a fortnight, and
I
have got to think up presents for everybody! Dear me, it’s so tedious! Everybody has got everything
that can be thought of.’” This character goes on to declare that even though “‘every shop and store is glittering with all manner of splendors,’” it was impossible to decide what presents “‘to get for people that have more than they know what to do with now; to add pictures, books, and gilding when the centre tables are loaded with them now, and rings and jewels when they are a perfect drug!’” When she was a child of 10, explained Stowe (or the character who stands in for her in the story), “‘the very idea of a present was so new’” that a child would be “‘perfectly delighted’” with the gift of even a single piece of candy. In those days, “‘presents did not fly about as they do now.’” But nowadays, things are different: “‘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.’”
²

Just as many people do today, Harriet Beecher Stowe seems to have believed that this change took place within her own generation (she was born in 1811). But the difference is that Stowe was substantially correct. Commercial Christmas presents did start to become common when she was a child, and especially during the decade of the 1820s. This chapter will explore the process by which that came to happen and the implications such a development had for the meaning of the gift exchange.

If the domestic reform of Christmas began as an enterprise of patricians, fearful for their authority, it was soon being reinforced by merchants, who needed the streets to be cleared of drunks and rowdies in order to secure them for Christmas shoppers; by shoppers who in turn needed to feel secure in the streets; and by newspaper editors whose success depended on their mediating between other businessmen and their own readers (who were shoppers, too).

Advertisements for Christmas presents actually began to appear as early as the first signs of interest in St. Nicholas emerged, although they did not become common for several more decades. The first explicit ad for Christmas presents I have found anywhere in the United States comes from a New England community, Salem, Massachusetts. Dating from 1806 and headed “Christmas Gifts,” the advertisement was placed by a local bookseller. (Salem was a major port at this time, and a prosperous one.) Boston and New York had their first Christmas advertising two years later, in 1808, when two such ads appeared in the
New York Evening Post
. One of these was for a shop offering “four hundred and fifty kinds of Christmas presents and New-year’s gifts, consisting of toys, childrens
[sic] and school books, Christmas pieces, Drawing books, Paint, Lead Pencils, Conversations and Toy cards, Pocket Books, Penknives, &c.”
³

The advertising began to proliferate after 1820. By 1823 Christmas was already becoming so commercial that one Boston magazine was able to make a joke of it:

A decade later, in 1834, a letter printed in a Boston Unitarian magazine suggested that the available choice of presents, and the aggressiveness with which they were being advertised, had reached the point where Christmas shopping was becoming a source of confusion. “The days are close at hand when everybody gives away something to somebody,” this letter began:

The same letter warned shoppers to “put themselves on their guard, to be resolved to select from the tempting mass only what is useful and what may do good,” and to avoid “empty trifles, which amuse or gratify for the day only.”

Only too familiar. Even in a small town in rural New Hampshire, in 1835 a local newspaper printed a cautionary tale titled “Reflect Before You Buy”—a story written for young children!
⁶
Similar examples abound from following years. By the time Harriet Beecher Stowe published her 1850 lament, the sentiment she expressed had become a commonplace.

Most commercial presents were manufactured for children. The very first advertisement I have found for Christmas presents, the 1806 one from Salem, Massachusetts, was for “a large assortment of Youth’s and Children’s Books.” The first ad from Boston, in 1808, was for “Books for Children.” The first New York ad, also in 1808, was for children’s books and toys.
⁷
Over the years, children remained the primary target of Christmas ads, but they ceased to be the
exclusive
targets. In 1809, for example, four of the five ads for holiday presents that appeared in one Boston newspaper were for the entertainment of children, but the remaining one focused on the decoration of women: “a general assortment of elegant and fashionable
JEWELLERY
[sic], consisting of Fine pearl set Brooches; Ear Rings; Finger Rings; Bracelets, &c., with rich carnelian and topaz Centers; … carnelian Necklaces; Ear Knobs; Tops and Drops; tortoise-shell Combs of all descriptions; gold Watch Chains….” (Women, like children, were dependent members of the household. Only later were adult men included as appropriate recipients of Christmas presents.)
⁸

A thorough examination of early-nineteenth-century American newspapers might well yield slightly earlier dates for such minor milestones as the first complaint about consumer confusion or the first Christmas advertisement. But the pattern itself seems clear enough: Commercial Christmas presents were first publicly advertised in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, and the advertising became pervasive during the following decade, in the 1820s. And through the “country editions” printed by many urban newspapers for their rural readers, word that Christmas presents were available (and fashionably appropriate) spread throughout much of the United States.

In the early 1840s advertisements for Christmas presents became more numerous, ornate, and sophisticated, and newspapers began to organize them into a separate category titled “Holiday Advertisements.” These columns were typically placed on the front page, at the very beginning of the advertising section (one New York paper noted in 1841 that they held “the post of honor”).
⁹
Christmas advertisements began to appear earlier and earlier, into the second week of December.
¹⁰
On December 23, 1845, Horace Greeley’s
New York Tribune
announced that the paper would be “compelled to issue a [special] supplement” the following day so as “to make room for the matter which the pressure of Holiday Advertisements has crowded out for a few days past.” (“By the way,” it added, “our readers who think of making Christmas Presents will find our advertising columns unusually interesting. Almost every thing worth buying is offered there. Read and make your selections.”) Finally, Santa Claus himself
began to be used in advertisements, and of course in shops themselves, as a way of attracting the attention of children (more about this later).

It was probably no accident that these aggressive advertising tactics were devised in hard economic times. The depression that set in at the end of 1839 was the deepest the United States had yet experienced. But merchants, abetted by newspapers, openly used Christmas as a way to attract shoppers even in the depths of the depression. One Philadelphia paper announced on December 24, 1841, that “Christmas is at hand,” and tried to persuade its readers to ignore economic conditions for a while by opening their purses to buy holiday gifts. The newspaper represented the depression as “Old Hard Times,” an unpopular monarch. But readers were assured that he “has abdicated for the present,” to be replaced by a more benevolent figure: “Old Santa Claus is expected tonight, and gaily are the windows of the fancy, fruit, cake, and other stores decorated to receive him—and puzzled will the old fellow be to make a selection from the thousand curiosities, delicacies, and elegancies which are spread before him.” The newspaper itself was prepared to come to Santas assistance: “In consideration of the many duties that he has to perform at this time, we will endeavor to lighten his labors; and in order that he may make the best choice to be found in the city, we are determined to send him a copy of the Ledger, where he will find every thing that is worthy of his notice judiciously advertised under the proper head….”
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