The Battle for Christmas (31 page)

But if Santa Claus was new in the 1820s and 30s, so too was the ideology of domesticity itself, by virtue of which he entered so many American households. Domestic ideology placed children at the very center of family life, and assumed that families existed more to provide emotional gratification than to engage in economic production. In one sense, of course, it is true to say that the new domestic Christmas was an expression of that new ideology—a veritable celebration of domesticity.
But the obverse is true as well: The new domestic Christmas also helped to
create
that ideology. Even more than today, the exchange of Christmas gifts in the 1820s and ’30s was a ritual gesture intended to generate the sense that sincere expressions of domestic intimacy were more important than matters of money and business.

That was a heavy burden to place on Christmas presents—especially since most of them were produced, advertised, and sold as mass-market commodities. The personal feelings that Christmas presents were intended to engender actually hinged on a process that enmeshed those presents in the same commercial nexus that the gift exchange promised to transcend. The result was one of the most basic internal contradictions of our modern world: Marketplace commodities were given the job of generating intense, and intensely private, emotions.
⁸⁶

It should not be surprising, then, that the nineteenth-century Americans who began to celebrate the new domestic Christmas needed, just as much as our own generation, to believe that the holiday gift exchange was rooted in something deeper and more “authentic” than the dynamics of the marketplace. To do their job, Christmas presents had to obfuscate their commercial origins.

Some presents—Gift Books and Bibles, for instance—had their own ways of accomplishing that. And for other presents the practice of gift-wrapping could be an effective technique. One newspaper tried an appeal to ancient history, claiming that even “Greek and Roman babies” had been given “expensive toys” by their parents, so that it was unnecessary to think of fancy commercial presents as a recent invention, a raw product of the modern economy—they were burnished by the sands of antiquity.
⁸⁷

But it was Santa Claus who was able to provide this kind of reassurance best of all. Santa was even more effective than ancient history; he stood
outside
history. And from a parent’s perspective, the mystery of St. Nicholas effectively short-circuited any childish queries about where all the presents came from. We might say that Santa became an anticommercial symbol at the very moment he was used for commercial purposes. Better yet, we might say that it was precisely
because
he was such an effective anticommercial icon that he could become such an effective commercial icon. The two roles were quite compatible with each other. In fact, they were different sides of the same coin. Both the commercial and the anticommercial Santa were functions of the new domestic Christmas. (Here they stand in glaring contrast to
another
Santa Claus—the carnival Santa explored in
Chapter 3
, that “whoreson” who “boused it” and flirted with the girls, and with whom the domestic Santa Claus was not comfortable at all.)

Santa’s Workshop
. This picture was one of several colored illustrations that Thomas Nast prepared for book-length editions of “A Visit from St. Nicholas.” Notice that Santa’s workshop contains only hand tools, and no machinery. This picture appeared in 1869. (Another Nast portrayal of Santa’s workshop, from the early 1870s, shows the old fellow using needle and thread to make a hand-sewn stocking—at a time when almost every middle-class household had a sewing machine.)
(Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society)

The domestic Santa did the job in several different ways. His old “Dutch” origin was one of these, of course. The very fact that the Santa Claus ritual could be seen as ancient and unchanging offered a powerful symbolic link to an earlier and seemingly noncommercialized folk culture.

Just as important were the actual details of the Santa Claus ritual itself. To begin with, the presents came from Santa Claus, not from the parents—and
therefore not from shops. Santa mediated magically between parent and child—between the buyer and the recipient of the gifts. His presence was what took the gift out of the realm of commerce—in the eyes of parents, perhaps, as well as children. To phrase this in a more contemporary fashion, we might say that Santa “mystified” consumption.

He also mystified production and distribution. One of the great mysteries of Santa Claus was that he managed to provide presents for
all
children, everywhere. And he made them all himself—he was the producer of his own gifts. Finally, of course, he was the distributor, a distributor who managed to disburse his presents one house at a time. How Santa managed to do this was often the first skeptical question that children asked; but that he did so (and that the
how
of it all is a great mystery) must be a part of the parents’ answer.

And Santa’s presents are as good as handmade. Clement Clarke Moore’s poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” never described the actual manufacture of Santa’s presents—nor did the structure of the poem leave any space in the text that would invite professional illustrators to do so. But illustrators found the room anyway. Beginning in the late 1860s, the most popular illustrated editions of “A Visit from St. Nicholas” began to provide pictures of “Santa’s workshop,” pictures that always presented it as a place of household production, where only old-fashioned hand tools were in evidence. Even though this was the very apogee of the Industrial Revolution, Santa’s workshop was never violated by the presence of machinery.

In short, Santa Claus managed to reconcile opposites. He customized mass production. He maintained a personalized relationship with his enormous mass market—after all, his clientele was all but universal. And he did it all from motives that were in no way entrepreneurial. Santa Claus magically combined what in reality had now become a series of separate roles: He was simultaneously the gifts’ producer, distributor, seller, purchaser, and giver. In a new age of commodity production, what Santa Claus was able to offer—what he offered to
grown-ups
—was the moral equivalent of a world that had never wholly existed in the first place. It was the fading world of the household economy.

E
VERY SOLUTION
generates its own problems, and the child-centered consumer Christmas was no exception—particularly for people who found such a celebration most appealing. The concern those people came to feel was actually rooted in broad issues of child-rearing within the new middle-class family, but it came to a head in their fears about what a child-centered consumer Christmas might do to their children’s character. This chapter will examine the intersection of a new way of celebrating the holiday with just those broader cultural issues. It will suggest that the introduction of Christmas trees represented an effort to cope with the problems posed by the child-centered Christmas.

In about 1830 the literature of Christmas in America began to change. Before that date it dealt chiefly with questions of social disorder. Afterward a new concern emerged, an anxiety about private selfishness and greedy consumerism, especially as those issues affected children. Young people themselves had previously been seen as a source of disorder at Christmas, along with the poor (“Do not let your Children and Servants run too much abroad at Nights,” as that 1719 Boston almanac had warned). As part of the process by which middle-class young people were separated from the “lower orders” of society, they were created as “children” (a process explored in
Chapters 3
and
4
). But consequently they now
began to be seen as easy prey to materialism, superficiality, and selfishness. Middle-class Americans were becoming concerned that the holiday season was an infectious breeding ground for juvenile materialism and greed. Consumerism was coming to supplant chaos as the new problem of the holiday season. The battle for Christmas was beginning to change from a physical struggle that pitted the classes against one another into a moral one that divided the generations.
¹

That is the context in which the Christmas tree became an American holiday tradition. In fact, it was what lay at the heart of the emerging middle-class interest in the rituals of Christmas in Germany, of which the Christmas tree was the preeminent example. As we shall see, these rituals were associated with children who were
not
selfish, and for whom Christmas was an opportunity to give as well as to receive.

There is a belief among those who care about such things that the Christmas tree was spread throughout American culture by German immigrants. There is some truth to this. But, much like the notion that Santa Claus was brought to these shores by the Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam, such a belief also conforms to our desire to see our Christmas customs as rooted in something old-fashioned and authentic, in ancient folkways untainted by the marketplace. But Christmas trees became widely known in the United States during the mid-1830s, almost a decade earlier than any broad-based immigration from Germany can be said to have occurred.

As it turns out, the most important channels through which the ritual was spread were literary ones. Information about the Christmas tree was diffused by means of commercial literature, not via immigrant folk culture—from the top down, not from the bottom up. It was by reading about Christmas trees, not by witnessing them, that many thousands of Americans learned about the custom. Before they ever saw such a thing, they already knew what Christmas trees were all about—not only what they looked like, but also how and why they were to be used.

I shall deal, one by one, with each of the sources through which Christmas trees were introduced into middle-class American culture during the 1830s. Each source, as we shall see, reveals in turn a different element with which this ritual was associated: first, the element of
surprise;
second, that of
folk authenticity;
third,
unselfish children;
and finally,
parental control

Who were the writers who introduced the Christmas tree into American culture? The evidence suggests that, much like the Knickerbockers who devised Santa Claus, these writers constituted something of
a distinct set. Like the Knickerbockers, the members of this set were genteel and cultured. But they were part of an emerging upper middle class that laid no claim to preserving an aristocratic social order. In contrast to the Knickerbockers, too, they lived mostly in New England and Philadelphia, not New York, and the church of their choice was Unitarian rather than Episcopal. And instead of being politically reactionary, they tended to stand somewhere on the progressive, reformist side of the issues that were coming to divide Americans in the 1830s. This is not to say that the members of this set were of a single mind on every matter. After 1830, as we shall see, they were divided over the emerging antislavery movement, and also over issues of child-rearing. But in any event they used culture rather than politics as an instrument to influence the social order. They employed their cultural authority—a combination of literary skill and access to the most popular channels of print—in a strenuous effort to deal with what they feared were the corruptive cultural effects of consumer capitalism, especially on the young. The Christmas tree played a serious if relatively minor role in that larger project.