The Battle for Christmas (64 page)

20.
Richard H. Brodhead,
Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 13–47.

21.
Lawrence J. Friedman,
Gregarious Saints: Self and Community in American Abolitionism, 1830–1870
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), actually uses as an epigraph the Follen letter I have quoted above.

22.
Liberator
, Dec. 21, 1833 (juvenile choir concert); William Lloyd Garrison to his mother, Dec. 24, 1836, in Walter M. Merril and Louis Ruchames, eds.,
The Letters of
William Lloyd Garrison
(6 vols., Cambridge: Harvard, 1971–81), II, 194 (“young fanatic”). The annual Antislavery Fairs can be followed over the years in the
Liberator
. For an African-American participant in many of these fairs, see Ray Allen Billington, ed.,
The Journal of Charlotte Forten, A Free Negro in the Slavery Era
(New York: Norton, 1981), 66, 78, 87, 133, 125–126. See also Debra Gold Hansen,
Strained Sisterhood: Gender and Class in the Boston Anti-Slavery Society
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1993), 123–139; and Deborah van Broekhoven, “Spheres and Webs: The Organization of Antislavery Fairs, 1835–1860,” paper delivered to the American Historical Association, December, 1988.

23.
Liberator
, Dec. 20, 1834.

24.
Catharine M. Sedgwick, “New Year’s Day,” in
The Token and Atlantic Souvenir: A Christmas and New Year’s Present
(ed. S. G. Goodrich; Boston, 1836 [c. 1835]), 11–31 (quotation from 14–15).

25.
Elizabeth E. Sedgwick to William Ellery, Jan. 13, 1834 (Sedgwick V, Box 17.1). On January 1, 1829, bad weather kept the number of visitors down to about thirty. But next year the weather was “absolutely perfect,” and from noon until 4 p.m. she received “a constant succession of guests.” Poor health prevented Mrs. Sedgwick from receiving visitors the next two years, but in 1834 she was back in form.

26.
Catharine Sedgwick to Kate Sedgwick, Dec. 29, 1834[-Jan. 2, 1835] (CMS I, Box 1.17).

27.
Sedgwick, “New Year’s Day,” 26–28.

28.
Ibid., 28.

29.
Ibid., 18–20. The Christmas tree functioned as a literary device that seemed to take the presents hung upon it out of the realm of the commercial marketplace. It is no accident that Sedgwick described those presents, hanging on the branches of the tree, as St. Nicholas’s “fruit”—as if they were the
natural
growth of the tree itself (ibid., 17). (It was common for writers to describe the hanging presents with that metaphor, and it may have been why presents were often hung from the tree at this time, and not placed under it in the modern fashion.)

30.
The anticommercial promise of Christmas trees may well have been related to the social position of people like Catharine Sedgwick, who was a member of a prominent gentry family from rural Massachusetts, the kind of patrician who easily associated the fashionable world of New York with an upstart bourgeoisie. A story like “New Year’s Day” was, on the face of it, an attack on the fashionable world written from “above” (Sedgwick makes plain that Lizzy Percival comes from an older and more distinguished family than do any of her visitors). But by associating the Christmas tree itself with Lizzy’s German maidservant, Sedgwick managed to ally herself imaginatively with the world “below”—a world equally detached from bourgeois American culture.

31.
Quoted in Alfred Shoemaker,
Christmas in Pennsylvania: A Folk-Cultural Study
(Kutztown: Penn. Folklore Society, 1959), 52. In 1824, two years later, a humorous notice in a York (Penn.) newspaper suggests that Christmas trees could still be put to the service of a different Christmas tradition: carnival and courtship. That year a local young men’s club (the Society of Bachelors) announced that—in return for receiving a “Cart load of Gin-gercakes” from any “Old Maids” who would pay them a visit on “second Christmas eve”—they would set up a “
Krischtkintle Baum.”
(“It’s decorations shall be superb, superfine, superfrostical, schnockagastical, double refined, mill’ twill’d made of Dog’s Wool, Swingling Tow, and Posnum [sic] fur; which cannot fail to gratify taste”—ibid., p. 52.) The rhetoric here suggests that the occasion was to be a young people’s carnival. As for the picture (see page 196) by John Lewis Krimmel (1776–1821): Milo M. Naeve, John
Lewis Krimmel: An Artist in Federal America
(Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1987), dates this picture to 1819–20; while Anneliese Harding,
John Lewis Krimmel: Genre Artist of the Early Republic
(Winterthur, Del.: Winterthur Publications, 1994), 45, gives the date as 1812–13.

32. Memoirs of Baroness Oberkirch, quoted in Alexander Tille, “German Christmas and the Christmas-Tree,” in
Folk-Lore: A Quarterly Review of Myth, Tradition, Institution, and Custom
(London), III (1892), 166–182. This and the following paragraphs are based on the above article, along with the following: Kurt Mantel,
Geschichte des Weinachtsbaumes
(Hanover: M. u. H. Schaper, 1975), 5–32 and passim; Alexander Tille,
Die Geschichte der Deutschen Weinacht
(Leipzig, 1893), 256–278; Alexander Tille,
Yule and Christmas: Their Place in the German Year
(London, 1899), 103–106, 170–176, 214–218; and Ingeborg Weber-Kellerman,
Das Weinachtfest: Eine Kultur-und Sozialgeschichte der Weinachtszeit
(Lucerne and Frankfort: Christmas. J. Bucher, 1978), 104–131. See also Phillip V. Snyder,
The Christmas Tree Book
(New York, 1976), 14.1 have used these sources to arrive at the above interpretation, but the interpretation itself is my own.

33.
George Bancroft to his parents, Aaron and Lucretia Bancroft, Dec. 30, 1820, in Bancroft Papers, American Antiquarian Society.

34.
“Christmas Eve; or, The Conversion. From the German,”
Atheneum
, VII (May-June, 1820). This story had appeared earlier that year in a French magazine,
La Belle Assemblée
(Jan. 1820). For a much later story (which placed the origin of the Christmas tree even earlier), see Henry Van Dyke,
The First Christmas Tree
(New York, 1897, illustrated by Howard Pyle), set in the German forests in
A.D.
722.

35.
For Coleridge’s gentry associations in Ratzeburg, see Oswald Doughty,
Perturbed Spirit: The Life and Personality of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(East Brunswick, N.J., 1981), 150–152. Coleridge himself, in a 1798 letter, referred to his society as “Gentry and Nobility.” His description of the house in which he observed the Christmas tree refers to two parlors. (Coleridge was rather offended by the sexual looseness he witnessed in Ratzeburg.)

36.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Christmas Within Doors, in the North of Germany,”
The Friend
(Burlington, Vt., 1831), 321–322.

37.
Ibid., 322. This scene took place “in the great parlour” of his host’s house. The ritual contained some of the old elements of Christmas as judgment day: Just before the presents are actually distributed, “the mother says privately to each of her daughters, and the father to his sons, that which he has observed most praise-worthy and that which was most faulty in their conduct.” It is interesting that the parents tell the children their faults “privately;” this has the ring of a new practice (like the Christmas tree itself).

38.
Catharine Sedgwick diary, Jan. 19, 1836, in CMS I, Box 11. The Burlington edition of
The Friend
was reprinted in 1831.

39.
Christian Register
, III (Apr. 24, 1824), 152. I suspect that I have not completely tracked down the printing history of Coleridge’s little report, or the history of the way it reappeared in American sources, sometimes without attribution.

40.
Lydia M. Child,
The Little Girl’s Own Book
(Boston, 1831), 286–287. (The title was registered for copyright on December 25, 1830, and the preface wished the children who read it “a merry Christmas and a happy New-Year” (ibid., iv). The book was reprinted several times, into the 1850s.

41.
J. K. Smith,
Juvenile Lessons; or, The Child’s First Reading Book
(Keene, N.H., 1832), 70–71. (This last statement of this lesson reveals that Coleridge himself, and not Lydia Maria Child, was almost surely the source.) Circumstantial evidence suggests that J. K. Smith, too, was a progressive Unitarian. Smith’s book went through three editions, all published in Keene, between 1832 and 1842.

42.
Youth’s Companion
, XIV (Dec. 25, 1840), 129. This magazine was edited by Nathaniel Willis, the father of two writers who were very popular in their day, N. P. Willis and Fanny Fern. The children in this “story” go on to propose (again following Coleridge’s report) that on Christmas Day their parents give them notes “‘telling them what faults they have overcome during the year, and what they have still left to overcome.’” (“‘I should like that,’” one of the children says.)

43. Philip J. Greven,
The Protestant Temperament: Patterns of Child-rearing, Religious Experience, and the Self in Early America
(New York: Knopf, 1977), 206 Greven adds that such parents (whom he calls “moderates,” as distinct from “evangelicals”) “were preoccupied with self-established and self-maintained boundaries over their passions and appetites” (p. 206). Theodore Parker, “Phases of Domestic Life,” quoted ibid., 168. For an overview of attitudes toward child rearing in nineteenth-century America, see Bernard Wishy,
The Child and the Republic: The Dawn of Modern American Child Nurture
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968); and for a splendid and provocative recent analysis of the corporal-punishment debate, see Brodhead,
Cultures of Letters, 13–47
. An influential nineteenth-century book on this subject is Horace Bushnell,
Views of Christian Nurture
(Hartford, 1847).

44.
Mrs. [Elizabeth] Sedgwick, “The Game at Jackstraws and The Christmas Box,” in
The Pearl; or, Affection’s Gift
(Philadelphia, 1834), 17–52.

45.
Ibid., 31, 36, 46.

46.
Ibid., 32, 46–47. This same number of
The Pearl
contained a prefatory poem about holiday gifts, signed “A.D.W.” and dated from Stockbridge (the author was almost certainly a friend of the Stockbridge Sedgwicks). This poem concludes with two stanzas advertising
The Pearl
itself: “And here is one,—look, Ellen dear,—/ That I from all would choose; / Its very name’t is sweet to hear; / Affection’s Gift’ who’d lose [“Affection’s Gift” was the subtitle of
The Pearl].”
“True, true, dear Sarah, I am sure / We need not look for [presents] more, / While here we have, so chaste and pure, / ‘The Pearl’ for thirty-four” (ibid., 10).

47.
Elizabeth E. Sedgwick to Robert Sedgwick, Aug. 22, 1835 (Sedgwick V, Box 17.12).

48.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature,” in
Nature, Addresses and Lectures (The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson
, 12 vols., Boston, 1903–4), I, 8–9.

49.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England,” ibid., vol. 10, 325. I am indebted to Conrad Wright for this reference.

50.
Quoted in E. Biber,
Henry Pestalozzi, and His Plan of Education
(London, 1833), 447–448.

51.
“S.” [Susan Sedgwick], “‘Record of a School: Exemplifying the general principles of spiritual culture,”
The Knickerbocker
, 8 (Feb. 1836), 113–130. Mrs. Sedgwick called Alcott an “enthusiast” and an “ultra.” Richard Brodhead makes a compelling linkage between radical educational theory and the abolitionists’ horror of the use of the lash on slave plantations. See Brodhead,
Cultures of Letters
, 13–14, 35–42.

52.
For this episode, see Folien,
Works
, 1, 360–378 passim; and specifically, 362 (“individual talent and taste”), 375 (“legitimate and innocent desires”). Folien maintained, as Elizabeth Palmer Peabody later reported, “that the child should be handled not with reference to his future, but to his present perfection; that the father of the man is the perfect
child in
the balance of childish beauty, and not the child prematurely developed into a man; that education which does the latter both destroys the child and dwarfs the man.” This is quoted in Spindler,
Charles Folien
, 107–109 (the quotation is from Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s 1880 volume
Reminiscences of W.E. Channing
, 250–257). For further evidence of Follen’s adherence Pestalozzian principles: In 1826 he tried to procure some “fables” by Pestalozzi (
Works
, 1, 161). And in 1828 he attempted to revise William Russel’s Pestalozzian “Teacher’s Manual,” a work evidently still in manuscript (ibid., 240).

53.
Diary entry, Dec. 26, 1827, in Folien,
Works
, I, 222.

54.
Elizabeth E. Sedgwick to Ellery Sedgwick, Aug. 4, 1835 (Sedgwick V, Box 17.9—this letter is addressed to “My dear precious son”); Elizabeth E. Sedgwick to Robert Sedgwick, undated but postmarked Sept. 1, 1835 (Sedgwick V, Box 17.12); Robert Sedgwick to Ellery Sedgwick, Jan. 3, 1836 (Sedgwick V, Box 18.1).

55. E. Biber,
Life and Trials of Henry Pestalozzi
(Philadelphia, 1833), 38–43. (The quotation marks appear in the original.) The translator continued: “Christmas-eve is abroad as here [i.e., in England and America], the time when children receive gifts of every kind from their parents, godfathers, &c.; but instead of ‘Christmas boxes,’ they are. The preparation of the ‘Christmas tree’ is a family mystery, and if the child asks from whence all the goodly things come, the answer is, ‘The Christchild brought them.’”

56.
Ibid., 43.

57.
Pestalozzi actually made the same connection. Somewhat like John Pintard (and many others of their generation), Pestalozzi waxed lyrical about the paternalist social relations that had characterized Christmas in the old days—meaning, in Pestalozzis case, the early days of Christianity itself. On Christmas Eve, Pestalozzi wrote, the high and the low together—patrons and clients—gathered in a spirit of harmonious reciprocity. On such occasions, the patrons expressed their spiritual [piety] by offering “earthly gifts” to their clients. “Thus stood the mother among her children, the master among his workmen, the landlord among his tenants. Thus assembled the congregation before its pastor; thus the rich entered the cottage of the poor …” (ibid., 38). But that was in the old days. In modern times, Pestalozzi implied, neither side in this exchange, whether workmen and masters, tenants and landlords, even congregations and pastors, had kept their part of the arrangement. But with children, Pestalozzi insisted, the old relations could and did still continue to function in their original harmony, and in the enactment of these relations with the young the intense spirituality of the old days could be re-created. (To an extent, Pestalozzi was simply playing on the symbolism of the Magi bringing gifts to the Christ child, with the assembled children taking the role of the Christ child. But for Pestalozzi the connection between children and the Christ child was real as well as symbolic—and it was here that his words crossed the line from symbolic social inversion into something much more radical.)