The Battle for Christmas (7 page)

Martha Ballard’s diary records a single present of a commercial nature. On December 29, 1796, she noted that “Daniel Livermore made a present of an Almanack to my Son Cyrus.”
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We cannot know what prompted Livermore
to make such a gift, or just which almanac he chose (there were many), but of one thing we can be sure: The almanac would have noted that December 25 was Christmas.

There is a story here. As far back as the seventeenth century, and even among devout Puritans, there had never been complete unanimity about the need to deny that Christmas could be an occasion for legitimate religious observance. In England, in 1629, no less prominent a Puritan than John Milton wrote a Christmas poem, “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity.” The poem began by announcing (almost defiantly, given the political context in which it appeared), “This is the month, and this the happy morn….”
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In Boston itself, on December 18, 1664, the young minister Increase Mather felt it necessary to deliver a sermon reinforcing the colony’s official policy. The day after Mather delivered it, he was confronted by three of the wealthiest members of his own church, who demanded that he discuss the subject further with them. In his diary Mather recorded the argument with tantalizing brevity: “Discoursed much about Christmas, I Con, they Pro.”
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Such evidence is scarce. But there is another kind of record that is much easier to come by and has broad implications—once again, the printed almanac. As we have seen, seventeenth-century almanacs were purged of all the traditional red-letter days that marked the seasonal calendar in English society (except, of course, for the countercultural almanacs that John Tully produced in the period of direct English rule from 1687 to 1689).

But there was a pair of exceptions to the ordinary rule. In the almanac for 1669, quietly placed at this date, in small italic letters, can be found the Latin phrase
“Christus Natus”
[i.e., Christ born]. And exactly ten years later, the 1679 almanac indicated, in English, “Our Saviorborn.”
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These two almanacs, like every book published in New England during the period, were printed on a press owned by Harvard College. The authorities must have noticed the insertions and allowed them to be made. A small notation in an almanac or diary may not seem very important today. But in the context of seventeenth-century New England, this gesture would have been charged with meaning. It was such small things that signaled to contemporaries the shifting lines between what was open for public debate and what was not.

Those lines shifted more clearly after 1700. During the 1710s, several almanacs named Christmas (one of them written by Edward Holyoke, a future president of Harvard). And in the 1720s James Franklin published
several more.
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By 1730 the hegemony of the government of Massachusetts in the matter of almanacs was fading. From that point on, the dominant role in determining whether the holiday was named was played not by official preferences but by the forces of the market, in concert with the personal predilections of individual almanac-makers. Before 1730 or so, it was not wholly safe to publish an almanac that named Christmas or the Anglican saints’ days. After 1730, it
was
safe. Over the next thirty years, some writers chose to name Christmas in their almanacs, and others chose not to.

But after 1760 it was exceptional
not
to name Christmas. The last major holdout, Nathanael Ames, named Christmas in 1760, and when he did so he added an explicit religious verse (“This is a Time for Joy and Mirth / When we consider our Saviour’s Birth”). Ames went further still that year: He incorporated all the saints’ days in the Anglican Church calendar. It was a major change, and the newspaper advertisements for the 1760 Ames almanac made a point of noting that it contained, “besides what is usual,
The Feasts and Fasts of the Church of England.”
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The year 1760 was also when Ames began his systematic campaign—described earlier—to take the gorging and drunkenness out of the Christmas holiday. The timing of Ames’ decision to name Christmas thus provides still another indication that the holiday became accepted into mainstream New England culture only as it was purged of seasonal excess.

The change is confirmed by the experience of Connecticut almanac-maker Roger Sherman. Sherman published a series of almanacs from 1750 to 1761. Every one of these almanacs listed Christmas and the saints’ days. But in 1758 Sherman felt obliged to publicly defend his practice. He had learned, as he wrote in the preface to that year’s almanac, “that some good People in the Country, dislike my Almanack, because the observable Days of the Church of England are inserted in it.” Sherman, a good Congregationalist, denied that he had Anglican leanings. He insisted that his almanac was not intended as an expression of personal belief; rather, “my Design in this Performance is to serve the Publick.” Everybody was free to observe such days or not, and no harm would be done as long as the physical space in the almanac taken up by naming the red-letter days “does not crowd out any Thing that might be more serviceable.”
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Sherman’s words concealed his real point. After all, the “good People in the Country” who “disliked” the practice were themselves members of the “Publick.” What Sherman was really alluding to was not religious freedom but market demand. His words suggest that the old Puritan preference for a “reformed” almanac remained just important enough to warrant a rhetorical response, just as his actual practice reveals that such an old-fashioned preference was no longer widespread enough to require anything
but
a rhetorical response. “Reformed” almanacs were still being published in 1758, but only four years later they would be gone, gone for good. By the 1760s the naming of Christmas and the saints’ days seems to have offended such a small group that it would not pay to produce even a single almanac for them. The Puritan buying market seems simply to have evaporated.

W
HAT WAS
true of almanacs was equally true of another immensely popular form of culture in early New England, the hymnal. During the seventeenth and well into the eighteenth century, most New England congregations used the so-called Bay Psalm Book, a rhymed version of the Old Testament Psalms, with additional hymns taken from various biblical sources (this was the first book published in New England). None of these hymns dealt with the Christmas story.

But by the 1750s the Bay Psalm Book had largely been replaced in New England churches by a pair of new verse translations of the Psalms, both of which contained Christmas hymns. The first of these had been written late in the seventeenth century by the English poets Nicholas Brady and Nahum Tate. (Tate was then England’s poet laureate; he is best known today as the librettist of Henry Purcell’s opera
Dido and Aeneas.)
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Brady and Tate’s
New Version
of the Psalms contained a hymn that told the story of the Nativity. (Written by Nahum Tate, this hymn is still popular today. It begins with the lines “While Shepards watch’d their Flocks by Night, / All seated on the Ground, / The Angel of the Lord came
down / and Glory shone around.”) The
New Version
was first printed in Boston in 1713. It was reprinted three times between 1720 and 1740, and some forty times more between 1754 and 1775.
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The other version of rhymed psalms and hymns that replaced the old Bay Psalm Book was written by the great English hymnist and religious poet Isaac Watts (1674–1748). Watts published not one but
two
Christmas hymns; both (like Tate’s) were rhapsodic accounts of the Nativity. Each was called “The Nativity of Christ,” and each placed the Nativity “today”—which would have made the hymns almost impossible to sing at any time other than the Christmas season.
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Watts’s religious verse became the steadiest of what David Hall has termed “steady sellers.” One New Englander who grew up toward the end of the century later recalled that as a youth “I could recite Watts’ version of the Psalms from beginning to end, together with many of his Hymns and Lyric Poems.”
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After 1762 no Congregationalist hymnal published in New England failed to include a hymn for Christmas. What makes the change especially suggestive, of course, is the way it parallels the transformation of New England almanacs. In both cases, Christmas was hardly to be found before 1720; after 1760 it could not be avoided.

T
HESE HYMNALS
were printed with texts only, and they could be sung to any tune that fit the meter. In fact, the earliest religious
music
to be printed in New England first appeared in 1698. Thereafter a familiar pattern emerged. In the first half of the eighteenth century, none of the religious “tune books” published in New England had texts that referred to the Nativity. But in 1760 (that year, again!) a tune book published in Boston included the music and words to a “Hymn on the Nativity,” composed by Englishman William Knapp to the familiar text of Nahum Tate. Other Christmas music composed by Englishmen appeared throughout the decade. In all, during the 1760s nine different Christmas songs were published in New England.
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Beginning in 1770, a new set of Christmas songs began to appear—songs written by native New England composers. The most famous of these Yankee composers, William Billings of Boston, composed Christmas music for each of the tune books he published between 1770 and 1794; there were eight such Christmas pieces in all, several of them extended contrapuntal “anthems.”
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Three of these pieces (and part of a fourth) were settings for the hymns by Isaac Watts and Nahum Tate. The texts of the others were written by Billings himself.

William Billings, “An Hymn for Christmas”
(1770).
The first of Billings’s eight Christmas pieces. The words, taken from Nahum Tate’s hymn “While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks by Night,” are indicated only by the opening phrase of each line—perhaps the singers were already acquainted with the text. The hymn’s subtitle, “Charlston” (i.e., Charlestown), probably names the congregation for which Billings first wrote the piece.
(Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society)

Billings was hardly alone. All told, during the last two decades of the eighteenth century, seven different New England composers published original Christmas music. And Christmas pieces by English composers continued to be routinely included in the anthologies of sacred music that appeared with accelerated frequency in the 1780s and ’90s. One of the most important of the new tune books, Isaiah Thomas’s 1786
Worcester Collection of Sacred Harmony
, even contained the “Hallelujah Chorus” from Handels
Messiah!
And another composer, Daniel Read, published an unattributed arrangement of a second chorus from
Messiah
, “Glory to God in the Highest,” together with his own version of the several recitatives that precede this chorus (beginning with “There were angels abiding in the fields”).
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Between 1760 and 1799 at least thirty different Christmas
songs were published in New England. It is safe to say that the decades after 1760 saw a veritable explosion of Christmas music in the region.

Beginning in about the middle of the eighteenth century, even some orthodox Congregationalist ministers began to confess their desire to observe Christmas, along with their regret that it carried too much unacceptable baggage, social as well as theological. (Their ambivalence is similar to the feelings about this holiday experienced by many contemporary American Jews.) One of these ministers, the Reverend Ezra Stiles, reflected on the quandary that would be faced over the coming years by an increasing number of Congregationalist clergymen (Ezra Stiles himself would later become president of Yale). On December 25, 1776, Stiles confided to his diary:

In 1778 Stiles specified the nature of his own reservations:
“Without superstition
for the day I desire to unite with all Christians in celebrating the incarnation of the divine Emmanuel.”
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In fact, as president of Yale, Stiles permitted his students to attend Christmas service (as Edward Holyoke had done at Harvard a generation earlier).
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Ezra Stiles was a theological liberal. But there were several more conservative Congregational ministers who left records of their attraction to Christmas in their private diaries. The Reverend Ebenezer Parkman of Westborough, Massachusetts, was one of these. For twenty years Parkman had been going about his ordinary business each December 25; he had even been chiding his neighbors for attending Christmas services in a nearby Episcopal Church. But suddenly, in 1747, Parkman revealed that he himself was tempted to join them: “God grant that I and mine may be happy partakers this Day with all those who Sincerely celebrate the Nativity of Jesus Christ!” Eight years later, in 1755, Parkman expanded on his earlier entry: He wrote that he had once again “had some serious
Thoughts on the Day, as kept by many in Commemoration of our Lords Nativity.” And he expressed the “desire to be one with all of them that are one with Christ,
and who avoid the Superstitions and Excesses of this Day
, and Serve the Lord in sincerity [italics added].” The caveat was crucial: Like Ezra Stiles, Ebenezer Parkman wished to celebrate Christmas with those people who did so “in sincerity,” not with those who did so with “Superstitions and Excesses.”
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