This essay was adapted from the Book of Ours video script: “The New Model: Resetting Christmas” and is based on the book “The Battle for Christmas, A Cultural History of America’s Most Cherished Holiday” by Stephen Nissenbaum
It’s Beginning to Feel a Lot Like…
Although it may be hard to believe, the way we celebrate Christmas is a little less than 200 years old. In many people’s minds, Christmas is as ancient as time itself and the way we celebrate it is just as old. This is the furthest thing from the truth and our holiday celebrations are really an invention of tradition.
At the dawn of the First Industrial Revolution, in the early part of the 19th century, the United States was undergoing a huge transformation. The Jeffersonian Revolution in 1800 changed the direction of Democracy, its politics and public policy. North eastern cities were industrializing and urbanizing the rural areas just outside of previous city limits.
The political and social changes that were taking place were bringing about a clash of traditions and a mixing of the classes that the upper classes were not happy about. In an attempt to change behavior and separate the American Aristocracy–the 1% of the 19th century from the rest of the plebeian public; three men through four publications created a new tradition designed to appear as an old one, which changed the way we have celebrated Christmas for the last 200 years.
We’re now at a point where the entire world celebrates Christmas whether the people celebrating the holiday are Western or Christian or not. At the same time the whole world is going through a gigantic transformation in every part of our lives.
At this time when people need most to come together we are being kept apart through divisions that are imposed on us by new forms of behavior modification via online influencers, propaganda, misdirection and lies of omission from media and the state.
But before we immerse ourselves in the sentimental, Hallmark-Christmas-movie-security-blanket of days gone by or even the comfort of the overly saturated, media driven, cranked-up-volume-spectacle of the current state of the holiday celebrations; or we try to find new ways of coping with the hyperreal experience of modern life, we need to look to the past, the long-past. Because as the cliché goes: you don’t know where you’re going unless you know where you’ve been.
Now Bring Us a Figgy Pudding…
Before the introduction of Santa Claus, holiday gift guides or even the Christmas tree, the season of Christmas in America and Europe was a much different experience than it is today. It’s important to point out that by the time of the American Revolution, pious and devout Christians of all types, not just Catholics, celebrated Christmas, but only in church, and unless it fell on a Sunday, December 25th was still considered an ordinary working day.
But for others, December was the end of the harvest, a time of leisure for farmers and farmhands, before the deep freeze of winter and a time after the work was done. This was a time of the bounty of harvest, of newly fermented beer or wine and a time when fresh meat from freshly slaughtered animals was available and had to be consumed before it spoiled.
The season of Christmas was not a one-day celebration, it was the winter holiday season, a time of rebelliousness, public drunkenness, excessive eating, aggressive begging, the mocking of authority figures and home invasions of wealthy households by the lower classes. This was a season of misrule and wassailing of mumming and Christmas carols.
Misrule meant behavior, regarded by the genteel and religious, as that of drunkenness, rioting, cross dressing, fornication and recklessness. But this was the end of the season and a time of blowing off steam, when the poor claimed the right to march into the houses of the wealthy land owners–often their employers, enter their halls, and receive gifts of food, drink, and sometimes money. This season was a societal pressure-release-valve that kept class resentments in check.
So at this time of the year, the lords of the manors would open their homes to the peasants, servants, and apprentices and feasted them. And in return the lower classes offered their “goodwill” or, in modern terms: a verbal agreement that they would continue to work the fields obediently the rest of the year. The gifts given were in the form of food and drink that were consumed in the presence of the giver. These were gifts given from the wealthy to the poor, employer to employee.
In later times, in a similar lord-to-servant gesture, money was put into a Christmas box for paper carriers or coffee house employees but in this case the transaction was consumer to service provider. We can see that tradition extended to contemporary times in the form of end of the year tips to letter carriers and others we see all year long as a form of thank you for service well done and of course, goodwill.
But by the early 19th century, the gentry, the aristocrats and upper classes who in generations before tolerated misrule were no longer willing to keep the lower classes in their place through this safety valve. The rituals that worked for centuries before in the agrarian societies of Europe, England and America did not fit into newly formed democracies and industrialized urban cities, especially in North Eastern American cities with Puritan and Protestant non-ritualistic roots.
The old culture and customs of public misrule and role reversal at the end of the year were now at odds with the practicality of a new urban environment and genteel society of that time. The social contract between lower and upper classes had come to an end. No longer was there an oath of goodwill in exchange for feasting at the end of the long agrarian season. Class, social and economic differences were forming at the dawn of the First Industrial Revolution. And it was this clash of classes and traditions in which the idea to create new holidays, practices and traditions was formed; traditions that conformed to this new, urban, Industrial Age.
T’was the night before Christmas
The St. Nicholas who became Santa Claus is a complete fabrication and he started life in New York City. In fact, the origin of the way we celebrate Christmas today is rooted in New York City by a group of wealthy civic leaders who all knew each other through the New York Historical Society. Nicknamed the Knickerbockers, these were men who all belonged to a distinct social set: the old aristocracy of the city. They picked up their name from a satirical allegorical book: Diedrich Knickerbocker’s History of New York by Washington Irving. Irving along with John Pintard and Clement Clarke Moore and others within their circle were politically conservative and reactionary and considered democracy to be nothing more than mob rule.
However, real mob-rule was beginning to take place in the form of roaming gangs of young street thugs and members of the emerging urban proletariat. These bands of revelers were no longer staying within the confines of working-class neighborhoods. They began to venture out across the city and into the city’s wealthy neighborhoods, especially on New Year’s Eve making as much noise as possible in the form of, what were known as Callithumpian bands. These groups and bands used drums, tin kettles, rattles, horns, whistles, and a variety of other instruments to wake the slumbering upper-class neighborhoods, in some cases remaining outside specific houses to deliberately disturb the wealthy occupants within.
In the light of these annual disruptions and the general political and social change that was taking place; the Knickerbockers were attempting to find a way to end what they thought of as immoral behavior and create new ways of public expression. But it wasn’t as self conscious as all that, well, it was but like all social change, the attempts made came in fits and starts. Starting with the Knickerbocker’s History of New York, various attempts at public holiday celebrations were made but didn’t gain any traction until the publishing of the poem, “A Visit from St. Nicolas.”
Although Washington Irving supplied the background and character sketches for the modern Christmas, it was John Pintard who provided the structure to build around and give the holiday shape.
His first endeavors however were not New Years events, nor were they Christmas events. Instead, Pintard gave us an event that took place on the feast day of a saint. A saint that he would introduce through a broadsheet published in 1810 which proposed this saint to be the new patron saint of old New York and that saint was St. Nicolas.
It’s said that if John Pintard introduced St. Nicholas, it was Washington Irving who popularized him. Washington Irving is probably best known for his stories The Ghost of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle. But before John Pintard introduced St. Nicolas to New York and subsequently to the world, Washington Irving would provide the description, background and mannerisms to the new St. Nick later to become known as Santa Claus. Irving provided enough background about St. Nicolas for others to later fill in more and add to the character who eventually became the personification of Christmas.
In two different books, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. and Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists, A Medley in which he employed the narrator Geoffrey Crayon, Irving offered up several stories about Christmas traditions that never really existed, at least as they were described in the stories but instead offered an invention of tradition. It was those fabricated traditions that people latched onto and allowed Irving, Pintard, Moore and others to create the Christmas in the ‘Original New-Old-Fashioned-Way’.
If John Pintard introduced St. Nicholas, and Washington Irving popularized him it was Clement Moore who gave us the character we know today as Santa Claus. But he didn’t create Santa from just Pintard’s and Irving’s works. There were also a number of earlier poems published between 1809 and 1823 by anonymous contributors–one of which gave St. Nick his sleigh and reindeer, which most likely gave Moore the material to create his poem that caught the public’s attention and gave us the template for the big man himself, the embodiment of Christmas, Santa Claus.
Must be Santa…
The character who first appeared in Clement Moore’s 1823 poem: A Visit From St. Nicholas, you know the one: ’Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house… was the first manifestation of the character we now know as Santa Claus. This St. Nicholas is nothing like the historical St. Nicholas who is the patron saint of Greece and Russia and is celebrated in the The Netherlands. That St. Nicholas was a bishop from the Southwest region of Turkey who is the patron saint of children, brides, bootblacks, barrel makers and a plethora of other tradespeople.
But the Dutch Santa Claus whose feast day is December 6th is not the same character as the American Santa Claus. Although, the traditional St. Nicholas may have been the inspiration for John Pintard and the Knickerbockers who were looking to the old Dutch culture of New Amsterdam as a guide to influencing the contemporaneous culture in New York, there is no evidence that the Dutch Saint Nicolas traveled with the Dutch settlers and traders of 17th Century New Amsterdam only to reemerge later in the early 19th Century New York.
The Santa Claus we know was created self consciously by a number of contributors and it was that origin of this character that gives Santa Claus his ancient, folkloric authenticity. But it was Santa’s activities: delivering presents to children around the world and wishing everyone a Merry Christmas that gave him the sheen of newness and joy which made him the perfect capitalist vessel and the perfect spokesman, EVER.
Childhood as a thing
One of the biggest changes that took place in society with the reinvention of Christmas was the reinvention of childhood. To be fair, society was naturally moving toward recognizing children as more than just small people or servants that were relatives. But those changes were coming slowly over time and it took the reinvention of Christmas and its emphasis on family gatherings inside the home that kickstarted the transformation. But it wasn’t just children that were being transformed, it was the family unit as well.
The domestication of Christmas was the cause and the effect of the domestication of childhood which in turn recreated the family. Before the reinvention of Christmas, the family was merely a means of creating workers who would help keep the family operating and keep the family name going. But now the family was a unit that was about children and their happiness. Childhood was now a thing, it was now revered as a time for children to be children a time to have fun, be happy and learn how to be adults.
And the instrument used to encourage these transformations of the family unit and childhood itself is as much a symbol of Christmas as Santa Claus himself… the Christmas Tree.
O Christmas Tree…
More than Santa Claus, or exchanging gifts, or Christmas itself, the Christmas Tree is thought to be as the ancient symbol for the winter holiday celebration, but it’s not. It, more than other contemporary symbols of the season has single handedly and physically replaced other, truly ancient symbols of the past. The Yule log, Wassailing and caroling now only exist as concepts in people’s minds or they are watered down customs that are not practiced in their original form.
The Christmas Tree, is THE reason we exchange gifts with one another. As I pointed out before, gifts were given in the past but they were given from the lord to the servant–from high to low. The Christmas tree was the medium for equal exchange from one to another but also parent to child but not because the child is a servant but because the child is a child.
In reality, the Christmas tree is not ancient at all and wasn’t adopted into mainstream American culture until the 1830s. It came from Germany but it didn’t come from German immigrants and wasn’t adopted into mainstream German culture until around the same time.
Like St. Nicolas, the Christmas tree was introduced as if it was an ancient and authentic, folk tradition. It originated in the last third of the 18th century and was a local custom in Strasbourg, Germany and the spread of the tradition throughout Germany can be attributed to the author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
At that time, the tree had wax candles attached to it. They were lit for a short time and only revealed at a specific moment on Christmas Eve. Gifts were tied to the branches of the tree and the whole spectacle was hidden from the children of the house until that special time when the children were brought into the room to take in that special, magical moment.
An American visiting Germany wrote letters to his father, a Unitarian minister about the Christmas tree ritual with its focus on children and the family. The tree, with its magical-reveal, fit an agenda of promoting the new concept of family and was at the crux of differences in child rearing being promoted at that time.
Like the story of St. Nick promoted by the Knickerbockers, the Christmas tree was related to an agenda and an effort to change society through the way children were raised and how they were taught. New methods of education were being developed by members of the Unitarian church in Boston. And we can look to the Unitarians for the widespread adoption of the Christmas tree which coincided with the new Christmas rituals that developed in New York.
Even though we can attribute the adoption of the Christmas tree through efforts and agendas of cultural reformers in the Unitarian church, we can also see that their concepts of family and children took place simultaneously with what was happening in New York and other cities in the US.
The Christmas tree fit in with the cult of Santa Claus, the new commercial opportunities that arose through gift giving and the transformation of children, childhood and the family.
The New Old-Fashioned Way
Despite our belief that the way we celebrate Christmas is ancient and has been going on for many centuries, it has really only been celebrated this way for the past 200 years or so. Christmas before the 19th century was celebrated in ways that are much different than today. Before the mid-18th century in North America and Europe, Christmas was a Catholic holiday not celebrated by Protestants. And secular celebrations of misrule and wassailing were focused on the ancient winter holiday rituals that came from so-called, pagan traditions.
And quite honestly, the church in Rome began formally celebrating Christmas on December 25th in 336 CE. So, although no one really knows when Jesus was born, that date was probably chosen to co-opt existing “pagan” holidays like the Roman holiday Saturnalia which took place between the 17th and 25th of December.
So from the beginning Christmas was used to change behavior or at least circumvent the more organic, pre-christian holidays and celebrations. And, the Christmas that a lot of people have been striving for since the “Culture Wars” of the 1990s, the one that is less secular and materialistic, and keeps “Christ in Christmas” never really existed; at least not in a contemporary context. Complaints about Christmas being too commercial and materialistic go back as far back as the 1830s, not long after the adoption of the new Christmas.
Before the introduction of Santa Claus and the Christmas tree, people went to church on December 25th and then went to work. It’s only since the industrial, consumer-focused Christmas that emerged from the mid-19th century that the holiday became what we experience today.
The change in how people celebrate the winter holidays was intentional in order to transform behavior from raucous roaming throughout the city, town or countryside to a quiet family celebration by moving the celebration from out-of-doors to in. And Christmas was used to do it.
It’s important to point out that the development of the Christmas holiday season that we celebrate today was not created over night but over a period of 10 to 20 years. John Pintard originally focused on December 6th, St. Nicolas Day, in order to promote the saint as a symbol and the patron saint of New York. But he changed his focus to January 1st New Year’s Day and then ultimately to December 25th, Christmas Day.
I also want to emphasize that throughout that time the promoters of Christmas, St. Nicolas and the Christmas tree were interested in changing social behavior by taking Christmas out of the street and putting it into the home, re-creating childhood and redefining the family unit.
And so this reinvention was intended for completely different reasons than lifting up a religious holiday. That date and its significance in the Christian calendar was used to eradicate the practices of misrule, wassailing and what was seen as idleness and debauchery.
But it’s likely that these rituals from the rural past would likely fade away or morph into something else anyway because the Industrial Revolution was having a big effect on culture and society. Workers were moving out of the fields from the country side and into factories in the cities. However, it was the introduction of coal driven industry that made the biggest difference in the urban population and how they spent their time. That’s because before coal, manufacturing mills were driven by rivers and streams which froze up during the winter which produced the same period of leisure time for mill workers that farm workers had during the winter.
With factories working all year round and a growing urban environment that was absorbing the rural lands around it and taking the workers from the fields for factory labor, there was no place for the old ways that acted as a relief valve for class disparity. Those were addressed in other ways later in the century. But for that early part of the 19th century the newly invented traditions that were introduced to the population gave the bourgeoisie the feeling of at least changing behavior to something they could control.
But despite the cultural changes introduced by the Knickerbockers and the progressive wing of the Unitarian church, the world was already changing. The alignment of behavioral, cultural, civic and technological change that came together around the same time created the perfect environment for the emerging consumer culture of the mid-19th century to take hold and turn the winter holidays into the Christmas we celebrate today.
The Ghost of Christmas Future
We are now undergoing another huge transformation and experiencing a new behavioral change campaign. We’re told that we’re now more divided than ever. We’re being manipulated, misdirected, surveilled, pushed into debt peonage and lied to by media and the state.
It’s now time to make positive changes for ourselves and our society as a result of this intentional manipulation of our lives. As a popular Christmas song says: “it’s the most wonderful time of the year.” So maybe we need to leave behind the empty gift-giving that has come about through the last 200 years of holiday driven consumerism and go back to the more social interactions of the past.
But in order to do this, we have to stop believing the lies that the ruling class, the politicians, celebrities, marketers and influencers are telling us. This is the same class of people who conned us for generations into the compulsory, holiday gift giving, over-consumption and Christmas-time deficit-spending.
If we’re to regain our humanity, it’s time to get outside with large groups of people and make some noise. We need to rethink and reinvent our traditions, rituals and practices to something more organic and human. To do that we need to be social again and possibly look back to the way we lived and celebrated before the reinvention of Christmas and the winter holidays.
And who knows, maybe we won’t go back to the days of Misrule or Wassailing. But whatever we call it, we have to go back to demanding our share and claim our right to march into the houses of the ruling class, enter their halls, and receive the food, drink, and the gifts that we deserve. Or maybe we just turn our backs on the ruling class all together and make our own fun.
But most importantly, we need to take back our lives.
There is no greater gift.
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