Notes

Chapter 1

1. James H. Barnett, The American Christmas: A Study in National Culture (New York: Macmillan, 1954), 19–20; Edward Everett Hale, “Christmas in Boston,” The New England Magazine n.s., I (1889), 356–357; Francis X. Weiser, The Christmas Book (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1952), 48–49. See also Hale’s autobiography, A New England Boyhood (New York, 1893), 117. The idea that Christmas was universally rejected by the Puritans, and that it was not practiced in New England until the nineteenth century, has been casually accepted in virtually all the relevant scholarship. This is even true of the best article on the subject: Ivor Debenham Spencer, “Christmas, the Upstart,” in New England Quarterly 8 (1935), 356–383. See also Katherine van Etten Lyford, “The Victory of the Christmas Keepers,” Yankee (Dec. 1964), 76–77, 102–105; and Katherine Lambert Richards, How Christmas Came to the Sunday-Schools: The Observance of Christmas in the Protestant Church Schools of the United States (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1934). A recent and notable exception is Richard P. Gildrie, The Profane, the Civil, and the Godly: The Reformation of Manners in Orthodox New England, 1679–1749 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994).

2. Increase Mather, A Testimony against Several Prophane and Superstitious Customs, Now Practiced by Some in New-England (London, 1687), 35.

3. An Anglican minister in northern England, writing as early as 1725, acknowledged the pagan origins of these practices. Yule logs and candles, for example, were for pagans “an Emblem of the Sun, and the lengthening of Days,” and they originated in an effort “to Illuminate the House, and turn the Night into Day.” But he speculated that it became associated with the Nativity for Christian reasons—“a Symbol of that Light which was that Night born into the World.” He argues that light has been associated with many things, and that one of these is that it has become “an emblem … of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Henry Bourne, Antiquitates Vulgares (Newcastle, 1725), 127, 128, 130, 134. The best account of the non-Christian origins of Christmas rituals remains Clement A. Miles, Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan (London, 1912; reissued as Christmas Customs and Traditions: Their History and Significance (New York: Dover Publications, 1976), 159–360 passim.

4. Miles, Christmas Customs and Traditions, 173–174. According to the Reverend Henry Bourne, many in England and Scotland continued the season as late as Candlemas (Feb. 2). Bourne, Antiquitates Vulgares, 156.

5. See, for example, John Ashton, A Right Merrie Christmasse: The Story of Christ-Tide (London and New York, 1894), 6–8, 45, 246–250. The situation was similar in colonial America; see Barnett, The American Christmas, 9, 11.

6. I. Mather, Testimony, 25. For perspectives on the world of carnival, see Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), 199–203; Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968); and Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen, 1986), 171–190.

7. Ashton, Right Merrie Christmasse, 125–126.

8. I. Mather, Testimony, 36; Cotton Mather, Grace Defended: A Censure on the Ungodliness, By Which the Glorious Grace of God, Is Too Commonly Abused (Boston, 1712), 20. Increase Mather cited earlier authorities to confirm his point: “‘[T]he Feast of Christ’s nativity is attended with such profaneness, as that it deserves the name of Saturn’s Mass, or of Bacchus his Mass, or if you will, the Devil’s Mass, rather than to have the holy name of Christ put upon it.’” William Perkins argued that “the Feast of Christ’s Nativity (commonly so called) is not spent in praising God, but in Revelling, Dicing, Carding, Masking, Mumming, and in all licentious Liberty for the most part, as though it were some Heathenish Feast of Ceres or Bacchus.” (I. Mather, Testimony, 36.) For the Puritan war on Christmas in England, see Chris Durston, “Lords of Misrule: The Puritan War on Christmas, 1642–60,” History Today 35 (Dec. 1985), 7–14; and David Underdown, Revel, Riot, and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 160J-1660(1985), 256–268. See also Gavin Weightman and Steve Humphries, Christmas Past (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1987), 38–53.

9. Bourne, Antiquitates Vulgares, x (“scandal”), 153–154, 156 (40 days of Christmas drinking), 147–149 (mumming), 139–141 (caroling).

10. For various inversion rituals, see John Brand, Observations on the Popular Antiquities of Great Britain (rev. by Sir Henry Ellis, 3 vols., London, 1849), I, 7–28, 415–531 passim; Ashton, Right Merrie Christmasse, passim; W. Carew Hazlitt, Faiths and Folklore of the British Isles, A Descriptive and Historical Dictionary (2 vols., 1905), I, 68–71, 119–125; II, 392–393, 437–438, 619–620.

11. I. Mather, Testimony, 35.

12. François Maximilien Misson, Travels in England, quoted in Hazlitt, Faiths and Folklore, 120–121, and in Brand, Popular Antiquities, I, 495. Misson added: “In the taverns the landlord gives [i.e., gives away, for free] part of what is eaten and drank in his house that and the next two days: for instance, they reckon [charge] you for the wine, and tell you there is nothing to pay for bread, nor for your slice of Westphalia [ham].” See also a 1570 account in Barnabe Googe, “The Popish Kingdom,” quoted in Brand, Popular Antiquities, 1, 13.

13. Robert Herrick, Hesperides (London, 1648); quoted in Brand, Popular Antiquities, I, 71–471; also Ashton, Right Merrie Christmasse, 75.

14. To add a touch of sexual banter, the song opens with a demand that the “prettiest maid” [i.e., maiden] in the house “roll back the pin … [and] let us all in.” One version of the “Gloucestershire Wassail” is in Brand, Popular Antiquities, I, 7–8. A recorded version of this song, performed in the appropriate spirit, can be found on the album The Second Nowell: A Pageant of Mid-Winter Carols, vol. 2 (John Roberts, Tony Barrand et al.), Front Hall Records.

15. Ashton, Right Merrie Christmasse, 225 (“invited into the house”). For the Scottish version of wassailing, called Hagmena (or Hogomany), see Ashton, Right Merrie Christmasse, 217.

16. See Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, 199–203; Natalie Zemon Davis, “The Reasons of Misrule: Youth Groups and Charivaris in Sixteenth-Century France,” in Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), 97–123.

17. Money, Dec. 1991, 82.

18. Ashton, Right Merrie Christmasse, 34–35.

19. John Taylor, The Complaint of Christmas, quoted in Durston, “Lords of Misrule,” 11.

20. Ashton, Right Merrie Christmasse, 27 (1644 law), 34–37 (popular resistance to the suppression).

21. David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgement: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (New York: Knopf, 1989), 10.

22. William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620–1647 (New York: Knopf, 1952), 97.

23. For examples of occasional instances of the emergence of popular customs (including a citation to the first instance of Christmas disorder to be examined below), see Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 210–211.

24. For a fine account of Marblehead maritime culture, including a subsequent conflict over the celebration of Christmas, see Christine Leigh Heyrman, Commerce and Culture: The Maritime Communities of Colonial Massachusetts, 1690–1750 (New York, W. W. Norton: 1984), 216–302.

25. Records and Files of the Quarterly Courts of Essex County (8 vols., Salem, 1911–1921), II, 433. Hoar’s age is from ibid., IX, 208. William Hoar’s occupation as a fisherman is ibid., VI, 401.

26. The Hoar clan’s activities are reported ibid., VII, 43–55, 81, 181–183. For a modern account, see Barbara Ritter Dailey, “‘Where Thieves Break Through and Steal’: John Hale Versus Dorcas Hoar, 1672–1692,” in Historical Collections of the Essex Institute, vol. 128 (1992), 255–269.

27. Essex Quarterly Courts, VII, 331–332. For a follow-up to this episode, see ibid., VII, 424.

28. Braybrooke, a weaver, was taxed in the lowest 15 percent of Salem Village rate payers in 1681, and in 1700 he was renting a small parcel of land from a local landowner, Thomas Putnam, Jr. Fuller was the son of a bricklayer; in 1690 he was taxed in the lowest quartile. Flint was the younger son of a sturdy farmer, and would later inherit the less desirable portion of his parents’ estate; he did not flourish. And Foster was assessed the minimum for the 1683 county rate. (Data are from Essex Institute Historical Collections 51 [1915], 190–191; ibid. 53 [1917], 336; Paul S. Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, eds., Salem-Village Witchcraft: A Documentary Record of Local Conflict in Colonial New England [Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993], 321–322, 353–355; Essex Quarterly Courts, VII, 424; Sidney Perley, The History of Salem, Massachusetts [3 vols., Salem, 1924], III, 422.)

29. Boyer and Nissenbaum, Salem-Village Witchcraft, 262 (anti-Parris petition) and 350 (list of villagers withholding taxes).

30. Samuel Sewall, The Diary of Samuel Sewall, 1674–1729. (2 vols., New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973), I, 90 (Dec. 25 and 28, 1685); 1, 128 (Dec. 25, 1686).

31. John Tully, “Tully 1687. An Almanac” (Boston, 1687); John Tully, “Tully 1688. An Almanac … Imprimatur Edw. Randolph, Secr.” (Boston, 1688).

32. Ibid., 15–22. Selections from these prognostications are reprinted in Harrison T. Meserole, ed., Seventeenth-Century American Poetry (Stuart Editions, N.Y.: New York University Press, 1968), 512–515. The copy of this almanac I have used (from the “Early American Imprints” series on microfilm) was purchased and used by Samuel Sewall himself. Other copies lack the “Prognostications,” which may have been copied from an English almanac. There is a good discussion of early New England almanacs, and Tully’s in particular, in Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 54–61. See also Bernard Capp, English Almanacs, 1500–1800: Astrology and the Popular Press (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979).

33. Mather wrote: “The impious and mischievous men, against whom the Inspired Writer is now engaged [in the sermons text, are guilty of the following:] First The Ungodly Men stand charged with Filthiness. They were, that I may use the most agreeable Term, which the French Translation leads me to, A very Dissolute Generation. I take notice, by the way, that the Greek term, here used for, Lasciviousness, or Wantonness, is derived from the name of the town Selga; a Place infamous for such dissolute Practices.” He concluded this series of euphemisms by admitting, “I am lothe here to explain my self too particularly.” C. Mather, Grace Defended, 2.

34. Cotton Mather, Advice from the Watch-Tower; in a testimony against evil customes. A brief essay to … offer a … catalogue of evil customes growing upon us (Boston, 1713), 31–40.

35. Ibid., 34–35.

36. See John Demos, “Families in Colonial Bristol, Rhode Island: An Exercise in Historical Demography,” in William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 25 (1968), 56–57. The seasonal rhythm of conceptions is from a paper delivered by Kenneth Lockridge at SUNY, Stony Brook, in 1969. For a fine account of premarital sex and marriage at the end of the eighteenth century, see Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812 (New York: Knopf, 1990), 134–161. The laments of such ministers as Cotton Mather have conventionally been interpreted as mere “jeremiads,” an irrational response to the decline of Puritanism. But recent scholarship supports my own sense that these were part of a reasonable response to the reemergence of popular culture in New England. The best recent study is Gildrie, The Profane, the Civil, and the Godly. This is the only work which shows that Christmas itself was making a comeback at the turn of the eighteenth century.

37. William Brattle, “An Ephemeris … for … 1682 (Cambridge, 1682). The verse actually concluded with a couplet that ridiculed those who believed its message.

38. Titan Leeds, “The American Almanac for … 1714” (Boston 1714). This was a Boston reprint of a Philadelphia imprint.

39. Samuel Clough, “The New-England Almanack” (Boston, 1702); Nathaniel Whittemore, “An Almanac” (Boston, 1719).

40. Nathanael Ames, “An Astronomical Almanac for … 1749” (Boston, [1748]); George Wheten, “An Almanac for … 1754” (Boston, [1753]).

41. Nathaniel Whittemore, “Almanac” (Boston, 1719). It is interesting that this admonition does not challenge the legitimacy of the ritual. By warning householders not to let their dependents “run too much abroad at Nights,” it seems only to be admonishing them not to stay out all night, or every night.

42. Nathanael Ames, “An Almanac for … 1746” (Boston, 1746).

43. Historians once believed that “Yankee Doodle” was the work of British soldiers who were satirizing New England rustic manners, but it now seems likely that its words were a local American product:—a kind of sophisticated rural self-parody. Evidence also suggests that the earliest of these verses date not from the era of the American Revolution but from a full generation earlier—from the early 1740s. The preeminent argument for the American origins of the verse is J. A. Leo Lemay, “The American Origins of ‘Yankee Doodle,’” William and Mary Quarterly, 33 (1976), 435–464. Lemay dates at least some of the verses to the 1740s (even though they were not actually published until the late 1760s and 1770s and later), using references to events that took place in King George’s War, especially the capture of Louisburg (on Cape Breton) in 1745 (ibid. 443–447).

44. This verse—and several others cited below—comes from a version of “Yankee Doodle” called “The Lexington March,” published in London, probably in 1775 (the only copy is owned by the Huntington Library). For evidence that these verses were of American composition, see Lemay, “Yankee Doodle,” 436–438.

45. For election day: “Lection time is now at hand, / We’re going to Uncle Chace’s, / There’l be some a drinking round / And some lapping lasses.” (Yankee Song Broadside, Essex Institute; quoted in Lemay, “Yankee Doodle,” 450. For cornhusking: “Yankee Song” (owned by Essex Institute), quoted ibid., 448. For a late-eighteenth-century rural New England diary that records the association of cornhuskings with “abandoned drinking and sexual liaisons,” see Ulrich, Midwife’s Tale, 146–147.

46. This verse is from “The Lexington March” (Huntington Library copy). “Mother Chase’s” corresponds to “Uncle Chace’s” in the election verse quoted in the previous note. The verse quoted above continues with the following: “Punkin Pye is very good / And so is Apple Lantern; / Had you been whipp’d as oft as I, / You’d not have been so wanton.”

47. Mather relegated to a footnote in the published text of this sermon (probably an indication that it was not part of the sermon as he originally delivered it in church) his demonstration that Jesus could not have been born in December.

48. Mather, Grace Defended, 19.

49. As early as 1706, Daniel Leeds warned in an almanac published in New York that “More health is gotten by observing diet / Than pleasure found in vain excess and Riot.” (Lines at Dec. 26–29; in Daniel Leeds, Leeds, 1760. The American Almanack [New York, 1706].) Twenty years later, in a Philadelphia almanac, his son Titan Leeds attacked both gambling and “surfeiting.” (Titan Leeds, The American Almanack for … 1726 [Philadelphia, (1705)].)

50. Other New England almanacs, while not sounding the dietary urgency of Nathanael Ames, typically combined notes of moderation with those of mirth, as when the “Bickerstaffe” almanac for 1777 assured its readers that “to keep your stomach warm / A moderate glass can do no harm.” ([Ezra Gleason, Bickerstaffe’s Boston Almanack, for… 1777 [Boston, 1777].)

51. As Eric Foner has pointed out, Franklin urged men like himself “to remember that ‘time is money,’ and condemned [the old] practice of observing the traditional pre-industrial ‘holiday’ of ‘Saint Monday’ and spending the day at the alehouse.” (Eric Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 35). Another self-made New Englander who urged temperance in his almanacs is Roger Sherman of Connecticut.

52. Robert R. McCausland and Cynthia MacAlman McCausland, eds., The Diary of Martha Ballard 1785–1812 (Camden, Maine: Picton Press, 1992), 742 (1807); 828 (1810); 852 (1811).

53. Ibid., 565. “Ephraim” and “Cyrus” were Martha Ballard’s still-unmarried sons; Patty Town was a grown-up granddaughter who was spending a few months at her grandmother’s in order to help with the housework (see entries from Oct. 15, 1801, to Feb. 8, 1802, ibid., 559–569 passim). Cyrus Ballard remained a bachelor all his life.

54. Ibid., 320. For Dolly and Sally Cox, see Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale, 144–145, 220–221. Only a few months later Barnabas Lambard would marry Martha Ballard’s daughter Dollie.

55. Ballard, Diary, 320 (Daniel Bolton); 217 (Mrs. Lithgow); 596 (“pumkin and apple pies” and clothes-mending); 624 (“puding and roast”).

56. Ibid., 217 (1791); 770 (1808); 771 (“childn here”).

57. Ibid., 714. A goose was clearly a special gift, and a seasonal one at that. According to the index to the published diary, there is only one record of a goose in the entire document; but the index is inadequate, failing to note either this New Year’s goose or a Thanks giving goose mentioned on page 621.

58. Ibid., 743. For further examples, see entries for Dec. 24, 1808, Dec. 30, 1810, and Dec. 22, 1811.

59. Ibid., 770.

60. Ibid., 396. This is the first example I have found in the history of New England of a commercial Christmas present. But see Chapter 4, p. 133.

61. Milton wrote this poem as a young man, in 1629, but he remained sufficiently proud of it to place it first in a later collection of his poetry.

62. Increase Mather, manuscript diary, Dec. 19, 1664 (in Mather Family Papers, American Antiquarian Society, Diary Typescript: Box 3, Folder 1, 48–49). I have inferred the subject of Mather’s sermon from circumstantial evidence. Much of his reading the previous week (as recorded in his diary) had dealt historically and critically with Christmas. It included Rudolf Hospinian, De Festiorum (Tiguri, 1592), William Prynne, Histrio-Mastix (London, 1633), and two references I have not been able to trace: Stuckins’ [?] De Antiq. and Caudrey, De Christmass (the reading is recorded in the entries for Dec. 12–14, 1664). This episode is alluded to in Michael G. Hall, The Last American Puritan: The Life of Increase Mather, 1639–1723 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 66.

63. J.B. [Joseph Browne], “An Almanac … for … 1669” (Cambridge, 1669); J.D. [John Danforth], “An Almanac … for … 1679” (Cambridge, 1679).

64. Edward Holyoke, “An Almanac … for … 1713” (Boston, 1713: “Licensed by His Excellency the Governour”); Titan Leeds, “The American Almanac for … 1714” (Boston, 1714); Increase Gatchell, “The Young American Ephemera for … 1715” (Boston, 1715). The James Franklin almanacs are: Poor Robin, “The Rhode Island Almanac for … 1728 (Newport, 1728) and “The Rhode Island Almanac for … 1729” (Newport, 1729). In his Boston newspaper, the New England Courant, Franklin had featured a front-page poem in defense of Christmas in the issue of Dec. 17–24, 1722.

65. Nathanael Ames, “An Almanac for … 1760” (Boston, 1759). The ads are in the Boston Post-Boy, Dec. 3, 1759 and the Boston News-Letter, Dec. 6, 1759.

66. Roger Sherman, An Astronomical Diary … for … 1758 (New Haven, 1758), 1.

67. Purcell set many of Tate’s poems to music, including what may be his greatest vocal solo, “The Blessed Virgin’s Expostulation.” Nicholas Brady wrote the libretto to Purcell’s 1692 “Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day.”

68. Nicholas Brady and Nahum Tate, A New Version of the Psalms of David, Fitted to the Tunes Used in the Churches (Boston, 1720). The printing history of this collection can be traced most easily through Clifford K. Shipton and James E. Mooney, National Index of American Imprints Through 1800: The Short-Title Evans (2 vols., Worcester: American Antiquarian Society, 1969). On Dec. 24, 1722, James Franklin printed two other Christmas hymns in his Boston newspaper, the New England Courant.

69. Isaac Watts, Hymns and Spiritual Songs (Boston, 1720). One of these Nativity hymns was placed third in this lengthy collection (It opens: “Behold, the grace appears, /The promise is fulfilled; / Mary the wondrous virgin bears, / And Jesus is the child.” It also reports that the “promis’d infant” is “born to day”). The second hymn, from Horae Lyricae [Lyric Poems] (Boston, 1748), begins: “Shepards rejoice, lift up your eyes.”

70. Joseph T. Buckingham, Personal Memoirs and Recollections of Editorial Life (2 vols., Boston, 1852), 1, 19; quoted in Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 37. The folklorist Peter Benes has estimated that by 1780 almost half of the New England churches were singing the Watts version; another 25 percent were using Tate and Brady; and most of the remaining churches were singing from the old Bay Psalm Book. (Peter Benes, “Psalmody in Coastal Massachusetts and the Connecticut River Valley,” in The Bay and the River, 1600–1900 (Annual proceedings of the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, vol. 6 [Boston: Boston University, 1982], 117–131; esp. 125.) Like the Anglicans Brady and Tate, the great English hymnist and religious poet Isaac Watts (1674–1748), though a steadfast Congregationalist, designed his verses to evoke powerful emotions rather than to offer plain and strictly faithful translations of the original biblical texts.

71. William Knapp, “An Hymn on the Nativity,” in Thomas Walter, The Grounds and Rules of Musick Explained (Boston, [1760]). The other songs were William Tans’ur, “An Anthem for Christmas Day,” in [Daniel Bayley,] The Royal Melody Complete (Boston, 1761); “An Hymn for Christmas Day,” in Daniel Bayley, A New and Complete Introduction to the Grounds and Rules of Musick (Newburyport, Mass., 1764); William Knapp, “An Anthem for Christmas Day;” anon., “A Christmas Hymn;” and Joseph Stephenson, “O Zion that Bringest,” all in Joseph Flagg, ed., Sixteen Anthems (Boston, 1766); Stephenson, “An Anthem, Out of the Second Chapter of Luke;” Stephenson, “Hark, Hark;” “Boston, A New Hymn for Christmas Day;” “Great Milton” (“Joy to the World”); and Stephenson, “An Anthem Out of the Fortieth Chapter of Isaiah” (“O Zion that bringst glad tidings”), all in Daniel Bayley and A. Williams The American Harmony (2 parts, Boston, 1769).

72. In chronological order of publication, these were: “An Hymn for Christmas or Charlston [sic]” and “Boston, for Christmas,” both published in The New-England Psalm-Singer (1770); “Boston” (same music as “Boston, for Christmas,” but with a different text), “Judea,” and “Bethlehem” (all in The Singing-Master’s Assistant) [1778]; “Emmanuel for Christmas” (in The Psalm-Singer’s Amusement [1781]); “Shiloh, for Christmas” (in The Suffolk Harmony [1786]); and “An Anthem for Christmas” (in The Continental Harmony [1794]). In addition, Billings may have been asked in 1782 to compose an elaborate Christmas hymn (also on a Watts text, but for soloist, chorus and organ) for Trinity Episcopal Church in Boston. (See David P. McKay and Richard Crawford, William Billings of Boston: Eighteenth-Century Composer [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975], 132–133. A discussion of Billings’s Christmas songs can be found ibid., 141–146.)

73. Isaiah Thomas, Worcester Collection of Sacred Harmony (Worcester, 1786), 188–194; Daniel Read, “A Christmas Anthem,” The Columbian Harmonist No. III (New Haven, 1785), 9–13. Technically, the “Hallelujah Chorus” is not a Christmas song, and Messiah itself was not written or initially performed as a Christmas oratorio. In 1795, Thomas would publish, as a separate imprint, a “Christmas Anthem,” with music by Isaac Lane—to a text by Isaac Watts. (See Isaac Lane, “Christmas Anthem” [Worcester, 1785]).

74. F. B. Dexter, ed., The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles (3 vols., New York, 1901), II, 103).

75. Ibid., II, 315.

76. The Yale community seems to have been a center of Christmas activity in the 1780s. In 1786 the Yale College Chapel was the site of a performance of a large-scale Christmas cantata, “An Ode for Christmas,” composed specially for the occasion and subsequently published in a New Haven musical magazine. This “Ode” was sung by three separate four-part choirs (each representing one of the shepherds) and an additional three-part choir (in the role of the angel Gabriel). The published version of this elaborate piece indicated that it had received “universal applause.” American Musical Magazine (New Haven, 1787), vol. 1, 27–30; microfilm in American Periodicals Series I: Reel 6.

77. Francis G. Walett, ed., The Diary of Ebenezer Parkman 1703–1782: First Part, 1719–1755 (Worcester, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society, 1974), 160 (1747), 195 (1755).

78. Manuscript diary of David Hall, in pre-Revolutionary Massachusetts Diaries, Massachusetts Historical Society: Microfilm 5:1. (Entries are missing for many of the years in the 1750s.) Hall composed extended Christmas meditations in 1763, 1768, and 1769. He is not to be confused with the historian David D. Hall.

79. John Birge manuscript Daybook (Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association Library), p. 62. This document was unearthed by Carrie Giard, an undergraduate student at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. (Birge’s final comment—“I cannot see why it was much better than Burglary”—implies that other people did not think of such Christmas intrusions as burglary, and supports the idea that this kind of seasonal misrule operated just at the boundaries of acceptable behavior.)

80. [Joseph Green,] “Entertainment for a Winter’s Evening: Being a Full and True Account of a very strange and wonderful Sight seen in Boston on the twenty-seventh of December at Noon-Day” (Boston, 1750), 5–6 (“diverting Christmas tale;” “‘tis love … house of God”), 11 (“eating”). For another modern account of this event, see Steven Bullock’s Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Order, 1730–1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). The Masons celebrated the name day of two saints named John; the other was St. John the Baptist, whose name day happened to fall on June 24. In effect, the Masons were celebrating both the winter and the summer solstice. Capt. Francis Goelet recorded three visits to the Freemasons’ Boston lodge, at Stone’s Tavern, all in October 1750. See New England Historical and Genealogical Register, 24 (1870), 53.

81. E. P. Thompson, “Patrician Society, Plebeian Culture,” in Journal of Social History, vol. 7 (1974), 382–405.

82. Green, “Entertainment,” 12.

83. “The News-Boy’s Christmas and New Year’s verses” (Broadside, Boston, 1770). The Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Post-Boy for Dec. 23, 1771, printed a devotional poem, “An Hymn on Christmas Day.”

84. W. W. Newell, “Christmas Maskings in Boston,” in Journal of American FolkLore 9 (1896), 178.

85. H. E. Scudder, ed., Recollections of Samuel Breck, with Passages from His Note-Books (1771–1862) (Philadelphia, 1877), 37. Breck was raised as an upper-class Bostonian. From 1780 to 1792 (when he moved to Philadelphia), his family lived in a “remarkably fine” house at the corner of Winter and Common (now Tremont) Streets, with an acre of land. The house was sold for $8,000 in 1792. (Ibid., 37–38.) This was presumably where Breck saw the Anticks.

86. The [Boston] Mercury, Dec. 20, 1793. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word antic originally meant “a grotesque gesture, posture, or trick.” It was commonly used to refer to “a grotesque pageant or theatrical representation …; hence, a grotesque or motley company.”

87. The [Boston] Mercury, Dec. 24, 1793, and the Columbian Centinel [Boston], Dec. 25, 1793; The Diary of William Bentley, pastor of the East Church, Salem (4 vols., Salem: The Essex Institute, 19–5–14), II, 78. The Anticks were not the only perpetrators of Christmas violence in Boston in 1793. On Christmas Eve another mob disrupted religious services in the local Roman Catholic church. (Columbian Centinel [Boston], Dec. 25, 1793.)

88. Massachusetts Centinel, Dec. 23 and 26, 1789; see also Russell E. Miller, The Larger Hope: The First Century of the Universalist Church in America, 1770–1870 (Boston: Unitarian Universalist Association, 1979), 321.

89. Earl Morse Wilbur, A History of Unitarianism (2 vols., Cambridge: Harvard University Press:, 1945–52), vol. 1, 400–414. The one marginal exception to the Unitarian front was the Old South Church, which “remained nominally orthodox by the narrowest margin, [although] its minister, Dr. Eckley, denied the supreme divinity of Christ” (ibid., 400).

90. Boston Daily Advertiser, Dec. 24, 1817. See also Independent Chronicle, Dec. 24, 1817, and Boston Gazette, Dec. 25, 1817 and Dec. 29, 1817 (a confirmation that all of this actually happened).

91. Quoted in Caroline Sloat, “Before There Was Christmas,” Old Sturbridge Visitor 24 (1984), 10.

92. See Boston Intelligencer, Dec. 12, 19, and 26, 1818; Boston Gazette, Dec. 21 and 24, 1818; Boston Daily Advertiser, Dec. 22, 1818; The Idiot, Dec. 24, 1818; New England Galaxy and Masonic Magazine, Dec. 18 and 25, 1818.

93. Boston Daily Advertiser, Dec. 22, 1818; New England Galaxy, Dec. 25, 1818 (this letter is signed “South End”).

94. Notice in Massachusetts Spy [Worcester], Dec. 22, 1818. Bancroft had the sermon published as “The Doctrine of Immortality: A Christmas Sermon” (Worcester, 1819). Aaron Bancroft was an open Unitarian who had been preaching Christmas sermons each year since 1816. See “The Diary of Isaiah Thomas 1805–1828,” in Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society IX (1909), 337 (1816), 368 (1817), 412–413 (1818). The 1659 Massachusetts law was printed in the Boston Intelligencer and Evening Gazette, Jan. 2, 1819. For data on the open churches, see Boston Gazette, Dec. 24, 1818. The previous year a collection of Christmas hymn texts was printed in Boston (it may have been part of the same movement): G. Carseer, Hymns for the Nativity of Our Saviour (Boston, 1817).

95. Boston Recorder, Dec. 19, 1818. The previous year the approval of this paper had been implicit: ibid., Dec. 30, 1817.

96. Boston Gazette, Dec. 23, 1819; Farmer’s Cabinet (Amherst, N.H.), Dec. 25, 1819 (the previous Christmas the same paper had reported favorably on the Boston business closings, and two local religious societies actually held devotional meetings in Amherst). See also New-England Galaxy, Dec. 24, 1819; Boston Intelligencer, Dec. 25, 1819; Independent Chronicle, Dec. 22 and 25, 1819.

97. New England Galaxy, Jan. 2, 1824.

98. “On Public Festivals,” Missionary Herald at Home and Abroad [The Panoplist and Missionary Herald] (Boston), vol. 16 (Feb., 1820), 57–59; Boston Statesman, Dec. 27, 1828.

Chapter 2

1. The episode is recorded by Pintard in a letter written in stages between Dec. 8, 1820, and January 4, 1821 (the passage I have used was written on January 1): Letters from John Pintard to his Daughter 1816–1833 (4 vols., New York: New-York Historical Society, 1940): vol. 1, 359. I have modernized Pintard’s spelling and punctuation. The revelers who disturbed Pintard’s sleep would have constituted a callithumpian band consisting of young working-class men; by the 1820s, these bands had become a menace in the eyes of more prosperous New Yorkers. See Paul A. Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763–1834 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 254–255.

2. The Hudson [N.Y.] Weekly Gazette, Jan. 4, 1787. This item was brought to my attention by Robert Arner.

3. E. P. Thompson, “Patrician Society, Plebeian Culture,” in Journal of Social History, vol. 7 (1974), 382–405 (see esp. 390–394). The resurgence of paganism in England during this period has often been noted; Thompson’s splendid article places it in a richly subtle context.

4. E. P. Thompson deals with the English version of the charivari in two articles: “‘Rough Music’: Le Charivari anglais,” Annales (1972); and “Rough Music,” in E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York: The New Press, 1993), 467–533.

5. Such employers collectively resisted the ongoing tendency of their workers to treat the month of December as a period of leisure and festivity. An instance of English worker resistance to celebrating Christmas on a single day is reported in J. M. Golby and A. W. Purdue, The Making of the Modern Christmas (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1986), 76. This book offers a very good overview of the history of Christmas in England.

6. For England, see J. M. Golby, “A History of Christmas” (1981), quoted in Daniel Miller, “A Theory of Christmas,” in Daniel Miller, ed., Unwrapping Christmas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 3. Golby has traced references to Christmas in the Times of London from 1790 to 1836.

7. For the transformation of New York, see Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy; Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (New York: Knopf, 1986); Elizabeth Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, 1785–1850 (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1989); Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); and Raymond A. Mohl, Poverty in New York, 1783–1825 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971). The recorded population of New York City increased from 33, 131 in 1790 to 202, 589 in 1825.

8. Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy, 239 (also 135–213). The best brief account of the transformation of early-nineteenth-century New York is Stansell, City of Women, 4–10.

9. Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, 170–172. According to Blackmar, the poor “used the streets as a common landscape” that provided an opportunity for unregulated, spontaneous encounters with others, encounters that made it possible for them “to gain or supplement subsistence by peddling fruits, oysters, hardware, used clothing, or sexual favors” (or by scavenging, gambling, shoplifting or fencing stolen goods). “No less than foraging on rural common land, the ‘liberty’ of the streets supported the city’s poorest residents.” See also 41–42.

10. See, for example, letter of Dec. 17, 1828, in Pintard, Letters, III, 51–52.

11. Oct. 28, 1818, in Pintard, Letters, I, 151. For the Society for the Prevention of Pauperism, see Stansell, City of Women, 30–36 (also 18, 71, 164), and Mohl, Poverty in New York, ch. 5. The S.P.P.’s purposes included the discouragement and “prevention of mendicity and street begging;” the group argued that existing relief policies only served to encourage laziness and dependence on charity (Mohl, Poverty in New York, 245). Pintard himself wrote that the S.P.P. was intended to stem the growth of “the present system of relieving the poor,” by providing “not … alms but labor, so that there shall be no pretext for idleness,” and “to expel the drones from society.” (Pintard, Letters, 1, 151.)

12. Dec. 16, 1828, ibid., III, 51–52.

13. This item was actually printed as a broadside: “The following piece, which was desired to be inserted in the New-York Journal of this Day, Dec. 24, 1772, but omitted for want of room, will be inserted next Week.”

14. Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy, 130–133, 253–260. See also Susan G. Davis, “‘Making Night Hideous’: Christmas Revelry and Public Order in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia,” American Quarterly, 34, No. 2 (Summer 1982), 185–199; esp. 186–192. This is the best study of the battle for Christmas in a nineteenth-century city. See also Susan G. Davis, Parades and Power: Street Theatre in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 38–39, 76–78, 103–109, 158–159.

15. Ibid., 255. The mayor was Philip Hone. In 1837 Hone recorded in his diary a New Year’s Day scene at the house of a subsequent mayor: “[T]he rabble … use his house as a Five Points tavern…. [T]he scene … defies description … the tables were taken by storm, the bottles [of wine and punch] emptied in a moment. Confusion, noise, and quarreling ensued, until the Mayor, with the assistance of his police, cleared the house and locked the doors…. Every scamp … considers himself authorized to use him and his house and his furniture at his pleasure; to wear his hat in his presence, to smoke and spit upon his carpet, to devour his beef and turkey, and wipe his greasy fingers upon the curtains, to get drunk with his liquor….” Hone suggests that similar scenes had happened before. Allan Nevins, ed., The Diary of Philip Hone, 1828–1851 (2 vols., New York, 1927), I, 235–236).

16. Quoted in Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy, 254.

17. New York Advertiser, Jan. 4, 1828; Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy, 257–259; Luc Sante, Low Life: Lures and Snares of New York (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991), 341–342.

18. Davis, Parades and Power, 108; Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy, 260.

19. May 27, 1823, in Pintard, Letters, II, 137–138.

20. Charles Jones, “Knickerbocker Santa Claus,” New-York Historical Society Quarterly 38 (1954), 356–383 (see 367–371).

21. Ibid., 370–371.

22. For example, see Dec. 18, 1827, in Pintard, Letters, II, 382.

23. Dec. 16, 1827, in Pintard, Letters, II, 382.

24. Dec. 16, 1827, ibid., II, 382; Jan. 2, 1828, ibid., III, I.

25. For the St. Nicholas Day banquets, see Pintard, Letters, 1, 38 (1816); 1, 156 (1818). For New Year’s Day, see ibid., I, 44 (1817); 1, 161 (1819); I, 358–359 (1821); II, 117 (1822); II, 320, 324 (1827); III 1 (1828); III, 117 (1830). In 1832 Pintard anonymously published in the New York Mirror (Dec. 29, 1832, 207) an essay lamenting the decline of New Year’s open houses among the New York elite and attributing it to the nouveaux riches. (This anonymous essay was brought to my attention by Elizabeth Blackmar.) Pintard’s authorship is indicated ibid., IV, 114–115, 117.

26. Eric J. Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Anthropologists have dubbed this phenomenon, rather meanly and a little unfairly, fakelore (as distinct from more authentic folklore).

27. J. M. Golby and A. W. Purdue, The Making of the Modern Christmas (Athens, Ga: University of Georgia Press, 1986), 43.

28. “Keeping Christmas,” Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction 10 (1825), 514–518. (This magazine, published in Boston, reprinted British material.) Another essay on the same topic simply argued that the old rural Christmas was a complete bore! “A Country Christmas,” ibid. 5 (1823), 168–172.

29. For Christmas as a day of prayer, see Pintard, Letters, 1, 356 (1820); II, 114 (1821); II, 210 (1825). For “St. Claas”: ibid., II, 384 (1827); III, 53–540 (1828); III, 115 (1829); III, 206 (1830); III, 305 (1831); IV, 116 (1832).

30. While Pintard’s basic Santa Claus ritual remained essentially the same after he first devised it, Pintard did continue to tinker with the details. In 1827–29, the family’s presents were placed in stockings hung by the chimney, but in 1830 they were placed on a table. The presents themselves changed, too: candies and fruit at first; toys were added in 1828 (a drum), and in 1832 the toys were replaced with books (because toys “cost much and are soon broken”).

31. There were allusions to St. Nicholas’ Day in 1773 and 1774, but Jones explains these in reference to the American Revolution (i.e., as a patriotic alternative to St. George’s Day), and not as precursors of the St. Nicholas cult that would develop a generation later. Jones, “Knickerbocker Santa Claus,” 362–364.

32. Ibid., 376. In another study Jones even suggests that the Dutch themselves took up the St. Nicholas cult from America—in the twentieth century, and largely for the sake of the tourist trade: Charles W. Jones, St. Nicholas of Myra, Bari, and Manhattan: Biography of a Legend (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 307–308.

33. Washington Irving, A History of New York (2d ed., 2 vols., New York, 1812), vol. 1, 247 (Book 4, ch. 5).

34. Jan. 15, 1822, in Pintard, Letters, II, 121–122.

35. Irving, History of New York (1812 ed.), vol. 1, 116 (Book 4, chs. 5–6); “with characteristic slowness….” appears only in the first edition (N.Y., 1809), vol. 1, 116 (Book 2, ch. 5); Irving deleted the passage in the 1812 edition. For a somewhat later (and highly self-conscious) expression of this same Knickerbocker enterprise, see James K. Paulding, The Book of Saint Nicholas, translated from the Original Dutch (New York, 1836), a “biography” of the saint, dedicated to the St. Nicholas Society of New York, and with a preface dated “Nieuw Amsterdam, 1827.” See also Peter H. Myers, The Young Patroon; or, Christmas in 1690. A Tale of New-York (New York, 1849).

36. Sean Wilentz terms Moore a “level-headed Episcopalian conservative.” (See Chants Democratic, 79.) The only book-length study of Moore, short and hagiographic, is Samuel W. Patterson, The Poet of Christmas Eve: A Life of Clement Clarke Moore, 1779–1863 (New York: Morehouse-Gorham Co., 1956). For Moore’s ancestral background (and the Tory sympathies of his family), see 22–29, 31–36, 48–51. His wife—they married in 1813—was a member of the Cordand family (64–66). For information on Moore’s slaves, see 5, 48. The political tracts Moore published include Observations upon Certain Passages in Mr. Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia (New York, 1804), a critique of Jefferson’s irreligion; and A Sketch of Our Political Condition (New York, 1813), condemning the Jefferson and Madison administrations (and the War of 1812) for their destruction of rural life! A shorter biographical sketch is Arthur N. Hosking, “The Life of Clement Clarke Moore,” appended to the 1934 reprint of a facsimile edition of Moore’s “A Visit from St. Nicholas” (New York, 1934).

37. Moore’s professorship initially paid a token $750, a figure that eventually increased to $2,000. See Patterson, The Poet of Christmas Eve, 77–79.

38. Hosking, “Life of Moore,” 23.

39. April 8, 1830, in Pintard, Letters, III, 137. For Moore’s wealth, see Charles Lock-wood, Manhattan Moves Uptown: An Illustrated History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), 205; Patterson, Poet of Christmas Eve, 106–110.

40. Isaac N. Phelps Stokes, The Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498–1909 (6 vols., New York, 1915–28), vol. 5, 1602. Moore writes of eminent domain in A Plain Statement, Addressed to the Proprietors of Real Estate in the City and County of New-York(New York, 1818), 13–18. A few years later, the city made plans to fill in an area under the Hudson River, in the process moving the river away from Moore’s estate. (Phelps Stokes, Iconography, vol. 5, 1603). By the 1830s some of that land was occupied by the Manhattan Gas-light Works, a company that was installing street lights in that area of the city, and digging a network of underground pipes in order to do so. (See New York As It Is [New York, 1837], 14.)

41. Longworth’s City Directory (New York, 1821), 315.

42. Nov. 3, 1832, in Pintard, Letters, IV, 106. By the end of the 1820s, the area that had come to be known as Chelsea Square was home to a substantial population, much of it poor and/or immigrant. By the 1830s Moore was watching Irishmen on St. Patrick’s Day marching along the periphery of his property—down Twenty-third Street, then turning south on Eighth Avenue. See Patterson, Poet of Christmas Eve, 92–93. Like most of the men who owned great uptown estates, Clement Clarke Moore erected fences around his property.

43. Hosking, “Life of Moore,” 28–31.

44. Moore, Plain Statement, 6, 12, 39, 62. Elizabeth Blackmar shrewdly suggests that Moore’s complaint was based on his understanding that New York’s urban development actually functioned as a public-works program to provide jobs for the poor and the unemployed—a program Moore opposed (Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, 162–163). Cartmen, whom Moore singled out for criticism, had developed a reputation for especially rude and surly behavior by 1820, breaking speed limits and running down pedestrians—much like the modern taxi drivers who partly replaced them. See Graham Hodges, New York City Cartmen, 1667–1850 (New York: New York University Press, 1986), 116–117, 127. Hodges indicates that many wealthy New Yorkers chose to move out of downtown New York after being awakened regularly by the sound of “hundreds of cartmen racing their vehicles at dawn” (p. 121). In the late 1820s Moore was actually planning to move out of Chelsea to a still-rural area of Manhattan several miles to the north; he changed his mind only when his wife died in 1830. In 1839 Moore purchased an estate up the Hudson River at Sing Sing, and in 1850 he rented a house in Newport, Rhode Island, where he spent his remaining summers. Patterson, The Poet of Christmas Eve, 93–94, 149–150.

45. Irving, A History of New York, vol. 1, 120 (Book 2, ch. 7); see also 454, 639, 655.

46. The Children’s Friend (New York, 1821).

47. Irving, A History of New York (1812 ed.), vol. 1, 253 (Book 4, ch. 6: “ease, tranquillity;” vol. 1, 246 (Book 4, ch. 5: “meddlesome and fractious”); vol. 1, 254 (Book 4, ch. 6: “long pipes … short pipes”). Irving introduced the story of the “pipe plot” only in the 1812 edition.

48. Lauren J. Cook, “Snow White Little Instruments of Comfort: Clay Pipes and Class Consciousness at the Boott Mills Boarding Houses,” a paper delivered at a meeting of the New England Historical Association, Lowell, Massachusetts, April 21, 1989. There was a practical reason for workers’ use of short pipes: they made it possible to smoke while working. But what may have begun as a practical necessity became, by the nineteenth century, a political gesture. By the same token, smoking a long pipe became an assertion as well as a sign of genteel leisure (as, for example, the long pipes in Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle”).

49. “Southwark Watchman’s Address for Christmas Day, Dec. 25, 1829” (Philadelphia, 1829), Broadside collection, American Antiquarian Society. Coincidentally, even the meter (of the odd lines, at least) is identical to that of “A Visit from St. Nicholas.”

50. Among some British Jews today, I have been told, the gesture still thrives, signifying stumm!, or “hush.”

51. New York Sun, Sept. 21, 1897.

52. Patterson, Poet of Christmas Eve, 99–101.

53. Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, 195–196. See also Lockwood, Manhattan Moves Uptown, 205. John Pintard made the same point in 1832; see letter of Nov. 3, 1832, in Pintard, Letters, IV, 106.

54. Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, passim.

Chapter 3

1. New-York American [for the country], Jan. 4, 1822.

2. New-York Weekly Commercial Advertiser, Jan. 3, 1823. Stone added that such a change would also provide the “young ladies” who hosted the visits with “an opportunity for a contest of skill in making coffee.”

3. “Sainte Claus,” in New-York Evening Post, Dec. 26, 1820 (this poem was reprinted from the Northern Whig).

4. “Ode to Saint Claas, Written on a New Year’s Eve,” New York Advertiser, Jan. 4, 1828 and New-York American, Jan. 4, 1828.

5. For another example of Santa as Lord of Misrule, see Francis H. Davidge, “Christmas Is Coming,” in T. S. Arthur, ed., The Brilliant (New York, 1850), 22–26. This sketch was apparently written by a Southerner, and it was in the South that Santa Claus continued for decades to be described as a “trickster.” See, for example, Joel Chandler Harris, “Something About ‘Sandy Claus’”: ch. 7, On the Plantation: A Story of a Georgia Boy’s Adventures During the War (New York, 1892), 104–121, in which a pair of slaves describe Santa Claus as a kind of Brer Rabbit figure.

6. New-York Advertiser, Jan. 4, 1828. This was the same callithumpian parade described in Chapter 2 (pp. 54–55).

7. New-York American, Dec. 28, 1827.

8. Ibid., Dec. 30, 1828. A year later the same newspaper came out in favor of excluding alcohol from the New Year’s visitation ritual (ibid., see letter appearing Jan. 1, 1830).

9. Eliza C. Folien, “Life of Charles Folien,” The Works of Charles Folien (5 vols., Boston, 1842), I, 562.

10. New York Morning Herald, Dec. 25, 1839. The theater at which “Santiclaus” appeared was the Broadway Circus, perhaps the only New York theater that was still attracting a “mixed”-class audience at this time. See also New York Tattler, Dec. 27, 1839. These items were brought to my attention by Dale Cockrell.

11. New York Daily Herald, Dec. 23, 1839.

12. Dec. 26, 1848, in Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas, eds., Diary of George Templeton Strong (4 vols., New York: Macmillan, 1952), 1, 338–339.

13. New-York Tribune, Dec. 23, 1850. The paper went on to suggest that these gangs had the tacit support of politicians (presumably from Tammany Hall).

14. New-York Tribune, Jan. 3, 1852. For a survey of riots in nineteenth-century New York, see Luc Sante, Low Life: Lures and Snares of New York (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991), 339–356, a chapter bearing the apt title “Carnival.”

15. New-York Tribune, Jan. 3, 1852.

16. See also the New-York American for Dec. 26 and 30, 1840, juxtaposing riot reports (in one column) with an upbeat editorial (in another) about Christmas shopping and “the merry days [of] childhood and youth.”

17. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Christmas at Ratzeburg,” in The Friend (Burlington, Vermont, 1831), 322. Coleridge continues: “About seven or eight years old the children are let into the secret, and it is curious how faithfully they keep it!” Readers who studied the piano as children may recall “Knecht Ruprecht” as the title of a mock-scary piece from Robert Schumann’s “Album for the Young.” In Alsace, a similar figure was named Hanstrap.

18. Pennsylvania Gazette, Dec. 29, 1827; quoted in Alfred Shoemaker, Christmas in Pennsylvania: A Folk-Cultural Study (Kutztown: Penn. Folklore Society, 1959), 74.

19. Ibid., 74–75.

20. See, for example, P. E. Gibbons, “The Pennsylvania Dutch,” Atlantic Monthly, Oct. 1869, 484; quoted ibid., 76.

21. Diary of James L. Morris (from Montgomery, Penn.); quoted ibid., 74.

22. Pottstown Lafayette Aurora, Dec. 21, 1826; quoted ibid., 73–74.

23. Morris diary entry, Dec. 24, 1844, quoted ibid., 74; Norristown Herald and Free Press, Dec. 31, 1851; Lancaster Daily Evening Express, Dec. 26, 1873; Carlisle Herald, Jan. 2, 1873; all quoted Shoemaker, Christmas in Pennsylvania, 77.

24. Reading Berks and Schuylkill Journal, Dec. 27, 1851; Norristown Olive Branch, Dec. 31, 1853; Easton Daily Express, Dec. 27, 1858 (all quoted Shoemaker, Christmas in Pennsylvania, 76).

25. Pottstown Ledger, Dec. 26, 1873; quoted ibid., 77.

26. Susan G. Davis, “‘Making Night Hideous’: Christmas Revelry and Public Order in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia,” American Quarterly 34 (1982), 185–199 (quotation from 190–191).

27. Philadelphia Daily Chronicle, Dec. 26, 1833; quoted Shoemaker, Christmas in Pennsylvania, 86; partly quoted in Susan G. Davis, Parades and Power: Street Theater in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 81.

28. Philadelphia Public Ledger, Dec. 27, 1839.

29. Davis, “‘Making Night Hideous,’” 191.

30. Philadelphia Public Ledger, Dec. 25, 1839.

31. Ibid., Dec. 27, 1848. On Dec. 30, 1856, Philadelphia patrician Sidney Fisher noted in his diary that he had “[h]ad trouble with our servants—cook and waiter got drunk this afternoon & I was obliged to have the police to take them away.” Nicholas B. Wainwright, A Philadelphia Perspective: The Diary of Sidney George Fisher Covering the Years 1834–1871 (Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1967), 264.

32. Philadelphia Public Ledger, Dec. 25, 1844. Or take Sidney Fisher: On Christmas Day, 1840, that patrician “ate pretty well & drank claret, champagne &, Madeira [at dinner], again at supper drank Burgundy, Madeira & whiskey punch, besides 4 cigars at home.” Diary entry, Dec. 26, 1840, in Wainwright, A Philadelphia Perspective, 108.

33. For the open shops, see, for example, the 1841 column of Christmas Day amusements: “[W]e briefly note below where are kept and may be obtained the good things prepared for the times, the large use of which is part of the performances of the day.” Although “businesses” were reported closed, that term apparently referred to large-scale financial and manufacturing enterprises.

34. Nile’s National Register, Jan. 1, 1842, 288 (this item was brought to my attention by Carol Sherif). See also Philadelphia Public Ledger, Dec. 27, 1843, and Dec. 25 and 27, 1844. These promenades may have been a source of Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Man of the Crowd,” a dark tale about a man who gets swept up in a vast crowd while promenading through the streets of a large city. The story (set in London, which Poe had never seen) was published in 1840, after the first Christmas Poe spent in Philadelphia.

35. Philadelphia Public Ledger, Dec. 27, 1841 (“struggling and jostling”); Dec. 26, 1842 (“the whole city”).

36. Ibid., Dec. 27, 1843 (“more drunken men and boys”); Dec. 25 and 27, 1844. Philadelphia was not the only city in which regular public rituals were burlesqued. In New York, the military companies that marched out of the city each Christmas Day on the way to target-shooting were burlesqued by similar bands of “fantasticals.”

37. Philadelphia Public Ledger, Dec. 27, 1845; Dec. 25, 1846.

38. In 1801 Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser carried a watchman’s address asking for money (Dec. 25, 1801). But in 1802 the same newspaper published a warning, under the heading “Christmas Reflections,” urging religious piety instead of revelry and excess—at least on Christmas Day itself: “Pause—ye giddy and ye gay…. Forego, for one day at least, the resplendent and fascinating charms of dissipation.” (Ibid., Dec. 25, 1802.)

39. The four almanacs: “Citizens & Farmers’ Almanack for … 1825” (Philadelphia, [1824]); “Grigg’s Almanack, for … 1825” (Philadelphia, [1824]); “New Brunswick Almanack, for 1825” (Philadelphia, [1824]); and “The United States National Almanac” (Philadelphia, 1825). The newspapers: Saturday Evening Post, Dec. 23, 1826; National Gazette, Dec. 24, 1827 (Moore poem); Poulson’s, Dec. 26, 1827 (Bracebridge Hall). The “Bracebridge Hall” extract was a passage defining Christmas as “the season for gathering together of family connections….”

40. Poulson’s, Dec. 24, 1828; National Gazette, Dec. 26, 1828; Poulson’s, Dec. 26, 1829 (Santa Claus ritual)); National Gazette, Dec. 24, 1830.

41. Nathaniel Whittemore (Boston, 1719), lines opposite Dec. 18–21; Henry Dwight Sedgwick to Theodore Sedgwick, manuscript letter, Dec. 24, 1805, in Sedgwick Family Papers V (Massachusetts Historical Society), Box 2.13; Boston Daily Advertiser, Dec. 22, 1818; John Pintard to his daughter, Dec. 16, 1827, in Letters from John Pintard, vol. 2, 382; New-York Tribune, Jan. 2, 1854. For comparison, here is the text of a wassail sung by young people in England: “We are not daily beggars / That beg from door to door, / But we are neighbors’ children, / Whom you have seen before…. / We have got a little purse / Made of stretching leather skin, / We want a little of your money / To line it well within.” (Quoted Ashton, Right Merrie Christmasse, 111–112.)

42. See, for instance, John R. Gillis, Youth and History: Tradition and Change in European Age Relations, 1770-Present (New York: Academic Press, 1974); for an American version, see John Demos, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970). Phillipe Aries, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (New York: Knopf, 1962), shows brilliantly how this began to change in the seventeenth century among the European aristocracy and nobility.

43. The ritual had reached America by the middle of the eighteenth century. A little broadside printed in 1765 or 1766 (probably in Boston) contains the following short verse, written by a blacksmiths apprentice: “This is unto all GENTLEMEN who shoes [sic]] here, / I wish you a merry Christmas, a happy New Year: / For shoeing your Horses, and trimming their Locks, / Please to remember my New-Years Box.” (This is catalogued as Bristol ’B2818; S-M41768; Ford #137. Ford says it was “probably” printed in New England because it was found together with other New England material.) For the history of Christmas boxes, see Ashton, A Right Merrie Christmasse, 202–204 (Samuel Pepys and Jonathan Swift); see also J. A. R. Pimlott, The Englishman’s Christmas: A Social History (Sussex, England: Harvester Press, 1978), 72–73.

44. Nurse Trueloves Christmas Box (Worcester, Mass., 1786 [and several times thereafter]); Emily E. F. Skeel, Mason Locke Weems, His Work and Ways (3 vols., New York, 1929), III, 29. An advertisement headed “Christmas Box” appeared in the New-York Evening Post, Dec. 24, 1802.

45. Both volumes were originally printed in Boston in 1747. The former was reprinted six more times by 1804; a last edition appeared in 1824.

46. A Present to Children (New London, 1783); Present for Misses (Worcester: I. Thomas, 1794); A Present for a Little Boy (Philadelphia, 1802); A Present for a Little Girl (Philadelphia, 1804).

47. “How am I pleas’d with painted toys? / I feed the foolish fire: / Trifles and fashions cover my eyes / And cheat my warm desire. / On jointed babes [i.e., dolls] I fix my hope. / In my fond arms carest; / I dress the mimic-puppets up, / And hug them to my breast.” (A Present to Children [New London, Conn., 1783], 9.)

48. Boston Daily Advertiser, Dec. 22, 1818. This letter is also discussed in Chapter 1.

49. Rex Cathcart, “Festive Capers? Barring-Out the Schoolmaster,” History Today 38 (Dec. 1988), 49–53. Cathcart suggests that barring-out may have begun as a substitute for the earlier inversion ritual known as the “Boy-Bishop,” which was suppressed at about the same time. See also Keith Thomas, Rule and Misrule in the Schools of Early Modern England (Reading, England: University of Reading Press, 1976). For barring-out in England, see Maria Edgeworth, “The Barring Out” (Philadelphia, 1804); Brand, Popular English Antiquities, I, 441–434; and Ona and Peter Opie, The Lore and Language of Children (Oxford, England, 1959).

50. “The Further Affidavit of James Blair …,” in William S. Perry, ed., Historical Collections Relating to the American Colonial Church (2 vols., Hartford, 1870), 1, 137–138. Virginia was also the site of an apparently more peaceful barring-out much later in the same century. A Northern visitor noted in his diary on Dec. 18, 1773, that “Mr Goodlet was barr’d out of his School last Monday by his Scholars, for the Christmas Holidays, which are to continue til twelfth-day….” (Hunter Dickinson Farish, ed., The Journal and Letters of Philip Vickers Fithian [Williamsburg, Va., 1943], entry for Dec. 18, 1773, 34.)

51. Philadelphia Democratic Press, Dec. 18, 1810; quoted Shoemaker, Christmas in Pennsylvania, 24. Another Pennsylvanian, writing later in the century, recalled the custom from his childhood in the 1850s: “The windows were nailed fast, one and all; the benches were dragged from all parts of the room and piled against the door,—a long row extending to the stove, as a prop…. For one brief hour the scholars were master,—the tables turned, as it were, and riot ran high and wild.” (Charles H. Miller, Lykens Twenty Years Ago (Lykens, Pa., 1876), 13; quoted ibid., 27.)

52. Horace Greeley, Recollections of a Busy Life (New York, 1868), 43–44. For an Indiana example from the 1830s, reported in vivid detail, see A Home in the Woods: Oliver Johnson’s Reminiscences of Early Marion County, as Related by Howard Johnson(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, [1951]), 56–64. (This item was brought to my attention by Burton Bledstein.)

53. For background on school culture in New England, see Robert A. Gross, An Age of Revolution (forthcoming, Hill & Wang), ch. 3. Barring-out presumably died off later in the century, as Christmas vacations became an official part of the school calendar rather than something negotiated ad hoc by the schoolboys themselves (and as the teaching profession itself became professionalized—and feminized). Even in colleges, a similar custom may have been practiced, although by the nineteenth century it more generally took the form of students simply leaving the campus at Christmastime, sometimes with the encouragement of the faculty. (See Diary of George Templeton Strong, Dec. 22–23, 1835, 1, 8–9.) But students at Yale were engaging in an annual Christmas Eve “Callithumpian anniversary” during the 1830s and 1840s: Late at night, “painted and masked, wearing all sorts of hideous and fantastic dresses; some having drums, some tin kettles, some horns,” they would march through New Haven, “carrying devastation and ruin wherever they go, levelling fences, breaking windows, destroying the unfortunate barrels of whiskey, which may happen to be exposed….” (An extended account of this ritual appeared in the New York Herald, Dec. 30, 1837.) After the 1847 callithumpian parade, one Yale student was actually indicted for attempted murder (Hampshire Gazette [Northampton, Mass.], Dec. 28, 1847, and Feb. 8, 1848).

54. See Seba Smith, “Yankee Christmas,” in ‘Way Down East; or, Portraitures of Yankee Life (New York, 1854), 29–52; previously printed in the New York [Weekly] Herald, Dec. 24, 1842. See also “Doesticks’ Description of the Christmas Party at His Friend Medary’s,” in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, Jan. 2, 1858, 75.

55. Eliza Leslie, “Snow-Balling; or, The Christmas Dollar,” in The Violet (Philadelphia, 1839 [c. 1838]), 36–52.

56. New York American, Dec. 26, 1840. An exemplary study of Philadelphia’s “mechanics” during these years is Bruce Laurie, Working People of Philadelphia, 1800–1850 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980).

57. “Christmas Eve,” in Christmas Blossoms, and New Year’s Wreath for 1850 (Philadelphia, 1850), 38–39.

58. Christmas Holidays; or, A Visit at Home (Philadelphia [American Sunday School Union], [1827]), 19–20.

59. Lydia Maria Child, The Girl’s Own Book (Boston, 1833), iv.

60. This is not the only such example. The American Antiquarian Society’s copy of Robin Carver, The Book of Sports (Boston, 1834) is inscribed on its flyleaf with the date “Jan. 1st, 1835.”

61. New-York Daily Advertiser, Dec. 26. 1817; New-York Daily Advertiser, Dec. 24, 1824). See also an ad in the New England Palladium, 1822–23, for “instructive games on cloth, with te-totems.” A te-totum was a top.

62. Cincinnati Daily Gazette, Dec. 23, 1844.

63. Ibid., Dec. 23, 1845.

64. Liberty Hall and Cincinnati Gazette, Dec. 24, 1821; New England Galaxy, Dec. 26, 1823.

65. Quotations from Claire McGlinchee, The First Decade of the Boston Museum (Boston: Bruce Humphries, Inc., 1940), 132. See also A. E. Wilson, Christmas Pantomime, the Story of an English Institution (London, 1934; reprinted as King Panto; the Story of Pantomime [New York: E. P. Dutton, 1935]); R.J. Broadbent, A History of Pantomime (London, 1901). McGlinchee writes that “[t]his type of entertainment was superseded by the Christmas show, a queer medley of burlesque, musical comedy, fairy play, and revue. The term ‘pantomime’ was kept, even though dialogue had been introduced.”

66. For a good description of theater as a “male club” (and the mid-nineteenth-century effort to transform it into “respectable” family fare), see Richard Butsch, “Bowery B’hoys and Matinee Ladies: The Re-Gendering of Nineteenth-Century American Theater Audiences,” American Quarterly 46 (1994), 374–405.

67. New York Weekly Herald, Dec. 30, 1837; New York [Daily] Herald, Dec. 26, 1844.

68. Ibid. The tickets had probably been purchased for the newsboys by their employers, as a Christmas present. See Brother Jonathan, Holiday Extras dated Jan. 1, 1843, and Dec. 25-Jan. 1, 1844 (which reported that they had gone to the Chatham Theater).

69. The best account of the newsboys’ love of theater is in an 1852 novel by Elizabeth Oakes Smith, The Newsboy (New York, 1854), 25–33, from which I have taken some of my description. See also Tom Brice, the News-boy (New York, 1862), 4–5; and Charles Loring Brace, The Dangerous Classes of New York, and Twenty Years’ Work Among Them (New York, 1872), 345–346.

70. Philadelphia Public Ledger, Dec. 25, 1844.

71. For this quotation and those in the following paragraph, see ibid., Dec. 27, 1843.

72. Ibid., Dec. 25, 1845.

73. Ibid., Dec. 24, 1845.

74. Kriss Kringle’s Book (Philadelphia, 1845), 6. The title of the book is—deliberately—malleable. The cloth cover reads “Kriss Kringle’s Book,” and that title is repeated at the very end of the preface. But the title page itself reads “St. Nicholas’s Book,” and that is the way the book is referred to at another point in the preface. When the book was reprinted in 1846 the title page read “The Christmas Book,” while a third printing, in 1852, read “Kriss Kringle’s Book.”

75. Kriss Kringle’s Christmas Tree: A Holliday [sic] Present for Boys and Girls (Philadelphia, 1845), 77 (“sword or drum”); Kriss Kringle’s Raree Show, for Good Boys and Girls (Philadelphia, 1845).

76. Oxford English Dictionary (definition of raree show).

77. Kriss Kringle’s Raree Show, 5.

78. The socially disruptive, subversive potential of books (especially fiction and romance) was well recognized in the early nineteenth century (critics employed virtually all the same arguments that are used today against children’s watching television). Novels were even written to warn their readers about the dangers of reading other novels! In one novella, published in 1824 and set during the Christmas vacation from school, the parents keep their collection of books in a locked bookcase, and a series of mishaps is set off when the mother is obliged to entrust the key to her oldest daughter. ([Lucy Lyttleton Cameron,] The Sister’s Friend; or, Christmas Holidays Spent at Home [Boston, 1824]).

Chapter 4

1. John Birge manuscript Daybook (Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association Library), p. 89. This reference was discovered by Carrie Giard, an undergraduate student at the University of Massachusetts. Carrie also discovered that two years later, in 1771, another Deerfield shopkeeper paid one of his clients 10½ shillings “cash at Christmas” in return for “four days [i.e., of labor] at Christmas.” (We can only speculate as to why this man desired to have cash at Christmas.) John Russell manuscript Account Book (Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association Library), pp. 153–154.

2. Harriet Beecher Stowe, “Christmas; or, The Good Fairy,” in National Era 4 (Dec. 26, 1850). This was the same magazine in which Stowe was shortly to begin serial publication of her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The story was later reprinted in The Mayflower, and Miscellaneous Writings (Boston, 1855); it did not appear in the original (1842) edition of that volume. For scholarly works that date the commercialization of Christmas to the turn of the twentieth century, see William B. Waits, The Modern Christmas in America: A Cultural History of Gift Giving (New York: New York University Press, 1993); and, implicitly, William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Pantheon, 1993); as well as James H. Barnett, The American Christmas: A Study in National Culture (New York: Macmillan, 1954), 79–101. This interpretation is part of a larger analysis that places the emergence of modern American consumer culture in the decades 1880–1920. See, for example, Simon J. Bronner, ed., Consuming Visions: Accumulation and Display of Goods in America, 1880–1920 (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1989); Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears, eds., The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980 (New York: Pantheon, 1983). For a recent reevaluation (and one that deals with the “carnivalesque” as well), see Jackson Lears, Fahles of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994), chs. 1–5. But another historiographical strain dates the origins of the consumer revolution far earlier, even to the middle of the eighteenth century; see page 340, note 16.

3. Salem Gazette, Dec. 18, 1806; New-York Evening Post, Dec. 26, 1808. Philadelphia’s first ad for Christmas presents came in 1812. If we include ads for “New Year’s Presents”—or “Holiday Presents”—this dating needs to be moved back a decade or two earlier. Salem came in in 1804, two years before the ad that named Christmas. (It was placed on Dec. 21, 1804—four days before Christmas—by the same bookseller. Headed simply “Elegant Presents for Children,” it was followed on January 1 by a similar ad headed “Elegant New Year’s Presents for Children.” It is as if this bookseller was testing the cultural waters before actually daring to name Christmas.) But Salem was not the first American community to advertise New Year’s gifts. The first community to do so was another New England town, Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1783 (more about Worcester a little later). New York followed in 1789; Philadelphia, in 1796; Boston, in 1801. Salem Gazette, Dec. 21, 1804, and Jan. 1, 1805. Other New England examples: Amherst, New Hampshire, in 1811; Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1816.

4. “Christmas and New Year’s Presents,” in New England Galaxy and Masonic Magazine, Dec. 26, 1823. By 1825 the same periodical was able to claim that Christmas was a season “which custom from time immemorial has pointed out as a proper one for giving and receiving remembrances, and tokens of affection” (ibid., Dec. 23, 1825).

5. E.N.T., “Christmas and New Year’s Presents,” Christian Register, Dec. 20, 1834. In Worcester, Massachusetts, one man noted in his diary on Christmas Eve: “[G]eneral preparation for Christmas: the children must have presents and the parents, uncles, and aunts are all getting them.” (Levi Lincoln Newton Diaries, 1837–1843, in manuscript collection, American Antiquarian Society.)

6. Farmer’s Cabinet (Amherst, N.H.), Jan. 2, 1835. The story urged children to buy books rather than candy for the holidays.

7. The same pattern is true of ads labeled “New Year’s” or “holiday” gifts. Worcester, Massachusetts (1783): “New Year’s Gifts [all of them books] for Children;” New York (1789): books “for young gentlemen and ladies;” Boston (1801): “Books for Young Persons;” Portsmouth, New Hampshire (1816) “Juvenile books, suitable for To-morrow [New Year’s Day].”

8. In contrast, I have found only a single advertisement that advertised presents for servants. During the 1822 Christmas season, one Boston bookstore, after advertising a great variety of books and games for children of various ages, added that it also had “a large collection of Narratives, Popular Stories, &c., very cheap and neat editions, suitable for presents to Domestics and others.” (New England Palladium, Jan. 3, 1823.) The 1820s may have been the last decade in which such an ad could reasonably appear; after that, servants would not have been considered real members of the household. (Conversely, the early 1820s were also virtually the first time such an ad could have appeared; only a decade or two earlier, nobody would have received a commercial Christmas present.) In January 1820, a prosperous New York woman recorded spending “2.6” [2s. 6d.?] for “N[ew] Year presents to servants.” The following December the same woman made a similar entry: “New Year presents to servants[:] 1.56.” [Jane Minot Sedgwick?], Accounts and Commonplace Book, 1817–59, in Miscellaneous Sedgwick Papers (Massachusetts Historical Society), vol. 16.

9. New-York Herald, Dec. 23, 1839; New-York American, Dec. 27, 1841; see also New York Tribune, Jan. 3, 1844.

10. In 1844, the first Christmas ads in the New-York Tribune appeared as early as December 12.

11. [Philadelphia] National Gazette, Dec. 24, 1841.

12. Philadelphia Public Ledger, Dec. 25, 1841.

13. The idea probably originated in New York, where one paper reported in 1838 that “[f]our or five mammoth cakes have been made in this city to be cut up on New Year’s Eve. That at Ameli’s, 395 Broadway, is the largest ever made in this city. It weighs about 3300 pounds, and is worth $1500” (New York Weekly Herald, Dec. 22, 1838). But even as early as 1819, a New York baker advertised a “mammoth cake … weighing 300 pounds” (New York Evening Post, Dec. 28, 1819).

14. The quotation is from Eliza Leslie, “Snow-Balling; or, The Christmas Dollar,” in The Violet (Philadelphia, 1839 [c. 1838]), 36–52.

15. New York Daily Herald, Dec. 23, 1839.

16. Cary Carson, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert, eds., Of Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994).

17. Emily E. F. Skeel, Mason Locke Weems, His Work and Ways (3 vols., New York, 1929), III, 29. This advertisement originally appeared in the Georgia Journal (Milledgeville), Nov. 18, 1810.

18. Worcester Spy, Dec. 25, 1783; Dec. 23, 1784.

19. In some years, at least, Isaiah Thomas published more books during the holiday season than at other times of the year. In 1794, for example, between March and late November he placed a total of anywhere from one to four book ads in any given issue (the paper was published weekly). But on November 26 he placed five such ads, a number that went up to six on December 10, and then to nine on both December 17 and 24, before falling back to seven on December 31, then to four on January 7 and 14, and to a single one on January 21. It would appear that in some years Thomas printed his books on a seasonal cycle, a cycle that peaked during the Christmas season. There were other children’s books that we can assume were published for the Christmas trade, since the word Christmas was part of their title (and they had no other Christmas-related content). See, for example, “Peter Pinchpenny,” The Hobby Horse; or, Christmas Companion (Boston, 1804).

20. Copies of these two Munro and Francis catalogs are held by the American Antiquarian Society.

21. For the decentralized nature of the American book trade, see two books by William Charvat: Literary Publishing in America, 1790–1850 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993); and The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800–1870: The Papers of William Charvat (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1968), ch. 1.

22. New York Herald, Dec. 23, 1839. Bennett’s $3 minimum suggests the financial level below which Gift Books did not penetrate.

23. The New-York Book of Poetry (New York, 1837).

24. David Kaser (ed.), The Cost Book of Carey & Lea, 1825–1838 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1963), 68–108, 280–284. This paragraph is based on the work of UMass graduate student Richard Gassan—who also devised the idea of calculating these figures.

25. The Annualette: A Christmas and New Years Gift for Children (Boston, 1840), preface. There was a similar verse in the same Gift Book for 1841.

26. The Pearl (Philadelphia, 1837), 186. The publishers of The Pearl may well have pressured their authors to insert such advertising copy into their work. In another children’s Gift Book, Christmas Blossoms for 1850, a Santa-like figure named Uncle Thomas embeds the same point in a passage explaining the advantages of mass production and mass marketing:

What a wonderful thing printing is! It seems hard to understand how the world could have got along so long and so well without it…. Even after printing was invented, it was, for a long time, so costly that books were often bound with strong iron rings fastened to the leather, and were fixed to the walls of the library or the sides of the book-cases, by means of iron chains, for fear they should be stolen. How happy, then, Uncle Thomas should be that he can now print his Christmas Blossoms, and send them over the country so cheaply that everybody can easily get to see them. He can now talk to six millions of little boys and girls, and shake hands with them on paper all at once (pp. 19–20).

27. St. Nicholas’ Book, for All Good Boys and Girls (Philadelphia, 1842), 6.

28. John Davis to Elizabeth Bancroft Davis, Dec. 26, 1826, in John Davis Papers, American Antiquarian Society.

29. Reprinted in Albany Journal, Dec. 16, 1846.

30. New York Herald, Dec. 23, 1839.

31. The Brilliant: A Gift Book for 1850 (New York, 1850). This was edited by T. S. Arthur, best remembered today as the author of the temperance novel Ten Nights in a BarRoom.

32. Philadelphia Public Ledger, Dec. 24, 1844.

33. In a Boston bookshop in 1823, King Solomon “might there find his own proverbs illustrated, and made familiar to the eye of childhood, by means of the graphic art; and the [wonders] of Egypt and the realm of his favorite queen of Sheba, displayed in miniature, to furnish up an evening of entertainment for the nursery.” (“CHRISTMAS AND NEW YEAR’S PRESENTS,” in New England Galaxy and Masonic Magazine, Dec. 26, 1823.)

34. New Hampshire Gazette [Portsmouth], Dec. 22, 1818; “The Diary of Isaiah Thomas 1805–1828,” in Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society X (1909), 171. Bibles had long been commercial products, but never before to this degree.

35. Albany Journal, Dec. 16, 1846 (reprinted from the New York Tribune).

36. Peter J. Wosh, Spreading the Word: The Bible Business in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994), 19–21. Wosh adds that the Harpers “established the Bible as an article of mass consumption, an attractive centerpiece for the proper Victorian bookshelf. The medium rather than the message assumed center stage as mere possession of the volume conferred cultural status on, and testified to the good taste of, the purchaser” (ibid., 20). See also R. Laurence Moore, Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 17–18, 34–35. An excellent reference source is Margaret T. Hills, The English Bible in America: A Bibliography of Editions of the Bible and the New Testament Published in America 1777–1957 (New York: American Bible Society, 1961).

37. The dates of these inscriptions also confirm that these personal Bibles, like Gift Books, were seen as appropriate presents to be given during the Christmas season (or, in one of these cases, at Thanksgiving).

38. Louisa May Alcott, Little Women; or, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy (Boston, 1869), Ch. 2.

39. See Richard H. Brodhead, Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 95–96.

40. Susan Warner, The Wide, Wide World (New York, 1851), ch. 3, 30–31 (this scene is also briefly described in Moore, Selling God, 34). Later in the novel, in a scene set at Christmas, the feeling of helplessness became especially acute. Ellen and her friends are discussing Christmas presents they are about to make out of satin cloth and morocco leather they have received. They agree to choose which pieces each of them will take. “But this business of choosing was found to be very long and very difficult….” One girl says: “I declare it’s too vexatious! Here I’ve got this beautiful piece of blue satin, and can’t do any thing with it; it just matches that blue morocco—it’s a perfect match—I could have made a splendid thing of it, and I have got some cord and tassels that would just do—I declare it’s too bad.” She is told by another girl: “Well, choose, Margaret.” But Margaret replies: “I don’t know what to choose—that’s the thing. What can one do with red and purple morocco and blue satin? I might as well give up” (ibid., 292–293). For another example, see Anna Warner, Mr. Rutherford’s Children. Second Volume (New York, 1855), 91–96. (Anna Warner was Susan Warner’s sister and her sometime collaborator.)

41. The Sedgwick family maintained its cohesion and distinction well into the present century; one of its more recent members, Edie Sedgwick, achieved notoriety—and an early death from drugs—as a movie starlet in Andy Warhol’s “stable.” See Jean Stein, Edie, An American Biography (New York: Knopf, 1982).

42. Pamela Sedgwick to Theodore Sedgwick, Dec. 18, 1792 (Sedgwick Family Papers, Collection III, Box 1.13) and Dec. 25, 1794 (ibid., Box 1.18); see Henry Van Schaack to Theodore Sedgwick, Dec. 25, 1788 (Sedgwick Family Papers I, Box 1.12—“Merry Christmas”). Theodore Sedgwick himself returned such salutations for the first time only on Jan. 1, 1795, in a pair of letters, one to his wife and the other to Ephraim Williams (Sedgwick Family Papers V, Box 1.14). Note: The Sedgwick Family Papers are catalogued in five separate collections at the Massachusetts Historical Society, labeled I-V, respectively. Henceforth these will be referred to as “Sedgwick I” [etc.]. The papers of Catharine M. Sedgwick are catalogued separately.)

43. Henry Van Schaack to Theodore Sedgwick, Jan. 2, 1784 (Sedgwick I, Box 1.5). Van Schaack jokingly added that his wife had “eloped,” so there would be no women present. Eight years earlier, when Sedgwick and Van Schaack were both serving in the War for Independence, Sedgwick sent his friend a copy of a soldier’s drinking song in mid-December; the song concluded: “Its not right for a soldier to grumble I know / But there is one grudge that I lawfully owe / those Damnable Sutters[?] how slighly [i.e., slyly] they’ll come / and charge us one Dollar for a Quart of rum. / Sweet Connecticut if I shall see you one [once] more / for the price of one Quart I could have three or four. / I would Drink & be Merry my Toast it shall be / Success to the Lads that shall gain Liberty” (Sedgwick I, Box 1.1).

44. Theodore Sedgwick to Ephraim Williams Jan. 9, 1795 (Sedgwick III, Box 2.1); Henry Van Schaack to Theodore Sedgwick, Dec. 25, 1799 (Sedgwick I, Box 4.4). Van Schaack said the wine was “excellent” and asked Sedgwick to get more. “As long as I can drink such wine you and others may consume Madeira and Claret and Cherry [Sherry] and Lisbon….” Van Schaack’s brother Peter had also received a gift of wine from Sedgwick (ibid.).

45. The phrase comes from his letter to Pamela Dwight of Jan. 1, 1795 (Sedgwick V, Box 1.14).

46. Pamela Sedgwick to Theodore Sedgwick, Jan. 1, 1798 (Sedgwick III, Box 2.10). On New Year’s Eve, 1799/1800, Theodore Sedgwick, Jr., wrote to his father: “I should [prefer to] live in a Town, at this season” (Sedgwick III, Box 2.16). And in 1808 Catharine M. Sedgwick wrote to her sister Frances Watson on Dec. 25 that she felt “secluded and alone” in Stockbridge (Sedgwick IV, Box 2.12).

47. Catharine Sedgwick to Frances S. Watson, Dec. 28, 1807-Jan. 1, 1808, Catharine M. Sedgwick Papers I (Massachusetts Historical Society), Box 1.1. (Note: Catharine M. Sedgwick’s papers are catalogued in three separate collections at the Massachusetts Historical Society. Henceforth these will be referred to as “CMS I” [etc.], and Catharine M. Sedgwick’s name will be abbreviated “CMS.”)

48. Henry Dwight Sedgwick to Theodore Sedgwick, Dec. 24, 1805 (Sedgwick V, Box 2.13).

49. Theodore Sedgwick to Henry Dwight Sedgwick, Jan. 2, 1806 (Sedgwick III, Box 3.7).

50. Eliza S. Pomeroy to Henry D. Sedgwick (Sedgwick V, Box 5.1). A letter from Theodore Sedgwick to Henry D. Sedgwick, written the next day, Jan. 2, 1812 (ibid.), makes no reference to this “feast.”

51. For Christmas: CMS to Robert Sedgwick, Dec. 23–24, 1817 (Sedgwick IV, Box 3.9); Charles Sedgwick to CMS, Dec. 25, 1820 (Sedgwick IV, Box 3.23); for New Year: Jane Sedgwick to Louisa Minot [part of a letter from Henry D. Sedgwick to William Minot], Dec. 29, 1820 (Sedgwick IV, Box 3.23).

52. Ibid. (“mince pies”). It was actually New Year’s rituals in New York that were unknown in Boston, as Henry D. Sedgwick pointed out in a letter to his Boston fiancée: “Tomorrow is the commencement of a new year consecrated here to a species of brisk hilarity and hurried sociability of which you have scarcely an idea in Boston. After Church, which is out at ***1/2*** past 12 & before dinner at 3 you are expected to call on all your friends everywhere to get a glass of wine & a cookie (small cake). You cannot stay at one place more than 3 minutes.” [Henry D. Sedgwick] to [Jane] Minot (from N.Y.C.), Dec. 28–31, 1816; quoted passage is dated December 31 (Sedgwick V, Box 8.9). The next day Henry D. Sedgwick described the scene: “On New Year’s day Robert began his visits at a quarter past twelve. I accompanied him. It is considered indispensable to visit all your friends at that season…. We finished our rounds or rather ex[h]austed our time at a quarter past 3 having made more than 30 visits in every part of the city. There were still several omissions which he very much regretted.” [Henry D. Sedgwick] to [Jane] Minot, Jan. 1, 1817 (Sedgwick V, Box 9.1).

53. This was not because of a dearth of young people in the family. From 1795 to 1820 there were twenty Sedgwick children born to the third generation (i.e., Theodore Sedgwick’s grandchildren).

54. “Vous savez notre cher pere que nous vous aimons et que nous n’avons rien a vous donner si nous avions ete dans la ville certainement nous vous avarions donne quelque chose. A l’un qui est toujours indulgent et toujours genereaux a tout le monde et surtout a ses enfans a [sic] billet est presente par Theodore Sedgwick et M. Sedgwick.” Maria and Theodore Sedgwick III to their father, Theodore Sedgwick, Jr., Jan. 1, 1824 (Sedgwick II, Box 6.17). Theodore III was 12, and his sister was 10 years old. Of course, the letter itself was the real present, displaying, as it did, the children’s command of a foreign language.

55. See, for example, Elizabeth Sedgwick to Robert Sedgwick, Oct., 1835: “The fact is the whole responsibility of affairs falls upon her shoulders, and even hers are not broad enough to bear it” (Sedgwick V, Box 17.14). This was one of the rare acknowledgments of the way Catharine Sedgwick was handed responsibility by her relatives. As for her love of children, Catharine Sedgwick wrote of one little boy, the son of two of her close friends: “He had better come to his Aunt Catharine who has nothing to do but to make time pass agreeably to children from two to ten years old.” CMS to Eliza Cabot Follen, April 1, 1833 (CMS I, Box 8.8). Catharine Sedgwick didn’t much like the commercial part of Christmas, but it was she who ended up doing much of the family’s shopping, because other family members trusted her judgment (and as an unmarried woman, she was expected to have the time).

56. CMS to Katherine Sedgwick, Dec. 28, 1825 (CMS I, Box 1.9). This passage was a postscript to a letter otherwise addressed to young Katherine’s father, Charles Sedgwick (Catharine’s youngest brother). Catharine Sedgwick herself had sent this same niece a present of books.

57. What is just as striking (but not apparent from the above description) is that the woman who sent the present, “Aunt Speakman” (Jane Sedgwick’s aunt on her mother’s side) was a Bostonian. One of the lingering ambiguities of the Christmas season (it would not be resolved for another generation) was when to open presents—on December 25 or January 1? Ultimately, it was all the same thing, inasmuch as the date was less important than the sheer fact of the gifts (indeed, as we shall see, the first Christmas trees in the Sedgwick family would be set out on New Year’s Day). But it is striking nonetheless that New York was the city that held out for New Year’s, while December 25 was more customary in Boston.

58. Elizabeth B. Sedgwick (Mrs. Charles) to CMS, Dec. 31, 1827 (Sedgwick IV, Box 5.3: misfiled because misdated 1828—“Episcopal style”); Susan Sedgwick to Jane M. Sedgwick, Jan. 5, 1828 (Sedgwick V, Box 14.1—“the most entire satisfaction”).

59. Susan R. Sedgwick to Theodore Sedgwick, Jr., Jan. 6, 1828 (Sedgwick II, 7.8).

60. Elizabeth E. Sedgwick to her father, William Ellery, Jan. 12, 1828 (Sedgwick V, Box 14.1).

61. Elizabeth E. Sedgwick to William Ellery, Jan. 3, 1829 (Sedgwick V, Box 14.7).

62. Jane Sedgwick to her brother William Minot, Jan. 1, 1830 (Sedgwick V, Box 15.1).

63. Katherine Sedgwick [Minot] to CMS (from Lenox), Jan. 1, 1830 [a postscript to a letter otherwise written by Charles Sedgwick (Sedgwick IV, Box 5.7).

64. Elizabeth Ellery Sedgwick to her father William Ellery, Jan. 5, 1830 (Sedgwick V, Box 15.1).

65. Elizabeth E. Sedgwick to her father, Wiliam Ellery, Jan. 9, 1831 (Sedgwick V, Box 15.11).

66. “Lizzy Sedgwick” to Katherine Sedgwick, Jan. 2, 1831 (Sedgwick IV, Box 5.7). Three years later, Catharine Sedgwick teased Lizzie on the morning of New Year’s Day: “Lizzie woke with the first ray of light—jumped into my bed & I quizzed [i.e., teased] Sue & her unmerci[full]y with a descrip[tio]n of the Tables [of presents] awaiting them—boxes of pills, doses of castor-oil, crust of bread, mug of water, &c.” CMS to Kate Sedgwick, Dec. 29, 1834–[Jan. 2, 1835] (CMS I, Box 1.17).

67. Charles Sedgwick to CMS, Dec. 24, 1832 (Sedgwick IV, Box 5.12). See also the letter Theodore Sedgwick received in 1824 from his two children, apologizing for not having bought a present for him.

68. Charles Sedgwick to his daughter Katherine Sedgwick [included in a letter from his wife], Jan. 1, 1834 (Sedgwick IV, Box 5.17).

69. Elizabeth Sedgwick (Mrs. Charles) to her daughter Kate Sedgwick, Jan. 7, 1836 (Sedgwick IV, Box 6.5). The missing presents turned up the following evening. For other examples, see Susan R. Sedgwick to her son Theodore Sedgwick III, Dec. 16, 1830 (Sedgwick II, Box 7.14), and Theodore Sedgwick, Jr., to Theodore Sedgwick III, Dec. 17, 1832 (Sedgwick II, Box 7.19).

70. CMS to Kate Sedgwick, Dec. 17, 1832 (CMS II, Box 1.9).

71. Jane Sedgwick to CMS, Jan. [prob. 4], 1834 (CMS III, Box 4.1).

72. Elizabeth D. Sedgwick (Mrs. Charles) to Kate Sedgwick, Jan. 1, 1834 (Sedgwick IV, Box 5.17).

73. Kate Sedgwick to CMS, Jan. 1, 1830 [postscript to a letter from Charles Sedgwick (Sedgwick IV, Box 5.7).

74. Elizabeth D. Sedgwick to her daughter Katherine Sedgwick, Jan. 1, 1834 (Sedgwick IV, Box 5.17).

75. CMS to Kate Sedgwick, Jan. 7, 1833 (CMS I, Box 1.15). Or again, CMS to Katherine Sedgwick, Dec. 29, 1834[-Jan. 2, 1835]: “Your Aunt & E. rec’d handsome wax flowers from the Rod[ha]ms & mingling a few fresh geranium leaves with them they passed with these artifi[cia]l New Yorkers for as natural as mine. Do you believe they’d know a live lion from a dead dog?” (CMS I, Box 1.17.)

76. Susan Sedgwick to Theodore Sedgwick, Jr., Dec. 30, 1835 (Sedgwick II, Box 8.5).

77. CMS to Kate Sedgwick, Dec. 17, 1832 (CMS II, Box 1.9).

78. CMS to her sister Frances Watson, Dec. 23, 1831 (Sedgwick IV, Box 5.9).

79. CMS to Kate Sedgwick, Jan. 7, 1833 (CMS I, Box 1.15).

80. Jane Sedgwick to CMS, Dec. 22–24, 1833 (CMS III, Box 3.14).

81. All the above from CMS to Kate Sedgwick, Dec. 31, 1830 (CMS I, Box 1.13).

82. “Major Longbows Description of Jos. Bonfanti’s Fancy Store,” American Antiquarian Society. This verse was printed sometime between 1824 and 1837, probably during the mid-1820S. Bonfanti published another Christmas verse-advertisement during the 1824 Christmas season, sixteen verses describing the shop’s most alluring gifts—but without any reference to Santa Claus (this appeared in the New York Advertiser, Jan. 1, 1825).

83. Daily Cincinnati Gazette, Dec. 24–18, 1844. This same newspaper printed the following editorial notice on Dec. 24: “SANTA CLAUS. This renowned friend of good boys and girls held a grand levee at LOUDERBECK’S yesterday, and was waited upon by hundreds of the little people of the Queen City. Hearing of what was going on, we called around just about sun-down, but were rather late. The old gentleman, with his arms full of Christmas presents, was on the eve of retiring for the night. Seeing us however, he paused a moment, although he had one leg down the chimney, and allowed us to scan his features. He is very certainly a benevolent old gentleman, and altogether as comical in appearance as any one we have ever seen. He holds another levee today, and such of our little friends as did not visit him yesterday, should not fail to make him a call” (Cincinnati Daily Gazette, Dec. 24, 1844). The same picture turned up in an 1851 jeweler’s advertisement in Bangor, Maine. (1851 Bangor City Directory.)

84. [Philadelphia] North American, Dec. 25, 1841, quoted in Alfred Shoemaker, Christmas in Pennsylvania, A Folk-Cultural Study (Kutztown: Penn. Folklore Society, 1959), 46; Philadelphia Public Ledger, Dec. 27, 1841.

85. Daily Cincinnati Gazette, Dec. 23 and 24, 1844. The earliest reference I have found to a living impersonation of Santa Claus dates from 1833, when a student at the General Theological Seminary in New York (Clement Clarke Moore’s institution, located in Chelsea) attended a church Christmas fair in Morristown, New Jersey, and reported that “[i]t was held … under the auspices of a figure called St. Nicholas who was robed in fur, and dressed according to the description of Prof. Moore in his poem.” Manuscript diary of Francis Prioleau Lee, Dec. 31, 1833, in the archives of the General Theological Seminary. (Sandra D. Hayslette brought this item to my attention while she was an undergraduate student at the College of William and Mary.) It is possible that this St. Nicholas was a constructed figure and not a real person.

86. For a stimulating discussion of this paradox, see Karen Hultunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982). In the capitalist order, personal relationships were based on competition, limited only by law and contract, while in the domestic order those relationships were founded on affection and loyalty. In retrospect, it is clear enough that capitalism and domesticity went hand in hand with each other. But at the time, people sometimes experienced the two as being in mutual tension, a tension that was resolved by assigning the two to operate in what were sometimes termed “separate spheres.” Domestic values took precedence within the home and family; capitalist values held sway in most of the world outside, the world of business and politics.

87. New York Tribune, Dec. 25, 1855. Horace Greeley himself had editorially resisted Christmas consumerism throughout the 1840s. For a while he ran annual editorials attacking lavish spending as socially harmful.

Chapter 5

1. The first expression of this new concern I have found is a story by Eliza Leslie, the author of “Snow-Balling.” It is “The Souvenir,” in The Pearl for 1830 (Philadelphia), 106–123, a story about a little girl who gives away the Gift Book she has received as a Christmas present.

2. The scene is recorded in Harriet Martineau, Retrospect of Western Travel (2 vols., London and New York, 1838), 1, 178–179; and in Eliza C. Folien, “Life of Charles Folien,” The Works of Charles Folien (5 vols., Boston, 1842), I, 386–387. Harriet Martineau thought this was the Follens’ first Christmas tree, but Eliza Follen’s account indicates that it was probably their fourth.

3. Follen’s two exiles are described in George W. Spindler, The Life of Karl Folien: A Study in German-American Cultural Relations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1917), 76–84; see also Folien, Works, 1, 3–158.

4. Ibid., 1, 149 (reading Redwood)’, 150 (1825 visit); 152 (Stockbridge visit); 163 (Sedgwick introduces Cabot to Folien). The Follens’ little boy was particularly fond of Catharine Sedgwick (he called her “Aunt Catharine”), and she returned his affection.

5. Ibid., 1, 303 (new house). The Harvard position paid only $500 per annum. One of the three men who contributed the money was Eliza Follen’s father. See Douglas Stange, “The Making of an Abolitionist Martyr: Harvard Professor Charles Theodore Christian Folien (1796–1840),” in Harvard Library Bulletin, vol. 24 (1976), 17–24.

6. Folien, Works, 1, 379.

7. Ibid., I, 342–346. Douglas Stange argues that the termination was unrelated to Follen’s abolitionist activities, and that Harvard had never planned in the first place to offer Folien a permanent job; he attributes the anti-Harvard interpretation to radical Garrisonian propaganda—the desire to create abolitionist martyrs (ibid., 19–20, 23). I disagree: Stange’s argument is based on a literal interpretation of a letter written by Harvard president Josiah Quincy, a letter that was almost certainly designed to protect Harvard’s interests by ascribing to purely administrative causes what was actually a thoroughly political decision. Compare the following letter from William Minot to Jane Sedgwick, April 14, 1836: “The Follens … are full of prejudices & have communicated … very erroneous notions of the condition of Harvard College as to discipline Sc instruction. They are disappointed in their places & impute the failure to others instead of themselves. The Dr. [Folien] is a learned & very laborious man of good talents, an excellent teacher of the German language, but deficient in the qualifications of an interesting & useful public lecturer, and he & his wife are dissatisfied because the College would not give him the professorship of moral philosophy which has been vacant ever since the death of Mr. Fiske[?], for which he is by no means fit. They have both thrown themselves into the melee of this abolition controversy[,] & by their indiscreet zeal have annoyed their friends & as I think injured the cause of emancipation” (Sedgwick Family Papers V [Massachusetts Historical Society], Box 18.2).

8. Folien, Works, I, 360–361; Catharine Sedgwick to Jane Sedgwick, Mar. 29, 1835, in Catharine Sedgwick Papers III (Massachusetts Historical Society), Box 4.3; see also Catharine Sedgwick to Eliza Cabot Folien, July 28, 1835, in CMS I, Box 8.8.

9. Folien, Works, 1, 360–368 (quotation from 362).

10. For analyzing and dating Follen’s loss of this position, see Catharine Sedgwick to Eliza Cabot Follen and Catharine Sedgwick to Jane Sedgwick, both dated December 19, 1835 [though not postmarked until January 3, 1836] (CMS Papers I, Box 8.8). See also Follen, Works, 1, 374–378.

11. Follen, Works, I, 387–403; Martineau, Retrospect, II, 165–168. Follen seems to have developed this style early in life: In response to being taunted by his father and brothers, he devised a facade of “perfect self-control” to hide his feelings (Follen, Works, 1, 7–8.)

12. R. K. Webb, Harriet Martineau: A Radical Victorian (London: Heineman, 1960), 43–133.

13. Catharine Sedgwick to Jane Sedgwick, May 3, 1835 (CMS III, Box 4.3).

14. See CMS to Eliza L. Follen, July 28, 1835 (CMS I, Box 8.8).; Ellery Sedgwick to Elizabeth Sedgwick, July 31, 1835 (Sedgwick Family Papers V [Massachusetts Historical Society], Box 17.11). In September, Martineau visited Newport, where she met Elizabeth Ellery Sedgwick (who reported conversing with her through Martineaus notorious hearing aid—she was hard-of-hearing—which Mrs. Sedgwick called the “dreaded trumpet.” Elizabeth Ellery Sedgwick to Robert Sedgwick, Sept. 10, 1835 (Sedgwick V, Box 17.13).

15. Harriet Martineau, Retrospectives of Western Travel (2 vols., London and New York, 1838), II, 164. Twenty years later, Martineau wrote: “I felt that I could never be happy again if I refused what was asked of me: but to comply was probably to shut against me every door in the United States but those of the Abolitionists. I should no more see persons and things as they ordinarily were: I should have no more comfort or pleasure in my travels; and my very life would be … endangered by an avowal of the kind desired” (Harriet Martineau, Autobiography [3 vols., London, 1877], II, 30).

16. Martineau, Autobiography, II, 32–42; Martineau to Fanny Wedgwood, Jan. 17, 1840, in Elizabeth Sanders Arbuckle, ed., Harriet Martineaus Leo Fanny Wedgwood (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1983), 30 (“nearest friend”).

17. Martineau, Retrospect, II, 173–176.

18. Follen to Harriet Martineau, Nov. 30, 1835, Works, vol. 1, 381–383 (“if the world separate itself”); Follen to Martineau, undated (but late December), ibid., 385 (“our Holy Triple Alliance”).

19. Martineau’s publisher, Saunders and Otley, could hardly have been willing to print a book that was so personally revealing—and so politically controversial (for the terms of her book contract, see Webb, Martineau, 156). Whenever she wrote about Charles Follens role in the abolitionist movement (as she did in reporting his stoical performance before the Massachusetts legislative committee in early 1836, an event she witnessed), Martineau kept her own relationship with him completely out of her account. Conversely, whenever she wrote of that personal relationship (as she did in recounting the western trip she took with the Follens in the late spring of 1836, or—to return to the subject of this book—the evening of the famous Christmas tree), she disguised Follen’s identity by referring to him simply as “Dr. F.,” an apolitical figure who, in this guise, invariably played a secondary role to his young son, “my little friend Charley.” The use of “little Charley” was an effective literary device. The boy also served as a rhetorical substitute for his father, and made it possible for Martineau to convey in utterly nonpolitical ways her close relationship with Charles Follen (who appeared in the wholly domestic role of Charley’s father).

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.)

58. Ibid., 43.

59. Ibid., 39.

60. Ibid., 43.

61. Mrs. G. “The Christmas Tree,” in The Pearl; or, Affection’s Gift: A Christmas and New Years Present for 1837 (Philadelphia, 1837 [c. 1836]), 179–189.

62. Ibid., 179.

63. Ibid., 180.

64. Ibid., 180, 183.

65. Ibid., 183–185.

66. This point constitutes further evidence that Christmas trees were used by prosperous families, families who could afford to live in houses that contained enough rooms to do this job—and who were up-to-date enough for these rooms to be “specialized” to the extent that at least one of them was off-limits to the children.

67. Ibid., 180. The same custom is implied in Catharine Sedgwick’s 1836 story “New Year’s Day.” There the children “waked [Lizzy Percival, the heroine] at dawn with … cries of ‘Happy New Year’;” and the servants “besieged her door with their earnest taps and their heart-felt good wishes, and each received a gift and a kind word to grace it.” (Sedgwick, “New Year’s Day,” 17.)

68. Mrs. G., “The Christmas Tree,” ibid., 186.

69. For example: [Christophe von Schmid,] The Christmas Eve: A Tale from the German (Boston, 1842, etc.; apparently translated by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody); Theodore Parker, Two Christmas Celebrations (Boston, 1859); Lydia Maria Child, “The Christ-Child and the Poor Children,” in her Flowers for Children (Boston, 1861), 9–48; L. D. Nicholas, “Willy Ely’s Christmas Tree,” Our Young Folks 2 (1866), 737–740; Louisa May Alcott, “Tilly’s Christmas,” in her Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag (Boston, 1872), 122–133.

70. Louisa May Alcott, Little Women; or, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy (Boston, 1869), ch. 3.

71. The best book about Fuller is Charles Capper’s analytic biography Margaret Fuller, An American Romantic Life: The Private Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), the first of two projected volumes, taking Fuller’s career only up to 1841.

72. New York Tribune, Dec. 25, 1844. I ascertained the authorship of this essay from Charles Capper. For another “German” legend, printed in an American newspaper in the mid-1830s—complete with suffering child, a vision of the infant Jesus, and a Christmas tree—see “The Forlorn Child’s Christmas Eve, a translation from the German of Ruckert,” in the Philadelphia Public Ledger, Dec. 24, 1836.

73. New York Tribune, Dec. 28, 1844.

74. Ibid., Jan. 3, 1845.

Chapter 6

1. Charles Loring Brace, Home-Life in Germany (New York, 1853), 225.

2. Ibid., 122–124.

3. Ibid., 221–222. Brace was staying at a lodging-house near the Lindenstrasse (ibid., 121).

4. A Christmas Carol never even shows us the poor, even though the book opens by evoking a general vision of a society riven by vast economic and social divisions. But the book provides hardly a glimpse of poverty, and none at all of discontent. The Ghost of Christmas Past takes us back into the time of Scrooge’s childhood, a time portrayed as if it antedates capitalism altogether. The Ghost of Christmas Present takes Scrooge on a tour of England, but the only workers he chooses to show us are miners (a happy family, singing Christmas songs) and, even more briefly, a group of sailors at sea. Real poverty does make one appearance on this tour—but only in the form of a pair of allegorical figures labeled “Want” and “Ignorance.” And these figures, who do not move or speak, take the innocent form of a pair of young children. In any case, even this brief excursion into the industrial hinterlands of “Christmas Present” is fictionally framed on either side by two lengthy and richly detailed stops at which we witness Christmas dinner with the families of a pair of characters who are already familiar to us: The first is at the house of Scrooge’s merry nephew Fred; the second is at the Cratchits’. Because these two scenes are portrayed so vividly, they end up satisfying us emotionally. But both Fred’s Christmas dinner and (as we have seen) the Cratchits’ are bourgeois events—even though the Cratchits’ dinner has all the pathos (without any of the accompanying resentment) of a proletarian meal.

5. New York Times, Dec. 25, 1893. See also ibid., Dec. 25, 1876: “Should the weather prove fine there seems to be no reason why everybody, including all the possible Bob Cratchits and Tiny Tims in the great Metropolis, should not to-day have the happiest of ‘Merry Christmases.’ The times are hard, it is said, but the charitable institutions are all bountifully supplied with substantial food, and with an abundance of toys and fruit and candy for the children…. In the markets the dealers say that never before were there so many purchases by employers who desired to reward faithful employees, and to make their gifts in the shape of poultry.”

6. Susan Sedgwick to Theodore Sedgwick II, Jan. 2, 1838, in Sedgwick Family Papers II (Massachusetts Historical Society), Box 8.15. Sedgwick assured her husband that “It would have just suited you—sufficiently republican, yet in excellent taste.” She went on to note that “We came away at half past 8, & reached home in time to get seasonably soust[?!]”

7. New York Tribune, Jan. 3, 1844. See also ibid., Dec. 24, 1845: “Who can devote even one day to hilarity and social enjoyment until he shall have at least devoted as much of his worldly substance as that day’s enjoyment will cost him to the relief of the misery so imminent and appalling.”

8. Ibid., Dec. 30, 1853.

9. Ibid., Dec. 22, 1854.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid., Jan. 1, 1848. Greeley went on to insist on the need to attack poverty as a systemic problem.

12. New York Times, Dec. 26 and 27, 1855.

13. “How to Help the Poor,” New York Times, Dec. 25, 1854.

14. Ibid., Dec. 26, 1866. See also ibid., Dec. 25, 1868 (“The evils of individual, which is, as a general rule, indiscriminate, charity, are almost equal to its benefits; and the truly charitable will wisely give what they can to the organized societies”) and Dec. 23, 1871 (“A dollar given to an institution like this [the Children’s Aid Society] is sure to be more fruitful than twenty bestowed in undiscriminating alms”).

15. Ibid., Dec. 25, 1893.

16. For the cloakmakers, see ibid., Dec. 26, 1894.

17. For the Five Points, see Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 68–69, 81. For the missions: Marilyn Irvin Holt, The Orphan Trains: Placing Out in America (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 98–102. See also Peter C. Holloran, Bostons Wayward Children: Social Services for Homeless Children, 1830–1930 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1994); and Luc Sante, Low Life: Lures and Snares of New York (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991), esp. pp. 305–312.

18. [Emma Brace,] The Life of Charles Loring Brace, Chiefly Told in His Own Letters (London, 1894), 75–76.

19. Charles Loring Brace, Short Sermons to Newsboys (New York, 1866), 13. For Brace, see Boyer, Urban Masses, 97–107; Holt, The Orphan Trains, 41–79, 120–155. See also Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (New York: Knopf, 1986); Thomas Bender, Toward an Urban Vision: Ideas and Institutions in Nineteenth-Century America (Lexington, Ky.: University of Kentucky Press, 1975).

20. New York Times, Dec. 25, 1855. A recent examination of New York’s orphan children is Bruce Bellingham, “Waifs and Strays: Child Abandonment, Foster Care, and Families in Mid-Nineteenth-Century New York,” in Peter Mandler, ed., The Uses of Charity: The Poor on Relief in the Nineteenth-Century Metropolis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 123–160.

21. Boyer, Urban Masses, 98. For a history of the movement, see Holt, The Orphan Trains, passim.

22. Boyer, Urban Masses, 99 (“excursion to Hoboken” quotation); Brace, The Dangerous Classes of New York, and Twenty Years’ Work Among Them (New York, 1872), 114.

23. Boyer, Urban Masses, 100.

24. Charles Loring Brace, Gesta Christi; or, A History of Humane Progress Under Christianity (New York, 1882), 95, 414.

25. Bender, Towards an Urban Vision, 147–149.

26. Brace, Sermons to Newsboys, 38. The most sympathetic and perceptive modern treatment of newsboy culture is David Nasaw, Children of the City: At Work and at Play (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), esp. pp. 62–87 and 149–166. Nasaw’s study deals with the period 1900–20, when newsboy culture had changed (for example, most early-twentieth-century newsboys lived with their own families).

27. New York Times, Dec. 26, 1867.

28. Brace, Sermons to Newsboys, 108, 112, 117.

29. Ibid., 26.

30. Kevin Gilbert, “Friends or Dependents: Christmas Charity Dinners and Changing Images of the Poor in New York City, 1897–1915” (unpublished seminar paper, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 1993). On the newsboys’ code of honor, see Brace, Dangerous Classes, 98–99.

31. Boyer, Urban Masses, 98.

32. New York Times, Dec. 26, 1871; Dec. 26, 1872; and Dec. 26, 1873. Roosevelt was present once again in 1884 (ibid., Dec. 26, 1884).

33. New York Times, Dec. 26, 1890. “This compilation does not make any allowance for the turkey bones, but, on the other hand, the weight of the newsboys before beginning the repast is placed rather high.”

34. Ibid.

35. Boyer, Urban Masses, 98.

36. Brace, Dangerous Classes, 395.

37. Horatio Alger, Jr., Ragged Dick; or, Street Life in New York (Boston, 1868). Most of the other books about newsboys were anonymously authored. These include John El-lard, The Newsboy (Philadelphia, 1860), a nonfiction account of the “Newsboys’ Aid Society,” founded in Philadelphia in 1858; Tom Brice, the News-boy (New York, 1862); Willie Wilson, the Newsboy (New York, 1865), a moralistic tale of a good boy; Luke Darrell, the Chicago Newsboy (Chicago, 1866); and [Thomas March Clark,] John Whopper the Newsboy (Boston, 1871), a fantasy adventure story of a newsboy’s trip to China.

38. Elizabeth Oakes Smith, The Newsboy (New York, 1854; reprinted 1870), 17–18. Robert says later, “‘I never had any father; I was sea-born.’” (156).

39. Ibid., 17 (“agin my natur”), 374 (“miracle of goodness”).

40. E.H.C., “The Sufferer,” Child’s Friend, Apr., 1844, 19–22.

41. Louise Chandler Moulton, “Just a Little Bit of Christmas,” Youth’s Companion, Dec. 21, 1865, 200. For other examples of poor children who do not ask for anything, see “Nelly’s Christmas Gift,” ibid., Dec. 20, 1877, 434–435 (in this story the little heroine is black); and also the two stories to be discussed below.

42. Annie Fraust, “Christmas for Rich and Poor,” Godey’s Lady’s Book 57 (Dec. 1858), 513–516. See also Frank Lee Benedict, “The Orphan’s New-Year’s Eve,” Peterson’s Magazine 31 (Jan. 1864), 27–34, in which an impoverished orphan turns out to be the illegitimate daughter of the rich heroine’s closest friend.

43. This story is also about the conflict between older notions of family structure, which gave fathers veto power over their children’s marriage partners, and emerging notions which accorded children free choice. From still another angle, the daughter’s “elopement”—and her subsequent banishment from the family—can be read as a symbolic way of touching on the issue of premarital sex and illegitimacy. Ironically, from this angle such stories do deal with social class, after all—in the form of the risk of downward mobility posed by sexual misconduct. (For a discussion of this question in a male context, see the story of young Robert Hamlin in Eliza Leslie’s story “Snow-Balling,” discussed in Chapter 3.)

44. Susan Warner, Carl Krinken: His Christmas Stocking (New York, 1854), 14, 22. This point follows out the implication of scenes about consumerism from The Wide, Wide World (discussed in Chapter 4).

45. William Dean Howells, “Christmas Every Day,” in Christmas Every Day and Other Stories Told for Children (New York, 1893), 3–22.

46. Edmund Alton, “The Children’s Christmas Club of Washington City,” St. Nicholas 15 (1887), 146–149.

47. New York Tribune, Dec. 26, 1851; ibid., Dec. 29, 1852. For 1853, see ibid., Dec. 27, 1853.

48. The Tribune of Dec. 26, 1853, published an extensive list of the charitable agencies that had held open house the previous day—twenty in all.

49. Ibid., Dec. 27, 1853. For a similar story about a Boston institution, see “Christmas Eve at the Orphan Asylum,” Child’s Friend (Jan., 1856), 77–79.

50. There were three other reports of charity visitations in that same number of the Tribune. All three took place at institutions for children: Randalls Island, the New York Juvenile Asylum (the children there were served a dinner “which they enjoyed in a manner that would have made many a street vagrant envious”), and the Girls’ Industrial School.

51. See Richard Sennett, Families Against the City: Middle-Class Homes of Industrial Chicago, 1872–1890 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970).

52. New York Times, Dec. 26, 1875; New York Tribune, Dec. 27, 1875; Louisa May Alcott to the Alcott family, Dec. 25, 1875, in Joel Myerson and Daniel Shealy, eds., The Selected Letters of Louisa May Alcott (Boston: Little, Brown, 1987), 210–213. That same year Alcott published a novel in which several children experience a perfect, present-filled Christmas: “‘Now, I believe I’ve got every thing in the world that I want,’” one of them says. (Louisa May Alcott, Eight Cousins; or, The Aunt-Hill [Boston, 1875], 226–227.)

53. Edward W. Bok, “Complicating Christmas,” Ladies’ Home Journal, Dec. 1897. For women’s work at Christmas, see Leslie Bella, The Christmas Imperative: Leisure, Family and Women’s Work (Halifax, N.S.: Fernwood Pub., 1992).

54. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981); Christopher Lasch, The New Radicalism in America, 1889–1963: The Intellectual as a Social Type (New York: Knopf, 1965). For an example of the Social Gospel applied to Christmas, see George Hodges, “What the Christmas Spirit Saith unto the Churches,” New England Magazine, Dec. 1896, 469–476.

55. New York Times, Dec. 26, 1890.

56. Ibid., Dec. 26, 1891. The event was repeated only once, the following year. It is evident that this event was resented by the established charitable agencies, who saw it as drawing attention (and contributions) away from their own work. A representative of the Christmas Society told a reporter the following year, “The organized charities of the city say we have been the means of depriving them of subscriptions [i.e., contributions].” Rental of Madison Square Garden alone cost $800 (ibid., Dec. 27, 1892).

57. Ibid., Dec. 26, 1899. See also the 1901 report: “From the boxes many prominent people looked down upon the 3,000 Christmas diners, the majority of whom remained until the end of the entertainment.” The article concluded with a list of prominent New Yorkers who “purchased boxes” for this event (New York Times, Dec. 26, 1901).

58. New York World, Dec. 26, 1899; quoted in Gilbert, “Friends or Dependents,” 9.

59. New York Tribune, Dec. 26, 1902.

60. New York Times, Dec. 26, 1903. New York’s mayor, Seth Low, was in attendance on this occasion.

61. Ibid., Dec. 26, 1905.

62. New York Tribune, Dec. 26, 1895. The article continues: “After eating three plates of turkey and as many dishes of sauce the soup is called for, and when they have got outside of one or two bowls they stuff their pockets with candy, apples, nuts, bananas and other good things and hasten to the gymnasium, where they exercise vigorously for an hour…. All these customs were kept strictly at the dinner last night.” For other newsboys’ dinners given by Fliess, see ibid., Dec. 26, 1895; New York Times, Dec. 26, 1899 (with descriptions of pie-throwing in previous years); New York Times, Dec. 26, 1901 (a dinner given by Frank Tilford, who was quoted as saying: “Who is there that could watch these little fellows enjoying themselves without feeling happy?” Nevertheless, “twelve policemen were present to maintain order.” New York Tribune, Dec. 26, 1908 (a history of the newsboys’ Christmas dinners).

63. There may have been an additional reason for the newsboys’ preferences: They were rejecting the “bourgeois” practice of separating sweet dishes from the rest of the food as a distinct course termed “dessert.”

64. New York Times, Dec. 25, 1876.

Chapter 7

1. “Christmas at the South,” New York Times, Dec. 25, 1867. Over subsequent decades, Southerners themselves evoked similar recollections of Christmas as part of the psychological arsenal they employed to plead with Northern whites for reconciliation along class and racial lines (which, they implicitly argued, ought to transcend the earlier opposition along regional lines). See, for example, three fictional works by Thomas Nelson Page: A Captured Santa Claus (New York; 1902; first published in 1891); “Polly: A Christmas Recollection,” in In Ole Virginia; or, Marse Chan and Other Stories (New York, 1887), 187–230; and “The Christmas Peace,” in Bred in the Bone (New York, 1904), 183–234. See also Joel Chandler Harris, “A Child of Christmas: A Christmas Tale of North and South,” in The Making of a Statesman and Other Stories (New York, 1902), 71–151.

2. John Esten Cooke, “Christmas Time in Old Virginia,” Magazine of American History with Notes and Queries 10 (1883), 443–459; the “Bracebridge Hall” passage is on p. 451. Another account, published in 1897 by Thomas Nelson Page, included, just as Irving had done, an extended description of the anticipation of the guests who were being driven in carriages to spend Christmas in their old family mansion. (The illustration for this section—it is captioned “At last the ‘big gate’ is reached”—was surely intended to evoke the highly popular illustration that Randolph Caledecott prepared for the 1875 edition of Bracebridge Hall.) It is no coincidence that Page, who helped invent the idea of the old Southern Christmas, was also largely responsible for inventing the myth of Old Dixie.

3. “Abolition of Christmas,” Evangelical and Literary Magazine (Richmond) 6 (Dec. 1823), 636–639.

4. Charles G. Parsons, An Inside View of Slavery: A Tour Among the Planters (Boston, 1855; reprinted, Savannah, 1974), 27 (delirium tremens); Nancy Chappelear Baird, ed., Journals of Amanda Virginia Edmonds, Lass of the Mosby Confederacy, 1859–1867 (Stephens City, Va., 1984), 9–10 (1857), 64 (1861); Mary A. Livermore, The Story of My Life (Hartford, 1897), 210 (drinking children). See also Baird, Edmonds, 243 (1866): “‘Christmas Gift’ is uttered by all tongues this morning, then nog, breakfast, and almost tight!”

5. Norfolk Public Ledger, Dec. 26, 2876. Norfolk was a port town with a naval yard and many saloons; it experienced a race riot in 1866. See George C. Rable, But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1984), 31.

6. Journals and Letters of Philip Vickers Fithian 1772–1774 (Williamsburg, Va., 1945), 52. The Robert E. Lee letter is quoted by James M. MacPherson, New York Review of Books 42 (Dec. 21, 1995), 15. For evidence that Christmas misrule was common in parts of the South at least as early as the late seventeenth century, see Michel Sobel’s provocative book, The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1987), 37, 67, and 263n13.

7. M. M. Folsom, “Christmas at Brockton Plantation,” Southern Bivuoac n.s. 1 (1886), 483–489; quoted passage is on p. 486.

8. William Nevison Blow, manuscript Memoir, Archives of the College of William and Mary. This item was brought to my attention by Patrick Breen.

9. Susan Dabney Smedes, Memorials of a Southern Planter (3rd ed., Baltimore, 1888), 160–161.

10. Quoted in Abe C. Ravitz, “John Pierpont and the Slaves’ Christmas,” Phylon 21 (1960), 384–385; also quoted in Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon, 1974), 578. The one general exception to the pattern of free time involves house slaves, whose labor (unlike that of field hands) was needed at Christmas.

11. See also the testimony of Henry Cheatam, who attributed the policy to a mean overseer: “[D]ere weren’t no celebratin’, ‘ceptin’ at hog killin’. Dat was de biggest dat of de year.” Quoted in Norman R. Yetman, ed., Life Under the “Peculiar Institution”: Selections from the Slave Narrative Collection (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), 56. A few planters—they seem to have clustered in the “new” States from Alabama to Texas—allowed no holiday at all. An ex-slave from Alabama remembered once having to build a lime kiln at Christmas (ibid., 147). An ex-slave from Oklahoma recalled that her owner “didn’t [even] tell us anything about Christmas …, and all we done was work” (ibid., 329). The same informant also argued: “The way he made the Negroes work so hard. Old Master must have been trying to get rich” (ibid., 326). A planter’s wife in Texas justified this policy by telling her slaves that “Niggers was made to work for white folks.” But the powerful hold of the holiday even within this family is demonstrated by the fact that on at least one occasion another white woman living in the household secretly baked two Christmas cakes for the slaves (ibid., 70).

12. For example, Mingo White recalled: “On Christmas we didn’t have to do no work, no more’n feed the stock and do de li’l work round de house. When we got through with dat we had de rest of de day to run round wherever we wanted to go. ’Course, we had to get permission from de master” (ibid., 314). See also Tatler, “Management of Negroes,” in Southern Cultivator 8 (1850), 162–164: “Believing that the strolling about of negroes for a week at a time during what are called Christmas Holidays is productive of much evil, the writer has set his face against the custom. Christmas is observed as a Sacred Festival. On that day as good a dinner as the plantation will afford is served for the negroes, and they all sit down to a common table, but the next day go to work. From considerations both of morality and needful rest and recreation to the negro, I much prefer giving a week in July, when the crop is laid by, to giving three days at Christmas.” Quoted in James O. Breeden, ed., Advice Among Masters: The Ideal in Slave Management in the Old South (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980), 258.

13. Yetman, Selections, 281. There was at least one ritual, practiced in the “low country” of Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina, that allowed slaves to exert at least symbolic control over the length of the holidays: They were to last as long as the “Yule log” continued to burn in one piece. Slaves would choose the largest possible tree, chop it down a year in advance, soak it in water for the entire year, and light it early on Christmas Day in the hall of the Big House, where it would be the “back-log.” The holidays would be over when the Yule log finally burned into two pieces—a process that could take a full week. This ritual was recalled by Booker T. Washington in “Christmas Days in Old Virginia” (1907), in Louis R. Harlan, ed., The Booker?. Washington Papers (14 vols., Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972–89), 1, 394–397 (Yule log is on p. 397). See also John Williamson Palmer, “Old Maryland Homes and Ways,” Century 49 (1894), 260; and Rebecca Cameron, “Christmas on an Old Plantation,” in The Ladies’ Home Journal (Dec. 1891), 5–8. This ritual was apparently devised by literary-minded Anglophile planters; it derived from an English custom in which tenants and servants were permitted to eat at the patron’s table as long as the Yule log burned.

14. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 574–575. I have not encountered a single case in which slaves were unambiguously deprived of their customary right to freedom from labor at Christmas. The two cases most nearly approaching this both seem to refer to the deprivation of other privileges. In 1854, James Henry Hammond denied slaves Christmas celebrations at his plantation, on account of a poor (wasted) harvest. He wrote in his record book on Dec. 25, 1854: “No festivities, crops being lost—negroes not having done their duty.” (Norrece T. Jones, Jr., Born a Child of Freedom Yet a Slave: Mechanisms of Control and Strategies of Resistance in Antebellum South Carolina [Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1990], 199.) In 1858 or 1859, on Robert Allston’s South Carolina rice plantation, two slaves “were made to run the gauntlet for taking a hog out of the pen. The whole plantation being shared out of Xmas until they found out the crimnal [sic].” (J. H. Easterby, ed., The South Carolina Rice Plantation as Revealed in the Papers of Robert F.W. Allston (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945), 34.

15. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (Boston, 1845), 74–75. This is the first version of Douglass’s autobiography; his description of Christmas is different in subsequent versions.

16. For example, one slave owner “followed the common practice of paying his slaves if they chose to work during the holidays when they would otherwise be free. [In 1853 he] paid several slaves fifty cents a day for splitting rails, hauling cotton and corn, and operating the plantation cotton gin.” Orville W. Taylor, Negro Slavery in Arkansas (Durham, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1958), 207.

17. Jones, Child of Freedom, 70–71.

18. Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave (Auburn & Buffalo, 1854), 214; Irwin Russell, “Christmas-Night in the Quarters,” in Poems by Irwin Russell (New York, 1888), 1 (“high carnival”); the Reverend Bayard R. Hall, D.D., Frank Freeman’s Barber Shop; A Tale (New York, 1852), 103–104 (“Ah! white man”), 109–111 (“times of cramming”). See also Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 574. For one former slave’s recollections, see John W. Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), 652–653.

19. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 578 (John Pierpont). See also Allen Parker, Recollections of Slavery Times (Worcester, Mass., 1895), 67. Several historians report that slave marriages were sometimes “grouped” at Christmas. See Blake Touchstone, “Planters and Slave Religion in the Deep South,” in John B. Boles, ed., Masters & Slaves in the House of the Lord: Race and Religion in the American South 1740–1870 (Lexington, Ky., 1988), 124; and Ulrich?. Philips, American Negro Slavery (New York: Appleton, 1918), 213. This claim is backed by the accounts of ex-slaves (e.g., Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, 221–222) as well as by plantation records. One plantation diary from 1859–60 records seven slave marriages at a single Christmas (Easterby, Allston, 453–454).

20. Ravitz, “Pierpont,” 384–385; Thomas Bangs Thorpe, “Cotton and Its Cultivation,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 8 (1854), 447–463 (449: “saturnalia of the Romans”); Hall, Frank Freeman, 102–103 (“grand saturnalia”). For a concise account of slave revelry, see Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 224.

21. For example, a Florida newspaper argued in 1857 that it was foolish to believe that the “idle, lounging, roving, drunken, and otherwise mischievous [Christmas] week fits the Negro in the least degree for the discharge of his duties.” (Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the AnteBellum South (New York: Knopf, 1956), 170.

22. Quoted by Stampp, Peculiar Institution, 170, from De Bow’s Review 13 (1852), 193–194.

23. Douglass, Narrative, 75–76. I would agree with Eugene Genovese in taking issue with Douglass’s claim: “Douglass was right in thinking that the holidays … undermined the revolutionary impulse of the slaves, but he was wrong, I believe, in thinking that the cause lay in the slaves’ being trapped in triviality and self-degradation.” Rather, Genovese suggests that the counterrevolutionary effect of such “big times” was that they developed in slaves a patriarchal sense of “community with their white folks” (Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 580). On this issue I disagree with Genovese, and I would add another point: Douglass was very much a man of bourgeois principles—for him, the loss of self-control through drinking and sexual excess signified a loss of self-respect. Finally, Douglass’s rhetoric was bound to appeal to the temperance-minded audience that constituted a substantial part of his intended Northern readership.

24. Parker, Recollections, 67–68; Smedes, Southern Planter, 161–162. Alexander Barclay wrote in 1828 about slave life in Jamaica: “Such dances were formerly common, or I should rather say universal, at Christmas; but of late years have gone much out, owing to an idea impressed on the minds of the negroes, principally I believe by the missionaries, that the season ought rather to be devoted to religious exercises. It is now considered more becoming to attend the places of worship, or to have private religious parties among themselves; and in passing through a negro village on a Christmas night, it is more common to hear psalm-singing, than the sound of merriment. Alexander Barclay, A Practical View of the Present State of Slavery in the West Indies (3rd ed., London, 1828), 10–11.

25. Phillips, Slavery, 315; Jacob Stroyer, My Life in the South (Salem, Mass., 1879), 35.

26. Parker, Recollections, 67–68; see also Phillips, Slavery, 316–318. The music at these revivals was limited to the human voice (and other parts of the body); musical instruments were prohibited for religious reasons.

27. Report by Harriet Ware, Dec. 26, 1862; quoted in Elizabeth Ware Pearson, ed. Letters from Port Royal, Written at the Time of the Civil War (Boston, 1906), 124; Sallie Holley, A Life for Liberty: Anti-Slavery and Other Letters (New York, 1899), 229–230.

28. Yetman, Selections, 193 (also quoted in Jones, Child of Freedom, 70). See also Charles L. Perdue, Jr., Thomas E. Barden, and Robert K. Philips, eds., Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia Ex-Slaves [Charlottesvile: University Press of Virginia, 1976], 229. Stampp, Peculiar Institution, 166, offers good examples from the 1850s. The gifts on one plantation were unusual enough to become a subject of humorous comment: “Every woman got a handkerchief to tie up her hair. Every girl got a ribbon, every boy a ballow [i.e., Barlow] knife, and every man a shin plaster. De neighbors call de place, de Shin Plaster, Barlow, Bandana place” (Yetman, Selections, 59).

29. Charles Kershaw [a factor] to Charlotte Ann Allston, Charleston, Nov. 29, 1815, in Easterby, Allston, 359. Allston himself, writing in the 1830s, noted: “the plantation stock to furnish … a beef for Christmas” (ibid., 257). Ravitz, “Pierpont,” 384–385); Ronald Killion and Charles Waller, eds., Slavery Time When I Was Chillun Down on Marster’s Plantation: Interviews with Georgia Slaves (Savannah: Library of Georgia, 1973), 11 (Georgia Baker); Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, 215–216. See also Sarah Virgil: “On Fourth of July and Christmas, Marster would give us the biggest kind of to-do. We always had more to eat than you ever saw on them days” (Killion and Waller, Slavery Time, 141.) Slaves often provided their own food and drink, from stock they had raised, made, or sold on their own during the year; sometimes they simply stole the master’s food. See, for example, Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (ed. by Lydia Maria Child; Boston, 1861 [Cambridge, 1987 reprint; ed. Jean Fagan Yellin]), 180–181. Compare a Christmas song recorded by Joel Chandler Harris in 1858: “Ho my Riley! dey eat en dey cram, / En bimeby [by-and-by] ole Miss’ll be sendin’ out de dram.”

30. Thomas Bangs Thorpe, “Christmas in the South,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper 5 (Dec. 26, 1857), 62.

31. Yetman, Selections, 73 (“barrels o’ apples”); Jones, Child of Freedom, 70, quoted from the Reverend Irving Lowery, Life on the Old Plantation (Columbia, S.C., 1911), 13, 37, 67.

32. This slave was speaking in the month of June, so he had not eaten meat for almost half a year. His remark was made to Charles Ball, and reported in Ball, Slavery, 79–80. Norrece T. Jones, who has measured Christmas meat in the context of “ordinary” slave diet on one South Carolina plantation, writes that over a period of nine months, “workers received meat from their master during four weeks only” (Jones, Child of Freedom, 49).

33. Stampp, Peculiar Institution, 166; anonymous Mississippi planter, “Management of Negroes upon Southern Estates,” De Bow’s Review 10 (1851), 621–627; quoted in Breeden, Advice Among Masters, 253–254 (“whipping and forfeiture”); Jesse H. Turner, “Management of Negroes,” in South-Western Farmer 1 (1842), 114–115 (“no matter by whom”); quoted ibid, 257–258.

34. Jones, Child of Freedom, 70. See also Ball, Slavery in the United States, 206–207.

35. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 579; E. P. Thompson, “Patrician Society, Plebeian Culture,” in Journal of Social History, vol. 7 (1974), 382–405 (see esp. 390–394); quoted in U. B. Phillips, “Plantations with Slave Labor and Free,” American Historical Review 30 (1925), 742.

36. Cicely Cawthon, in Killion and Waller, Slavery Time, 40 (“something else!”); Georgia Baker, ibid, 11–12 (“Marse Alec”). See also Martha Colquitt, in Yetman, Selections, 62: “On Christmas mornin’ all of us would come up to de yard back of de Big House and Marse Billie and de overseer handed out presents for all.”

37. Smedes, Southern Planter, 161; Bessie M. Henry, “A Yankee Schoolmistress Discovers Virginia,” Essex Institute Historical Collections 101 (1965), 121–132; “take the kitchen” quotation is on p. 129; Blow, “Memoir;” Mariah Calloway, in Killion and Waller, Slavery Time, 142 (“ate from the family’s table”). One planter gave his slaves their gifts in the family kitchen. (Palmer, “Maryland Homes and Ways,” 260). A Jamaican planter reported in the 1820s that “[i]n the evening they assemble in their master’s or manager’s house, and as a matter of course, take possession of the largest room, bringing with them a fiddle and tambourines” (Barclay, Practical View, 10).

38. For masters who visited the slave quarters, see Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, 215: “White people in great numbers assemble [there] to witness the gastronomical enjoyments.” Another ex-slave later recalled that “[w]hile they danced and sang the master and his family sat and looked on” (quoted in Killion and Waller, Slavery Times, 116). For an extreme version of masters joining in their slaves’ festivities, see Helen Tunnicliff Catterall, Judicial Cases Concerning American Slavery and the Negro (2 vols., Washington, D.C., 1926–37), vol. 2 (1929), 140–141. A misleading summary of this fascinating case can be found in Guion Griffis Johnson, Ante-Bellum North Carolina: A Social History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1937): Johnson misinterprets the story as a matter of the owner’s merely inviting the slaves home to perform for the “amusement” of his own family. See below, note 42.

39. Cameron, “Christmas on an Old Plantation,” 5–8.

40. Thorpe, “Christmas;” Stampp, Peculiar Institution, 169. Thomas Nelson Page later recalled how his own family decorated the table for their slaves’ Christmas dinner with “their own white hands”! Thomas Nelson Page, Social Life in Old Virginia Before the War (New York, 1897), 102.

41. Stampp, Peculiar Institution, 169 (“happy as Lords;” quoted from John Houston Bills ms. diary, Dec. 30, 1843); Barclay, Practical View, 10 (“all authority”); Foby, “Management of Servants,” in Southern Cultivator 11 (Aug. 1853), 226–228 (“difficult to say who is master”: quoted in Breeden, Advice Among Masters, 309; partially quoted in Genovese, 579). See also James Benson Sellers, Slavery in Alabama (University, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1950), 124.

42. John N. Evans to John W. Burrus, Jan. 1, 1836; quoted in Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 579–580. See also the following slave owner’s diary entry from December 25, 1852: “I have endeavored … to make my Negroes joyous and happy, and am glad to see them enjoying themselves with such a contented hearty good will” (quoted in Stampp, Peculiar Institution, 169). One North Carolina planter was brought to court in 1847 for allowing members of his own family (including his young daughters) to dance with the slaves he had invited into the Big House on Christmas night. The judge in the case acquitted this man of the charges, and in his decision wrote of the defendant’s behavior that “there was nothing contrary to morals or law in all that … unless it be that one feel aggrieved, that these poor people should for a short space be happy at finding the authority of the master give place to his benignity…. It is very possible, that the children of the family might in Christmas times, without the least impropriety, countenance the festivities of the old servants of the family by witnessing, and even mingling in them.” North Carolina v. Boyce, in Catterall, Cases Concerning Slavery, II, 140–141. See above, note 38.

43. Quoted in Johnson, Ante-Bellum North Carolina, 552–553, from ms. in N.C. Legislative Papers, June 18, 1824. For an account of the murder case that lay behind this statement, see Elizabeth A. Fenn, “‘A Perfect Equality Seemed to Reign’: Slave Society and Jonkonnu,” North Carolina Historical Review, 65 (Apr. 1988), 127–153. Compare Judge Ruffin’s decision in the Boyce case: “It would really be a source of regret, if, contrary to common custom, it were denied to slaves, in the intervals between their toils, to indulge in mirthful pastimes, or if it were unlawful for the master to permit them among his slaves, or to admit to the social enjoyment the slaves of others, by their consent…. We may let them make the most of their idle hours, and may well make allowances for the noisy outpourings of glad hearts, which providence bestows as a blessing on corporeal vigor united to a vacant mind….” (Catterall, Cases Concerning Slavery, II, 139–141; several passages from this quotation are taken from the version that appears in Johnson, Ante-Bellum North Carolina, 555.)

44. Fithian Journals, 52–53.

45. Thorpe, “Cotton,” 460–461.

46. Julia Peterkin, in Charlmae Rollins, ed., Christmas Gif; an anthology of Christmas poems, songs, and stories, written by and about Negroes (Chicago: Follett, [1963]), 33; Smedes, Southern Planter, 162; see also Blow, Memoir; Cooke, “Christmas Time in Old Virginia,” 458; Folsom, “Christmas at Brockton Plantation,” 486 (this involved whites only); Joel Chandler Harris, “Something about ‘Sandy Claus,’” in his On the Plantation: A Story of a Georgia Boy’s Adventures During the War (New York, 1892), 116; Johnson, Ante-Bellum North Carolina, 552.

47. James Bolton, in Killion and Waller, Slavery Time, 25; see also Blow, Memoir.

48. Harris, “Something About ‘Sandy Claus,’” 116; Rollins, Christmas Gif’!, 35 (Hurston story). In some places this “game” lasted into the twentieth century. See Harnett T. Kane, ibid., 16. Zora Neale Hurston told a story of a black man who hid behind a stump one Christmas and took God Almighty by surprise with the cry “Christmas gift!” (ibid., 35). There is even a reference to this ritual in William Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury. As young Quentin Compson leaves Harvard College in despair and arrives by train in Mississippi on December 25, the first thing that happens to him when he steps off the train—it is what makes him realize he has arrived “home”—is that he is approached by a Negro beggar who accosts him with the words “Christmas gift.”

49. Page, Social Life, 96; Baird, Edmonds, 9–10 (1857 entry), 177 (1863 entry). See also William Gilmore Simms, The Golden Christmas: A Chronicle of St. Johns, Berkeley (Charleston, S.C., 1852), 143–145.

50. Edmonds married only in 1870, at the age of 30. One young Virginia married woman claimed the perquisites of both roles: “We [she and her husband] have invitation to a dinner on Wednesday …, and I am invited among the young people to an evening party on Friday—so you perceive I have [both] married and single privileges” (Tyler ms., Swem Library, College of William and Mary).

51. Smedes, Southern Planter, 162.

52. Stampp, Peculiar Institution, 366 (“best rigging”: quoted from John W. Brown diary, Dec. 25, 1853); Cameron, “Christmas on an Old Plantation.”

53. Thorpe, “Cotton,” 460 (“drop their plantation names”); Mary A. Livermore, The Story of My Life (Hartford, 1897), 210 (“almost a burlesque”).

54. Thorpe, “Cotton,” 460.

55. Henry, “Yankee Schoolmistress,” 129–130 Bayard Hall reported that slaves mimicked the idiosyncrasies of the whites’ dialogue and mannerisms (Hall, Frank Freeman, 109–110).

56. Quoted Johnson, Ante-Bellum North Carolina, 145.

57. Liberator 8 (May 26, 1837, 85. The writer acknowledged that “very few of the blacks were at church,” and added that “the distant sounds of Cooner reached even there.”

58. Johnson, Ante-Bellum North Carolina, 552–553 (quoted from ms. in N.C. Legislative Papers, June 18, 1824). For an account of the incident behind this statement—the killing of a white man by a John Canoer—see Fenn, “A Perfect Equality Seemed to Reign,’” 127–153. See also Edward Warren, A Doctor’s Experiences in Three Continents (Baltimore, 1885), 198–203.

59. James Norcom to his daughter Mary Matilda Norcom, Jan. 13, 1838; quoted by Jean Fagan Yellin in Jacobs, Incidents, 277. See also Edward Warren, A Doctor’s Experiences in Three Continents (Baltimore, 1885), 198–203.

60. Jacobs, Incidents, 180.

61. Ibid., 179–180.

62. Dougald MacMillan, “John Kuners,” Journal of American Folklore 39 (1926), 53–57. This verse is quoted by Lawrence Levine, who writes that it was sung by the John Canoe band to “those whites who did not respond to their offerings with generosity.” Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 13. I have found one other (rather inoffensive) fragment of a begging song, recalled years later by a white woman who was raised in the area: “C’ris’mas comes but once er yeah, / An’ ev’y po niggiah arter have ‘e sha’” (Folsom, “Christmas at Brockton Plantation,” 485).

63. Jean Fagan Yellin quotes from a letter from John W. Nunley to Jean Fagan Yellin suggesting that John Canoe was “a creolized masquerade tradition that has incorporated African and English traditions of masking…. The penchant for rum and the collecting of money by the maskers is also a shared trans-Atlantic tradition” (Jacobs, Incidents, 278–279n). Frederick G. Cassidy claims that the ceremony comes from the “Gold Coast,” though it was widely observed in the New World: Frederick G. Cassidy, “‘Hipsaw’ and ‘John Canoe,’”American Speech 41 (1966), 45–51. On “John Canoe” in North Carolina, see Fenn, “A Perfect Equality’;” Richard Walser, “His Worshipful John Kuner,” North Carolina Folklore 19 (1971), 160–172; and Nancy Ping, “Black Musical Activities in Antebellum Wilmington, North Carolina,” The Black Perspective in Music 8 (1980), 139–160. As far as the ridiculing song, Dena Epstein notes that “the parallel with African songs of derision is evident” (Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals[Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977], 131). The song quoted by Lawrence Levine is taken from Dougald MacMillan, “John Kuners,” Journal of American Folklore 39 (1926), 53–57. See also Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness), 12. Ira de A. Reid, “The John Canoe Festival: A New World Africanism,” Phylon 3 (1942), 349–370, argues for the English origin of the ritual. Martha Warren Beckwith, Black Roadways: A Study of Jamaican Folk Life (Chapel Hill, 1929), gives evidence from the 1920s that Shakespearean plays were being used by the John Canoers. (See also the same author’s Christmas Mummings in Jamaica (Pubs. of the Folklore Foundation: Vassar College, 1923).

64. Epstein, Sinful Tunes, 131.

65. For an instance, see Catterall, Cases Concerning Slavery, vol. 2, 536: Tennessee cases: “Bowling v. Statton and Swann, … December 1847. ‘[A]ction … for the loss of a negro man … hired … and never returned.’”

66. Dan T. Carter, “The Anatomy of Fear: The Christmas Day Insurrection Scare of 1865,” in Journal of Southern History 42 (1976), 345–364; “nearly one-third the rumors” is on p. 358. Joel Williamson also notes that in South Carolina “[t]he Fourth of July … and Christmas or New Year’s Day had marked a large number of insurrections or planned insurrections.” Joel Williamson, After Slavery: The Negro in South Carolina During Reconstruction, 1861–1877 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965), 250. For a report of an 1835 slave revolt in Louisiana that was planned for Christmas, see Joe Gray Taylor, Negro Slavery in Louisiana (New York, 1963), 218–220. The South Carolina report is from Frederick Law Olmstead, A Journey Through the Back Country (London, 1860), 203; quoted in Joseph Cephas Carroll, Slave Insurrections in the United States, 1800–1865 (Boston, 1938), 176. For the 1856 reports, see Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943), 347–350. On December 24, 1856, one Virginia slave was discovered carrying a letter concerning an imminent “meeting” that would lead to “freedom;” the letter claimed that soon “the country is ours certain” (quoted ibid., 350). Some revolts were timed for July 4, the other major slave holiday, and one that was also charged with a powerful symbolism of liberation. Nat Turner, for example, originally intended his 1831 rebellion to begin on July 4.

67. See William McFeely, Yankee Stepfather: General O. O. Howard and the Freedmen (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968); Eric Foner, Reconstruction America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988); Carter, “Anatomy of Fear;” William C. Harris, Presidential Reconstruction in Mississippi (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967), 88–89; Claude F. Oubre, Forty Acres and a Mule: The Freedmen’s Bureau and Black Land Ownership (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), esp. pp. 1–89. The Civil War origins of a potential land-reform policy are discussed in LaWanda Cox, “The Promise of Land for the Freedmen,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 45 (1958), 413–440.

68. Henry Watson to his daughter Julia Watson, Dec. 16, 1865, ms. in Frost Library, Amherst College. This letter was brought to my attention by Wesley Borucki. Watson added that “The [black] women say that they never mean to do any more outdoor work, that white men support their wives and they mean that their husbands shall support them.” Such hopes to abandon “outdoor work” suggest intriguingly that these freedwomen harbored bourgeois aspirations—i.e., to work in the home and be supported by their husbands.

69. Carter, “Anatomy of Fear,” associates the “Christmas Riots of 1865” with the long history of rowdy behavior on this holiday but does not go on to associate the holiday with gestures of paternalist largesse on the part of whites.

70. Texas State Gazette [Austin], quoted in The Daily Picayune [New Orleans], Nov. 21, 1865 (“waiting for the jubilee”—the writer had traveled through Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana); Daily Picayune, Dec. 27, 1865 (“their old masters”).

71. Henry Watson to Julia Watson, Dec. 16, 1865. “As for work,” one South Carolina planter told a visiting reporter, “[T]he freedmen were doing absolutely nothing. He had overheard one of his girls saying that she hadn’t seen any freedom yet, she had to work just as hard as ever. And that was the feeling of a great many of them. Then, as he had said, they were waiting for January, and nothing could be done with them till they became convinced that they must work for wages” (The Nation I [1865], 651).

72. For example, the provisional governor of South Carolina, James Lawrence Orr, wrote: “[During] Christmas week, which has always been a holiday for the negroes they will congregate in large numbers in the villages and towns where they will get liquor and while under its influence I fear that collisions will occur between them and the whites. When once commenced no one can tell where the conflict will end” (Orr to Gen. Daniel Sickles, Dec. 13, 1865; quoted in Carter, “Anatomy of Fear,” 358n).

73. Atlanta Daily Intelligencer, Dec. 21, 1865; quoted in Carter, “Anatomy of Fear,” 358); The Nation I (1865), 651.

74. Shreveport Gazette, reprinted in Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, Nov. 23, 1865 (“growing more insolent”); ibid., Nov. 24, 1865. For other reports, see the following (all 1865); ibid., Nov. 28 (Louisiana, Texas); ibid., Nov. 30 (Georgia); ibid., Dec. 23 (Texas, citing San Antonio Gazette); ibid., Dec. 23 (Virginia); National Intelligencer [Washington], Nov. 29 (Mississippi); Washington Evening Star, Dec. 26 (Mississippi, citing the Vicksburg Journal); Cincinnati Enquirer, Nov. 28 (Texas).

75. New Orleans True Delta, Dec. 15, 1865, reprinted in National Intelligencer [Washington, D.C.], Dec. 30, 1865.

76. The Daily Picayune [New Orleans], Nov. 14, 1865.

77. General Howard’s address to the freedmen was printed in the New Orleans Times, Dec. 10, 1865, and quoted in Carter, “Anatomy of Fear,” 360. McFeely, Yankee Stepfather, 105, quotes “a la mode Santa Claus.” Colonel Strong’s speech was quoted in The Daily Picayune [New Orleans], Nov. 28, 1865. (Colonel Strong was General Howard’s inspector general; he had been sent to Texas by Howard himself.) Not all agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau were willing to do this dirty work. At least one, Thomas Conway of the New Orleans office, continued into the fall to advise freedmen that they could apply for free land through the end of December (McFeely, Yankee Stepfather, 179; Oubre, Forty Acres, 34). And another, General Edgar Gregory—formerly a radical abolitionist—was reported to have given a somewhat incendiary speech to Texas freedmen, telling them that they were entitled to free land and urging them not to sign unfavorable labor contracts (The Daily Picayune [New Orleans], Nov. 28, 1865). It was agents such as these that the Southern press regarded as the “bad white men” who were corrupting the black population. For the official mission of the Freedmen’s Bureau, see Carter, “Anatomy of Fear,” 360.

78. Columbus [Miss.] Sentinel, reprinted in New Orleans Daily Picayune, Nov. 28, 1865. See also ms. letter of Henry Watson to Julia Watson, Dec. 16, 1865, Amherst College Archives.

79. John S. Garvin to Governor Parsons; quoted Carter, “Anatomy of Fear,” 361. Many blacks were arrested and otherwise harassed during the weeks before Christmas.

80. Unpublished memoir of Sally Elmore Taylor, quoted in Joel Williamson, After Slavery, 249–250. For another expression of white fear, see ibid., 251 (a white planter, watching his former slaves slaughtering a hog on December 4, “shuddered … to see the fiendish eagerness in some of them to stab & kill, the delight in the suffering of others”).

81. National Intelligencer [Washington, D.C.], Dec. 30, 1865.

82. Alexandria Gazette, Dec. 28, 1865 (“too much whiskey”); Washington Star, Dec. 30, 1865 (“much bad whiskey”); Richmond Daily Whig, Dec. 29, 1865 (“some colored men”); National Intelligencer [Washington, D.C.], Dec. 28, 1865 (“no political significance”).

83. Richmond Daily Whig, Dec. 27, 1865.

84. The Daily Picayune, Dec. 31, 1865.

85. Ibid., Dec. 27, 1865. In any case, the Picayune noted, readers could take heart from the knowledge that “the negro population will be found, as it has always been found in the South, to be docile.”

86. Richmond Daily Whig, Dec. 25, 1865.

Epilogue

1. Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery: An Autobiography (New York, 1901), 133. (He added, referring to the turn of the century, “This custom prevails throughout this portion of the South to-day.”) The following material appears ibid., 133–136.

2. This paragraph and the following ones are from Ira de A. Reid, “The John Canoe Festival: A New World Africanism,” Phylon 3 (1942), 349–370; see also Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 150 (it is Levine who explains the term dicty).

3. William Carleton, “The Midnight Mass,” in his Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry (2 vols., Philadelphia, 1834), 1, 13–102 (esp. 46–54).

4. Cited in Kevin Danaher, The Year in Ireland (Cork: Mercier Press, 1972), 241–242.

5. Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall, Ireland, Its Scenery, Character, etc. (3 vols., London, 1861–63 [orig. published in 1841), vol. 1, 23–25. The Halls refer to this as “the only Christmas gambol remaining in Ireland of the many that in the middle ages were so numerous and so dangerous as to call for the imposition of the law, and the strong arm of magisterial authority” (ibid., 25).

6. Colm Kerrigan, Father Mathew and the Irish Temperance Movement, 1838–1849 (Cork: Cork University Press, 1992), passim (the pledge figure is from p. 82).

7. Ibid., 76–77 (social advancement), 107–127 (repeal).

8. See entry of Dec. 23, 1842, where he “[gave] audience to half the world, some humbly begging for a little help, some asking merely for a loan….” David Thomson, with Moyra McGusty, eds., The Irish Journals of Elizabeth Smith, 1840–1850.A Selection(New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 59.

9. Ibid., 25. (Dec. 25–26, 1840). Two years later, on New Year’s Eve, 1842, Mrs. Smith wrote that she and her husband would “drink it [the old year] out in negus upstairs and punch below” (ibid., 60).

10. [New York] Irish World, Dec. 28, 1872. For a different reading of temperance, see Paul Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815–1837 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978); and, of working-class immigrants and the reform of holiday celebrations, see Roy Rozenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920 (Cambridge and New York, 1983), 65–92, 153–170.

11. These dates appear in James H. Barnett, The American Christmas: A Study in National Culture (New York: Macmillan, 1954), 20.

12. Acts and Resolves Passed by the General Court of Massachusetts, in the Year 1855, ch. 91, 549; Acts and Resolves Passed by the General Court of Massachusetts, in the Year 1856, ch. 113, 59–60.

13. John R. Mulkern, The Know-Nothing Party in Massachusetts: The Rise and Fall of a People’s Movement (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990), 79, 89–90, 101, 108–11 (the quotation is on p. 108). The Know-Nothings lost control of the state legislature in the 1856 elections. See also Ronald P. Formisano, The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Parties, 1790s—1840s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983).

14. Boston Daily Bee, Feb. 8, 1856; see also Boston Courier, Feb. 8, 1856, for a letter pointing to the financial effects of the bill. (While Rep. Vose was a Know-Nothing, he was also a leader of the opposition to the temperance legislation that had passed the previous year.)

15. This point is made in William B. Waits, The Modern Christmas in America: A Cultural History of Gift Giving (New York: New York University Press, 1993), 8.

16. Interview recorded by Alan Lomax, on “Leadbelly: Go Down with Aunt Hannah” (The Library of Congress Recordings, vol. 6; reissued by Rounder Records, 1994: CD 1099).

17. “I begin to whoopie” is from Peetie Wheatstraw, “Santa Claus Blues” (1935), Peetie Wheatstraw (1930–1941), da Music, CD 3541–2; “New Year’s Blues” is from Tampa Red, “Christmas and New Year’s Blues” (1934), from Complete Works, vol. 6, 1934–35; Document Records DOCD-5206; “valentine’s Day” is from Walter Davis, “New Santa Claus” (1941), from Complete Works, vol. 7, 1940–46; on Document Records DOCD-5286. One blues song that does deal with children and presents (sung from a woman’s perspective, it is about a man who has abandoned his woman and children during Christmas week) ends by reporting happily that another man has entered the singer’s life—“there’s a big fat Santy [Santa] walkin’ in my front door.” See Victoria Spivey, “Christmas Without Santa Claus” (1961) on Woman Blues (text by Victoria Spivey: Prestige / Bluesville Records? V-1054. For another Christmas-reunion blues, see Floyd McDaniel, “Christmas Blues” (1992), The Stars of Rhythm ‘n’ Blues, CMA Music Productions CD, CM-10007.

18. Robert Johnson, “Hellhound on My Trail” (1937: from The Complete Recordings, Columbia C2K-46222; 1991) [King of Spades Music, 1990]; “Every day is Christmas” is from Joe Turner, “Christmas Date Boogie” (1948 / 9: from Tell Me Pretty Baby, Arhoolie CD 333 (1992) [text by Joe Turner]; “like a rooster” is from Champion Jack Dupree, “Santa Claus Blues,” from The Joe Davis Sessions, 1945–46 (Flyright FLY CD 22, 1990). The term Christmas could actually become a euphemism for sex, as in the blues song “Merry Christmas, Baby.” After an opening verse that makes the association between Christmas and sex—by repeating the words of the title and adding, “you sure did treat me nice”—the second verse opens with a line in which the very term Christmas has come to mean “sex”: “I’m comin’ home, comin’ home for Christmas right now.” By the end of the song we have come to hear the repeated refrain “Merry Christmas, Baby” to mean simply Thanks for the great sex, baby. See Luther “Guitar Junior” Johnson, “Merry Christmas, Baby” (1991) on I Want to Groove with You, Bullseye Blues/Rounder Records CD BB 9506 [text by L. Baxter and J. Moore: St. Louis Music Corp., 1948]. The association of Christmas with leisure in African-American rural culture has remained so strong that the idea of working on Christmas Day is powerfully symbolic. In Howlin’ Wolf’s “Sittin’ on Top of the World,” for example, the singer suggests how hard his lot is by simply noting that he spent Christmas Day in his “overalls” [text by Chester Burnett, Arc Music Corp., BMI].

19. “Dresser drawers” is from Sonny Boy Williamson, “Santa Claus” (1960), [text by Rice Miller] Bummer Road (Chess/MCA CHD-9324, 1991); “this very Christmas night” is from Charley Jordan and Verdi Lee, “Christmas Tree Blues,” in Charley Jordan: Complete Recorded Works, vol. 3 (1935–37), Document Records CD, DOCD-5099; “backdoor Santa” is from Clarence Carter, “Backdoor Santa” (1960), from Snatching It Back: The Best of Clarence Carter Rhino/Atlantic CD (1992), R2–70286 [text by Clarence Carter Carter and Marcus McDaniel: Screen Gems-EMI, BMI]; “even if my whiskers is white” is from Blind Lemon Jefferson, “Christmas Eve Blues” (1928: Complete Recorded Works, vol. 3: Document Records DOCD 5019); “hang your stocking by the head of the bed” is from Charley Jordan and Verdi Lee, “Christmas Tree Blues” (cited above); “on your Christmas tree” is from Peetie Wheatstraw, “Santa Claus Blues” (cited above, note 14): the same image is used in Charley Jordan, “Santa Claus Blues” (1931), on Complete Recorded Works, vol. 2: Document Records DODC-5098. Other Christmas blues include: Bessie Smith, “At the Christmas Ball” (1925: Complete Recordings, vol. 2); Will Weldon, “Christmas Tree Blues” (1937), on Will Weldon as Casey Bill: The Hawaiian Guitar Wizard, 1935–38; Blues Collection/EPM, 1994” by W. Weldon; Sonny Boy Williamson [John Lee Williamson], “Christmas Morning Blues” (1938: Complete Recorded Works, vol. 2: Document Records, DOCD-5056); Lightnin’ Hopkins, “Santa,” on Mojo Hand, Golden Classics CD (Collectible Records Corp., Narbeth, Penn., CD-5111; Walter Davis, “Santa Claus Blues,” from Complete Works, vol. 6); Charlie Johnson, “Santa Claus Blues,” from Complete Works, vol. 2 (1931–34); and Freddie King, “Christmas Tears” (from 17 Hits).

20. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Cambridge: MIT, 1968), 4–18, 145–154. For ongoing vestiges of carnival, see Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen, 1986), 171–190.

21. But it appears that in many places Thanksgiving itself came to take on some of the aspects of carnival. For an account of this development, see Harriet Beecher Stowe’s historical novel Oldtown Folks (Boston, 1869), ch. 27: “How We Kept Thanksgiving.” For a contemporaneous perspective, in 1818 the Farmer’s Cabinet (an Amherst, N.H., newspaper) printed an article lamenting the “frolicks of Thanksgiving” and wishing that “the period annually set apart as a season of devout thanksgiving … were in reality a season of heart-felt and religious gratitude … when the heart and not the appetite should be the source of thanksgiving.” The same editorial suggested that Thanksgiving had also become at least semi-commercialized, a time when “farmers and merchants make their calculations to profit by its return, in the disposal of their various articles.” (Farmer’s Cabinet, Dec. 26, 1818; reprinted from the New Hampshire Patriot).

22. “Hanukkah was probably attached to a solstice feast already celebrated in Jerusalem by Jews friendly to Greece.” Martin Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism: Studies in Their Encounter in Palestine During the Early Hellenistic Period (translated from the German; 2 vols., Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974), I, 235; see also ibid., 303.

23. Israel Abrahams, Jewish Life in the Middle Ages (New York, 1896), 389–398 (Chanukah exception is on p. 396).

24. Increase Mather, A Testimony Against Several Prophane and Superstitious Customs, Now Practiced by Some in New-England (London, 1687), 41–42.

25. See, for example, Michael Strassfeld, The Jewish Holidays, A Guide and Commentary (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 187–196. This chapter bears the title “Purim: Self-Mockery and Masquerade.” See also Francis Spufford, “Pleasures and Perils of Purim,” in Times Literary Supplement, June 5, 1992. Spufford terms Purim “a carnival as Bakhtin described carnivals.”

26. Daniel Miller, “A Theory of Christmas,” in Daniel Miller, ed., Unwrapping Christmas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 3.