I. The Origins of Christmas in Europe:
Should December Be a Time for Physical Pleasure or a Time of Spiritual
Renewal?
The Gospels give no clues about the date or even the season of Jesus’
birth. However, in the fourth century of the common era, the Roman
Catholic Church began to celebrate the birth of Jesus on December 25.
Church leaders picked December 25, because they were concerned about the
popularity of the pagan god Saturn. In Roman polytheism Saturn was the
agricultural god, the god of sowing and seed. Saturn's great festival, the
Roman harvest celebration, was the most popular and most exciting of all
the pagan festivals. Starting on December 17, the celebration lasted for
seven days. With the harvest completed, workers suspended all work and
business. Instead of working, Romans hunted, ate, and drank. Slave-owners
gave slaves temporary freedom to say and do as they wished. Roman leaders
eased certain moral restrictions, and people freely exchanged presents.
Sixteen hundred years ago the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church saw it
as their responsibility to encourage Romans to honor not Saturn, but
Jesus. They intentionally established Jesus’ birthday at the same time as
Saturn’s festival, hoping that Romans would transfer the reverence they
held for Saturn to Jesus. This decision by Roman Christians to turn a
pagan celebration of the end of the harvest into a Christian celebration
of the birth of Jesus has led to a debate over the true meaning of
Christmas that has continued for sixteen hundred years.
On
the one hand, the end of the harvest was in many people’s minds a good
time to relax at the end of a year of hard labor. Romans had a few drinks.
They enjoyed eating the food that they had harvested. They played games
and gambled and dressed up in funny costumes. They danced and sang. They
gave gifts to loved ones.
On
the other hand, Church leaders taught that December 25, was a time to
celebrate a sacred event, the birth of Jesus, and to recommit oneself to
living life according to the teachings of Jesus.
Over the next thousand years, the observance of Christmas with its two
very different meanings spread as Christianity spread across Europe. In
Scandinavia, Christmas became combined with the pagan feast season known
as Yule. Sometime around the Norman invasion in 1050 the old English word
Christes maesse (festival of Christ) entered the English language.
From the thirteenth century on, nearly all Europe celebrated Christmas.
As
Christianity expanded throughout Europe, clergy had mixed reactions to the
two different ways people celebrated Christmas. Some clergy believed that
humankind needed a season of indulgence and excess. They tolerated the
hunting and eating and drinking, if people carried on under the umbrella
of Christian supervision. Other clergy argued that they must remove all
aspects of paganism from the holiday.
The Anglican Church tried to gain control over Christmas, with little
success in England. The annual indulgence in eating, dancing, singing,
hunting, card playing, gambling and drinking escalated in England. Finally
in the 16th century, people revolted against the excesses of
the holiday.
Most of us have attended social events where things have gotten out of
hand. Most of us have experience with the problems of alcoholism and
gambling. When drinking and gambling become excessive, they destroy
families and friendships. I suspect that this was part of the motivation
of people who gathered into a religious group called Puritans. They were
fed-up with the damage that excessive drinking and gambling were causing.
They sought to “purify” the Church and to cleanse England of its impure
practices.
Under Oliver Cromwell, the Puritan Parliament met on each Christmas Day
from 1644 to 1652. In 1647, it declared Christmas a day of penance, and in
1652 “strongly prohibited” any observance of Christmas. Ministers who
preached on the topic of Christmas risked imprisonment. Church wardens
faced fines for decorating their churches. Puritans required stores to
stay open Christmas day, as if it were any regular business day.
II. Christmas in America During Colonial
Period
During this time of turmoil in England, English settlers arrived in
America. The English who settled in the south were those who enjoyed
drinking in excess as the way to celebrate December 25. For example,
Maryland-bound passengers aboard a boat in 1633 “so immoderately” drank
wine on Christmas that “the next day thirty sickened of fever” and “about
a dozen died.”
Up
in New England the Pilgrims were Puritans. They spent their first
Christmas at Plymouth building a house. Later, the Puritan Governor of the
Massachusetts Bay Colony attempted to suppress the holiday.
A
Puritan minister wrote:
It
can never be proved that Christ was born on December 25. Had it been the
will of Christ that the Anniversary of his Nativity should have been
celebrated, he would at least have let us known the day.
South of New England, Dutch, German and Swedes settled the areas of New
York and Pennsylvania. They celebrated Christmas and New Years by drinking
hard cider, masquerading, card playing and the firing of guns. In
Maryland, Virginia and the Carolinas, the non puritan English settlers
enjoyed dancing, card playing, cockfighting, ninepins, and horse racing.
In
the lives of people in the mid Atlantic colonies and the southern
colonies, Christmas was not a major holy day. Thomas Jefferson rarely
mentioned Christmas. George Washington frequently spent Christmas hunting
and settling year-end financial matters. In the 18th century
Americans celebrated few holidays before independence and even fewer after
our revolutionary war. At the time of the birth of our county national
holidays as we know them today did not exist. The only consistency was
that where and when people celebrated a holiday, drinking, fighting, and
squandering of money was the routine way to behave. All of this changed as
the culture of our new nation developed.
III. Christmas in the New Nation
Anthropologists and sociologists say that special religious and civic
days, interspersed among ordinary days, temporarily release us from the
everydayness of life. Holidays establish a rhythm in a calendar year and
help us describe and give significance to units of time. They help us
renew social, religious, and civic commitments, and in this way they give
us a national cultural identity. So as our new nation matured, we
gradually created holidays such as Thanksgiving, Independence Day, New
Years, and Christmas.
In
the early 19th century loud explosions were popular on
Christmas, as they were on the Fourth of July and New Years. Shooting guns
and exploding gun power was the most common approach, but people created
explosive noise any way they could. One man in Missouri recalled that in
his boyhood his brother took the bladders of freshly butchered hogs and
blew them up tightly. Christmas Day they lay the bladders down on the ice
and struck them with a big paddles making “a noise louder than a popgun.”
The practice of drinking as a way to mark Christmas was also popular.
According to a newspaper, in Philadelphia on Christmas eve 1833 young men
wandered in packs, drinking in taverns and fighting on street corners.
IV. Starting about 1823: A Transition
from Explosions, Drinking and Gambling to Home and Family
Gradually nineteenth-century Americans recast Christmas. Slowly our
foremothers and forefathers molded Christmas into something new. It became
a celebration of the family and the home as a spiritual sanctuary from the
world.
The central scripture of this new American Christmas was a poem attributed
to the Episcopalian, Clement Clarke Moore. “An Account of a Visit from St.
Nicholas” was first published in 1823. Soon it appeared each year at
Christmas in newspapers throughout the nation. The poem about Santa Claus
celebrates home and family instead of gambling, firing guns, and getting
drunk.
A
central focus in the home became the
Christmas Tree. A pagan symbol of fertility and regeneration, the
practice of bringing an evergreen branch or a small tree into the house
and placing it on a table became popular in German speaking areas of
Europe about 1600. The Pennsylvania Dutch brought the custom of Christmas
trees to the United States. One of the earliest documented references is
in 1821. In 1832 Rev. Charles Follen a Unitarian and professor of German
at Harvard College, put up a tree in his home in Cambridge and decorated
it. Because of this, Unitarians like to claim that we were the first to
introduce Christmas trees to America. These first trees were small and sat
on tables. Soon Americans started bringing trees that went from floor to
ceiling into their homes. They decorated the trees with candies, toys and
candles, transforming this ancient fertility symbol into a symbol of the
home as a spiritual sanctuary from the world.
Slowly the popularity of the day grew. Louisiana was the first to declare
Christmas an official holiday, in 1837. By 1860 fourteen states had done
so. The need for a national holiday to celebrate “religion, family
happiness, childlike mirth, and generosity” increased during the Civil
War. By 1865, 31 states and territories officially recognized Christmas,
and in 1870 the Congress in Washington voted Christmas a federal holiday.
V. Christmas in America after the Civil
War
Christmas after the Civil War came of age as the most important American
holiday. The old Christmas of drinking, card playing and shooting guns had
disappeared. A national celebration of home and family replaced it.
A. Music
New traditions developed to reinforce this home and family theme. Starting
after the war, huge choruses sang the Messiah each year in a New York
armory. Carols that originated as pagan round dances, that the Puritans
had denounced, gained in popularity after the Civil War.
-
Edward Sears, a Unitarian minister, wrote “It Came Upon a Midnight
Clear.”
-
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a Unitarian poet, wrote “I Heard the Bells
on Christmas Day.”
-
The
Unitarian John Pierpont wrote “Jingle Bells.”
Caroling became popular. Some 150,000 wandering singers toured Boston’s
streets in 1895. By 1928, 2,000 American cities had community carol
singing.
B. Christmas Lights and Tree Decorations
The first electric lights replaced candles in 1882. In 1895 electric
lights replaced candles on the White House Christmas tree. By 1900 one in
five American homes had a Christmas tree. Besides lights, some homeowners
created elaborate landscapes beneath the trees, including earthen hills
three to five feet tall covered with snow or moss. One house had a
mountain, achieved with an estimated half ton of rocks in its front room.
In Farm houses near Reading, Pennsylvania people decorated trees with
stuffed animals. Squirrels and chipmunks perched on the branches. Grouped
around the base were opossums, racoons, and occasionally a fox. By 1930
Christmas trees were nearly universal.
C. Christmas Cards
A
German immigrant printed and distributed the first American Christmas card
in the early 1850s. By the 1880s, as Americans became more mobile and mail
delivery became more reliable, they sent millions of cards. They were
gifts of small works of art, affordable to nearly everyone.
D. Gifts
The early Christians refrained from
gift-giving at Christmas because it was a popular custom of the
Romans during their pagan harvest celebration. However, German Moravians
and non Puritan English revived the custom. By the 19th century
gift-giving became prevalent in America. Giving gifts to spouses and to
children promoted the American Christmas idea of home and family.
Before the Civil War most gifts were hand made. After the war Christmas
shopping grew dramatically. In 1867, for the first time Macy’s stayed open
until midnight on Christmas eve.
E. Charity at Christmas
The social changes of war, the industrial revolution, and the growth of
cities, caused people to increase gift-giving to reinforce relationships
at a personal level. These same social changes also inspired charitable
giving for people to (at least symbolically) make a connection to the most
impoverished in America. More than any other single work, Charles Dickens’
A Christmas Carol established a moral obligation that Americans
adopted toward Christmas charity. Written in 1842, A Christmas Carol
was first widely read in the United States after the Civil War. Like the
poem “An Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas,” A Christmas Carol
also became a central scripture of the American Christmas. The poem
explored the lighter side of Christmas. Dickens’ story explored the darker
side of 19th century life.
VI. In the 20th Century:
The Conflict Between Spiritual Renewal and Physical Pleasures Continued
In
the 20th century these customs of caroling, decorations with lights,
sending cards, giving gifts and practicing charity at Christmas endured
and grew stronger. In particular shopping for gifts grew more popular. In
1939 the owner of a department store persuaded Franklin Roosevelt to set
the date for Thanksgiving as the fourth Thursday of the month instead of
the last Thursday of the month. This insured a four-week shopping season
each year at Christmas. Today half the income for the entire year for many
stores comes in these four weeks.
The issues raised by shopping are rooted in the decision sixteen hundred
years ago by the Roman Christians to have Jesus’ birthday fall at the same
time as a celebration in Rome at the end of the harvest season. Because of
that decision, for centuries Christians have worried about the pagan
customs dishonoring Christmas. The most extreme reaction was that of the
Puritans, who felt that the heavy drinking and gambling had gotten so much
out of hand in England, that Christmas itself should be banned.
In
the 20th, and now in the 21st, century people are
still concerned about drinking and gambling, but the greatest concern for
clergy at Christmas is the commercialization of the holiday. During much
of the 20th century, each year at Christmas clergy would preach
sermons about how we should “put the Christ back in Christmas.”
For example, in 1992, clergy, both Protestant and Catholic, issued a
proclamation condemning the commercialization of Christmas. They wrote:
We
have seen the spirit of Christmas reduced to a carnival of mass marketing.
Consumption has taken on an almost religious quality; malls have become
the new shrines of worship. Massive and alluring advertising crusades have
waged war on the essential meaning of the spiritual life, fostering the
belief that the marketplace can fulfill our highest aspirations.
Today this is the role of clergy when it comes to Christmas. Just as
ministers in the past centuries warned about drinking and gambling, I warn
about the dangers of materialism. I do not want to go as far as the
Puritans and outlaw Christmas. Nevertheless, I do want to remind each of
us to do what we already know we should do this time of year. Again this
December let us all try:
-
To
resist the consumer gospel at Christmas that equates buying and spending
with fulfillment and happiness.
-
To
keep our gifts simple, heartfelt, and meaningful.
-
To
make the season a special time of contemplation, and self examination.
-
To
remember the poor in substantial ways and work for economic justice.
Do
these things, and the joy of the carols, the beauty of the trees, the
friendly messages of the cards, and charity of giving, will renew our
spirits and fill our hearts with hope and love.
Sources:
Nissenbaum, Stephen, The Battle for Christmas, Vintage Books, New
York, 1996.
Restad, Penne, Christmas in America, A History, Oxford University
Press, New York, 1995.
Schmidt, Leigh Eric, Consumer Rites, The Buying and Selling of American
Holidays, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1995.
