The Battle for Christmas (20 page)

In Philadelphia as in New York, then, the period from the 1820s to the 1840s was one in which the carnival form of Christmas was essentially “read out” as a legitimate part of the holiday, and in which the “real Christmas”—indeed, everything that really mattered most in life itself—came to be seen in domestic terms that centered around family and children. That process actually involved two elements. Thus far we have dealt with the first of these, which might be summarized as
keeping the poor away from the house
. But it now became necessary not only to keep the poor
outside
the house but to keep one’s own children
inside
.

Much of the rowdy behavior indulged during the Christmas season had been ascribed, simultaneously and indistinguishably, to youths and workers. Evidence of this abounds from the colonial period well into the nineteenth century. A 1719 Boston almanac warned householders in late December: “Do not let your Children and Servants run too much abroad at Nights.” A 1772 New York newspaper referred to “[t]he assembling of Negroes, servants, boys and other disorderly persons, in noisy companies in the streets.” An 1805 letter written from Albany, New York, reported that on account of “the holydays, a considerable number of pennies has
been given to the boys & servants….” In 1818 a Boston woman noted that “Christmas is now generally observed as a holiday. Our children and domestics claim it as such.” (And she went on to complain that the children as well as the domestics often spent the day “in idleness and dissipation.”)

It was this same social mix that John Pintard himself fondly recalled from his own childhood days in the latter 1700s, when he and a family servant traveled together around New York in “boisterous” fashion, drinking a “dram” at every stop and “coming home loaded with sixpences.” And as late as 1854, when the New York situation had turned ugly, a local newspaper complained that “at almost every corner gangs of
boys and drunken rowdies
were seen amusing themselves by throwing snowballs, using vulgar and blasphemous language, and otherwise desecrating the Sabbath [emphasis added].”
⁴¹

Children and servants; boys and drunken rowdies. Why this improbable linkage? To answer that question is to probe a much broader historical issue—the changing historical relationship between age and social class. I have been arguing that what happened during the nineteenth century was that age replaced class as the axis along which the Christmas gift exchange took place. But it would be useful now to modify that point. Until the nineteenth century, children did not make up a distinct social category; they were not a separate social group, as they are in modern Western societies. Nor did they act as if they were. Instead, children were lumped together with other members of the lower orders in general, especially servants and apprentices—who, not coincidentally, were generally young people themselves.
⁴²

From this perspective it becomes clear that giving Christmas gifts to children was not new, after all. Young people did receive gifts at Christmas—but in their role as servants or apprentices (or newspaper carriers) and not because they were children. Both children and servants were at the bottom of the hierarchy in the households in which they lived, linked to the larger household as much by bonds of labor and subordination as by those of affection. (For example, the term “maid” was used to refer not to a cleaning lady but to an unmarried girl or a young woman [i.e., a “maiden”]. But the household tasks generally assigned to such females were ordinarily menial ones—the kind of work that was later associated with the term “maid” in its more recent usage.) Conversely, servants and apprentices were treated as members of the household in which they worked and lived. Before the nineteenth century, in other words,
class
and
age
were thoroughly intermingled.

What happened in the early nineteenth century was that age ceased
to be associated with social status. Youth no longer connoted “meniality.” It no longer made sense to refer to girls as “maids,” or, conversely, to speak of those of lowly status as “boys”—except in a vestigial fashion, as in the term “bellboy” or “cowboy”—or, notably, whenever the color line was involved. (But just as black men commonly continued to be addressed as “boys” in order to connote their lower status, so, too, women of any race continued to be addressed as “girls” to connote
theirs
. And, of course, the term “maid” has come to refer
only
to household service.)

Only from the perspective of our own culture, in which age and class bear no significant relationship to each other, does it appear as if Christmas rituals of class were replaced by those of age. It would be more accurate to say that in the early nineteenth century,
age alone
was coming to replace a more general kind of status as the primary axis along which presents were given. The domestication of Christmas was thus related (as both effect and cause) to the creation of domesticity and of “childhood” itself, even to the novel idea that the central purpose of the family was to provide not simply for the instruction of its children but for their happiness as well.

We can glimpse something of this process by tracing changes in the very
terminology
of the Christmas gift exchange. As we have seen, Christmas presents had their origin in wassailing and other forms of Christmas begging, in which the poor demanded gifts from the neighboring gentry—generally gifts of food and drink, to be consumed on the spot. An urban version of the same ritual, known as the “Christmas box,” was developed in seventeenth-century London (and probably in other cities) by young tradesmen’s apprentices and other low-level workers, who kept earthenware boxes—the ancestor, really, of the piggy bank—into which, during the Christmas season, they asked those who employed their services to put money. (The purpose of this box was to ensure that none of the money could be appropriated by a single individual, and that it would be distributed collectively within the shop when the box was broken open.) Men of means regarded their contributions to Christmas boxes as a necessary expense. Samuel Pepys referred to them in 1668: “Called up [i.e., waked up] by drums and trumpets; these things and boxes having cost me much money this Christmas already….” And Jonathan Swift wrote sardonically in 1710: “I shall be undone here with Christmas boxes. The rogues at the coffee house have raised their tax….”
⁴³

During the course of the eighteenth century, the term “Christmas box” came to be applied not to the box itself but to the donation that was placed into it—and, soon, to any such gift. By century’s end, the term was being used colloquially to refer to Christmas presents per se, even when those presents were commercial products given by parents to their children. Thus a children’s book published in New England in 1786 was titled
Nurse Trueloves Christmas Box
. And in Virginia, in 1810, Mason Weems announced that he would sell his biography of George Washington at a deep discount to buyers “who take several copies … for Christmas Boxes to their young relations.”
⁴⁴

Unlike the term “Christmas box,” the word
present
did not signify something that was given as a tip or an obligation but rather something that was given freely. But this term, too, was often used to name a gift offered by patrons to their dependents. It is striking that before 1780 the only two books published in America bearing the word
present
in the title were guidebooks for servants:
A Present for an Apprentice
and
A Present for a Servant-Maid
. These works, which were reprinted frequently until about 1800, consisted of a series of short admonitory essays warning apprentices of the dangerous temptations they were apt to encounter in their position.
⁴⁵
These were “presents” given down across class lines—but apprentices and maidservants also happened to be young people themselves, so these presents were also given across lines of age. (We have no way of knowing whether any of them were ever actually given during the Christmas season.)

The three decades following 1780 saw the appearance of a spate of books with the word
present
in the title. But now there was a change: All of these books were specifically intended for young people.
A Present to Children
(1783);
Present for Misses
(1794);
A Present for a Little Boy
(1802) and its mate
A Present for a Little Girl
(1804).
⁴⁶
At first these books, too, contained rules for behavior (children, like servants and apprentices, were household dependents whose behavior could not be wholly trusted and thus required careful regulation). The first five editions of
A Present to Children
, for example (all published before 1800), contained nothing but catechisms and “moral songs.” One actually warned against playing with toys.
⁴⁷

But the subtitle of the sixth edition of this same work, printed in the year 1800, promised to introduce a new genre—“entertaining stories.” The change had begun—the change from books designed for training young people to books designed for
amusing
them. Just as age alone was coming to replace status in general as the primary axis along which presents were
given, pleasure was coming to replace discipline as the primary purpose of those presents.

It seems that Christmas “presents” slowly replaced Christmas “boxes” as gifts given within the household at a time when the household itself was coming to exclude servants from real membership. It was the isolation of children from other dependents at Christmas that produced—that
was
—the domestication of the holiday.

But in the early nineteenth century Christmas had not yet become a child-centered domestic ritual. Nor did children instinctively know that they were being created as “children.” Indeed, there were no Christmas activities for children other than making noise or making trouble. “Christmas is now generally observed as a holiday,” a Boston woman said in 1818, noting that “[o]ur children and domestics claim it as such.” And she went on to complain that it was generally spent in “idleness” or else “in revelry and dissipation.” (The same woman also proposed that the local churches hold Christmas services—not for religious reasons but so that “families, children, and domestics, can attend public worship” instead of making trouble.
⁴⁸
)

It is interesting to learn that Christmas was “generally observed as a holiday” by Boston’s schoolchildren in the mid-181os. But what is also interesting is the casual observation that children were taking the day through their own initiative rather than by virtue of an official policy (“our children … claim it as such”), and there is the implication, too, that their actions were informally sanctioned by those in authority. There is a story behind this, one that reveals something about the nature of youth culture in the era before the invention of childhood.

School was one place, perhaps the only place before the nineteenth century, where young people (particularly boys) were physically separated from their peers in the lower orders. But at Christmas schoolboys devised their own version of carnival misrule, a ritual practice that “turned the world upside down” every bit as much as aggressive peasant wassailing had done. Here the figure of authority was the schoolmaster, and it was on him that the tables were turned.

This ritual, which became known as “Barring Out the Schoolmaster,” originated in England toward the end of the sixteenth century. A modern historian describes it this way: “As Christmas drew near the boys gathered together weapons, ammunition and a store of provisions. Then one morning they seized the school premises and barred the doors and windows against the master.” The most important goal of the “barring out” was to force the schoolmaster to grant his pupils a holiday vacation.
⁴⁹
(In addition to the threat posed to their authority, schoolmasters had a reason to attempt to reclaim the schoolhouse: They were generally paid by the day, and would lose their stipend if they were not able to teach.)

Barring-out came to America early, and rather violently. The year was 1702, and the place was a grammar school in Williamsburg, Virginia. On that occasion students not only barricaded the schoolhouse but actually fired pistols at the schoolmaster when he responded by trying to break down one of the doors. He reported what took place:

The practice of barring-out continued through the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth, and extended into other regions of the United States. A letter to a Philadelphia newspaper written in 1810 objected to the practice but acknowledged that it was commonplace there: