The Battle for Christmas (28 page)

Ellen is bewildered. She has “lost the power of judging amidst so many tempting objects….” Finally, rejecting “all that were decidedly too large, or too small, or of too fine a print,” she chooses among three Bibles “of moderate size and sufficiently large type, but different binding.” Her mother approves of all three; Ellen finally picks “the red one.”
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This was the best-selling novel of its day. Susan Warner’s point is clear, and her scores of thousands of avid readers must have responded to it: There was simply
too much stuff
. The very choices buyers faced made them feel helpless. Middle-class America was consumer heaven, but consumer heaven was also consumer hell. The Bible itself—the Book of Books, the one book that offered a certain guide through the labyrinth of human existence—had become a part of the labyrinth, another overwhelming commodity.

The commercial and domestic Christmas did not enter American culture in some abstract fashion, through some impersonal force called
consumer capitalism
. It was actively pressed, as we have seen, by actual producers and sellers and their cultural allies. And on the other side it was actively embraced, person by person and community by community. To show something of that embrace, I have chosen to focus in detail on a single American family. What makes this family—the Sedgwicks of western Massachusetts and New York City—such a rewarding case study is the richness of the private papers they left behind. The Sedgwicks were more numerous, and their papers cover a longer period of time, than any of the scores of other families whose Christmas practices I have traced. The extant
Sedgwick family correspondence, housed in several hundred manuscript boxes at the Massachusetts Historical Society, is filled with detailed and interlinked descriptions of domestic events, including holiday rituals. The family letters give us a good picture of the way a prosperous New England family made the transition to a child-centered Christmas focused on the exchange of commercially produced presents. Some of the letters were actually written by children. And there is a final touch, though it will receive its due attention only in the next chapter: One member of this family, the writer Catharine Maria Sedgwick, herself played a small role in the larger history of this holiday—for it was she who wrote the first fictional account of an American Christmas tree, in a story published in 1835.

T
HE
S
EDGWICK CLAN
was the leading family in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, a small town located in the Berkshire Hills in the rural western part of the state. The family patriarch, Theodore Sedgwick (1746–1813), moved to the area from Connecticut before the Revolutionary War, and afterward he became an imposing political presence, serving first in the Massachusetts legislature and later in the U.S. Congress, where he advanced from the House of Representatives to the Senate. In 1799 Theodore Sedgwick moved back to the lower house, to be elected its Speaker. In 1802 he was appointed to the Massachusetts Supreme Court. Always a staunch political conservative, Sedgwick was a leading opponent of Shays’s Rebellion, the populist uprising that swept through Massachusetts in 1786–87, and he became an active member of the Federalist Party under the new constitution of 1787.

Theodore Sedgwick had ten children, born between 1775 and 1791, and seven of the ten lived to reach adulthood. His four surviving sons entered adulthood between 1800 and the early 1820s. Three of these sons became lawyers; two of them moved to New York City to pursue their practice. None of the children achieved anything like their father’s power, although Theodore, Jr., did get himself elected to the Massachusetts state legislature (he also became a Democrat and an antislavery reformer during the 1830s). The most prominent and influential of Theodore Sedgwick’s children, though, was not any of his sons but his youngest daughter, Catharine Maria Sedgwick (1789–1867). Catharine Sedgwick became a professional novelist and short-story writer—indeed, one of the most popular American authors during the 1820s and ’30s.
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Along with all her siblings, she rejected Calvinist orthodoxy and became a committed Unitarian.

The Sedgwicks were hardly a typical American family. But as patrician as they may have been, they were not terribly wealthy (not in the same league as a man like Clement Clarke Moore, for example). In financial terms, the children of Theodore Sedgwick could best be described as belonging to the prosperous upper-middle classes. Furthermore, their fundamental conservatism (and their rural base) acted as something of a brake on the family’s temptation to enmesh themselves in a consumerist Christmas.

The correspondence of the original family patriarch, Theodore Sedgwick, covers almost exactly the same period as Martha Ballards diary (see Chapter 1). Except for a single letter from 1776, the holiday-season letters begin in the mid-178os, and Theodore himself died only months after Martha Ballard did. Despite the differences in the social status of the Sedgwicks and the Ballards, the pattern of holiday rituals observed by the two families turns out to be somewhat similar. Christmas and New Year’s are mentioned casually in the correspondence, in the form of seasonal salutations, especially in letters Theodore Sedgwick received from his friends. Theodore’s wife, Pamela Dwight Sedgwick, noted the holidays more frequently than did Theodore himself, wishing her husband a “joyful Christmas” in 1792 and opening a letter to him two years later by noting that “It is a most beautiful Christmas morning.”
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Domestic presents do not enter the picture.

Theodore Sedgwick preferred to observe the season with alcohol. On January 2, 1784, his old friend and political crony Henry Van Schaack wrote him a characteristically jocular letter centering on a cask of wine. Van Schaack called Sedgwick a “drinking devil” and promised that when the two men met “We will eat & drink & be merry.”
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In fact, during the Christmas season Sedgwick and all his old friends characteristically wrote to one another in this fashion, under the guise of “good old boys.” The convention endured well into Sedgwicks middle years, even though by then he was a member of the U.S. Congress and claimed to have forsworn such behavior. On January 9, 1795, he thanked another friend for his “New Years wishes” and inquired, “Where did you eat your beef stake? I suppose you gluttonized at the Tavern, and drank a little, and swore a little and gambled a little. But with all these wicked things I should have been glad to have participated not in them but in your mirth and good humour.” And on December 23, 1799, Henry Van Schaack wrote to Sedgwick: “We dined at Judge Silvesters this day and demolished 3 bowls of the wine you sent.”
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As much as anything else, Sedgwick and his friends used such festivities
as a male ritual, implicitly based on the exclusion of women. When Sedgwick served in Congress during the 1790s, he wrote frequently and disdainfully of the “ladies’ parties” that he was invariably pressed to attend during Christmas week in Philadelphia.
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But along with women, it was children who were excluded from Theodore Sedgwick’s holiday festivities. In all the scores of surviving letters written during this season over the years between Theodore and his wife and their seven children, there is no indication until the very end that the Sedgwicks observed the season with any special domestic celebration at their house in Stockbridge. It was Pamela Sedgwick who would write to her husband—enviously, it seems—“This is a season of great festivity to
you.”
But for her own part she had nothing to report.

Before 1804, Theodore never once so much as mentioned the holidays in his letters to his children. In that year, he finally wished them all “many happy new years.” Apparently such greetings were more appropriate for Sedgwick’s old friends than for his own children. (By this time Sedgwick’s youngest child was 13 years old, and the others ranged in age from 16 to 28.) In any case, each year from 1804 until his death eight years later, Sedgwick invariably used the approaching New Year to lecture them about the need for critical self-reflection. On December 24, 1804, he wrote his sons a long moralizing letter warning them of the dangers of dissolute behavior, especially gambling at cards, an activity that had long been associated with the Christmas season. But nowhere in all this correspondence is there any hint of domestic celebration. Nor do such hints appear in the surviving letters written in these years by second-generation Sedgwicks themselves, whether to their father or to one another.

It was not for lack of interest. Theodore Sedgwick’s children (along with their mother) keenly felt the absence of holiday festivity, at least when they were in their teens. But what they yearned for, it seems, was parties and dances, not domestic rituals—for precisely the kind of activities that Theodore Sedgwick experienced (and scorned) as a congressman in Philadelphia. As early as 1798, Pamela Sedgwick wrote about the loneliness of being in Stockbridge during the holiday season:

The holidays did not go wholly unacknowledged in Stockbridge. On New Years Day, 1805, Catharine M. Sedgwick (then 16 years old) used the bulk of her morning “to discharge my domestic duties, and greet my neighbors with the salutations of the New Year.” And that afternoon her privacy “was interrupted by the most unwelcome and vexatious visitors.” Although we have no way of knowing why these particular guests seemed so “vexatious,” the Sedgwicks were the squires of Stockbridge, and it should come as no surprise that Catharine accepted such holiday visits from the townsfolk as part of her “domestic duties.”
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December 1805 found Theodore Sedgwick’s 20-year-old son Henry in Albany, New York. He reported to his father the public rituals of the season there, rituals that openly embraced the kind of interclass begging rituals that may not have characterized Christmas in rural New England:

But Theodore Sedgwick responded to his son’s letter merely by noting that “another year has passed,” and the occasion was a fit one to “retrospect.”
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Only in the final year of the patriarch’s life does any sign of change appear. On January 1, 1812, Theodore Sedgwick’s married daughter Eliza S. Pomeroy wrote to her brother Henry D. Sedgwick that “Pappa … gives a New Year feast” for some guests, and that she and her seven children would participate. And she added, “The little ones are as happy and playful as lambs.”
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By decade’s end, the tide had begun to turn. Theodore Sedgwick’s children were beginning to wish one another a merry Christmas and a happy New Year, and to report Christmas dinners and New Year’s parties.
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In the mid-181os two of the Sedgwick sons, Henry and Robert, had moved to New York City, where they set up a joint law practice. Their sister Catharine, now an aspiring writer, lived with them. But it was not on account of their departure from New England that things were beginning to change. Henry Dwight Sedgwick was married by this time, into a distinguished Boston family (his wife, Jane Minot Sedgwick, was the daughter
of a prominent Boston judge). During their courtship, in 1816, he wished her a “merry, merry Christmas,” confident that this would cause his New England fiancée no offense. Indeed, Jane Minot’s Congregationalist family had been celebrating Christmas in Boston for years. In December 1817, the first year of her marriage, Janes brother wrote to her that “[o]ur Christmas was a merry one,” adding that he had dined “with some young people.” And three years later Jane Sedgwick herself wrote to her sister Louisa Minot of her nostalgia for the “mince pies and plum puddings” they had all formerly dined on “at this merry season.”
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In the same letter she conveyed a New Years greeting to her sister-in-law—and included Louisa’s children in the greeting: “A happy New Year to you dear Louisa, & William, & to all yr good little children.” This was the first time a member of the Sedgwick family had incorporated young people into their holiday wishes.
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S
TILL
, no presents were involved in any of these interchanges. The first evidence that any of the Sedgwicks received (or offered) a holiday present was in January 1823, when Catharine M. Sedgwick received in the mail a gift from one of her friends (sent as a “little token of my affections”). The first present involving family members came a year later, and in the third generation of the family, when the two children of Theodore Sedgwick, Jr. (the eldest Sedgwick son, and the inheritor of the family manse in Stockbridge), wrote their father a charming note—entirely in French—apologizing for not having bought a present for
him.
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