The Battle for Christmas (35 page)

It is commonplace to believe that Christmas trees were transmitted to America by early German immigrants in Pennsylvania. And in all probability, American Christmas trees did, indeed, first appear in the Pennsylvania German community in the early nineteenth century. But it is unlikely that they made their appearance much before 1820. Folklorists have done their best to seek out the first tree in Pennsylvania, and it seems plain that credible evidence of actual Christmas trees dates no earlier than the 181os. In 1819 (possibly as early as 1812), an immigrant artist from Germany drew a picture of a tree he saw during a tour of the Pennsylvania countryside, and that picture has been preserved in his sketchbooks. The first extant
verbal
reference to Christmas trees dates from the very next year, 1821 (it is an entry in the diary of a Lancaster resident, who reported that his children had gone to a nearby sawmill “for Christmas trees”).
³¹
After that, references begin to multiply.

What this sequence suggests is that Christmas trees were first set up by Pennsylvania Germans sometime during the 1810s (the very decade during which St. Nicholas was introduced in New York). If that chronology holds, it is natural to wonder why Christmas trees were introduced in Pennsylvania at such a late date. Why didn’t they appear a century or so earlier, when the first Germans emigrated to Pennsylvania? The answer to this question is intriguing. It turns out that the Christmas tree was a relatively new tradition in Germany itself, one that was still emerging there in the early nineteenth century. In fact, the story of the German Christmas tree has parallels to that of the Dutch Santa Claus. What happened in both cases was that a small group of people suddenly began to make much of what had previously been a distinctly minor tradition.

An Early American Christmas Tree
. This sketch was drawn from life (in either 1812 or 1819) by John Lewis Krimmel, a German painter who had emigrated to Philadelphia, and who drew the sketch while touring the Pennsylvania countryside. (Although Krimmel’s sketch is the first picture of an American Christmas tree, it was not printed until a few years ago.) The eleven people who appear here are apparently members of a single family. Judging from the dress and furnishings, this was a relatively prosperous household—a point of some significance in tracing the way Christmas trees were diffused through the Pennsylvania German community.
(Courtesy, The Winterthur Library: Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera, No. Col. 308)

A careful reading of the German sources suggests both a chronology and a pattern to this process. Before the last third of the eighteenth century, Christmas trees had been a localized custom, largely limited to a single place—the Alsatian capital of Strasbourg—where they seem to have developed by the beginning of the seventeenth century. The Strasbourg Christmas tree was apparently used as part of a
judgmental
Christmas ritual—much
like the similar St. Nicholas ritual in Holland—in which good children were rewarded with bonbons provided by the “Christkindle” (i.e., the Christchild), while “disobedient” youngsters were punished by a figure known as “Hanstrapp,” the local version of the Belsnickle.
³²

The ritual began to spread to other parts of Germany—minus Hanstrapp—only after 1750. A key date in this development may have been 1771, when Strasbourg became the site of an extended visit by the young writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who discovered in this city a new sense of “German” identity that transformed his larger cultural vision. Goethe came to associate the Christmas tree itself with that new awareness. In fact, a Christmas tree scene is included at a dramatic moment of the 1774 novel that established his literary reputation,
The Sufferings of Young Werther
(the scene takes place shortly before the hero’s suicide).

It was largely through Goethe and his literary colleagues that the Christmas tree spread to other parts of Germany. It did so as a fashionable new ritual that was perceived—even there—as an ancient and authentic folk tradition. Christmas trees were adopted by the elite in Berlin, for example, only in the 1810s. In 1820 a young American visitor, the future historian George Bancroft, saw a tree there in the home of his local host, the distinguished jurist Baron Friedrich Karl von Savigny—a man who had married the sister of Goethe’s mistress Bettina Brentano. (Bancroft reported this episode in vivid detail in a letter to his father, who was a Unitarian minister in Worcester, Massachusetts.)
³³

It was not until the 1830s that Christmas trees became a truly national practice in Germany. They were introduced to Munich, for example, only in 1830, by the queen of Bavaria. It seems fair, under the circumstances, to consider Christmas trees as something of an “invented tradition,” much like Santa Claus in New York—a ritual picked up by the elite and spread via literary channels through a middle class that was interested in discovering its “authentic” national culture.

By the early nineteenth century, Christmas trees were being described as a timeless tradition. In 1820—the same year that produced the earliest evidence of an actual Christmas tree in Pennsylvania—a story of modern European authorship, but set in medieval Germany, noted that on Christmas Eve “every family assembles all its members together and fathers and mothers are surrounded by their children; they light up a number of wax lights, which they suspend to the branches of a small fir-tree, which are also hung round with the presents they mean to make them.” (The same story also informs us—remember, this is the fourteenth century—that “the shops in the streets” are filled with “toys of every kind.”)
³⁴

As it happens, that story was reprinted in the United States the same year it was published in Europe. Its American venue was
The Athenaeum
, a cosmopolitan literary magazine published in Boston by Unitarians and devoted to reprinting the latest European literary work. The story itself was trivial (even though it, rather than Catharine Sedgwicks 1835 story, may represent the first reference to Christmas trees that was published in the United States). Still, two things about it have a bearing on
our
story. What matters first is the story’s plot. It deals with the redemption of a sinful mother by her selfless young child—a child who, like Jesus himself, was born on Christmas Eve (the story is titled “Christmas Eve; or, The Conversion”). The other point that matters is the place where the story was printed—in an organ of New England Unitarian culture.

The two points are interrelated. By now it should be clear that the Christmas tree was spread throughout the United States in large measure by committed Unitarians. It is time to ask what their agenda was. Why did members of this group care so much about Christmas trees? Answering this question takes us along two important literary paths. The first starts with a famous British writer; the second, with a controversial Swiss educational reformer. Both paths run chiefly through the channels of Unitarian culture. And both constantly refer to the theme of selfless children.

The British writer was Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), the Romantic poet and essayist. Coleridge happened to spend the 1798 Christmas season in the German town of Ratzeburg, located near Hamburg in the northern part of Germany. He had gone to Germany three months earlier, shortly after making a professional decision that changed the shape of his career—he had just decided against pursuing a career as a minister in the Unitarian Church. (In addition, Coleridge had recently completed what would prove to be his two greatest poems, “Kubla Khan” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”) The 26-year-old poet spent much of the season socializing with the local elite and fending off invitations to attend their frequent holiday dances.
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But in the midst of these revels he witnessed a domestic Christmas tree, accompanied by a ritual that “pleased
and interested” him so much that he published an account of it eleven years later, in a magazine he was then editing in England (the piece was published in time for the 1809 Christmas season).

The tree that Coleridge saw was, as we might expect, the top of an evergreen fastened onto a table in one of the parlors in the house to which he had been invited, and there were lighted candles attached to its branches. But that wasn’t what most “pleased and interested” Coleridge. What really impressed him was a more important twist—for in the ceremony he witnessed, it was the
children
who gave presents to their
parents
, and not the other way around. Coleridge detailed the procedure:

Those, then, were the presents that were placed under the Christmas tree, to be opened on Christmas Eve “with kisses and embraces,” in a ceremony that Coleridge found deeply moving:

Coleridge did not realize it, but this ritual seems to have been a strictly local one, conceivably even limited to the single household in which he observed it. He afforded only brief mention to the more standard ritual that took place the following day—the familiar ritual in which the parents gave presents to their children.
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Coleridge’s account left something of a wake in the United States, a wake that I have come to term “the Ratzeburg file.” Coleridge originally published his Christmas recollections in 1809, in a short-lived magazine he edited called
The Friend
. The bound magazine was republished in London three times during the 1810s, and an American edition appeared in 1829 (in Burlington, Vermont). Catharine Sedgwick, for one, read the book no later than January 1836 and perhaps earlier.
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Actually, Coleridge’s account of the Ratzeburg Christmas tree had been printed as a separate item in the United States back in 1824, in the official journal of the Unitarian Church in America, the
Christian Register
, published in Boston.
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Six years later parts of the account reappeared,
without attribution, in a children’s book written by another Unitarian, Lydia Maria Child. Child, a novelist and an abolitionist, was best known at the time as the author of a cookbook,
The New England Frugal Housewife
. For the 1830 Christmas season she published a juvenile Gift Book,
The Little Girls Own Book
. This volume contained a collection of games, puzzles, and riddles. It is the last item in the book, titled “A Custom Worthy [of] Imitation,” that is of interest to us here. For it was nothing other than a paraphrase of Coleridge’s report—except that Child did not refer to the Christmas tree itself but only to what we might think of as the central element in the ritual, the generational reversal in the gift exchange. (Child did not refer to Coleridge, either, or to Ratzeburg itself; instead, she implied that the ritual characterized Germany as a whole.)

Another version of the same account appeared the very next year, 1832, in Keene, New Hampshire, in a children’s primer authored by one J. K. Smith,
Juvenile Lessons; or The Child’s First Reading Book
. One of the reading lessons in this book was titled “Christmas Presents.” This lesson began: “The children in the North part of Germany, have a custom which pleases me much. It is usual with them to make little presents to their parents at Christmas time.” The lesson went on to tell its young readers: “For some time before this happy day, the girls are as busy as so many bees, and the boys are careful to save every cent of their pocket money.” It then added confidentially: “They are very careful to keep all their plans secret; for they do not wish to have their parents know the pleasant surprise they are preparing for them, till the time arrives.”