The Battle for Christmas (5 page)

What happened during these three years was deeply humiliating to the Puritans. The hated governor of the Dominion, Sir Edmund Andros,
ruled most of New England (along with New York). From his headquarters in Boston, Governor Andros attempted to impose English law and custom in the very seat of Puritan power. On Christmas Day, 1686, for example, two religious services were performed at the Boston Townhouse, and Andros attended both of them, with “a Red-Coat [soldier] going on his right hand and Capt. George on the left.”

But Governor Andros did not simply impose Anglican practices on a populace that was universally resistant to them. One effect of his rule was to permit the public expression of a set of seasonal practices that were associated with the popular culture of seventeenth-century England. Those expressions of the popular culture could not have surfaced openly without the legal protection offered by the Andros regime. Under its protective mantle, during this brief period, it was possible for the first time in Massachusetts to act out heterodox rituals in public. A few Bostonians celebrated Shrove Tuesday (Mardi Gras) by dancing in the streets, and a maypole was erected in Charlestown.

Christmas-keeping apparently began even in advance of the Andros regime. On December 25, 1685, the magistrate Samuel Sewall noted that “Some somehow observe the day,” but he added, as if to reassure himself, that “the Body of the People profane it, and blessed be God no Authority yet to compel them to keep it.” (Sewall also offered himself the reassurance that there was “less Christmas-keeping [this year] than last year, fewer Shops Shut up,” but that reassurance implicitly ceded the point that in 1684 an even greater number of persons had “observed” Christmas.) A year later, on December 25, 1686, Sewall once again noted, “Shops open today generally and persons about their occasions.” (Again, the key word here may have been “generally,” because Sewall went on to acknowledge, “Some, but few, Carts [were] at Town with wood….”
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Christmas-keeping even entered into print culture during the Andros regime. The most dramatic example was an almanac, written by a resident of Saybrook, Connecticut, named John Tully and published in Boston during each of the three years of Dominion government, 1687–89. We have already seen that the Puritans purged New England’s almanacs of all reference to Christmas and the various saints’ days of the English church calendar. But Tully boldly labeled December 25 in capital letters, as “CHRISTMAS-DAY,” and he also added every one of the red-letter days recognized by the Church of England. December 21 thereby became “S. THOMAS,” December 26 was “S. STEVEN,” and December 27 was “INNOCENTS.” (In all likelihood, Tully used capital letters simply because his Boston printer did not have any red ink.) The following year,
Tully’s almanac was published with the official imprimatur of Andros’s deputy, Edwin Randolph, on the title page.
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That same year, Tully made an even more dramatic gesture to signify his incorporation of English popular culture. At the end of his 1688 almanac Tully added a series of monthly “prognostications,” all of them satirical and most of them bawdy or scatological. For example, he concluded his prognostication for the month of March by announcing that if it failed to come true, the reader should “light tobacco, or make bum-fodder with our Observations” (in other words, use the pages of his almanac to wipe their asses). For February, Tully wrote:

Tully’s prognostication for December was a verse that opened by referring to the feasting that would take place during the Christmas season:

And it went on to associate this feasting with the social inversion of rich and poor.

In prose, Tully added: “This month, Money & Rum will be in great request; and he that hath the first shall not need fear wanting the latter.”
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T
HE OVERTHROW
of the Dominion of New England in 1689 put a stop to this flurry of popular culture, and it ushered in two decades in which there is little in the public record about Christmas. That changed in 1711, when the Reverend Cotton Mather of Boston recorded some disturbing news in his diary for December 30: “I hear of a number of young people of both sexes, belonging, many of them, to my flock, who have had on the Christmas-night, this last week, a Frolick, a revelling feast, and Ball [i.e., dance]….” The very next year Mather denounced the holiday in a sermon, published immediately after its delivery under the title
Grace Defended
. The biblical text on which he based his sermon, drawn from the Epistle of Jude, showed what was on Mather’s mind: The text he chose was an attack on certain early Christians who had deceitfully “crept into” the early Christian church, using religion as a cover for sexual license, “giving themselves over to fornication”—“ungodly men, turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness.” (Mather substituted the word “wantonness.”)
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Christmas in a New England Almanac
. The December page from John Tully’s notorious 1688 Boston almanac. Along with weather predictions, Tully brazenly (and in capital letters) named Christmas and the Anglican saints’ days.
(Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society)

Mather returned to the same topic in 1713, in a treatise titled
Advice from the Watch-Tower
. This new treatise cut a broader swath than
Grace Defended
. It dealt with a whole battery of practices that were threatening to subvert New England culture from within. The treatise ended by presenting “a Black List of some Evil Customes which begin to appear among us.” Along with Christmas—and gambling with cards and dice—
Mather’s “black list” included partying on Sunday evenings (and even during the intermission between the two Sabbath-day sermons); running horse races on such solemn occasions as funerals, training days, and public lectures; turning weddings into drunken “revels;” and holding cornhuskings that were little more than excuses for “riot.”
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There was a pattern here: All these practices involved young people who were appropriating serious social occasions as opportunities for bouts of drinking and sex. (In his section on cornhuskings, Mather warned young people: “Let the Night of your Pleasure be turned into Fear.”) It was in just such a context—positioned between the drinking of toasts and riots at cornhuskings—that Mather placed the subject of Christmas. “Christmas-Revels begin to be taken up,” he reported, “among some vainer Young People here and there in some of our Towns.”
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It was bad enough, Mather argued, that Christmas was not divinely ordained, but what was “offensive” about it “most of all” was that it was being abused just as the weddings and the cornhuskings were abused—an occasion on which, as Mather put it, “Abominable Things” were done. Clearly, those abominations had mostly to do with sex.

Mather’s charges are confirmed by demographic data. Social historians have discovered that the rate of premarital pregnancies in New England began to climb early in the eighteenth century, and that by mid-century it had skyrocketed. (In some New England towns almost half the first children were born less than seven months after their parents’ marriage.) What makes the demographic data especially interesting is that this sexual activity had a seasonal pattern to it: There was a “bulge” in the number of births in the months of September and October—meaning that sexual activity peaked during the Christmas season.
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Mather’s charges are also buttressed by—once again—the evidence of almanacs. Almanac makers sometimes included monthly verses along with aphorisms (in prose or verse) that were interlineated at particular dates, along with the astronomical and astrological data, and the tides and weather observations. The December page sometimes included implicit references (occasionally explicit ones) to the Christmas season, and much of this material dealt with food and drink. In his notorious 1688 almanac John Tully wrote that in December “Money and Rum will be in great request.” But even as early as 1682, a Boston almanac written by the thoroughly orthodox William Brattle contained a verse for the December
page that referred to all the drinking that went on during that month (“sack” refers to sherry, and “tubs” to kegs):

(In other words, if people drink up all their sherry each day and leave the cask outside overnight, the next morning it will be magically full.) Brattle’s verse may have referred to a popular belief about magical rebirth and renewal at the time of both the solstice and Christmas, but what matters more is that he seems to have assumed that December was indeed a month of heavy drinking. The same double allusion to intoxication and solstice can be found in an almanac printed in Boston in 1714, placed by the dates December 28–31: “By strong Liquor and Play / They turn night into day.” And here, from that same almanac, is the verse that heads the month of December:

In 1702 the Boston almanac-maker Samuel Clough reported (disapprovingly, to be sure) that December was a time when men of the lower orders—“Coasters and Boat-men”—gathered in taverns to gossip and drink:

And in 1729 Nathaniel Whittemore warned simply: “Extravagancies bring Sickness.”
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New England almanacs occasionally addressed the sexual barriers that were breached by the license (and the cold temperatures) of the Christmas season. Thus in 1749 Nathanael Ames wrote (at December 15–17):

On a similar note, George Whetens almanac for 1753 noted in a quadruple rhyme: “The weather that is cold[,] that makes the maid that is old for to scold for the want of a Bed-fellow bold.”
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But most common of all were the references to interclass eating and drinking—the familiar social inversion in which the low changed places with the high. At one extreme was John Tully’s 1688 verse that Christmas was a season when “poor men at rich men’s tables their guts forrage.” Another Boston almanac, this one by Nathaniel Whittemore for the year 1719, contains an interesting piece of advice interlineated at the dates December 18–21. It warns householders about a practice we can recognize as another familiar element of the wassail ritual (once again, “abroad” means outside): “Do not let your Children and Servants run too much abroad at Nights.”
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A Warning for Late December
. Christmas is not named in this December page from Nathaniel Whittemores 1719 Boston almanac, but between the dates December 18 and 21 can be found, in italics, an admonition to householders: “Do not let your Children and Servants run too much abroad at Nights.”
(Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society)

Several decades later, Nathanael Ames’s almanac for 1746 put at the dates December 20–23 a concise but rather cynical description of interclass merriment (the words recall the 1679 Salem Village wassail, when old John Rowden was visited by four young men who came “to call for pots”):