The Battle for Christmas (54 page)

The best-known wassail ritual in rural Ireland involved groups of youths known as the Wren Boys. Dressed up in rags, ribbons and bits of colored paper (reminiscent of the John Canoers), the Wren Boys would
march noisily through their village—stopping, of course, to sing in front of rich people’s houses. (One of their songs is virtually identical to the “Gloustershire Wassail,” quoted in
Chapter 1
. After asking for beer, this group of Wren Boys proceeded to pronounce the familiar mix of promise and threat: “And if you dhraw it ov the best, /I hope in heaven yer sowl will rest; / But if you dhraw it ov the small, / It won’t agree wid’de wran boys at all.”)
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But here, too, there was a change, a change initiated and spread from within. Beginning in the late 1830s, Ireland was swept by its own indigenous temperance movement, led by a Roman Catholic priest who was locally born and bred, Father Theobald Mathew (1790–1856). Father Mathew demanded total abstinence (or teetotalism), and he called on people to sign a written pledge that they would give up all forms of alcohol, in any amount. His movement swept through the Irish countryside like the religious revival it actually was, resonating deeply in both rural and urban areas. By 1842 an astonishing five million people had signed the temperance pledge.
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Much like Booker T. Washington’s more systematic program of personal reform at Tuskegee, the Irish temperance movement took hold because it held out the promise of restoring dignity and self-respect to a conquered and oppressed people. In fact, Father Mathew’s movement was deeply intertwined with the political movement for Irish independence from England. And Father Mathew himself promised his potential followers that sobriety would be a means of achieving social advancement for themselves and their children.
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Needless to say, Father Mathew’s temperance crusade had an effect on the old Christmas rituals. For this there exists a wonderful account, in the form of a diary kept by a wealthy English gentlewoman, Elizabeth Smith, who, together with her husband, managed a large estate in the Irish countryside in the years around 1840. The husband seems to have played the part of country squire to his dependents (she called them his “pensioners”), offering them gifts and forgiving their debts at Christmastime.
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Elizabeth Smith did not object to the begging, and her diary shows that she was quite happy to play her own part in the ritual. What troubled her was that many of these dependents had chosen to give up drinking! On Christmas morning, 1840, she made a mistake that haunted her throughout the day: “I forgot teetotalism when I mixed the puddings,” she wrote, “and not one of the outside men would taste them.” Mrs. Smith expressed grudging (and condescending) pleasure with the reformation—that “these unruly people have such self-command where they think it a
sin to yield to temptation.” But she was also disappointed that the old ways were changing. “What a pity,” she mused, referring to her oversight—or was it to her tenants’ new-found sobriety?

In any case, early the following morning the Smiths were awakened by a group of Wren Boys shouting “a regular reveilee—the Wren—under our windows.” The Wren boys, too, were keeping sober, and once again Mrs. Smith took note of the dampening effects: “This morning there were no young women of the party as there used to be. Maybe they don’t find it merry enough now that whiskey a’n’t in fashion.”
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It’s a fascinating reversal. Here in rural Ireland, we can witness a mid-nineteenth-century instance of exactly what both Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington claimed was true of the American South—a representative of the ruling classes who wished to see the Christmas drinking continue, and her dependents, who decided to stop it themselves.

From the mid-1840s on, just after Father Mathew’s movement reached its peak, Irish people began to emigrate in massive numbers to the United States. Many of these immigrants had been affected by the movement, and others joined it after they arrived in America. Father Mathew himself spent two and a half years (from 1849 to 1851) touring the United States, spreading the total-abstinence pledge chiefly among his newly arrived countrymen. (This was the very time the American temperance movement was hitting a crest of its own, one that would inspire a wave of prohibitionist legislation in several American states. All six New England states, for example, passed temperance laws between 1851 and 1855). Eventually, Irish-American newspapers that supported the cause of independence from England also began to print Clement Clarke Moore’s “Visit from St. Nicholas” on Christmas Day.
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This puts in place the final large element in the process by which a carnival Christmas was replaced by a domestic one. Victory in the battle for Christmas in America resulted from a convergence of interests that melded a variety of groups and classes. In the first place, as we have seen, the domestic reform of Christmas was an enterprise of patricians, fearful for their authority. (In New York, the reform was part of a larger project that was a response to the democratization and commercialization of the city—a strategic shift from the use of
politics
to that of
culture
as a way of
retaining control of urban life.) That domestic reform, examined in
Chapters 2
and
3
, led to (and was part of) the development of a commercial Christmas trade (examined in
Chapter 4
). As such a trade developed, merchants needed the streets to be free of drunks and rowdies in order to secure them for Christmas shoppers. And shoppers themselves needed to feel secure in the streets.

But finally, especially in the 1840s and afterward, the development that I have just traced occurred—a reform from within the working classes themselves. With at least some working-class support for a domestic Christmas added to the existing (and growing) enthusiasm of the middle classes and the remnants of the old elite, something new began to happen. Christmas Day became officially recognized as a legal holiday in the United States. It was the individual states, one by one, that passed the necessary legislation. The movement swept the nation during the two decades that began in the mid-1840S. By 1865, twenty-seven out of thirty-six states (along with four territories) had set December 25 apart as a day when certain kinds of ordinary business could not legally be transacted.

There was an intriguing pattern to this legalization process, a pattern that can be detected by focusing on those states that were relatively late in granting legal recognition to Christmas Day. Of the twenty-four states that joined the United States no later than 1820 (the “first generation” of states, as we might think of them), by 1865 all but five had made December 25 a legal holiday. What is striking about the list is that four of the five states that had
not
done so were
slave states
—the two Carolinas, Mississippi, and Missouri. (Two other slave states, Texas and Florida—both admitted to the Union in 1845—waited until 1879 and 1881, respectively, to legalize Christmas.) The slave South seems to have been the laggard in this matter. Not New England, surely—all six states in that supposedly Puritan region of the country had recognized Christmas between 1845 and 1861 (Connecticut being the first to do so, and New Hampshire the last).
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To be sure, the pattern was not universal. The first three states to legalize Christmas all permitted slavery, while the final member of the “first generation” to do so—Indiana, in 1875—was a free state. And the Civil War itself may have had something to do with the South’s relative recalcitrance (though the war did not stop Northern states from proceeding on this score). In any case, the meaning of the pattern is not fully evident, but there is one possible explanation. It has to do with how much pressure there was in any given state for a formal, legislatively mandated release from work at Christmas. Such pressure was strongest in New England,
the most heavily industrialized part of the United States, but less so in the slave South, an agricultural region that was still governed (as we have seen) by a seasonal rhythm that may have made it unnecessary to dictate a holiday by force of law.

This hypothesis is partly borne out by looking at the Christmas legislation in a single, highly industrialized state—Massachusetts.
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Christmas achieved legal recognition in Massachusetts in a pair of laws, passed in 1855 and 1856, respectively, during two turbulent sessions of a reform-minded legislature that was under the majority control of an insurgent “third party,” the American Party—better known as the “Know-Nothings.” The Know-Nothings are best remembered today for a single plank in their platform, a nativist hostility to the immigrants who were flocking to New England. But just as important, the Know-Nothings were a party that represented native-born urban workers (who actually held almost 25 percent of the total seats in 1855). The legislation passed by the Massachusetts Know-Nothing legislatures included measures to suppress gambling, prostitution, and—especially—the use of alcohol (the penalty for selling a single glass of liquor was six months’ imprisonment). It also included a set of antislavery laws, as well as laws related to industrial welfare and safety in the workplace. The Know-Nothings almost succeeded in passing a bill that would have ensured factory workers a maximum ten-hour day. A recent study of the Massachusetts Know-Nothing legislature concludes that most of its legislation “specifically addressed the needs of an industrial society.”
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The pro-labor sympathies of the 1855–56 Massachusetts legislature are suggested by the terms of the pair of laws that recognized Christmas Day. The 1855 law simply barred the collection of commercial paper on Christmas (as well as July 4), with the intention of putting a stop to large-scale commercial transactions. The 1856 law went further. It established Christmas and July 4, along with Washington’s Birthday (previously unrecognized), as holidays for state workers, closing down “all public offices” on those days. (The expectation was that closing state offices would have a domino effect, leading to the closing of other businesses as well.) The import of this gesture is underlined by a further provision of the law, one that established a Monday holiday when any of the three dates fell on the Sabbath. Such a provision ensured that state workers would always receive a separate day off on these three annual occasions. In other words, Washington’s Birthday was not afforded legal recognition simply for “patriotic” reasons, nor was Christmas afforded that recognition simply out of “religious” considerations.

The point is underscored when we examine the actual legislative debate that took place over the 1856 holiday bill. While the inclusion of Christmas as a possible Monday holiday served only to extend the law of 1855, the addition of Washington’s Birthday to the bill provided a lightning rod for opposition to the entire bill, opposition that came chiefly from rural areas of Massachusetts. One rural representative argued that the legislature “should not take it upon itself to interrupt the business of the community.” In reply, a representative from Boston declared that “[h]e favored the bill because he would have the number of holidays increased for the benefit of the working classes.” And a representative from a nearby industrial town supported that position and added: “From January to January, there was one ceaseless strife and care; men were going down to early graves, just for want of a sufficient number of days of recreation.”
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For many workers, the “want” of leisure time may have been particularly acute during the Christmas season. The acceleration of a commercial holiday trade during the 1820s, 1830s and 1840s meant that for an increasing number of Americans, December was now a season of increased work, not leisure. That was especially true of the workers who actually produced the holiday goods. On the one hand, such a development helped to ensure ongoing income during a part of the hitherto slow winter season. But on the other, it meant that the workers who produced goods for the holiday trade were losing the leisure that would have enabled them to take the Christmas season as a time of intense relaxation. In other words, a generation earlier, when the very rhythms of an agricultural society dictated a season of leisure, there had been no need for “legal” recognition of Christmas as a holiday. Little wonder, then, that the development of a holiday trade should have generated working-class support for at least a single day of leisure in which laborers, too—women as well as men—might consume a share of the holiday goods instead of producing it.

In short, by mid-century a variety of interests had converged to agree on the point that Christmas deserved civic recognition. This point brought together laborers and capitalists, producers and consumers, clients and patrons. By the 1860s, in all but a handful of states, there seems to have been no significant opposition to making December 25 a legal holiday. Before long, there was virtual unanimity on that score, and it has continued to the present. Today it is impossible to imagine the date as a purely private, voluntary event. Indeed, Christmas has become the most important single civic celebration in the American calendar year.

But odd residual pockets of resistance to a domestic Christmas remain even to this day, as vestiges of carnival behavior. Think of the office parties commonly held just before Christmas—occasions marked by otherwise-unthinkable gestures of familiarity between supervisors and their (often secretarial) support staff; the whole lubricated by a supply of free alcohol. More obvious still, think of New Year’s Eve, the one day in the holiday season when rowdy public behavior is almost universally expected and even sanctioned. In the early nineteenth century, of course, “Christmas” and “New Year’s” were often barely distinguished from each other (we have seen that Christmas trees were commonly set up on New Year’s Eve, and several early printings of “The Night Before Christmas” were actually retitled “The Night Before New Year”). But by the latter part of the century, as Christmas Day secured its role as a time for children and presents, it was to New Year’s Eve that most of the vestiges of carnival behavior fell.
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