Read The Battle for Christmas Online
Authors: Stephen Nissenbaum
Breck’s account makes it amply clear that the Anticks were indeed Christmas mummers, and that they would actually perform an old mummer’s play, “St. George and the Dragon”:
I have seen them at my father’s, when his assembled friends were at cards, take possession of a table, seat themselves on rich furniture and proceed to handle the cards, to the great annoyance of the company. The only way to get rid of them was to give them money, and listen patiendy to a foolish dialogue between two or more of them. One of them would cry out, “Ladies and gentlemen sitting by the fire, put your hands in your pockets and give us our desire.” When this was done and they had received some money, a kind of acting took place. One fellow was knocked down, and lay sprawling on the carpet, while another bellowed out,
“See, there he lies,
But ere he dies
A doctor must be had.”
He calls for a doctor, who soon appears, and enacts the part so well that the wounded man revives.
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This often went on for half an hour. Breck remembered that even after the men finally left, “the house would be filled with another gang.” (Apparently there were multiple bands of Anticks.) Breck concluded by recalling an especially significant cultural point, that the victims of such visitations did not feel entitled to expel the Anticks from their houses: “Custom had licensed these vagabonds to enter even by force any place they chose.” (“What should we say to such intruders now?” Breck asked rhetorically in the very different culture of his old age. “Our manners would not brook such usage a moment.”)
The third and final report about the Boston Anticks reveals that at the century’s end the customary “license” to which Breck referred was coming under challenge. This third report, dating from 1793, is firsthand evidence. On December 20, 1793, a Boston newspaper printed an anonymous letter to the Boston Police Inspector, warning of the Anticks’ imminent
annual appearance and demanding that something be done to stop them. The letter specified in outraged detail the threat these mummers posed to respectable Bostonians:
The disadvantages, interruptions, and injuries which the inhabitants sustain from these gangs, are too many for enumeration, a few only must suffice. When different clubs of them meet in the street, noise and fighting immediately commences. Their demands for entrance in house, are insolent and clamourous; and should the peaceful citizen (not choosing to have the tranquillity of his family interrupted) persevere in refusing them admittance, his windows are broke, or the latches and knockers wrenched from his door as the penalty: Or should they gain admittance, the delicate ear is oftentimes offended, children affrighted, or catch the phrases of their senseless ribaldry. [In other words, the Anticks used bawdy language.]
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Aggressive, indeed. But the behavior of these mummers can also be seen as a kind of symbolic “counter-theater,” their response to the refusal of “peaceful citizens” to perform
their
allotted Christmas role. In any event, the Police Inspector responded with a letter of his own. Such gangs had been performing for years, he noted, though he agreed that they caused “inconveniency and frights” by “disturbing families and
begging a Copper.”
But it was difficult to identify the participants, because they went around in disguise. The Inspector also implied that they came from the town’s poorest classes (the kinds of people who “seldom if ever read the public papers”). In conclusion, the Police Inspector urged Boston’s respectable citizens to take into custody any Anticks who harassed them, promising that such persons would be prosecuted as criminals. (When William Bentley of Salem read this item, he considered it worth noting in his diary that “[t]he inspector of Police in Boston has forbidden the ‘Anticks,’ as they are called, by which the resemblance of this Christian feast to the Saturnalia has been so admirably maintained.”
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)
A final note about this episode. The exchange of letters about the “Anticks” never once mentioned Christmas
by name
, even though the connection would have been clear enough to anyone (as it was to Bentley). But the same issue of the newspaper that contained the Police Inspector’s notice also contained a pious poem about the mystery of the Nativity—and it took
Christmas
as its title. The presence of
this
word in the poem, and its complete absence in the discussion of the “Anticks,” suggests something of a rhetorical contest over the meaning of the word itself—whether it signified pious devotion or disruptive misrule. Back at
the beginning of the eighteenth century, the people who “spoke for” New England culture associated Christmas so profoundly with misrule that they needed to suppress it altogether. By the end of the eighteenth century, the descendants of those same people had discovered an alternative (and more acceptable) meaning of
Christmas
. Now they could wrest the word—if not the thing itself—away from the Anticks and their ilk, to redefine (and reclaim) it as their own.
With the turn of the nineteenth century, the reappropriation of Christmas took on a concerted form—a move to hold church services on December 25. This move was led by both evangelicals and liberals. In the forefront of the evangelicals were the Universalists. Largely a rural sect, Universalists openly celebrated Christmas from the earliest stages of their existence in New England. The Universalist community in Boston held a special Christmas Day service in 1789, even before their congregation was officially organized,
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and in the early nineteenth century it was this denomination that proselytized for Christmas more actively than any other.
The Unitarians were close behind. Compared with Universalists, Unitarians were more genteel, and (for all their theological liberalism) more socially conservative. And there were also more of them, especially in Boston. As a formal institution, the Unitarian movement was not organized until 1825. But by the early 1800s ministers who were inclined to doubt the trinity of the Godhead (and, by implication, the divinity of Christ) had come to dominate the Congregational churches in Boston. In fact, for most of the first decade of the nineteenth century, not a single church within Boston’s town limits remained in Trinitarian hands. So bad was the situation from an orthodox point of view, that in 1809 a group of theologically conservative ministers from neighboring communities found it necessary to establish a new church in the heart of Boston that would serve as a beachhead of orthodoxy, a kind of mission church on hostile turf. (The new Park Street Church was soon dubbed “Brimstone Corner,” after its first minister preached a sermon titled “The Use of Real Fire in Hell.”)
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Unitarians were calling for the public observance of Christmas by about 1800. They did so in full knowledge that it was not a biblically sanctioned holiday, and that December 25 was probably not the day on which Jesus was born. They wished to celebrate the holiday not because God had ordered them to do so but because they themselves wished to. And they
celebrated it in the hope that their own observance might help to purge the holiday of its associations with seasonal excess and disorder.
In 1817 a concerted two-pronged effort got under way to transform Christmas Day in Boston: by holding services in the local churches and by closing down its businesses. Within three years that effort would fail, but for the moment it was waged hard and with the support of influential citizens. The local press helped out, blanketing the town with publicity. The following report was typical:
Many Christians of the Congregational denomination in this town, have for a long time been desirous, that the anniversary of the nativity of our blessed Saviour should be marked by some religious observance of the day, and by a general abstinence from secular concerns. In consequence, some of the churches of that denomination will be open for public worship….
That was one prong of the campaign. A second local paper described the other prong, announcing that “Gentlemen of business in State-street” had “circulated a paper” to their colleagues. Those who signed the paper pledged themselves “to close their places of business, provided the same engagement should be signed by the principal part of the gentlemen on that street.” The circulators of this paper had received “the signatures of about seven eighths of the gentlemen on the street, and of nearly all to whom it was offered, including all who have the government of public offices.”
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The businessmen appear to have kept to their pledge. One rural merchant who was in town on a buying trip noted in his diary that “[t]he inhabitants of Boston introduced the suspension of business for the first time, with a view to commemorating this day in Religious Exercise.” He added that “but little business could be done,” and that he had been forced to reload the goods he had brought in to sell that day.
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The crusade was renewed the following year. For a week before Christmas, the newspapers were filled with letters and editorials calling for the general observance of the day as a religious holiday.
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One woman pointed out an additional reason. “Christmas is
now
generally observed as a holiday,” she wrote (i.e., a holiday in the de facto sense). “Our children and domestics claim it as such.” She added that “[s]chools and public places are closed … and generally the day is spent in idleness, and with regret I may add, by many in revelry and dissipation.” Opening the churches, she implied, would help reduce both the idleness and the dissipation.
Another citizen turned the same point on its head, arguing plausibly that if Bostonians abandoned their regular business on December 25, “it would become only another reason for dissipation, for frolic and insobriety.”
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Services were held in five reformed churches on Christmas Day, 1818 (in addition to the Catholic and Episcopal churches). These included three Congregational churches as well as a Universalist and a Methodist one. Services were held in the central Massachusetts town of Worcester as well, in the Congregational church led by Aaron Bancroft (father of historian George Bancroft). That same year one Boston newspaper published, without comment, the 1659 Puritan law banning the celebration of Christmas in Massachusetts.
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No comment was needed, since everyone would have caught the point:
We’ve come a long way since those days
.
A long way, indeed. That year, 1818, even the staunchly Trinitarian Congregationalist paper in Boston, the
Recorder
, indicated its approval. The
Recorder
was the organ of the Park Street Church—“Brimstone Corner.” But its editorial began: “We are happy to learn that it is the intention of many persons to observe Christmas day, this year, in a more solemn manner than they ever yet have done….”It even went on to imply that the Park Street Church itself should join in: “We are … decidedly in favor of the measure, and hope divine service will be performed in
all
our churches.”
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And so again in 1819. A letter to one newspaper declared that “all the banks, public offices, &c. will suspend business,” and expressed the hope that “every merchant and liberal minded man will also follow the example, and observe Christmas
more universally
, if possible, than Bostonians did the last year.” By this time the movement had reached as far as the rural New Hampshire town of Amherst, whose newspaper printed an impassioned editorial arguing that Christmas was more important than Thanksgiving.
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But the movement ran out of momentum that very year (religious services were held only at the two Universalist churches and at the Old South Church). Many businesses did remain closed that year, although by 1823 one paper reported with amusement that several shops only
appeared
to be closed—their window shutters were fastened, but “their doors kindly opened to all who would take the trouble to lift the latch.” The newspaper that reported this development went on to express its pleasure that “no law, either civil or divine,” actually
required
“the observance of the feasts of the papal and episcopal churches,” and to deplore the fact that Boston’s businessmen felt unable to “pursue their occupations openly.”
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Actually, this movement seems to have been part of a larger counterattack. Early in 1820 a religious magazine published in Boston assaulted the idea of making Christmas a public holiday. But its argument had nothing to do with theology, with the dating of Christ’s birth. The magazine acknowledged that December 25 was a time of “rejoicing, and of religious ceremonies” for many Christians. The problem lay with other kinds of behavior: “an immense majority of those, who celebrate the day, make it an occasion of indulgence and profane mirth, and of almost every species of licentiousness.” In any case, within only a few years the movement to close the shops and open the churches was dead. In 1828 the
Boston Statesman
noted with regret that “few places of business were closed yesterday, and none but the churches of the Episcopal order, we believe, were opened….”
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As it turned out, the years 1817–19 were to represent a historical high-water mark in the religious celebration of Christmas in Boston. To this day New England’s Unitarian, Baptist, and Methodist churches are ordinarily closed on Christmas Day, along with its Congregational and Presbyterian ones.
What happened was that in New England, as elsewhere, religion failed to transform Christmas from a season of misrule into an occasion of quieter pleasure. That transformation would, however, shortly take place—but not at the hands of Christianity. The “house of ale” would not be vanquished by the house of God, but by a new faith that was just beginning to sweep over American society. It was the religion of domesticity, which would be represented at Christmastime not by Jesus of Nazareth but by a newer and more worldly deity—Santa Claus.