Having recently discovered we own a copy of Washington Irving's SKETCH BOOK, published around 1820 (one of the books we inherited from my mother-in-law, many of which I shelved without looking at closely), I read his essays/stories about English festivities surrounding Christmas Eve, Christmas day, and Christmas dinner. The narrator, an American visiting England, comments with delight on the customs of the season. The host, a merry old squire, insists on keeping the time-honored traditions as he understands them. None of this modern stuff allowed! Centuries-old songs are sung, games of venerable vintage are played, wassailers are welcomed, the Yule log is burned, a decorated pig's head is ceremoniously carried to the dinner table in lieu of a boar's head. The kindly old gentleman, however, is widely considered eccentric for his devotion to the past. Some of the guests carefully chosen from among the "decent" subset of the local peasantry snicker behind his back. Although the narrator enjoys the celebrations, he makes it clear that the squire is reconstructing traditional customs as he imagines them, not passing them on unbroken from previous generations.
According to THE BATTLE FOR CHRISTMAS, by Stephen Nissenbaum, our concept of an "old-fashioned Christmas" derives in large part from these "sketches" by Irving as well as "A Visit from Saint Nicholas" (aka "The Night Before Christmas"), by his contemporary Clement Clarke Moore, and of course Dickens' A CHRISTMAS CAROL. Nissenbaum offers strong evidence that the Saint Nicholas legend brought to life by Moore didn't cross over intact from Holland. Instead, Santa Claus as popularized in early 19th-century New York and immortalized by Moore was "a conscious reconstruction. . . an invented tradition."
Similarly, Nissenbaum's research reveals that the Christmas tree constituted a purely local custom in a small area of Germany until it became nationwide only in the late 18th century. Moreover, instead of spontaneously spreading from German immigrant communities to the wider American population, Christmas trees first became familiar to the general public from literary sources. Yet already by the mid-19th century people would casually remark that of course they always displayed a tree, as if it were a long-established tradition. Popularization of trees, Santa Claus, and gift-giving went along with the invention of the domestic, child-centered holiday, replacing the REAL "old-fashioned Christmas." To us, the older celebration would look like a rowdy blend of Halloween, Thanksgiving, and New Year's Eve.
Invented traditions continue to spring up in our own era. How could we now imagine the American Christmas season without Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer annually appearing on TV? Yet his story was originally written as an advertising giveaway book for the Montgomery Ward department store in 1939. In a short essay published in the 1950s, C. S. Lewis complains of the Yuletide "commercial racket," implying the phenomenon had intruded on the season quite recently. As Nissenbaum describes at length, though, commercialization of gift-giving infested the child-centered holiday from the beginning. The film A CHRISTMAS STORY, what I think of as "the BB gun movie," presumably set pre-World-War-II like the book it's based on, showcases a department store Santa in a lavishly consumerist setting.
In my childhood home, Christmas traditions included having the extended family over on Christmas Eve, emerging from our bedrooms the next morning to the sight of a dazzling spread of presents from Santa, and driving to my grandmother's house for Christmas dinner. (When I could get away with it, I sat in a corner reading a new book; I figured that shouldn't be a problem because the adults would be talking to each other, not to me, anyway.) Our kids' Christmas traditions, in addition to church, festive dinners, and gifts, involved watching programs such as Rudolph, Charlie Brown, the Grinch (the Boris Karloff cartoon, of course!), and later the BB gun movie. Nowadays, with the prevalence of streaming media, the custom of a family gathering around the TV to watch one show together threatens to die out, if it hasn't already. What will our great-grandchildren (we currently have four) look back on as cherished holiday traditions that have "always" been done?
For many of us, a "traditional" holiday means customs as we imagine them having been celebrated in our grandparents' childhoods, whenever that may have been. "Over the river and through the woods. . . ." With snow, naturally, "dreaming of a white Christmas," even if we live in a region where the most we can expect are a few flurries in January. As Rudyard Kipling's ode of farewell to Romance -- in the sense of an imagined, ideal past more romantic than the dull, mundane present -- concludes, "Then taught his chosen bard to say: Our king was with us -- yesterday."
Margaret L. Carter
Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.
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