[S]arah Clement’s letter reminds me why I love history.
I’m forever astonished by how different things once were.
And, paradoxically, I’m often surprised by just the opposite, that in many ways things haven’t changed. That was the case with Clement’s letter.
Writing from Rutland, she told her mother-in-law: “Since the hurry of Christmas days is a little over, I am sitting down to write my thanks and acknowledgements and want to tell you what a pleasant Christmas we spent, although we missed very much the absent ones.”
Clement described the Christmas tree in the parlor decorated with popcorn that the children helped string. She mentioned who was too sick to visit and how the recent snows made for excellent sleighing, listed the books and other presents people received and said that “the children were all very happy.”
Clement penned those words in 1886. Substitute “living room” for “parlor,” “tinsel” for “popcorn” and “sledding” for “sleighing,” and it could be today. Except for the antiquated phrasing, everything about the letter is familiar. It almost could have been written by my mother.
Reading the letter, which is stored at the Vermont History Center in Barre, I started to wonder how far back our modern Christmas traditions began. I did a little digging, and soon that welcome sense of being in a foreign place returned.
Flash back to the 1600s and you’ll find that the first New England colonists didn’t celebrate Christmas much. Actually, they didn’t celebrate it at all. It was illegal to do so.
In 1621, just a year after the Pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts, Gov. William Bradford discovered that some colonists had the gall to take the day off for Christmas and ordered them back to work.
In 1659, the colonial court took things further, making the celebration of Christmas a finable offense.
I learned these and other astounding facts about the evolution of Christmas from “The Battle for Christmas,” the engaging book by Stephen Nissenbaum, a history professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
The Puritans found much to dislike in Christmas. First, despite its name, there was nothing particularly Christian about Christmas, they said. The Bible certainly does describe the birth of Christ, but it contains few clues as to exactly what time of year the event occurred. And if God didn’t tell us when Christ was born, the Puritans figured, then God obviously didn’t want us to celebrate the day.
It wasn’t until the fourth century A.D. that the Catholic Church declared Dec. 25 to be Christmas, even though Christ was probably not born in wintertime, given the warm weather suggested in the Nativity story. The date was chosen not for biblical reasons but because it fell roughly at the winter solstice, an event that had been celebrated long before Christ’s birth. Puritans dismissed Christmas, Nissenbaum writes, as “nothing but a pagan festival covered with a Christian veneer.”
It was a logical time of year for country people to celebrate. With the harvest complete and the days short, why not hold a feast to commemorate the return of the light?
But Puritans also hated the way Christmas was celebrated in England.
The holiday, which like today cast its shadow over the surrounding weeks, was marked by the sort of drunken debauchery we normally associate with Mardi Gras or frat parties. People drank and ate heavily, ridiculed authority and engaged in rather forceful begging – to the point of promising harm if their pleas were ignored. Since the Puritans believed people’s behavior and outward appearance were evidence of their connection with God, they must have seen these revelers as godless indeed.
During the Christmas season, the social order was turned on its head. In “mummer plays,” men would dress and act as women and vice versa, and the poor would invade the homes of the rich, expecting to be fed. The wealthy usually accepted the tradition. It was a way of buying a little peace between the classes for the rest of the year, Nissenbaum surmises.
In an odd way, this reversal of roles reflects aspects of the Nativity, as the three kings bowed to the infant in the lowly manger, he writes, and it might explain why we still see Christmas as a time of charity.
These traditions started in England, though clearly they survived the passage to America, since Massachusetts went to the trouble of prohibiting them.
But people continued to violate the ban, which was removed in 1681 to appease British authorities, who apparently were not as puritanical as their colonial brethren. That didn’t mean celebrating Christmas wasn’t still scorned.
The Rev. Cotton Mather, writing in his diary in 1711, expressed outrage that “a number of young people of both sexes, belonging, many of them, to my flock, … have had the Christmas night, this last week, a Frolick, a reveling feast, and Ball.”
Mather might have had reason to suspect that these young people were doing more than innocently feasting and dancing. Modern-day demographers, Nissenbaum points out, discovered a rise in illegitimate births in the colony each September and October, which of course points to premarital sex around Christmastime.
Gradually during the mid-1700s, the Protestant Church relented in its war against Christmas. If it couldn’t beat Christmas, the church would expropriate it, and emphasize the religious rather than riotous aspects of the holiday. In 1730, an almanac writer would have risked the wrath of the government if he’d noted that Dec. 25 was Christmas, Nissenbaum says. By 1760, however, he would have risked the wrath of customers if he had omitted it.
Just as churches tried to make Christmas their own, so too did businessmen, Nissenbaum notes. Even Santa Claus is a commercial creation, having been devised by a group of New York businessmen in the early 1800s.
So, by the time settlers began arriving in Vermont, it was perfectly acceptable for them to celebrate Christmas. But did they?
It is hard to know when Christmas traditions took root in Vermont. The early settlers in the late 1700s tended to be rather anti-Puritan, so it seems likely they celebrated the holiday in some way.
But it probably took generations for Christmas in northern New England to resemble a celebration we might recognize. A historian once told me she had read early diaries from Vermont in which people say they had not ever received Christmas presents before — and this was in 1840.
The holiday became a tradition first in communities like Burlington and Windsor that had ties to southern New England, which by the early 1800s had embraced the holiday.
Most people in southern Vermont were celebrating Christmas by the 1840s, though there were probably some holdouts. By the 1860s, only people in the most remote areas were ignoring the holiday.
Still, it was hard to pin down just who was celebrating Christmas. Until the Civil War, Thanksgiving was a celebration (not a national holiday) proclaimed at the whim of governors, who sometimes designated a day in early December; harvest festivals were held at the same time of year, and Christmas was celebrated as more of a season than a particular day. So who is to say whether a feast in December was meant to mark the harvest, Thanksgiving or Christmas?
Despite churches’ best efforts to make the holiday sacred, commercialism has always been associated with Christmas in Vermont. From the start, the holiday was not about being thankful for simple gifts. The image of poor country people receiving a lone orange as their sole gift is a bit misleading. There might have been some lean times like that, but people gave store-bought gifts when they could.
For better or worse, by the mid-19th century Vermonters were celebrating Christmas in a thoroughly recognizable way.
Another member of the Clement family, Elizabeth — mother-in-law of Sarah Clement — wrote to her son Wallace in 1861. In the letter Elizabeth Clement described how on Christmas Eve, she put Percival, her 10-year-old son (a future Vermont governor) to bed, then she teased his 15-year-old brother, Waldo.
“We told him it was a cold night, perhaps Santa Claus would not come,” she wrote.
But Waldo knew Christmas meant presents. “‘I shall hang up my stocking,’” she quoted him as saying. “‘I am not too old to hang up my stocking.’”
And in the morning, she continued, the children awoke to find their stockings filled with candy and other gifts.
Despite the homey tone of her letter, Elizabeth Clement seemed aware of Christmas’ less demure past.
Perhaps worrying what Wallace, who was 26, had done for Christmas, she wrote, “(I)t is always the greatest pleasure to learn that dear ones are enjoying the innocent delights of home.”
