When America dreams of Christmas, it dreams of Vermont, of white clapboard houses nestled cozily in a village, fresh snow everywhere. It’s part of the iconography of the holiday.
How did Vermont enter the imaginations of so many people — most of whom have never set foot here, yet remain convinced the state is quintessentially Christmasy?
To search for an answer, it is helpful to have a sense of how the holiday has historically been treated in New England. Christmas was no different from any other day to Pilgrims when they arrived in Massachusetts in 1620. Their governor, William Bradford, learned that some colonists had taken the day; he ordered them back to work. In 1659, the colonial court made celebrating Christmas a finable offense.
The Pilgrims, and their slightly less ardent brethren the Puritans, believed that, despite its name, there was nothing particularly Christian about Christmas. They noted that the Bible didn’t give a date for Christ’s birth, so they saw no reason to celebrate the date the Catholic Church had selected in the fourth century because it coincided with a pagan winter solstice celebration.
They also hated the traditions of the Christmas season in England, when people often drank and ate too much, the poor engaged in ritualistic and forceful begging for food and other goods from their wealthier neighbors, and people put on plays in which men dressed as women. To the strict Pilgrims and Puritans, Christmas was all a bit much.
But things changed and those puritanical ideas lost their dominance as New England’s first British settlers became outnumbered by members of other Protestant denominations. By the mid-to-late 1700s, Christmas was widely celebrated in major American cities, though it took decades longer to gain a foothold in the hinterlands, in places like Vermont.
To many people from southern New England and other parts of America, Vermont had always seemed uncultured. But at least Vermont had company; popular opinion was similarly critical of the rest of northern New England. Meanwhile, eastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island were disparaged as being uncouth as they became industrialized and crowded with immigrants.
In contrast, southern New England, particularly Connecticut and western Massachusetts, was seen as epitomizing the American ideal of pastoral virtue, which was said to be evidenced in the landscape and in the tidy houses clustered around village greens.
Artist George Durrie captured this ideal in 1861 in his painting “Home to Thanksgiving,” a snowy scene that depicts a son’s return to the farm where he grew up. Durrie, who probably painted the scene in the New Haven, Connecticut, area, presumably picked Thanksgiving because it was still the most prominent fall or winter holiday.
Over time, Christmas would grow in popularity, as would Vermont, and the two would become linked in the minds of many as the idealized time and place.
Few people probably saw Durrie’s painting, but printmakers Currier & Ives brought it to the masses. Their 1866 lithograph of the image was a massive seller. You can see why. With the country having just been through the devastating Civil War, people yearned to see this sort of reassuring tableau about returning home.
Many Americans in the late 1800s thought of New England as home. That is largely because, starting in the early decades of the century, the region witnessed a large-scale exodus of residents, mostly in a westward direction, in search of cheaper, more arable land and greater economic opportunity. Separation from their childhood homes only made people more nostalgic about the region.
But the region was changing rapidly. By the late 1800s, industrialization had reached most of southern New England. Immigration brought in new cultures and religions, particularly Catholicism, which many of the earlier Protestant settlers from Britain found foreign and alienating. Whether due to xenophobia, racism, or simply discomfort with change, the region started to feel less like home to them.
“People were now for the first time beginning to look for another place where New England (as they remembered it) still existed,” according to Stephen Nissenbaum, professor emeritus of history from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and author of the highly regarded book “The Battle for Christmas,” which probes the holiday’s history and evolution. “Very slowly, the heart of New England shifted north.”
As this shift was occurring, some people idealized archetypal New England culture. While the reality was far more complicated, many chose to see the region, set against a beautiful bucolic landscape, as representing America at its best.
In this way, Vermont benefited from having largely missed out on the Industrial Revolution. Though a lack of industry meant that many Vermonters struggled economically, it also meant that the state lacked some of the social strains cities were experiencing, and that its landscape was to a great extent unspoiled.
Promoters took advantage of this national nostalgia and started pitching the state as a vacation destination. In the late 1800s, marketers began to lure visitors who wanted to experience life as they believed it once was and should be. For decades, however, tourist-related business was focused almost entirely on summer. Burlington did host winter carnivals in the 1880s, but for the most part winter sports — and fall foliage — wouldn’t become strongly associated with Vermont until the mid-1900s.
Author Dorothy Canfield Fisher once recalled that during the early 1900s, when she spoke with people from outside New England, they would often ask what state Vermont was in. Then, starting in the 1930s, they stopped asking. They knew exactly where it was.
What had changed was that during the ’30s, the early ski areas that were opening in Vermont marketed the state as a winter wonderland. And like all marketing, the campaign focused on people’s emotional reactions — in this case, to the best aspects of winter. They portrayed Vermont as a place where visitors could go out for a bit of fun and healthy exercise in the brisk weather, before returning, pink-cheeked, to sit with a warm drink by the fire.
Just as that homey Currier & Ives print appealed to the public after the Civil War, these comforting images reached a country beset by hard times. The world was in the depths of the Great Depression and drifting toward a global military conflict. Vermont offered a retreat from an increasingly frightening world.
Artists and writers fed that image. Robert Frost, a California-born poet, became a presence in Vermont starting in the 1920s and wrote compellingly of the state’s beauty, strength and civic virtue, while artist Norman Rockwell, who moved to Arlington in 1939, began painting images of daily life featuring his new neighbors.
That hunger for peace only intensified after World War II, and again the state was there to serve as a sanctuary. The connection between Christmas and Vermont was perhaps cemented by the 1954 movie “White Christmas.” The story takes place shortly after World War II and features Army veterans played by Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye, who travel to Vermont to perform a Christmas variety show.
While ironically none of the movie was actually filmed here, Vermont is more than a backdrop in the movie; it is an integral part of the story. “White Christmas” helped make Crosby’s title song a huge hit. In romanticizing Christmas, the movie and song also linked the holiday with Vermont.
As Dona Brown, a history professor at the University of Vermont, once said: “People had come to see Vermont as the quickest place to get back to the past.”
