Posted by Conrad Goeringer (63.93.104.91) on December 20, 2001 at 00:16:59:
Remnants of Christmas Past
by Conrad Goeringer
The celebration of the Christmas holiday has been an evolving and contentious part of American history reflecting religious, political and class differences. Today’s celebration is the result of a long process of invention which deserves our appreciation and understanding.
Few times of the year seduce our imagination like the celebration of Christmas. In the modern era, this holiday has been identified with a number of evocative, though often conflicting messages. It is celebrated widely as a religious event, but it also resonates with clearly secular overtones being a time of consumption (both food and commodities), giving of presents, time off from work, and interaction with family.
Christmas is so popular that it marks the height of the retail seasons, with merchants often doing as much as 25% of their annual trade at this time of year. It also marks the annual peak in church attendance for Judeo-Christians [1] and a period which behavioral scientists and others say is characterized by unusually high levels of stress. One MSNBC survey, for instance, suggested that women - those to whom the task of shopping and cooking for family gatherings usually devolves - are more likely than men to feel stressed during this season. [2]
Many of the trapping of the Christmas season have their roots in earlier pagan rites and practices. We can thank the ancients for everything from the Christmas tree to the idea of seasonal greeting cards, giving and receiving presents, and investing the time with a unique sense of significance. The triumph of the Christian religion grafted its own elements onto an earlier holiday which celebrated the rhythmic oscillations of the seasons and the Winter Solstice - that time when the sun reached its lowest point in its annual apparent journey through the sky.
In America, what we understand as the modern Christmas holiday - a blend of both religious and secular elements - is the product of a long evolution dating back to the colonial era. Disputes over whether Christmas, either in its various European forms or as some other holiday activity, should be celebrated reflected religious, political, and class biases. Early settlers - including the Puritans - shunned Christmas, considering this December celebration as a blasphemous activity invented by the papal church. The holiday existed and thrived, though, as a “ritual of misrule,” where social hierarchies were inverted, and the poor and dispossessed sought rewards from their betters. That celebration, in turn, was replaced by an “invented” Christmas which emphasized new bourgeois values, including domesticity, the sanctity of sobriety, and family and also stressed a new valuation of children. Clement Moore, a patrician New Yorker, contributed to this process with his classic story/poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas.” The American illustrator Thomas Nast added further to this process with his depiction of Santa Clause which appeared in an 1866 issue of Harper’s Weekly.
Along the way, Christmas evolved from a riotous and disorderly celebration, a ritual of misrule, into an annual commercial event stressing propriety and consumption. Each stage in this process was accompanied by a different view of how the religious underpinnings of Christmas, a holiday supposedly celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ, fit into the new social reality. Religious groups saw Christmas and its celebration in different ways, and American culture has never fully resolved the dilemma of how to balance the secular and sacred components of this annual event.
The ambivalence over Christmas remains unresolved to this day. It is Janus-like, elevated as both a time of spiritual renewal and celebration of the birth of a messiah, a time of year eagerly (even greedily) embraced for its economic rewards. The baby Jesus resting happily in his birthing manger coexists in a precarious balance with the jolly Santa, his bag stuffed with consumer items as he frantically satiates the material desires of both adults and children. Most Americans reluctantly acknowledge these two poles of the annual celebration of Christmas, seeking some resolution of this ultimate conflict between the spiritual and the material.
The courts are equally divided on the question of whether Christmas is a secular event, a religious celebration (and one that might run afoul of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment) or both. The answer, for now anyway, rests in convoluted legal decisions such as Allegheny County v ACLU Greater Pittsburgh Chapter which took up the question of whether a Christian nativity crèche displayed on the steps of a county courthouse was somehow “secularized” by the presence of other traditional holiday symbols like Santa, plastic reindeers and other items of seasonal kitsch. Complicating this picture was the evolution of Christmas as a legal holiday, a process initially opposed by many Christian groups. In the early nineteenth century, for instance, a religious magazine in Massachusetts argued that while December 25 should be a time of spiritual celebration, in practice it was “a period of indulgence and profane mirth” and “licentiousness” that bordered on blasphemy.
There are smaller branches that lead off into the historical backwaters when we examine the evolution of the Christmas holiday in America. The “ritual of misrule” that was imported from Europe and which for half a century following the American revolution characterized the Christmas period expressed itself in distinct ways in southern states. Even during slavery, blacks engaged in “inversion” activities where the roles practiced by slave and master were ritually and symbolically turned upside down. This mirrored the “Callithumpian” bands which prowled New York at Christmas, composed mostly of “disorderly young men” stoked with alcohol and demanding appropriate gifts (“cakes and ale”) from passers-by and the more respectable elements of society. In areas of the North Carolina coast, this “inversion” ritual became known as “John Canoe.”
Where to start in telling this story?
Perhaps the best place is with the most evocative symbol of Christmas, the figure known as Santa Claus, and the man who popularized his legend - Clement C. Moore.
Born in 1779, Moore was a High Church Episcopalian landowner and member of the lingering residue of a near-feudal aristocracy that had characterized the Colonial era. His parents and grandparents were “closet Tories” during the Revolution, and afterwards - suspicious of Jeffersonian Republicanism - embraced the Federalist cause. [3] Moore had gone as far as to publish a series of tracts critical of Jeffersonian radicalism and, curiously, the urban commerce that was increasingly becoming part of the new American culture. In his exploration of the history of the Christmas holiday, Stephen Nissenbaum observes that Moore was “suspicious of democracy and other reforms,” and even opposed the abolition of slavery. [4]
Moore is best known as a poet who wrote the classic “A Visit From St. Nicholas,” in which he portrayed Santa on his Christmas eve rounds in a sleigh drawn by “eight tiny reindeer.” [5] Its publication had a profound impact on popular perceptions of the Christmas holiday, and how it was celebrated. It is useful, then, to examine the social and historical context Moore lived in, as he penned a story that has enchanted millions of youngsters, and so influenced their parents.
From Puritan Sobriety to Callithumpian Misrule
Moore’s legendary poem evokes a sense of calm domesticity and family-based ritual. It is also focused on children, rewarding those who behave and are obedient to their parents. There is a judgmental tone: St. Nicholas watches over the children throughout the year much as does the Christian god, watching and recording their actions.
While this vision of Christmas resonates even to this day in popular culture, it was not a sensibility that was observed or practiced by many Americans prior to Moore’s ditty. Christmas had evolved from a banned-holiday under the Puritans to a celebratory period of disorder when misbehavior was widely, if grudgingly, tolerated, and the rules governing the social hierarchy were turned upside down. It was a time of misrule and social inversion, nothing like what Moore and other patricians of his period hammered into the subsequent, modern celebration of Christmas.
The Puritan and much of the Anglican tradition shunned any festive celebration during Christmas. Indeed, in CE 245 Origen, one of the great Christian patriarchs of the Alexandrian church “protested against the very idea of celebrating the birthday of Jesus as if he were an earthly king...” [6] Part of the Puritan reluctance to embrace the December 25th date was due to the realization that in the fourth century, the church under Pope Julius I had declared that day as the official recognition of the birth of Jesus Christ. That had been a shrewd move on the part of the early papacy, since it permitted the insurgent Christian religion to essentially co-opt celebrations during a time of the year that had once been the exclusive domain of pagans, naturists, and other heathens. Various cultures had marked the period around December 25th (in the Julian calendar) as the Winter Solstice, when the sun reached its lowest point in its annual apparent journey across the sky. It was an event of profound significance in societies closely attuned to the rhythmic, seasonal oscillations of the year and heavily dependent upon agriculture. They were entranced by the cyclical pattern of vegetative death and renewal. [7]
Much of the symbolism and revelry of the mid-winter Solstice celebration carried over to the Christian adaptation. Although it was embraced by the church as a solemn period to commemorate the birth of Jesus Christ, for a world where most people engaged in agriculture for a subsistence living, December remains a symbolically charged time for very non-religious reasons. Winter was a period of relative leisure, coming after the fall harvest and well before the spring planting. Meat became plentiful. Nissenbaum observes that animals could not be slaughtered until the weather was cold enough to allow preservation of the meat, that it was also the time when “the year’s supply of beer or wine was ready to drink...” [8] The fusion of frivolity, celebration, indulgence of appetites (of many kinds!), and the creation of a theatrical climate all became part of the Christmas celebration.
It also meant that Christmas became a time of misrule, when ordinary social conventions were ignored or suspended. Social, political, sexual, and class distinctions were blurred or even inverted.
The Puritans and other religious persons wanted no part of this. Not only was Christmas tainted with the overtones of pagan times, it was also a time of disorderly conduct, misrule and blasphemy. Historian George Willison notes in his history of the Pilgrims [9] that the Mayflower settlers began work on their new colonial utopia on Monday, December 25 “which was Christmas, of course, but that made no difference...” The Christmas holiday was a “human invention,” the historical seed of the riotous and sensual Roman Saturnalia, an abomination and corruption.
Clergyman Increase Mather later continued denunciation of any Christmas celebration, describing it as a time men spent “in Reveling, Dicing, Carding, Masking, and in all Licentious Liberty ... by Mad Mirth, by long Eating, by hard Drinking, by Lewd Gambling, by rude Reveling...” [10]
Other customs, percolating through Europe, came to their full calamitous fruition in the new world. The Christmas misrule became a time when the economic underclasses - peasants, servants, young apprentices - inverted the social pyramid. This process ranged from the more staid custom of the better-off presenting gifts or tips to those who worked for or under them, to the activities of street Wassailers - often youthful bands which roved the streets - entering houses unannounced, accosting the well-dressed on streets or in business establishments, and demanding cakes and ale or other rewards. Lubricated by a steady supply of alcohol from private homes and liquor shops, the Wassailers often performed street pantomimes and sang ditties which at times had what Nissenbaum terms “an aggressive edge - often an explicit threat - conserning the unpleasant consequences to follow if the beggars’ demands were not met...” [11]
The upper classes looked upon such behavior critically, but grudgingly tolerated it as a necessary price to pay in insuring their stability and status. The inversion rituals and misrule of Christmas was likely a cathartic safety valve in a society with limited upward social mobility, and grinding poverty for the mass of the population.
The festive celebration of Christmas and the attendant rituals of misrule survived despite legal prohibition. In England, the Cromwellian regime banned any overt Christmas frivolities. Riots ensued in several cities, and the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 reversed the ban. In America, the Puritan agenda confined the celebration of Christmas; in 1659, the Massachusetts Bay Colony enacted a law which levied a penalty for anyone “found observing any such day as Christmas or the like, either by forbearing of labor, feasting, or any other way.” Government and religious leaders justified such measures, citing “prevention of disorders.”
Such legislation was widely resisted, and became a historical artifact with subsequent events such as the American Revolution and the process of disestablishing the churches. The open celebration of Christmas thrived, not so much as a time of religious meditation and observance but more as an opportunity for theatrical release, indulgence, and misrule. Some did mark the time with religious rites and “decently feasting with their friends and relatives.” [12] Many, though, chose to celebrate Christmas by “reveling in profusion, and paying their sincere devotion to merry Bacchus.” One newspaper noted the contrast between a reverential service within a church and “the temples dedicated to the service of merriment, dissipation and folly (which) were much crouded (sic.)…” [13]
The ritual of misrule reached its height with the formation of “callithumpian bands,” impromptu congregations of noisy revelers. [14] Some callithumpian groups evolved into more formal assemblages, such as The Boston Anticks, groups of liquor-lubricated plebeians who performed their acts of unfocused rowdiness on the nearest street corner.
The whole callithumpian activity, and the wider phenomenon of “organized misrule” - roving bands of loud, intoxicated youths or groups of drunken revelers who often invaded the homes of nascent bourgeoisie at all hours of the day and night (demanding an audience for their theatrics, and payment often in the form of “cakes and ale”) during the Christmas season offended the sensibilities of Clement Moore and other urban patricians. Moore had watched the gradual incursion of New York City into the grounds of the huge estate he had inherited upon his mother’s death. Known as Chelsea, it extended from what is now Nineteenth Street to Twenty Fourth Street and from Eighth to Tenth Avenue. [15] The urban metropolis was in its formative stages, and with it came waves of immigrants - including many Irish Catholics. [16]
The relentless march of urbanism, the rise of commerce, the influx of new ethnic groups and the weakening of a white and mostly Protestant (Episcopalian) post-revolutionary aristocracy troubled Moore. [17] His targets became “cartmen, carpenters, masons, pavers, and all their host of attendant laborers” - in other words, the working and commercial-entrepreneurial classes whose power resided in the creation of wealth rather than ruling the land. For Moore, nowhere was the down-scale disorder and threat to patrician influence more evident than in these insurgent groups, and the attendant population of young men, laborers - often unemployed for long stretches of time - who congregated on the street corners, cursed, drank and engaged in the others behaviors of misrule typified by the callithumpian bands.
Creating a Domestic, Commercial Christmas
Not all Christians gravitated to the extreme position of the Puritans or other sects who had seen in the December 25 holiday the hand of a popish conspiracy. Many felt that the holiday should be celebrated with reverence and solemnity. The tinny echoes of callithumpian disorder, street pantomimes and other rituals of misrule were said to blaspheme and trivialize the sacredness of the season.
Even prior to Clement Moore’s verse, though, a new vision of a different sort of Christmas celebration was being described by the American writer Washington Irving. Best known for works such as The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle, Irving (1783-1859) was a member of the Knickerbockers, a social and literary society which heavily represented the older and more established wealth of the city. While the name is generally identified with the Dutch, the Knickerbockers were primarily of British descent. “They were part of the wealthy old aristocracy of the city,” says Nissenbaum, “politically conservative, reactionary, even opposed to democracy (which they associated with mob rule) and fearful of both the working class and the new bourgeoisie.” Their patrician authority was “under siege.” And despite the British roots and Episcopalian religious sentiments, the Knickerbockers were fascinated with the agenda of forging a Dutch identity in at least their corner of the new world.
Irving’s two-volume Knickerbocker’s History of New York described a near-utopian Dutch colony, one of filial piety and serenity. Its inhabitants are composed, restrained, linked to the customs of their “revered ancestors” and moving with “characteristic slowness and circumspection” There was none of the disorder and chaos of the later New York with its waves of immigrants, pangs of industrialization and urbanism, and callithumpian gangs. Nor were there the annoyances and intrusions by the begging poor into residences and neighborhoods of more prosperous urban dwellers. In short, the Knickerbocker-Irving literary vision was the antithesis of the social reality of the time.
While Moore popularized St. Nicholas, it was John Pintard, the brother-in-law to Irving, who really introduced the legendary figure to influential society. At a dinner of the New York Historical Society which he had helped found, Pintard displayed a poster depicting St. Nicholas with two children against a backdrop of stockings hung from a fireplace. [18]
Pintard’s promotion of “old” Christmas as a tonic to the disorder and “ritual of misrule” which up to that point had so characterized the holiday was motivated by beliefs quite different from those of Moore and his Knickerbocker associates. Like Moore, he was a Federalist, but he was more tied to the Enlightenment spirit and vision of the country than the vanishing breed of staid aristocrats and new world patricians. He was a mover and shaker in the establishment of Wall Street, and part of a “generation who believed that all branches of knowledge could be mastered by the public-spirited citizen for the benefit of the republic...” [19]
For one thing, Pintard believed that the poverty and disorder of Christmas stemmed from the “culture of Protestantism.” Unlike the Catholic church which had amalgamated pagan rituals and beliefs into its system, the Protestant Reformation had throttled the sorts of rites and seasonal celebrations at which “mechanics and laborers” too could vent their pent-up energies. [20] America needed an inclusive ritual that embraced a wide representation of the populace, not just one class.
Pintard was also an economic realist, though, motivated by more than simple idealism. He represented an insurgent class of shop keepers, manufacturers, and financiers tied to a growing commercial culture. Christmas could be marketed, especially since it involved the giving and receiving of gifts. That required rudimentary practices - everything from advertising the idea of exchanging (bought) gifts, and creating a safe environment in the cities where people could shop - which would become popular and widely accepted. The disorder of Christmas, with its gangs of alcohol-lubricated young men, street ruffians, and obnoxious callithumpians was at odds with the new vision of the holiday that Pintard and others sought to establish.
Moore and the Knickerbockers saw a different use for the holiday, namely, the creation of a “traditional” Christmas as a cultural hedge against the incursions of commercialism and urbanism. They were in common alliance, though, with Pintard and others who for their reasons wished the streets swept clear of the callithumpians and the Lords of Misrule, and replaced by a steady stream of holiday shoppers.
Changing Views of Children
Fueled by the efforts of men like Pintard and Moore, the “old” Christmas - very much a social invention - promoted a new yet “traditional” view of the holiday. It was one built around sobriety, domesticity, family, and most important of all, a new view of children. In the early nineteenth century, children were perceived as willful and rebellious; in their natural state, they would develop into the street urchins, ruffians, and louts so feared by the patricians and even the nascent middle and commercial class. The idealized Christmas suggested a different view of childhood, though, where youngsters were judged by Santa (their parents and other adults) and rewarded. More importantly, these youngsters were well-behaved, and they gave their parents presents as tokens of familial respect.
As Nissenbaum observes, “Child-rearing practices were linked to theological beliefs.” The decision to beat children as a way of inculcating discipline, or lavish attention on them depended on how parents perceived the question of original sin. Puritans and other traditions saw will as something which was to be broken early in the child-rearing process. [21] A differing view was embraced by many nineteenth-century Unitarians, who believed that will should be channeled and directed, not broken. Training through the constant agency of parental supervision, rather than stern punitive measures, would result in happy, productive and balanced children. Unitarians and other liberals soon latched on to the theories of the Swiss educational reformer Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746-1827), whose educational philosophy emphasized developing the powers of observation and reasoning.
This was a profound shift in the popular view of childhood; it placed children at the center of a new domestic universe. If balanced, it presumably led to the formation of the types of individual anticipated years later in David Reisman’s The Lonely Crowd, where he discussed the “autonomous personality.” Abused, it would result in youngsters (and later adults) who were selfish, narcissistic and uncaring. Either way, Unitarians and others enamored of this new system of child-rearing walked a thin line.
So, a number of different forces and ideas converged to stimulate and affirm the creation of a new view of Christmas. One was the fear engendered in the patrician class of the misrule of callithumpians, vagrants, and others - a disconcerting brew of resentment and ill-bred behavior that could get out of hand at any time. Another was the desire of a growing class of merchants to create the sort of safe ambiance where families could seize upon Christmas as a time for buying, giving. and receiving presents. Domesticity was required for this, as was a new view of children - one that emphasized them as willing givers and deserving receivers of presents. Both merchants and advocates for workers also suggested a holiday period where people, after laboring for most of the year, could relax and consume and enjoy the product of that labor.
Accessorizing Christmas & Legal Recognition
Once this process had begun, new trappings of Christmas were grafted onto the observance, and old rituals were pressed into service as well.
The Christmas tree became a popular symbol of the holiday. There is dispute over exactly when and how this custom arose in America, but the practice of using an evergreen reaffirmed the belief in “life unconquered.” Trees had become icons in the winter solstice celebrations of Egyptians, Babylonians, and Romans. [22] Like so much of the holiday, it was pagan in its origins. Jeremiah 10:2-4 warns:
Thus saith the Lord, Learn not the ways of the heathen... For the customs of the people are vain; for one cutteth a tree out of the forest, the work of the hands of the workman, with the axe. They deck it with silver and gold; they fasten it with nails and with hammers, that it move not...
During the 1830s, the use of a tree as a focal point for the domestic Christmas ritual was becoming widespread. Godey’s Magazine (also known as Godey’s Ladies Magazine) published an article with illustrations in 1850 showing the British royal family of Prince Albert - a German - celebrating around a Christmas tree. Other depictions of Christmas usually showed “a typical family” at home, with children opening presents, or presenting gifts to each other and their elders.
Government sanction soon followed the development of this new Christmas ritual. Alabama [23] was the first state to declare December 25 a legal holiday, doing so in 1836. The period between 1850 and 1861 saw fifteen states follow suit, including Ohio, Wisconsin, Illinois and Minnesota. In some cases, the declaration of an official Christmas holiday also established other days such as July 4.
Perhaps the greatest incentive for declaring an official holiday, at least on the surface, was the notion that the laboring classes - often stressed by the demands of producing goods to be sold at the Christmas season - required leisure time. The call for a legal Christmas holiday, then, generated supported from diverse communities including both labor and capital. The economic and commercial aspect of Christmas finally overpowered any theological consideration of its origins and role.
One element remains in fleshing out this picture of the metamorphosis of Christmas in America. Beginning in 1830, and continuing to the present time, there has been a current of disapproval of the “commercialization” and material aspects of the holiday. Many religious groups originally focused their wrath on the impromptu, festive, and often disorderly celebrations of the Christmas season. Like Increase Mather, they denounced the excessive consumption of alcohol, the “dicing and gaming,” rude behavior and licentious liaisons which seemed to grow out of that time of misrule and social inversion. But replacing the callithumpian celebrations with one which emphasized domesticity, indulgence of children, and a safe and socially-approved commercialism was, for many, equally sacrilegious. The advertising of products to give as presents and the expectation of children threaten to make consumerism a bigger problem than the chaos and disorder of Christmas past.
The period around 1830 also marks the time when commercial advertising of the Christmas season became widespread. Broadsides and newspaper spreads tantalized consumers with ideas of gifts to be both given and received. Santa Claus was quickly pressed into the service of commercial capitalism as well. Just a few decades after appearing as Pintard’s St. Nicholas, he became a bell-ringing impersonator on street corners and in department stores. Many wondered if the season had not gotten out of hand, and if all of the excitement - even within the confines of domesticity - was an appropriate way to celebrate the birth of the Christian messiah.
Christmas in the Post-Modernist Age
The discontent and ambiguity over Christmas resonates to this day. During the early 1960s, community and religious groups launched a campaign to “Put Christ Back In Xmas” and emphasize the spiritual dimension of this time of year. There is, indeed, the perception that preparations for Christmas seem to commence earlier with each year, with department stores and other commercial outlets pushing back the clock on the inevitable Christmas and pre-holiday sales. [24] The commercialization of the season is nothing new, [25] however, and the ringing of cash registers in December is not some recent phenomenon that replaced a more sacred, religious ritual. As we have seen, the celebration of Christmas in America was originally shunned by the first Europeans who ventured onto the continent. It coexisted first with the plebeian rituals of misrule, and was re-invented very much as a rationale for pecuniary gain and business prosperity.
Given this Janusarian view of Christmas as both sacred commemoration of Christianity and mundane imperative of the marketplace, how have the courts viewed the celebration of this day and the status of its symbols? Here, too, we encounter confusion and ambiguity, the mirroring of a tension between the sacred and the profane (material), specifically regarding the matters of Christmas as a government holiday, and the status of religion-based displays in the public square.
Government recognition of Christmas changed with time, beginning with the early bans on any celebration of the holiday in early Colonial America, to its embrace as an official holiday. Individual states led the way, and it is significant that by and large the more industrialized northern states were quicker than their southern counterparts in giving this special status to December 25. Nissenbaum notes that one reason for this may be that the South constituted “an agricultural region that was still governed ... by a season rhythm that may have made it unnecessary to dictate a holiday by force of law.” [26] The more industrialized states, including Massachusetts, may have reflected more of a mercantile impulse to institute a domestic, family-oriented Christmas - a somewhat transparent, but effective cover for commercial activity. In addition, the activities of nativist groups including the Know-Nothings resonated with a number of agendas having to do with a “new” Christmas. These including emphasis on public sobriety (a ban on alcohol sales for the day), and time off and limits on work hours for the laboring classes. In 1855, the Massachusetts legislature banned commercial transactions on July 4 and December 25; the following year, Christmas, Independence Day and Washington’s Birthday were declared days off for public workers.
At the federal level, the constitutionality of Christmas as a government holiday has never been taken up by the US Supreme Court, although it was officially declared on 26 June 1870. Cincinnati attorney Richard Ganulin has challenged that status, and filed suit in US District Court in 1998, alleging that giving Christmas such a special significance violated the separation of church and state, and clearly favored one religion (Christianity) over all others. Indeed, December 25 is one of ten official federal holidays, the only one vaguely related to a religious celebration. [27]
While the federalized Christmas holiday is usually defended as having a clear secular purpose - time off for workers, or simple recognition of a holiday that grew out of cultural habit rather than ecclesiastical decree - the question of religious displays on government property is more complex. It does provide insight, though, into the Janus-like character of Christmas.
Two Supreme Court cases govern current legal thinking. Lynch v Donnely (1984) examined the practice by the city of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, of owning and erecting a seasonal Christmas display in the downtown area. The display included a nativity scene, along with a Santa’s house, animal figures, a Christmas tree, and colored lights. The plaintiffs argued that the presence of the crèche constituted official support for the Christian religion, thus violating the establish-ment clause.
In a 5-4 decision, though, the court rejected the claim that the purpose of the display was to convey an official government endorsement of Christianity.
Viewing the display within the context of the city’s celebration of a national public holiday, the majority concluded that the crèche served the legitimate secular purpose of symbolically depicting the historical origins of the Christmas holiday... [28]
Writing for the majority in Lynch, Chief Justice Warren E. Burger also noted, “Our [American] history is replete with official references to the value and invocation of Divine guidance in deliberations and pronouncements of the Founding Fathers and contemporary leaders,” going on to cite the decreeing of Thanksgiving and Christmas as official holidays. Ironically, the majority did not seek to dispute or minimize the religious significance of Christmas. Referring to Thanksgiving, the court opinion noted: “That holiday has not lost its theme of expressing thanks for Divine aid any more than has Christmas lost its religious significance...”
The decision in Allegheny County v ACLU 492 U.S. 573 (1989) suggested that the high court was not willing, though, to go beyond the loose limits that it had established in Lynch. Again, in close votes (5-3, 6-3), justices refused to approve a Christmas display that focused predominantly, by its placement and context, on religious symbols. Here, though, the court began opening the door for effectively “secularizing” nativity displays, or other religious and quasi-religious artifacts like the Jewish menorah, by including more secular holiday items - plastic Santas, candy canes, lights, and trees.
As a result, subsequent court decisions have wrestled with a multitude of seemingly extraneous factors when examining the constitutionality of religious displays in the public square. The “centrality” of a Christian nativity scene may be attenuated by moving the manger and juxtaposing it with secular holiday icons such as Santa. The religious elements of Christmas, then, even in the eyes of the law, blur into a cultural confusion of other symbols, customs, metaphors, and practices. Competing religions also enter the fray; those Christians who do observe December 25 as a sacred event must coexist during the holiday season with the presence of Jewish menorahs, and possibly even other religious displays - pagan, Wiccan - which could embrace this time of year as a natural holiday. Many blacks now celebrate Kwanza as a time emphasizing community, friendship, and family ties. There are also those Christians determined to “put Christ back in Christmas.” Many of the organizations and denominations which favor this agenda direct their energies elsewhere for the time being. [29]
There was probably never a time when Christmas was celebrated with the trappings and rituals we associate with it today, yet free of its commercial overtones. The family Christmas which emphasizes domesticity and children was very much a social invention. In the new world, Christmas began as an underground affair, shunned and legally prohibited by the Puritans. The holiday was a time of misrule, reminiscent perhaps of the ancient tradition of carnival - hence the frolicking, merry-making and drunken ecstasy which so characterized it. It was also distinctly plebeian, especially with its vaguely threatening inversion rituals. In England, and later America, this took the form of roving bands of holiday revelers, callithumpians, who made noisy and disorderly incursions into the neighborhoods, homes and social spheres of aristocrats and patricians. For a day, at least, they stood atop the social hierarchy - or so it appeared.
These rituals of misrule, though, were part of an America that was becoming increasingly industrialized and commercialized. Patricians like the Knickerbockers and Clement Moore sought to invent a mythical past by creating a holiday which was safe, orderly, contemplative and less plebeian. This “old” Christmas was really quite new, even artificial. It emphasized domesticity and helped to transform the role of children from rebellious and suspect dependents to objects of concern, obedience training, and nourishment. Again, religious views of the human personality played out in this process.
Misrule also offended the emergent bourgeois sensibility which sought to commercialize the Christmas season through the buying, giving, and receiving of gifts. Hand-crafted items were not sufficient; mass production, beginning with cards and books, unleashed a tidal wave of commodities appropriate to this new season. The process of shopping had to be made safe and friendly, especially for women venturing outside the walls of the home. Callithumpian bands or groups of rowdy young men accosting people for money or cakes and ale had to be cleared from the streets. Controlled revelry and the buying of holiday products replaced the spontaneous misrule and inversion rituals of decades past.
Christmas also came to be championed as a time where workers could enjoy and consume the product of their efforts, not just produce more items. At the state and federal level, those advocating a Christmas holiday often cited the heightened tempo of industrial capitalism and commercial enterprise as reasons for mandating a period of relaxation. It was a stark departure from the first Christmas as lived by those disembarking the Mayflower more than a century before, who considered any special recognition of December 25 as blasphemous.
What had begun in the 1820s an effort to reform the Christmas period culminated in 1870 with the declaration of December 25 as an official federal holiday. Few have bothered since then to examine the question of whether this constituted a government endorsement of religious belief, and a specific religion - Christianity. Outside of Richard Ganulin v United States of America, [30] the “battle over Christmas” has centered mostly on the status of religious displays in the public square. Again, the courts have shunned any strict interpretation of the establishment clause, preferring to see these sacred holiday symbols as part of a larger historical pastiche with a secular purpose. The trappings of Christmas kitsch - plastic Santas and reindeer, enormous trees and lights - have managed to keep Baby Jesus in many city parks, and in front of numerous public buildings. But as with the celebration of Christmas itself, Jesus is only part of the show. The holiday echoes with commercial vitalism - some would say outright greed and commodity fetish. Early rituals of misrule are safely subsumed or saved for the revelry of New Year’s Eve.
NOTES AND REFERENCES
[1] “Church attendance soars during holiday season,” Pittsburg (Kansas) Morning Sun, December 25, 1998.
[2] Some 41% “owned up to finding Christmas and Hanukkah stressful, rating it right up there with asking the boss for a raise.” MSNBC/Prevention poll, Nov. 21-25, 1998.
[3] Stephen Nissenbaum, The Battle For Christmas, Knopf, N.Y., 1966.
[4] Ibid., p. 67.
[5] Contrary to the modern telling of this story, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” was not part of Moore’s Christmas eve tale, but came about as a commercial invention. In 1939, a copywriter named Robert L. May devised a ditty about a recalcitrant reindeer for the Montgomery Ward department stores. See Stanley Frankel, “The Story Behind Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” Good Housekeeping, Dec. 1989.
[6] See R. J. Condon, Our Pagan Christmas, American Atheist Press, Texas, 1989.
[7] See E. J. Krupp, In Search of Ancient Astronomies, Doubleday, N.Y., 1978; and Echoes of the Ancient Skies: The Astronomy of Lost Civilizations, Harper & Row, N.Y., 1983.
[8] Nissenbaum, op. cit. p. 6.
[9] George F. Willison, Saints and Strangers, Reynall & Hitchcock, N.Y., 1945, p. 158.
[10] Nissenbaum, op. cit., p. 7.
[11] Ibid., p.10.
[12] Ibid. p. 50.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Nissenbaum suggests that the term may derive from the Greek calli - ‘beautiful.’ The word is absent from the Oxford English Dictionary, although thump enters the vocabulary in the sixteenth century, as “To strike or beat heavily, as with the fist, a club, or any blunt instrument producing a dull, somewhat hard sound…”
[15] It provided the name for that district of New York City today, Chelsea.
[16] Nissenbaum notes that Moore even published a pamphlet against the urban growth of New York City, a development he blamed on “destructive and ruthless hands” who “did not respect the rights of property.” He charged that city politics was controlled by “mechanics and persons whose influence is principally among those classes of the community to whom it is indifferent what the eventual result of their industry may be to society.”
[17] Within decades, nearly half of Manhattan’s population was foreign-born.
[18] “In fact, it was John Pintard who brought St. Nicholas to America in an effort to make that figure both the icon of the New York Historical Society and the patron saint of New York...” Nissenbaum, op. cit., p. 57.
[19] Howard M. Wachtel, “Alexander Hamilton and the Origins of Wall Street,” (Internet off-print, 1996, American University, Department of Economics)
[20] See Nissenbaum, op. cit., p. 55. “In fact, John Pintard himself was drawn almost compulsively to certain ceremonies, rituals and traditional practices - for himself and his family, for New York City, and even for the United States as a nation.”
[21] This process would only hold the line against the defect of original sin, though. Puritan ideology taught that the sin of Adam was so much a part of the human species that no act of will, no matter how strenuous, could by itself result in salvation. That was possible only “through a free gift of divine, arbitrary, and irresistible grace.” Nissenbaum, op. cit., p. 202.
[22] See Condon, op. cit., p. 18.
[23] Despite Alabama leading the nation, four of the five states which had not declared an official Christmas holiday by 1865 happened to be slave holding states, namely North Carolina, South Carolina, Missouri, and Mississippi. Nissenbaum notes that Texas and Florida waited until 1879 and 1881 respectively to put their imprimatur on the legalization of the Christmas holiday. See Nissenbaum, op. cit., pp. 308-309.
[24] One also must endure the unsavory ritual of “Christmas in July” sales, where merchants - perhaps displaying poor form and bad taste - attempt to co-opt the imagery of Santa to invigorate the balance sheet during the typical summer retail slump.
[25] In America, the bookselling trade was among the first to capitalize on the newly-invented commercial Christmas by advertising and selling a line of season “Gift Books” and other items. See Nissenbaum, op. cit., pp. 144-146.
[26] Ibid., p. 309.
[27] The others include New Year’s Day, Independence Day, Veterans Day, Martin Luther King’s birthday, Washington’s birthday, memorial Day, Labor Day, Columbus Day, and Thanksgiving.
[28] See Lynch v Donnely, 465 U.S. 668 (1984).
[29] The nation’s millions of evangelical, fundamentalist, and Pentecostal Christians should be fodder for such a social campaign, but they direct their energies elsewhere - the effort to ban abortion, pass a school prayer amendment, and other planks in the religious right social agenda. That could change, but at the present time there is little evidence of a renewed “Put Christ Back in Christmas” effort.
[30] United States District Court, Southern District of Ohio, Western Division: Civil No. C-1-98-557.