The Battle for Christmas

by Stephen Nissenbaum

  37. William Brattle, “An Ephemeris … for … 1682 (Cambridge, 1682). The verse actually concluded with a couplet that ridiculed those who believed its message.

  38. Titan Leeds, “The American Almanac for … 1714” (Boston 1714). This was a Boston reprint of a Philadelphia imprint.

  39. Samuel Clough, “The New-England Almanack” (Boston, 1702); Nathaniel Whittemore, “An Almanac” (Boston, 1719).

  40. Nathanael Ames, “An Astronomical Almanac for … 1749” (Boston, [1748]); George Wheten, “An Almanac for … 1754” (Boston, [1753]).

  41. Nathaniel Whittemore, “Almanac” (Boston, 1719). It is interesting that this admonition does not challenge the legitimacy of the ritual. By warning householders not to let their dependents “run too much abroad at Nights,” it seems only to be admonishing them not to stay out all night, or every night.

  42. Nathanael Ames, “An Almanac for … 1746” (Boston, 1746).

  43. Historians once believed that “Yankee Doodle” was the work of British soldiers who were satirizing New England rustic manners, but it now seems likely that its words were a local American product:—a kind of sophisticated rural self-parody. Evidence also suggests that the earliest of these verses date not from the era of the American Revolution but from a full generation earlier—from the early 1740s. The preeminent argument for the American origins of the verse is J. A. Leo Lemay, “The American Origins of ‘Yankee Doodle,’” William and Mary Quarterly, 33 (1976), 435–464. Lemay dates at least some of the verses to the 1740s (even though they were not actually published until the late 1760s and 1770s and later), using references to events that took place in King George’s War, especially the capture of Louisburg (on Cape Breton) in 1745 (ibid. 443–447).

  44. This verse—and several others cited below—comes from a version of “Yankee Doodle” called “The Lexington March,” published in London, probably in 1775 (the only copy is owned by the Huntington Library). For evidence that these verses were of American composition, see Lemay, “Yankee Doodle,” 436–438.

  45. For election day: “Lection time is now at hand, / We’re going to Uncle Chace’s, / There’l be some a drinking round / And some lapping lasses.” (Yankee Song Broadside, Essex Institute; quoted in Lemay, “Yankee Doodle,” 450. For cornhusking: “Yankee Song” (owned by Essex Institute), quoted ibid., 448. For a late-eighteenth-century rural New England diary that records the association of cornhuskings with “abandoned drinking and sexual liaisons,” see Ulrich, Midwife’s Tale, 146–147.

  46. This verse is from “The Lexington March” (Huntington Library copy). “Mother Chase’s” corresponds to “Uncle Chace’s” in the election verse quoted in the previous note. The verse quoted above continues with the following: “Punkin Pye is very good / And so is Apple Lantern; / Had you been whipp’d as oft as I, / You’d not have been so wanton.”

  47. Mather relegated to a footnote in the published text of this sermon (probably an indication that it was not part of the sermon as he originally delivered it in church) his demonstration that Jesus could not have been born in December.

  48. Mather, Grace Defended, 19.

  49. As early as 1706, Daniel Leeds warned in an almanac published in New York that “More health is gotten by observing diet / Than pleasure found in vain excess and Riot.” (Lines at Dec. 26–29; in Daniel Leeds, Leeds, 1760. The American Almanack [New York, 1706].) Twenty years later, in a Philadelphia almanac, his son Titan Leeds attacked both gambling and “surfeiting.” (Titan Leeds, The American Almanack for … 1726 [Philadelphia, (1705)].)

  50. Other New England almanacs, while not sounding the dietary urgency of Nathanael Ames, typically combined notes of moderation with those of mirth, as when the “Bickerstaffe” almanac for 1777 assured its readers that “to keep your stomach warm / A moderate glass can do no harm.” ([Ezra Gleason, Bickerstaffe’s Boston Almanack, for… 1777 [Boston, 1777].)

  51. As Eric Foner has pointed out, Franklin urged men like himself “to remember that ‘time is money,’ and condemned [the old] practice of observing the traditional pre-industrial ‘holiday’ of ‘Saint Monday’ and spending the day at the alehouse.” (Eric Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 35). Another self-made New Englander who urged temperance in his almanacs is Roger Sherman of Connecticut.

  52. Robert R. McCausland and Cynthia MacAlman McCausland, eds., The Diary of Martha Ballard 1785–1812 (Camden, Maine: Picton Press, 1992), 742 (1807); 828 (1810); 852 (1811).

  53. Ibid., 565. “Ephraim” and “Cyrus” were Martha Ballard’s still-unmarried sons; Patty Town was a grown-up granddaughter who was spending a few months at her grandmother’s in order to help with the housework (see entries from Oct. 15, 1801, to Feb. 8, 1802, ibid., 559–569 passim). Cyrus Ballard remained a bachelor all his life.

  54. Ibid., 320. For Dolly and Sally Cox, see Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale, 144–145, 220–221. Only a few months later Barnabas Lambard would marry Martha Ballard’s daughter Dollie.

  55. Ballard, Diary, 320 (Daniel Bolton); 217 (Mrs. Lithgow); 596 (“pumkin and apple pies” and clothes-mending); 624 (“puding and roast”).

  56. Ibid., 217 (1791); 770 (1808); 771 (“childn here”).

  57. Ibid., 714. A goose was clearly a special gift, and a seasonal one at that. According to the index to the published diary, there is only one record of a goose in the entire document; but the index is inadequate, failing to note either this New Year’s goose or a Thanks giving goose mentioned on page 621.

  58. Ibid., 743. For further examples, see entries for Dec. 24, 1808, Dec. 30, 1810, and Dec. 22, 1811.

  59. Ibid., 770.

  60. Ibid., 396. This is the first example I have found in the history of New England of a commercial Christmas present. But see Chapter 4, p. 133.

  61. Milton wrote this poem as a young man, in 1629, but he remained sufficiently proud of it to place it first in a later collection of his poetry.

  62. Increase Mather, manuscript diary, Dec. 19, 1664 (in Mather Family Papers, American Antiquarian Society, Diary Typescript: Box 3, Folder 1, 48–49). I have inferred the subject of Mather’s sermon from circumstantial evidence. Much of his reading the previous week (as recorded in his diary) had dealt historically and critically with Christmas. It included Rudolf Hospinian, De Festiorum (Tiguri, 1592), William Prynne, Histrio-Mastix (London, 1633), and two references I have not been able to trace: Stuckins’ [?] De Antiq. and Caudrey, De Christmass (the reading is recorded in the entries for Dec. 12–14, 1664). This episode is alluded to in Michael G. Hall, The Last American Puritan: The Life of Increase Mather, 1639–1723 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 66.

  63. J.B. [Joseph Browne], “An Almanac … for … 1669” (Cambridge, 1669); J.D. [John Danforth], “An Almanac … for … 1679” (Cambridge, 1679).

  64. Edward Holyoke, “An Almanac … for … 1713” (Boston, 1713: “Licensed by His Excellency the Governour”); Titan Leeds, “The American Almanac for … 1714” (Boston, 1714); Increase Gatchell, “The Young American Ephemera for … 1715” (Boston, 1715). The James Franklin almanacs are: Poor Robin, “The Rhode Island Almanac for … 1728 (Newport, 1728) and “The Rhode Island Almanac for … 1729” (Newport, 1729). In his Boston newspaper, the New England Courant, Franklin had featured a front-page poem in defense of Christmas in the issue of Dec. 17–24, 1722.

  65. Nathanael Ames, “An Almanac for … 1760” (Boston, 1759). The ads are in the Boston Post-Boy, Dec. 3, 1759 and the Boston News-Letter, Dec. 6, 1759.

  66. Roger Sherman, An Astronomical Diary … for … 1758 (New Haven, 1758), 1.

  67. Purcell set many of Tate’s poems to music, including what may be his greatest vocal solo, “The Blessed Virgin’s Expostulation.” Nicholas Brady wrote the libretto to Purcell’s 1692 “Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day.”

  68. Nicholas Brady and Nahum Tate, A New Version of the Psalms of David, Fitted to the Tunes Used in the Churches (Boston, 1720). The printing history of this collec
tion can be traced most easily through Clifford K. Shipton and James E. Mooney, National Index of American Imprints Through 1800: The Short-Title Evans (2 vols., Worcester: American Antiquarian Society, 1969). On Dec. 24, 1722, James Franklin printed two other Christmas hymns in his Boston newspaper, the New England Courant.

  69. Isaac Watts, Hymns and Spiritual Songs (Boston, 1720). One of these Nativity hymns was placed third in this lengthy collection (It opens: “Behold, the grace appears, /The promise is fulfilled; / Mary the wondrous virgin bears, / And Jesus is the child.” It also reports that the “promis’d infant” is “born to day”). The second hymn, from Horae Lyricae [Lyric Poems] (Boston, 1748), begins: “Shepards rejoice, lift up your eyes.”

  70. Joseph T. Buckingham, Personal Memoirs and Recollections of Editorial Life (2 vols., Boston, 1852), 1, 19; quoted in Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 37. The folklorist Peter Benes has estimated that by 1780 almost half of the New England churches were singing the Watts version; another 25 percent were using Tate and Brady; and most of the remaining churches were singing from the old Bay Psalm Book. (Peter Benes, “Psalmody in Coastal Massachusetts and the Connecticut River Valley,” in The Bay and the River, 1600–1900 (Annual proceedings of the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, vol. 6 [Boston: Boston University, 1982], 117–131; esp. 125.) Like the Anglicans Brady and Tate, the great English hymnist and religious poet Isaac Watts (1674–1748), though a steadfast Congregationalist, designed his verses to evoke powerful emotions rather than to offer plain and strictly faithful translations of the original biblical texts.

  71. William Knapp, “An Hymn on the Nativity,” in Thomas Walter, The Grounds and Rules of Musick Explained (Boston, [1760]). The other songs were William Tans’ur, “An Anthem for Christmas Day,” in [Daniel Bayley,] The Royal Melody Complete (Boston, 1761); “An Hymn for Christmas Day,” in Daniel Bayley, A New and Complete Introduction to the Grounds and Rules of Musick (Newburyport, Mass., 1764); William Knapp, “An Anthem for Christmas Day;” anon., “A Christmas Hymn;” and Joseph Stephenson, “O Zion that Bringest,” all in Joseph Flagg, ed., Sixteen Anthems (Boston, 1766); Stephenson, “An Anthem, Out of the Second Chapter of Luke;” Stephenson, “Hark, Hark;” “Boston, A New Hymn for Christmas Day;” “Great Milton” (“Joy to the World”); and Stephenson, “An Anthem Out of the Fortieth Chapter of Isaiah” (“O Zion that bringst glad tidings”), all in Daniel Bayley and A. Williams The American Harmony (2 parts, Boston, 1769).

  72. In chronological order of publication, these were: “An Hymn for Christmas or Charlston [sic]” and “Boston, for Christmas,” both published in The New-England Psalm-Singer (1770); “Boston” (same music as “Boston, for Christmas,” but with a different text), “Judea,” and “Bethlehem” (all in The Singing-Master’s Assistant) [1778]; “Emmanuel for Christmas” (in The Psalm-Singer’s Amusement [1781]); “Shiloh, for Christmas” (in The Suffolk Harmony [1786]); and “An Anthem for Christmas” (in The Continental Harmony [1794]). In addition, Billings may have been asked in 1782 to compose an elaborate Christmas hymn (also on a Watts text, but for soloist, chorus and organ) for Trinity Episcopal Church in Boston. (See David P. McKay and Richard Crawford, William Billings of Boston: Eighteenth-Century Composer [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975], 132–133. A discussion of Billings’s Christmas songs can be found ibid., 141–146.)

  73. Isaiah Thomas, Worcester Collection of Sacred Harmony (Worcester, 1786), 188–194; Daniel Read, “A Christmas Anthem,” The Columbian Harmonist No. III (New Haven, 1785), 9–13. Technically, the “Hallelujah Chorus” is not a Christmas song, and Messiah itself was not written or initially performed as a Christmas oratorio. In 1795, Thomas would publish, as a separate imprint, a “Christmas Anthem,” with music by Isaac Lane—to a text by Isaac Watts. (See Isaac Lane, “Christmas Anthem” [Worcester, 1785]).

  74. F. B. Dexter, ed., The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles (3 vols., New York, 1901), II, 103).

  75. Ibid., II, 315.

  76. The Yale community seems to have been a center of Christmas activity in the 1780s. In 1786 the Yale College Chapel was the site of a performance of a large-scale Christmas cantata, “An Ode for Christmas,” composed specially for the occasion and subsequently published in a New Haven musical magazine. This “Ode” was sung by three separate four-part choirs (each representing one of the shepherds) and an additional three-part choir (in the role of the angel Gabriel). The published version of this elaborate piece indicated that it had received “universal applause.” American Musical Magazine (New Haven, 1787), vol. 1, 27–30; microfilm in American Periodicals Series I: Reel 6.

  77. Francis G. Walett, ed., The Diary of Ebenezer Parkman 1703–1782: First Part, 1719–1755 (Worcester, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society, 1974), 160 (1747), 195 (1755).

  78. Manuscript diary of David Hall, in pre-Revolutionary Massachusetts Diaries, Massachusetts Historical Society: Microfilm 5:1. (Entries are missing for many of the years in the 1750s.) Hall composed extended Christmas meditations in 1763, 1768, and 1769. He is not to be confused with the historian David D. Hall.

  79. John Birge manuscript Daybook (Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association Library), p. 62. This document was unearthed by Carrie Giard, an undergraduate student at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. (Birge’s final comment—“I cannot see why it was much better than Burglary”—implies that other people did not think of such Christmas intrusions as burglary, and supports the idea that this kind of seasonal misrule operated just at the boundaries of acceptable behavior.)

  80. [Joseph Green,] “Entertainment for a Winter’s Evening: Being a Full and True Account of a very strange and wonderful Sight seen in Boston on the twenty-seventh of December at Noon-Day” (Boston, 1750), 5–6 (“diverting Christmas tale;” “‘tis love … house of God”), 11 (“eating”). For another modern account of this event, see Steven Bullock’s Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Order, 1730–1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). The Masons celebrated the name day of two saints named John; the other was St. John the Baptist, whose name day happened to fall on June 24. In effect, the Masons were celebrating both the winter and the summer solstice. Capt. Francis Goelet recorded three visits to the Freemasons’ Boston lodge, at Stone’s Tavern, all in October 1750. See New England Historical and Genealogical Register, 24 (1870), 53.

  81. E. P. Thompson, “Patrician Society, Plebeian Culture,” in Journal of Social History, vol. 7 (1974), 382–405.

  82. Green, “Entertainment,” 12.

  83. “The News-Boy’s Christmas and New Year’s verses” (Broadside, Boston, 1770). The Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Post-Boy for Dec. 23, 1771, printed a devotional poem, “An Hymn on Christmas Day.”

  84. W. W. Newell, “Christmas Maskings in Boston,” in Journal of American FolkLore 9 (1896), 178.

  85. H. E. Scudder, ed., Recollections of Samuel Breck, with Passages from His Note-Books (1771–1862) (Philadelphia, 1877), 37. Breck was raised as an upper-class Bostonian. From 1780 to 1792 (when he moved to Philadelphia), his family lived in a “remarkably fine” house at the corner of Winter and Common (now Tremont) Streets, with an acre of land. The house was sold for $8,000 in 1792. (Ibid., 37–38.) This was presumably where Breck saw the Anticks.

  86. The [Boston] Mercury, Dec. 20, 1793. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word antic originally meant “a grotesque gesture, posture, or trick.” It was commonly used to refer to “a grotesque pageant or theatrical representation …; hence, a grotesque or motley company.”

  87. The [Boston] Mercury, Dec. 24, 1793, and the Columbian Centinel [Boston], Dec. 25, 1793; The Diary of William Bentley, pastor of the East Church, Salem (4 vols., Salem: The Essex Institute, 19–5–14), II, 78. The Anticks were not the only perpetrators of Christmas violence in Boston in 1793. On Christmas Eve another mob disrupted religious services in the local Roman Catholic church. (Columbian Centinel [Boston], Dec. 25, 1793.)

  88. Massachusetts Centi
nel, Dec. 23 and 26, 1789; see also Russell E. Miller, The Larger Hope: The First Century of the Universalist Church in America, 1770–1870 (Boston: Unitarian Universalist Association, 1979), 321.

  89. Earl Morse Wilbur, A History of Unitarianism (2 vols., Cambridge: Harvard University Press:, 1945–52), vol. 1, 400–414. The one marginal exception to the Unitarian front was the Old South Church, which “remained nominally orthodox by the narrowest margin, [although] its minister, Dr. Eckley, denied the supreme divinity of Christ” (ibid., 400).

  90. Boston Daily Advertiser, Dec. 24, 1817. See also Independent Chronicle, Dec. 24, 1817, and Boston Gazette, Dec. 25, 1817 and Dec. 29, 1817 (a confirmation that all of this actually happened).

  91. Quoted in Caroline Sloat, “Before There Was Christmas,” Old Sturbridge Visitor 24 (1984), 10.

  92. See Boston Intelligencer, Dec. 12, 19, and 26, 1818; Boston Gazette, Dec. 21 and 24, 1818; Boston Daily Advertiser, Dec. 22, 1818; The Idiot, Dec. 24, 1818; New England Galaxy and Masonic Magazine, Dec. 18 and 25, 1818.

  93. Boston Daily Advertiser, Dec. 22, 1818; New England Galaxy, Dec. 25, 1818 (this letter is signed “South End”).

  94. Notice in Massachusetts Spy [Worcester], Dec. 22, 1818. Bancroft had the sermon published as “The Doctrine of Immortality: A Christmas Sermon” (Worcester, 1819). Aaron Bancroft was an open Unitarian who had been preaching Christmas sermons each year since 1816. See “The Diary of Isaiah Thomas 1805–1828,” in Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society IX (1909), 337 (1816), 368 (1817), 412–413 (1818). The 1659 Massachusetts law was printed in the Boston Intelligencer and Evening Gazette, Jan. 2, 1819. For data on the open churches, see Boston Gazette, Dec. 24, 1818. The previous year a collection of Christmas hymn texts was printed in Boston (it may have been part of the same movement): G. Carseer, Hymns for the Nativity of Our Saviour (Boston, 1817).