Christmas

by Judith Flanders

  Even those who were not moralistic saw December more generally as a ‘month … [where] ‘twill rain such a store of sack’, as one almanac promised in 1682; in 1714, another defined it as the month of

  Strong-Beer Stout Syder and a good fire

  Are things this season doth require.

  Now some with feasts do crown the day,

  Whilst others loose their coyn in play.

  But there was far more to the New World than Puritan New England. Even there, increased immigration had diluted Puritan dominance. In New York, Pennsylvania and down into the Carolinas, Georgia and Virginia, German and Swiss immigrants arrived with their own traditions; Scottish and Irish immigrants flooded into Pennsylvania, New Jersey and then south and west over the course of the eighteenth century; more immigrants from England attended the mainstream Church of England. Even a small number of new voices could potentially have a significant impact: early eighteenth-century New Amsterdam had a population of about 500 people, who between them spoke eighteen languages.

  Christmas therefore became a day that was hard to ignore, no matter how much an individual might desire to. The diary of Elizabeth Drinker, a Philadelphia Quaker, covers nearly half a century, and traces a pattern of gradual acceptance that was not unusual. Quakers did not celebrate the holiday, and in the 1760s and 1770s Drinker generally stayed at home on the 25th. In the 1780s she comments on the holiday activities of others. By 1793 she is still hesitant, calling it ‘Christmass, so call’d’, but the following year the distancing mechanism is absent, and it has just become ‘Christmass day’. By 1797 she had visitors on Christmas Eve; four years later there was a family dinner, and visitors afterwards – the festival had quietly crept up on her.

  In 1773 Philip Fithian, a northern, Presbyterian theological student, was employed as a tutor to the children of Landon Carter, the Virginia planter who had himself ignored the day. Presbyterians also shunned Christmas, and one can virtually see Fithian’s eyebrows rising as he recorded the pastimes and games of Carter’s friends, neighbours and even his own household. By the week before Christmas, he was shocked to find, no one spoke of anything but ‘the Balls, the Fox-hunts, the fine entertainments’. School broke up with a ceremony of ‘barring out’ the schoolmaster. This was a children’s form of topsy-turvy in which they locked the schoolroom door – barred it – against their teacher, forcing him to declare a holiday. The custom had been recorded in England in the sixteenth century, frequently in connection with the election of boy bishops. In 1702, in Williamsburg, Virginia, some boys barricaded themselves inside their schoolroom, but when their schoolmaster and two servants attempted to enter, the boys responded with pistol-fire. This was the first recorded episode of the tradition in the colonies, and the violence may have been the consequence of the participants not being sure of the rules.*

  Fithian was also surprised by the guns fired all around the neighbourhood on Christmas Eve, and again on Christmas morning. Firing rounds was traditional in many cultures. In New France, it had been assimilated into religious services: in Quebec, midnight mass was accompanied by cannon-fire. In most places, however, shooting was not formalized, but simply a matter of young men letting off steam. In several parts of Switzerland horns, bells and pistols abounded in the Samichlaus processions on St Nicholas’s Day; in one canton, each 5 December saw boys running through their villages with bells and guns, to chase the saint. In Sweden Christmas was ‘shot in’ – men crept up on their neighbours’ houses and fired off guns before racing away unseen and unidentified. Many Swiss, Scandinavian and German-speaking immigrants brought these customs from their native lands, and shooting at Christmas was found in Texas, in the Midwest and in Pennsylvania, as well as across the South.

  In England, too, young men in ‘antic attire’ danced ‘with swords or spears’ for money, with ‘gratitude expressed by firing a gun’. But shooting was rare there. Instead, across the British Isles, as well as dancing, increasingly through the eighteenth century, seasonal plays were performed. These were quite different from the mystery plays of the Middle Ages. Although the plays varied, some elements were consistent everywhere: a hero, often St George, fights a soldier, a devil or a ‘Saracen’; one dies, to be miraculously resurrected by a doctor. Secondary characters included a fool, the doctor’s assistant, a man carrying a club or a pan, often named Beelzebub, a sweeper and a money-collector. There was also a sword dance, the dancers accompanied by a fool and a Betty, a man dressed as a woman, which might also end in death and resurrection.* The characters were outsiders – devils, soldiers, quack doctors – and as with the Roman Saturnalia, the plays were a way for the working people to demonstrate, in one single, carefully discrete period of time, disrespect for their social superiors. And, like the boy bishops, the plays simulated social upheaval while leaving the status quo unharmed.

  The most important thing about any of these popular traditions was that all the participants knew the rules. When the rules were understood, it was mumming, or wassailing; otherwise, when one side failed to recognize what was occurring, it could look very much like breaking and entering, or robbery with menaces. In the colonies, the numerous immigrant backgrounds of the residents meant that mutual incomprehension was not unknown. In Salem in 1679, four young men ‘invaded’ a house, singing and demanding perry, or pear cider, which suggests they might have come from the west of England, known for both its perry-production and mumming. The householder presumably originated elsewhere, for he forced them out, despite their protests that ‘it was Christmas Day … and they came to be merry and to drink perry’. They showed their displeasure at their Christmas revels being cut short by shouting and throwing ‘stones, bones, and other things’, damaging the daub of the house, knocking down a fence, breaking into an outside cellar and stealing ‘five or six pecks of apples’.

  A hundred years later, even when mumming was recognized as such, it was looked down upon by the colonies’ upper classes, at least in the urban North. The politician Samuel Breck remembered how his wealthy Boston family in the 1770s and early 1780s suffered annually through a visit from ‘the lowest blackguards … disguised in filthy clothes’, who performed what from his description was clearly a version of the St George hero-play, although just as clearly Breck had never heard of it.

  Other immigrant groups practised their own house-to-house traditions. Where districts were sparsely populated, and by immigrants from the same background, this licensed rowdyism was a way of keeping a physically distant population connected. From at least the seventeenth century among the Norwegians of the Upper Midwest, groups of masked, costumed men, with at least one dressed as the Julebukk, wrapped in a goat’s skin, and with a horned-head mask, went Julebukking, as in their home country. In southern Pennsylvania, and parts of Virginia, similar Christmas forays were known as belsnickling by the descendants of German immigrants celebrating the arrival of Pelz Nichol, who had become the Belsnickle in Pennsylvania Dutch. Belsnicklers blackened their faces and wore furs or animal skins as they went door-to-door, bringing nuts and cakes for good children, and whips for the bad.*

  Where the social structure was oppressive, however, misrule might no longer be a safety valve, but a challenge to the ruling caste, and the American South was, therefore, the site of some of the most intense Christmas events. This might be outright revolt. Possibly because of seasonal licence, as well as the cycle of the agricultural year, slave rebellions often clustered around the holidays. One historian has found records, from the mid-seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century, regarding approximately seventy slave uprisings, both major insurrections and smaller, sporadic outbreaks that might be confined to a single plantation. Of those that can be accurately dated, one in three took place, or was planned to take place, in December.

  For those who did not revolt, the season instead brought a permitted form of topsy-turvy, ritualized mumming known as John Canoe, Kuner or Kooner, or Junkanoo, which many historians have suggested can be understood as a ve
hicle of covert social protest that those above could read as mere entertainment, allowing the powerless a single day in the year to speak. The most elaborate form of John Canoeing took place in Jamaica, which had by far the largest colonial slave population. Each region had its own variation, but the formula was for a procession led by John Canoe himself, dressed in a highly decorated mask and carrying a wooden sword, sometimes accompanied by his ‘wife’, a man in women’s clothes, and attended by musicians. They went house to house, dancing and playing in return for cash or alcohol. In the eighteenth century the masks were said to be African; later they could be more fanciful: one engraving shows a John Canoe wearing a model ship on his head, complete with puppet sailors, slaves and slavers. Unusually for this kind of street performance, there were also roles for women. In Jamaica in the eighteenth century, and later in New York, women performed in their own parades, with a Queen at their head.

  * * *

  Consistent across all these forms of Christmas ritual was the gift of food, drink or money. While new year’s gifts offered up to the sovereign had vanished, in agricultural areas there was still an expectation that tenants would send their landlords gifts, usually of food from their farms. In 1706 Lady Wentworth complained to her son, the future Earl of Strafford, of her anger ‘with al your sneeking tenents; all others send fowls, braun, and severel things, but yours send nothing.’ These gifts of obligation to social superiors would disappear in the coming century, even as gifts from social superiors to their inferiors were becoming enshrined as quasi-obligatory, be they gifts from householder to shop assistant, master to servant, slave-owner to slave: today we call them tips.

  As Pepys had done in the seventeenth century, a late eighteenth-century Norfolk vicar handed out vails to an astonishing number of recipients: to his tailor’s boy, the laundress’ maid, the barber’s man, a billiard marker, the servants of his friends and servants in inns, a carpenter, ‘a woman from the village who came to ask for charity’, his coal-merchant, the coal-merchant’s servant and his son, the butcher’s man, the mason’s boy, the chimney sweep and his son, the blacksmith’s man, the maltster’s man. Some groups’ solicitations were formalized. In the British Isles, bellmen called the hour, and often the weather, through the city streets at night (‘Past one of the clock, and a cold, frosty, windy morning,’ cried a bellman outside Pepys’ window in 1660). At Christmas, they had broadsides printed, which headings like ‘A Copy of Verses Humbly Presented to all my Worthy Masters and Mistresses in the Parish of _____ by _____ Bellman and Cryer’, followed by verses which might summarize news events from the year, and end with a list of winter cheer for the local householders, and a sign-off: ‘when you’re safe in bed … Think of your Bellman, cold, and void of ease, / Without one comfort, save his hope to please’. The same custom was followed in New England from at least the 1730s by watchmen and news-carriers. There, until the nineteenth century, they were called New Year’s notices, and so the custom flourished even in places where Christmas was not habitually observed.

  In the American South, slaves and servants used a different method to solicit tips, presented as though it were a game. Whoever shouted ‘Christmas gift!’ first on Christmas morning won, with the loser obliged to hand over a small gift, or cash. The game was in name only, the slaves always ‘winning’. In addition, more routine disbursements were virtually obligatory. A tutor like Philip Fithian was unlikely to have much money, yet during the holidays he paid out to ‘the Boy who makes my Fire, [and] blacks my shoes’, ‘the Fellow who makes the Fire in our School Room’, the slave who did his laundry, the woman who made his bed, the barber who shaved and dressed him, the groom who looked after his horse, the boy who waited on him at meals and another who ‘calls me to Supper’. And then, in turn, Fithian was tipped by his employer.

  It is to be expected that those on the giving, rather than the receiving, end of the transaction found it onerous. Both Christmas tipping, and complaining about tipping, had been constants for more than a hundred years, and would continue to be so for another hundred. On 26 December 1710 the satirist Jonathan Swift groaned, ‘By the Lord Harry, I shall be undone … with Christmas boxes.’* Others did not merely complain, but attempted to eradicate the custom. In 1767 a group of London bakers placed advertisements stating that they would not be giving Christmas boxes to their customers’ servants. Others quickly joined in, and by the end of the century, there were dozens of this type of advertisement placed by guilds and tradesmen, both forbidding the solicitation of tips by their employees, and announcing their own non-payment.

  The bakers’ rationale for their refusal was that, if the ‘lower ranks’ ‘wallow[ed] in wealth during the Holydays’, as they put it, they would spend it all on alcohol. The association of drinking and Christmas was not confined to aggrieved employers but was typically made by the upper classes when considering those lower down the social scale, both in Britain and in the colonies. One Boston newspaper in 1735 took for granted that men would ‘keep drunk all the Christmas Holy-days’, given the opportunity. British newspapers agreed. To celebrate Christmas, said one newspaper, was to celebrate ‘Rioting and Drunkenness’. This was probably not far from reality. In 1772 Joseph Banks, the naturalist on Captain Cook’s first voyage, recorded that the Endeavour’s crew kept Christmas ‘in the old fashioned way’: ‘all hands were as Drunk as our forefathers usd to be upon the like occasion’.

  Back home, many matched Cook’s sailors for seasonal drunkenness. In Aberdeen at Christmas 1784, ‘A riotous assemblage … stimulated by drink and madness’ actually attacked a Roman Catholic church. A few years later, a London court heard from a man who could not say where he had been when his wife was murdered, because ‘he had not the smallest recollection of what passed on Christmas Day, he was so much in liquor’. More commonplace was the man brought up on a drunk and disorderly charge in 1831. In his defence, he begged, ‘as it was Christmas time, the magistrates would forgive him’. The magistrate was unimpressed: ‘every person brought before him during the last three days had made nearly a similar defence, and appeared to think they had a right to commit all manner of excesses with impunity at this festive season’. (Verdict: guilty as charged.)

  Even the militantly sober accepted that holiday drinking was inevitable. A fur-trader in northern Ontario, near Hudson Bay, himself ‘Spent the Day in Religious Exercise’, although ‘to prevent hard Drinking’ by the other trappers, he read them ‘a dissuasive from the Sin of Drunkenness [and then] gave them a Little Liquor’. In other words, he read his men a lecture on the evils of alcohol, and followed it up by serving – alcohol.

  As one verse of ‘Yankee Doodle’ has it,

  Christmas is a-coming Boys,

  We’ll go to Mother Chase’s,

  And there we’ll get a sugar dram

  Sweetened with Melasses.

  Alcohol was simply part of Christmas. Yet there were nevertheless changing expectations about how, and where, it should be consumed. In 1754 the London Magazine defined Christmas as a festival ‘held sacred by good eating and drinking’. The magazine’s readers were not drunken sailors, nor young men on the razzle, but gentry and the comfortable middle classes.

  They, or so they believed, should be in charge of the holiday. In great part this was owing to the upheavals of the seventeenth century, and the subsequent outpourings of pamphlets worried that now, in the eighteenth, Christmas was no longer what it had once been. The new nostalgia drew comparisons to the good old days, which could turn reality on its head in startling ways.

  For example, as we have seen, gambling had long been a pastime of the Christmas holiday. From Henry VIII’s reign until 1772, a ritual enabled courtiers to gamble with the monarch himself. On Twelfth Night, it was formally pronounced, ‘His Majesty is out’, and the king became a mere player, on equal terms with his courtiers. When the evening was concluded, the announcement, ‘His Majesty is at home’, returned him to pre-eminence. Thousands of pounds, the value of a large country estat
e, were frequently wagered. But in the eighteenth century, nostalgic reimaginings of these festive indulgences turned wild profligacy into tame domesticity: in 1785 a play praised the days ‘When Bess was England’s Queen’, and cards were played only at Christmas, and then ‘for little and their games were few’.

  In a similar fashion, what actually took place in people’s houses was very different from what was said to have taken place. The Spectator magazine, for its prosperous middle-class readers, created the fictional Sir Roger de Coverley, a country squire of the sort that ought to have existed, who at Christmas kept open house ‘after the laudable custom of his ancestors’, ensuring that the poor had meat, mince pies and beer throughout the twelve days.*

  When contrasted with the Christmas customs of two real men in the same century, however, there is little, if anything, that can be recognized. Horace Walpole was of the upper class, the son of Sir Robert Walpole, the prime minister of Britain. He was himself a politician, but is today more famous for popularizing the new Gothic style, both at Strawberry Hill, his house in south-west London, and in his novel The Castle of Otranto. Of greater importance to social historians are his letters, which fill forty-eight large volumes. And there his passing references to the holiday over four decades show upper-class views of the day to be strongly at odds with Sir Roger de Coverley’s report. In 1743 Walpole described some friends as being ‘a thousand times more agreeable than Christmas, which, since I have done loving mince pies, I have never admired at all’. Five years later, he reiterated his distaste: ‘I have stuck no laurel and holly in my windows, I eat no turkey … I have no tenants to invite…’ And in 1788 he mockingly expressed admiration for those who adhered to traditions such as ‘making one’s neighbours and all their servants drunk’.