Christmas

by Judith Flanders

  As covering things became routine, so covering presents, never previously thought of, must have begun to appear natural. Other changes were also afoot, to make wrapping a present desirable. When only parents gave children presents, the items could be categorized as goods of either luxury or necessity. On the one hand, ‘rocking horses, omnibuses, superior dolls elegantly dressed … magic lanterns, [marionettes], magical dancers, conjuring tricks, dinner and tea sets … archery bows and arrows’; on the other, socks, shirts, boots. Who would want to cover up the glory of the first with brown or white paper, and why would anyone bother with the latter? Similarly, when children began to give their parents or siblings presents, the gifts were handmade, and tended to be things to cover things: a spectacle case for father, an embroidered folder to put needles in for mother, a blotting-paper case for a brother going off to school. There was no point in covering up a thing intended to be a cover. Soon, however, the industrial revolution, and the reduced prices that followed the arrival of mass-produced goods, meant that children, too, could purchase gifts for their parents and siblings. These new gifts fit into none of the previous categories: they were not luxury goods (children rarely had enough money); they were not goods of utility (parents bought children new boots, not the reverse); nor were they now home-made. Yet purchasing a present felt cold when compared to the love expressed by the time and commitment that went into a handmade gift. Wrapping a gift, therefore, was a way of decontaminating it, both of marking that it had been removed from the world of the shop, and of associating care and the personal with otherwise mass-produced item.* Gift-wrapping made this embroidery hoop, indistinguishable from the others in a shop or catalogue, different from that embroidery hoop, purchased in the same shop or ordered from the same catalogue. Love and care were imprinted into commercial products via the selection of paper, the writing out of a label.

  This personalization was made simpler as large factories replaced small manufacturers: to ensure safe shipping across the country, or across the globe, each item was encased in its own ‘pasteboard box’, something that had been unnecessary when manufacturing was local. Then, in the later part of the century, department stores encouraged manufacturers to use boxes for all goods, as they made it possible for dozens of irregularly shaped items to be stacked high in displays. The development of the parcel post, too, boosted the popularity of boxes: a reduced-price parcel service was instituted in Britain in 1883, the same year that Montgomery Ward’s mail-order catalogue in the USA expanded to offer 10,000 items, eagerly purchased by the many thousands of customers living days away from any shops at all.

  Advancing technology also contributed to the wrapping fashion. Brilliantly coloured printed papers became more easily available as chromolithography, a method of printing in colour patented in the 1830s, became less expensive in the later decades of the century. Patterned, printed or decorated paper thus became economically viable as a disposable covering for a gift, rather than an expensive luxury to be cherished in its own right.

  It also, therefore, became big business. In the USA the Dennison Manufacturing Company of Maine had made boxes for jewellers since the 1840s. In the 1870s the company imported tissue paper for retailers, and soon sold it directly to consumers via Sears, Roebuck’s catalogue, later adding instruction booklets explaining how to gift-wrap parcels. Then they moved on to produce labels, ribbons and boxes printed with holly and mistletoe and, in 1908, what may have been the earliest seasonal gift wrap, also printed with holly. This could be bought individually, or in a ‘Handy Box’, which also contained glue, string and labels printed with holly leaves – everything a household needed to wrap presents.

  Wrapping then developed in two directions, one commercial, one domestic. During World War I, a postcard salesman in Kansas City was no longer able to get hold of Dennison’s ‘gift dressings’ to sell in his shop. He made do by buying up elegant French envelopes and carefully removing their printed linings to sell by the sheet. These were so popular that the next year he bundled them up in packs, and, after that, began to manufacture his own paper, labels and ribbons printed with motifs that had become standard on Christmas cards in the previous decades: holly, mistletoe, candles, stars, snow scenes, or with topical images, marketed with booklets that assured customers ‘Your Packages Reflect Your Personality’. With the Depression, demand only increased: wrapping made inexpensive gifts appear more lavish. Technology made home-wrapping prettier, as new coloured and curled ribbons came on the market; then in 1932 it became easier, too, with the arrival of self-adhesive Scotch and Sellotape.

  Christmas wrapping was also changing retailing. In the 1890s many retailers had taken over the nascent wrapping business: frazzled shoppers could have their gifts neatly wrapped when they bought them. A shop assistant recalled a more fundamental shift around the turn of the century. His small shop had sold out of its seasonal ranges, so the staff packaged up non-Christmas lines in boxes printed with holly, holly wrapping paper and holly tags, turning everyday items into gifts and creating a new market where one had previously not existed. Manufacturers were close behind, and soon a raft of household and personal goods, with no connection at all to the holiday, were sold in boxes printed with holly motifs and the printed outline of a label, with ‘To —’ and ‘From —’ on it, transforming into gifts ordinary items of use: kitchen goods like knives, products for babies, clothes, especially small items like underwear, stockings and collar studs, or other purchases that were expensive and personal – a dip-pen and an inkwell were for household use and rarely advertised seasonally, while fountain-pens, stalwarts of Christmas advertisements, were personal possessions.

  And, as the presents hanging from, or under, the tree, grew more decorated, so too did the tree.

  Chapter Eight

  While modernity, and commercialism, hit Christmas hard, they didn’t replace old traditions; they simply created new ways to interpret, and enjoy, them.

  In Pennsylvania, the holiday’s decorative focus remained on the Putz, which reached its apogee in the nineteenth century. Many houses had at least a small Putz: branches laid on a table, on which holy family figurines were posed. More complex Putzes incorporated subsidiary characters and scenes – angels, shepherds, the Flight into Egypt – or more elaborate scenery – ‘lakes, caves, rivulets, waterfalls, crags, mountains, hills, fields, villages with lighted up churches, castles … houses and shelters’ which, as the century progressed, could be mechanically operated. These Putzes could be enormous, taking over an entire room on platforms low enough that small children could view them and with the walls lined with evergreen branches, and sometimes hung with candles, fruit and biscuits, like a tree. Much of any Putz was home-made, handcrafted or foraged; the figurines might be carved at home, or collected over generations; the platform covered with rocks and tree stumps (placed upside down, their roots made excellent forests), and moss that had been collected in the autumn and kept cool and watered for months in the cellar.

  Children were barred from the room while the Putz was laid out, before the great reveal on Christmas Eve, followed by open-house visiting, as families wandered from house to house to see the Putzes, the children welcomed with cookies and sweets. Many Putzes had a narrator, who explained the story being depicted. (In the twentieth century, where Putzes survived, recorded music or radio programmes were added to the same end.) While historians of the Putz state firmly that the nativity story was central, their accompanying descriptions indicate a more elastic approach: one Putz showed the surrounding neighbourhood as it would have been ‘some three centuries ago’, complete with ‘a group of Indians … mining jasper’; another included a Mennonite family walking to church beside a local canal and industrial plant; yet another, in the 1870s, a mountain and lakeside scene, came complete with waterfall, lake, frogs and fishes, a barnyard with horses and cattle drinking from ‘the tiniest running pump’, that sat beside a working threshing machine and grist-mill. One Putz replicated an entire village and its in
habitants in paper – houses, churches, barns, shops, farm animals, dogs, horse and carts, and all the villagers, as well as a train going through a mountain tunnel.

  Putzes were also used to raise money for good causes, as Christmas trees were. These trees had by now become commercial products: virtually all German and British households that had trees had purchased them; in America the proportion of households that obtained their tree outdoors was initially higher, but the custom was prevalent in urban environments by the 1840s.

  After the trees had been bought, they then acted as a commodity to display other commodities. Particularly in the earlier parts of the nineteenth century, when presents were hung from their branches and decorations were edible, these items were removed from display on the tree’s branches, just as items were removed from a shop cabinet and handed to the customers. Trees in the USA were often placed by a window overlooking the street, unconsciously echoing shop-window displays. Thus, when tree ornaments became available to purchase, it was a natural progression.

  From the beginning, Germany was the leader in the manufacture of these ornaments. By the early eighteenth century the tin-mines of the Erzgebirge mountains, in Saxony, in south-eastern Germany, were almost exhausted. To eke out a living, the miners created handmade gifts for Christmas markets. These carved-wood nutcrackers, toys and decorations made in regional style soon became representative of German Christmas style more generally, along with the regional hand-blown glass ornaments (glassblowing had been a local industry long before the mines began operating in the fourteenth century).

  Different places had different specialities. In the early days, Nuremberg tinsmiths turned out punched decorative pieces, some with glass inserts in flower or geometric shapes, designed to reflect a tree’s candles. These were followed by ‘icicles’, narrow strips of silver foil to hang over branches, and by wire ornaments in the shape of birds, flowers and stars. From Sebnitz, near Dresden, came metallic pieces covered in cotton wool, die-stamped in the shape of sleighs, nativity cradles, or rural motifs like cottages and wells with descending buckets, or, later, miniature Zeppelins, and dogs listening to gramophones. Mannheim produced celluloid (and highly flammable) miniature toys and dolls. In Thuringia, stuffed angels, or fairies, were given chromolithographed printed faces; the region also specialized in crepe-paper or celluloid cottages, icicles, and fruit- and vegetable-shaped hangings.

  Angels for the top of the tree were first produced in Nuremberg, then in Sonneberg, both developing from local doll-manufacturing businesses. These had wax or china heads and papier-mâché bodies covered by gold-coloured dresses. Other tree-toppers were more fanciful: birds of paradise, glockenspiels, gold, glass or brass flowers. Stars were popular, representing the star of Bethlehem. So was the treetop, or point, a series of glass balls of diminishing size, finished off with a spike. But the most common was the angel, soon secularized into a fairy. In 1850 Harriet Beecher Stowe’s mother made ‘a little doll like a fairy in white with gilt spangles & a gilt band around her head & a star on her forehead & a long gilt wand with a star on the end & gause [sic] wings spangled with gold’ for her tree.*

  This was home-made, but when exactly commercial ornaments arrived in the USA remains open to question. Illustrations before the 1860s tend to show trees decorated with home-made ornaments, but this may be because people thought this was the way a tree ought to look, and was not necessarily the way it did look. In 1860, a Pennsylvania newspaper praised a charity tree decorated with Matzebaum, animal-shaped biscuits, for what it called its ‘old-fashioned’ delights, which suggests that other trees had more modern decorations. A children’s book published shortly afterwards included a description of glass ornaments without explanation, the authors clearly assuming that their child readers knew them.

  Old-fashioned Christmases were what everyone was supposed to want, even as magazines promoted new decorations. By the end of the 1860s Harper’s Bazaar described manufactured tree decorations, including ‘globes, fruits, and flowers of coloured glass, [and] bright tin reflectors’, along with images of political figures, clowns, angels and more. In Germany books such as Hugo Elm’s 1878 Das goldene Weihnachtsbuch (The Golden Christmas Book) pronounced, in Martha Stewart fashion, on what types of ornaments were stylish (and contained advertisements for such ornaments in the back): ‘Essential’, it told the socially aspirant reader, was a mixture of the home-made – apples and nuts, gilded pinecones, marzipan – and the purchased – chocolate, blown-glass globes, and ornaments shaped like fruit, tinsel, artificial flowers, ribbons and a banner printed with ‘Glory to God in the Highest’ draped across the tree like a particularly jaunty sash.

  Among the purchased ornaments, glass globes, or Kugeln, were always the most common. Early on, these were hand-blown and hand-silvered; by the 1860s they were factory-manufactured, and available in a variety of colours and shapes. In 1880 the owner of a general store in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, was shown a line of German glass ornaments by an importer. Despite living and working in the heart of Christmas-tree country, he doubted their potential, and placed a small order only when guaranteed his money back if they didn’t sell. ‘With a great deal of indifference,’ he recalled, ‘I put them on my counters.’ Two days later, the story goes, they had already sold out. His much larger order the following year was still insufficient to meet demand, and by 1890, when Mr Woolworth had become the owner of a chain of thirteen shops, he went to directly to the source: to Lauscha, in Thuringia, where he ordered nearly a quarter of a million blown-glass ornaments.

  Lauscha continued to be the USA’s main supplier of all glass tree-ornaments until World War I put a stop to the trade, but after the war it quickly regained its position. No other glass-blowing areas could break the hold of that single town, and so others diversified. Czech glassblowers specialized in ropes of small glass beads: made in alternating shapes and colours, with cut edges, they flashed and sparkled in a tree’s candlelight, and had the added advantage that, unlike wax, paper and cotton ornaments, they didn’t burn.

  Fire was the great risk. For many, the Christmas tree’s raison d’être was the first magical view of the tree and its lit candles in single breathtaking Christmas Eve revelation. In daily life, candles and open hearths made fires more of a hazard than today we remember. Candle-lit trees increased that hazard greatly, as each candle was wired or tied to a drying tree branch, its weight altering and tilting as the candle burnt down and wax drippings piled up. A series of inventions and contrivances designed to hold each candle in place with greater stability appeared over the years, but a lit tree was never a safe tree. Many households lit their candles only once, on Christmas Eve, prudently keeping to hand water and a stick with a sponge on the end.

  In 1882 the Edison Illuminating Company built the world’s first electrical power station, lighting the 400 lamps of its eighty-two customers. Four months later a Christmas tree, unsurprisingly in the home of one of Edison’s employees, blazed out with eighty red, white and blue electric bulbs. For non-employees, however, electric lighting was too geographically circumscribed, and far too expensive, to be more than a gimmick. When it was used, it tended to be for some form of public event – in 1891 a tree with electric lights was put up in the children’s ward of a New York hospital and four years later the White House tree was lit by electricity. At the turn of the twentieth century, however, General Electric bought out the Edison Company, and soon an ‘outfit’, a string of ‘28 one-candle power miniature Edison lamps’, could be purchased for $12. Few could afford these (a low-end kitchen range in the Sears, Roebuck catalogue that year cost $4.85). Fewer still had houses wired for electricity. But, as the accompanying brochure pointed out, ‘Miniature incandescent lamps are perfectly adapted to Christmas tree lighting. The element of danger ever present with candles is entirely removed, as well as the inconvenience of grease, smoke, and dirt. The lamps are all lighted at once by the turning of a switch, will burn as long as desired without attention, and can be readily extingu
ished.’ The market was there, and in 1903 Austrian-manufactured strings of lights, with bulbs shaped like fruit, flowers and animals, or snowmen, or Santas, were battery-powered, and could be used in houses without electricity. By the beginning of World War I, prices had dropped to an expensive, but no longer astronomical, $1.75. Many insurance companies refused to extend policies to houses that had candle-lit trees, making the move from open flames to electric bulbs pragmatic as well as desirable. By 1912, when a tree was erected in Madison Square Park, its electric light was promoted as ‘typically modern and American’.

  This twenty-metre tree, with its 1,200 lights, was certainly both American and modern, far from the nineteenth-century domestic ideal. Germany and the USA had seen some trees in public indoor spaces – church halls, Sunday schools, orphanages, hospitals – but these were a way of extending the benefits of middle-class domesticity to those unfortunates who were not able to enjoy them otherwise. In Germany, trees were erected in hospitals and army bases during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, broadening familiarity with public trees. After German unification they became a symbol of the new nation, and also of the new industrial world, of the products of industry, of items of household consumption that had once been luxuries, and were now within the reach of more of the population.