One thing that irritates me every year around this time is having to listen to people complaining about how "Christmas has become all about shopping" when shopping and gift-giving is what made Christmas the major holiday that it's become. There was a reason that many religious people, including our own Puritans in New England, outlawed any kind of observation--it was a sham holiday (according to the Bible, Jesus couldn't have been born in December) laid clumsily over an ancient Roman one. Consumerism and the modern traditions of Christmas were invented at the same time in the early nineteenth century and owe their existence to one another. If there's a time of year when consumerism should come to the fore, it's Christmas.
(Much of the following information comes from Stephen Nissenbaum's The Battle for Christmas, which is a profound cultural history of the holiday and not related to the silly and shallow War on Christmas books.)
Have you ever wondered why images of “Old Christmas” are almost exclusively Victorian? Before the 1820’s, Christmas was a completely different holiday. The roots go back to the ancient Roman celebration of Saturnalia, a harvest holiday when Saturn was released, chaos reigned, the streets were full of bacchanalian revelry, and masters and servants would switch places for the duration. This served as a social gauge and was understandably popular with the servants.
Hundreds of years later, a monk placed the birth of Christ atop this pagan tradition in an attempt to smother it. Religious leaders were riled, asking what shepherds would be tending their flock by night in Syria in late December? When the Puritans came to New England, the holiday was outlawed in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The way the holiday was celebrated for centuries was with marauding members of the lower class knocking on the doors of the wealthy, caroling or wassailing until invited inside to partake of the best wine and food the house had to offer. (Think trick-or-treating.) In the rapidly growing city of New York, there was a move to alter this tradition.
The Knickerbockers, a wealthy social set with literary interests, which included Washington Irving (America’s first full-time writer and the man whose fabricated history of New York introduced the fictitious Knickerbocker family and the name “Gotham,” a man so respected that one bank printed his face on currency to attract investors and a developer named a street after him to lure residents to the newly laid-out Gramercy Park), decided to celebrate the holiday the way their Dutch forebears did. Of course, it was all phony. The Dutch did have a St. Nicholas Day in the beginning of December (or at least the Catholic Dutch back in Holland did), but the New Yorkers pulled in several disparate harvest traditions and invented others. A poem was crafted—A Visit from St. Nicholas—and first published anonymously in 1823 in the Troy Sentinel, a newspaper north of Albany.
Whether Clement Clarke Moore penned it or someone else as was recently claimed, it was a radical poem that cast Santa as a worker (he smokes a short pipe...everyone at the time knew that only workers smoked short pipes—they broke off the stems to fit them in their pockets while the wealthy left their pipes hanging on the tavern walls). In the poem, Santa (the worker) is someone who leaves gifts instead of guzzling your wine and is someone who comes down the chimney, allowing you to leave your front door firmly closed to the street. But the change that was most significant in the creation of this holiday was the idea that instead of servants switching places with their masters, the children switched places with their parents.
These writers, mainly in Greenwich Village and the area now known as Chelsea, played a vital role in turning this raucous street holiday based on class into a cozy domestic one centered around the family. And with this transformation comes the birth of consumerism (the first goods in the history of manufacturing to be given away by the purchaser were Christmas gift books); the cult of the child; and the countless traditions we now consider centuries old.
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