American Christmas
Editor's Note
This story appears annually at tomklingenstein.com on December 25, in commemoration of 250 years — and counting — of American independence.
On the mezzanine floor of the Parker House Hotel in Boston hangs a mirror, still today. In the late fall of 1867, this mirror hung in the apartment at the hotel occupied by the great English novelist Charles Dickens, and he spent hours studying himself in it as he practiced for what would become immensely popular readings of his classic story, A Christmas Carol, which had been circulating in America for twenty-five years.
Dickens gave his first public performance, with great success, on December 2, 1867 at the Tremont Temple in Boston. This was the same temple in which Frederick Douglass and thousands of others had waited for word of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation just a few years earlier, in the midst of Civil War.
After his Boston readings, Dickens traveled for months as far north as Portland, Maine, inland to Buffalo, New York, south to Washington, D.C., and always back to Boston, performing A Christmas Carol and other stories before enthusiastic audiences. Since that time, Americans have seen Dickens’s story adapted in every medium invention can imagine, from the stage to silent films, radio, talking feature films, and animations. There is a Mickey Mouse version, a Fred Flintstone version, and a Muppet version. There have been television musicals, HBO specials, and video games accessible in cloud-based gaming libraries.
As was noted in the New York Times back in the 1860s, “Dickens brings the old Christmas into the present out of bygone centuries and remote manor houses, into the living rooms of the very poor of today,” and Dickens’s Christmas became an inseparable part of American Christmas.
Every year, the elderly miser Ebenezer Scrooge is transformed once again by a visit on Christmas Eve, from the ghost of his former business partner Jacob Marley and the spirits of Christmases Past, Present, and Yet to Come. Every year, Scrooge puts behind him his “Bah! Humbug!” response to Christmas and becomes as good a keeper of Christmas as any man alive and as good a man as could be found in good old London, or any other good old city, town, or borough in the good old world. And every year, Tiny Tim ends the story again: “God bless us, Every One.”
At the time of the American founding, celebrations of Christmas in America varied widely, from Puritans and Quakers who shunned or ignored it, to other Protestant sects and Catholics who honored it in their own Christian ways, to those who spent the day in “riot and dissipation,” like an ancient Roman Saturnalia. But E Pluribus Unum — out of many one — was the American motto on the Great Seal, and over the generations, out of many ways of celebrating or ignoring Christmas, came a recognizably American way.
Washington Irving, renowned author of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle,” contributed to this with Christmas sketches he published in 1819 describing the charms of old English Christmases, when all around is joyful, and sacred solemnity is blended with mirth and conviviality; where pious worship is joined by revelry, feasting, spiced wine, dancing, caroling, mistletoe, presents, decorations, Yule logs, and a “general call to happiness.”
Irving became a special advocate for St. Nicholas and helped found the Saint Nicholas Society in New York. Independently of his efforts, in 1823, the anonymously published poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” created rhymes and images that became part of American Christmas ever after:
’Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there;
[Then] what to my wondering eyes did appear,
But a miniature sleigh and eight tiny rein-deer,
With a little old driver so lively and quick,
I knew in a moment he must be St. Nick.
As years went by, cities grew, and commerce flourished, the private celebrations of American Christmas became more public. City, town, and village centers were decorated for the season. Department stores like Macy’s and Woolworth found increasing numbers of customers shopping for Christmas gifts. They put on elaborate Christmas displays with lights, decorations, mechanical toys, and live Santas. By 1856, President Franklin Pierce put up the first Christmas tree in the White House. In 1870, President Ulysses S. Grant signed legislation declaring Christmas a federal holiday. In 1923, President Coolidge lit the first “National Christmas Tree” on the Ellipse.
Hollywood, of course, joined in the festivities. As America was just getting started in World War II, Bing Crosby, co-starring with Fred Astaire in Holiday Inn, sang Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas,” which went on to become — and remains — the most popular record ever made. The war was no sooner over, than Frank Capra gave us the Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life, about George Bailey who in his own way needs as much Christmas redemption as Scrooge. Miracle on 34th Street came out the next year—another Christmas classic. Soon Gene Autry was recording Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer and selling two million copies during its first Christmas season. Later generations would get Home Alone and Die Hard.
And from Dickens to Diehard, running through and making possible all these charming and uplifting stories that have become part of American Christmas is the original Christmas story, which most Americans from the earliest days would have read in the King James Version, even as Linus did in the 1965 animated classic A Charlie Brown Christmas:
And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger. And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.
Merry Christmas, America!