At the beginning of the nineteenth century the celebration of Christmas in the English-speaking world was in a state of disrepute. Observing the festival had been banned by Puritan governments in Scotland, England, and the New England colonies and even when it became legal again to mark the holiday, Christmas had become associated with the lower orders of society. Stripped of its religious significance by Calvinist Protestants and Enlightenment freethinkers, Christmas had come to be associated with drunkenness and disorder – noise in the streets, overindulgence in food and drink, and riotous behaviour directed against the middle class. In the cities of Great Britain and the United States, the Twelve Days were marked by vandalism, interruption of church services, attacks on religious and racial minorities, and urban gangs bent on mayhem. Groups of men parading about, banging on pot lids, blowing horns, and making rude noises produced what was termed “Callithumpian music”. It was the season for brazen demands by the riffraff for money from prosperous citizens either in public or in home invasions.
Even those who loved Christmas thought that the holiday had fallen on hard times. The American Episcopalian bishop Philander Chase complained to his wife that “the devil has stolen from us … Christmas, the day of our spiritual redemption and converted it into a day of worldly festivity, shooting and swearing.” The Industrial Revolution had drawn folk away from the countryside with its many quaint seasonal customs and forced them into a lifestyle in which there were no slack periods of agricultural inactivity that allowed for merrymaking. Old notions of Christmas as the season for charity seem to have been replaced by modern Malthusian ideas about denying aid to the needy lest it encourage idleness and overpopulation of useless mouths.
But just when Christmas seemed on its last legs, the first decades of the 1800s saw the festival almost miraculously revived by writers, poets, musicians, and thinkers in America and England.
In the United States we must thank, among others, the writer Washington Irving and members of the New-York Historical Society. It was these well-off gentlemen who looked to the history of Dutch settlement in New York and found the figure of Sinterklaas (Saint Nicholas) who, they said, was a magical Christmas gift-bringer who brought treats for good little girls and boys and switches to paddle the bottoms of bad children. Two poets, the anonymous author of “A Children’s Friend” (1821) and Clement Clark Moore who wrote “Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas”, better known as “’Twas the Night Before Christmas” (1822), popularized a fur-clad figure who arrived on Christmas Eve in a reindeer-pulled sleigh full of gifts. This invention of Santa Claus helped to remake the end of December into a time that focussed on the home and children and rescued it from outdoor, alcohol-fuelled disorder. Families (and merchants) were quick in spreading this new mythology and by mid-century America was exporting Santa to the rest of the world.
Meanwhile in England, Charles Dickens was refashioning ideas about the sacred season. In his A Christmas Carol of 1843, Dickens linked old notions of the holiday as a time of midwinter jollity and community to the idea of the festival as the feast of family togetherness and forgiveness. Secondly, Dickens accelerated the moral impact by reviving Christmas’s connection to charity, especially to the deserving poor, and to religion. His little book was wildly popular and joined a number of other contemporary impulses in English society at the time that helped to make Christmas respectable again.
One of these trends was the work of musicologists who were bent on rediscovering the lost Christmas music of the English countryside, wonderful carols and hymns that the city folk had forgotten about. Men such as William Sandys, Sir John Stainer, and John Mason Neale are responsible for preserving such beloved works as “The First Nowell,” “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen,” “I Saw Three Ships Come Sailing In,” “Joseph Was an Old Man”, “Good King Wenceslas,” and “Good Christian Men Rejoice.”
The resurrection of Christmas also owes much to the example of Queen Victoria and the British royal family as celebrators of a family- centered (as opposed to a traditionally riotous) Christmas. The German background of her husband, Prince Albert, contributed greatly: his importation of the Christmas tree, their adoption of turkey as the seasonal meal, and their emphasis on domestic togetherness proved an enormously attractive model for middle-class folk who now sought to emulate their monarch.
In the twenty-first century we still observe Christmas in ways that Washington Irving, the New-York Historical Society, Charles Dickens, Queen Victoria would find familiar and approve of.