Christmas Ape Goes to Summer Camp
I've had a couple of holiday cultural-history books for years, and this year I'm finally reading them. I read the Hallowe'en one at Hallowe'en-time and now I'm reading the Christmas one, historian Stephen Nissenbaum's The Battle for Christmas.
The first chapter makes the point that in the mid-2nd millenium A.D., Christmas was celebrated very publicly and very rowdily. It was a period of social inversion, in which people traded gender, age, and class roles. For the lower-class people it was a time of pleasure; for the upper-class people it seemed to be a time of patient endurance. In this connection it seemed to be much like Carnival, as also was Hallowe'en until not so many decades ago, and as today's New Year's Eve seems to be the only remaining holiday on which people do that. (As an aside, it seems to me that an argument could be made that all of the Memorial- and Labor- and Veterans-Day cookouts and sales that so exercise some people, are the consumer economy's version of this. I'm not going to develop that argument here, though.)
Anyway, the American Puritans disliked all this, hence their banning of Christmas altogether during the first two centuries of New England's colonization. As Christmas began creeping back into common practice around 1800, though, the upper classes were no longer willing to endure patiently the rowdy intrusions of the lower classes into their holiday, so the working class crowds that would have been rowdy but full of goodwill became more oppositional and aggressive.
This, it appears, was very much the context in which C. C. Moore wrote "A Visit from St. Nicholas" in New York in 1823. I have always thought of Moore as a stolid member of the Victorian bourgeoisie; but it seems that Moore was among the richest of the rich, and the Victorian era was still 15 years away when he wrote his poem. The poem's portrayal of a warm domestic holiday was more prescriptive than it was descriptive; that is, it described a Christmas as Moore thought it ought to be kept more than, and in reaction to, the way the working classes actually kept Christmas. Basically – and Nissenbaum took 80 pages to lay this all out, so what I've written is only a bare précis – the upper class was taking Christmas away from the working class, along with so much else.
That's as far as I've read. But it seems pretty clear, just as a matter of history, that the calm domestic Christmas so desired by Moore has, in fact, been wholeheartedly taken up by the middle- and working classes. And therein lies my newfound disquiet: with his poem, Moore, one of the ultra-rich bastards of his day, shoved a big Christmas bird in the face of the social classes of which I'd have been a part. Yet I have fond memories of the poem from the Christmasses of my childhood. One of my favorite Christmas "specials" is the Rankin/Bass adaptation, which has no sign whatsoever of any disaffected trashy people. I wish I knew of a way to enjoy the poem while also remembering its ungenerous origins. It's not that I feel guilty about enjoying it, but rather that I think it's a disservice, in these days of aggressive reactionary politics, to the working and middle classes to forget (now that I know) the historical context of this poem and, in fact, nearly all of the popular Christmas traditions that were recent social inventions with not-so-innocent economic and political motivations.
The first chapter makes the point that in the mid-2nd millenium A.D., Christmas was celebrated very publicly and very rowdily. It was a period of social inversion, in which people traded gender, age, and class roles. For the lower-class people it was a time of pleasure; for the upper-class people it seemed to be a time of patient endurance. In this connection it seemed to be much like Carnival, as also was Hallowe'en until not so many decades ago, and as today's New Year's Eve seems to be the only remaining holiday on which people do that. (As an aside, it seems to me that an argument could be made that all of the Memorial- and Labor- and Veterans-Day cookouts and sales that so exercise some people, are the consumer economy's version of this. I'm not going to develop that argument here, though.)
Anyway, the American Puritans disliked all this, hence their banning of Christmas altogether during the first two centuries of New England's colonization. As Christmas began creeping back into common practice around 1800, though, the upper classes were no longer willing to endure patiently the rowdy intrusions of the lower classes into their holiday, so the working class crowds that would have been rowdy but full of goodwill became more oppositional and aggressive.
This, it appears, was very much the context in which C. C. Moore wrote "A Visit from St. Nicholas" in New York in 1823. I have always thought of Moore as a stolid member of the Victorian bourgeoisie; but it seems that Moore was among the richest of the rich, and the Victorian era was still 15 years away when he wrote his poem. The poem's portrayal of a warm domestic holiday was more prescriptive than it was descriptive; that is, it described a Christmas as Moore thought it ought to be kept more than, and in reaction to, the way the working classes actually kept Christmas. Basically – and Nissenbaum took 80 pages to lay this all out, so what I've written is only a bare précis – the upper class was taking Christmas away from the working class, along with so much else.
That's as far as I've read. But it seems pretty clear, just as a matter of history, that the calm domestic Christmas so desired by Moore has, in fact, been wholeheartedly taken up by the middle- and working classes. And therein lies my newfound disquiet: with his poem, Moore, one of the ultra-rich bastards of his day, shoved a big Christmas bird in the face of the social classes of which I'd have been a part. Yet I have fond memories of the poem from the Christmasses of my childhood. One of my favorite Christmas "specials" is the Rankin/Bass adaptation, which has no sign whatsoever of any disaffected trashy people. I wish I knew of a way to enjoy the poem while also remembering its ungenerous origins. It's not that I feel guilty about enjoying it, but rather that I think it's a disservice, in these days of aggressive reactionary politics, to the working and middle classes to forget (now that I know) the historical context of this poem and, in fact, nearly all of the popular Christmas traditions that were recent social inventions with not-so-innocent economic and political motivations.
posted by Dr. Bubbles at 14:59
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