Everyone has their beloved Christmas memories and traditions. One of mine, from my days as a lad growing up in the 1960’s and 1970’s, is baking Christmas cookies with my Mom. The first major decision was which holiday cookie cutter to use. We always baked a sheet of the “same” cookies, no mixing and matching. What I mean is, several different types of cookies were eventually made; gingerbread men, Christmas trees, Santas and the like but only one design at a time. I don’t know if that was to conserve dough or to limit the dirty dishes or what, but that was our system growing up. After the cookies came out of the oven it was time to frost them, that was my favorite part, and I confess that not quite all of the frosting ended up on the cookies, although it didn’t go to waste. I’m sure you know what I mean.
While people must have baked Christmas goodies before 1796, that’s the first year we have documentation that Christmas cookies were referenced. It was in one of those “advice to homemaker” columns that still grace some newspapers, that the mention was made. There were recipes, along with suggested baking times, in the paper to help Americans celebrate the holiday season.
People didn’t always celebrate Christmas, not really. The early Church was focused on Christ’s resurrection, so nobody cared when he was born. The hoopla around Christmas and the birth of Christ only began when the Church began to coopt pagan practices in their attempt to woo pagans from their Earth religions (for example, the Druids, like Native Americans, believed everything in Nature had a spirit and was worthy of respect). So, Christ’s birth was arbitrarily set on a Roman pagan holiday. More on that in a later column…
The Scots banned the celebration of Christmas in 1638. The official view was the birth of Christ should be commemorated, not celebrated, in church in a solemn dignified way with none of this silly singing of Christmas carols or decorating Christmas trees or giving gifts or hosting parties or any of that other folderol that accompanies the Christmas season. In 1659, the Massachusetts Bay Colony fined individuals five shillings if they celebrated Christmas. The conversion isn’t perfect, but that works out to be about $100 in today’s money. That five shilling fine in 1659 was quite a hefty sum for the time. From 1789 to 1857, Congress was open on Christmas Day, although they didn’t necessarily sit in session on Christmas. By the way, Scotland rescinded their ban on the celebration of Christmas, in 1958. Yes, that’s right, Scotland rescinded their ban on Christmas in 1958, three hundred and twenty years after they first imposed it.
While Norse people had evergreen boughs in at Yuletide to signify that life continued to flourish over the harsh winter months, the Christmas tree is essentially a German invention. The first record of an indoor Christmas tree can be found in 1605 in Strasbourg. The German tradition is to set up the tree on Christmas Eve, which is the Feast Day of Adam and Eve. Originally, apples were hung on the tree as part of the celebration of the Feast Day of Adam and Eve. Those apples morphed over time instead into red ornament balls hung on the tree. Christmas trees were lit, briefly, with candles on the tree. However, this was usually a one off – let the family ooh and ahh – then quickly extinguish the candles before the dry tree, along with the whole house, was consumed by fire.
Queen Victoria married Prince Albert, a German, and according to lore it was Albert who brought the Christmas tree to England and from there the practice migrated to the United States. In 1856, Franklin Pierce was the first President to have a Christmas tree in the White House. Today, the White House Christmas tree lighting ceremony is a big deal and broadcast on national television. This year it was held on December 5th at 7pm Central Time. CBS will air the lighting ceremony on December 20th at 7pm Central Time.
For most people, if they had a Christmas tree at all then they had an actual tree. In the 1880’s the Germans started to make artificial Christmas trees from goose feathers. Apparently they looked okay, but you couldn’t hang any ornaments on them, the goose feathers couldn’t take the weight. In the 1930’s, the artificial trees manufactured in the United States were made from brush stuck together to resemble a tree. Neither Santa nor anybody else was fooled by a brush tree. In the 1950’s and 1960’s was when artificial trees became popular in the United States and have remained essentially unchanged since that time.
While people exchanged Christmas greetings via letter, the first mass, commercially produced Christmas cards came out in America in 1875. In the 1870’s it was not unusual for a store to give you a Christmas card as a combination “Merry Christmas and Here are Our Specials and Shop With Us Again” promotion.
In 1909, the very first “Christmas Club” got started. It was a kind of “lay away” program. At the start of the New Year, you opened a Christmas Club account at your bank and deposited money in it all year long. When Christmas time came around, (some banks didn’t let you take the money without a penalty until a certain day in December to help their more spendthrift customers hang on to their money for and until Christmas), you withdrew your Christmas Club money and that was your Christmas present shopping money. During the Great Depression, 12 million Americans had a Christmas Club account. It really was just another bank account, but psychologists would term it a “commitment device” to enable people to dedicate money to Christmas without the temptation to spend it on more pressing and immediate needs.
In 1882, Thomas Edison came out with the first string of Christmas lights. They were electric, of course. He touted them as festive but also safer than candles at Christmas. Both statements were true. There were two problems for Edison in selling these strings of Christmas lights. First, a single string of lights cost $12 in 1882. That’s equivalent to $300 in today’s money and the average American’s yearly income was $445 then, about equal to $1500 now. So, Edison was asking people to spend a fifth of their entire yearly income on a single string of lights. Even if Americans were willing to do that, his second problem was that only 1% of the homes in the United States were wired for electricity. In 1895, President Grover Cleveland helped popularize indoor electric lights for Christmas trees when he had the White House Christmas tree decorated with Edison’s Christmas tree lights. Over the course of time more and more homes were hooked up to electricity and the price of the lights eventually came down, due to a variety of factors.
Some people celebrate Christmas with a quiet family dinner and attendance at Midnight Mass. “Shooting In” Christmas was a tradition in much of the American South and especially in Texas and Pennsylvania. While Catholics were sitting in their pews at midnight, the cowboys and rednecks were shooting at the moon to “shoot in “ Christmas as a welcome to the day and the Holy Child. As America became more populated, urban and concentrated in major cities, the practice of “shooting in” Christmas died out.
On that “parting shot”, I wish a Merry Christmas to All and to All a Good Night!