A Traditional American Christmas

"We have saved out of the past nearly all that was good in it," wrote Charles Dudley Warner in 1884, "and the revived Christmas of our time is no doubt better than the old." In a sentence, Warner had grasped a truth about the holiday. Americans had reinvented Christmas. They culled a pastiche of customs and rituals from the past, originated modern traditions, and placed upon the entire holiday a meaning and order fit for their own times. In this Christmas they found a retreat from the dizzying realities of contemporary life and a lens through which to envision, as a people, from whence they came and whom they had become.

This national Christmas came of age in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, an era Mark Twain christened the "Gilded Age." Adding to the trauma of the Civil War and Reconstruction, the disorienting innovations and dislocations of a second industrial revolution had wreaked unprecedented change on society. Urbanization, mechanization, and the power of commerce and industry transformed American life at an ever-increasing rate, leaving old values and even the idea of constancy behind. Great poverty and phenomenal wealth existed side by side in the major metropolises. Laborers faced job insecurity and low wages. Farmers struggled against drought and debt. And the vast frontier, the mythic safety valve of American life, quickly vanished.

As important, even the physiognomy of America's citizenry changed under the double onslaught of emancipation and massive emigrations from such previously underrepresented places as Eastern, Central, and Southern Europe, as well as Asia. As new immigrants, freed blacks, common laborers, and farmers faced change, the more established Protestant middle class, where the American Christmas had taken earliest and firmest shape, looked to new sources for understanding its past and present.

The pressures and challenges of the modern age made many long for earlier times. Thus, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, culturally oowerful Americans exercised a growing enthusiasm for premodern ceremonies and rituals. They hoped to find in the intense experience of them not salvation and substance, but an alternative to the vagueness of liberal Protestantism and the sterility of positivism. The Christmas that these well-educated and comfortably middle-class or wealthy Americans embraced as a national holiday also reflected this leaning toward ceremonies that imagined simpler times when spirituality and community had once existed.

Americans struck by anti-modernism did not simply borrow from the past, but rather varied old themes and wove new symbols into the received fabric, creating something definitively their own. Their sending of Christmas cards, decorating evergreen trees, caroling, hanging Christmas stockings, and exchanging gifts did not flow from ancient custom and belief, but constituted a collage of ritual adapted to conditions of the late nineteenth century. Rather than venture into the snowy woods to cut Christmas trees, Americans bought them from tree dealers. As quickly as they adopted the tree custom, they abandoned the tradition of homemade ornaments, toys and gifts and went shopping for them. They sent Christmas cards with ready-written sentiments in place of handwritten letters to friends, and sang Christmas carols created only years before. Taken together, these acts and rituals made the modem Christmas seem a timeless tradition of American home life.'

Something that is so enduring nonetheless must have a history, and Americans implicitly understood the need to square their new but ancient festival with the past. Commentators on American life enhanced the impression of the holiday's timelessness by searching for, and writing frequently on, the origins of the nations' Christmas. In most instances, they defined it as a European hand-me-down, and often suggested that Americans still had not grasped an authentic feeling for the festival. "Christmas has never been fully observed" in America, "was never celebrated with an approach to old English heartiness except in the South" a Lancaster, Pennsylvania, newspaper reported in 1866. A Harper's editor thought Americans had derived "much of our poetic feeling for the holidays" from the English, and the "German Christmas-tree we have transplanted ... flourishes wonderfully in Yankee soil." But he missed "the burlesques and pantomimes which we associate so strongly with an English Christmas." "The American Christmas," affirmed another writer, "is a modification of the English." "Of Christmas in the New World," the Nation wrote in 1883, "we need not speak at all, since its customs, for the most part, have been transplanted from the Old."'

In many cases, writers charged American Puritans with thwarting the nation's celebration of Christmas. Their indictment carried an implication that Puritan influence on New England had somehow dampened all of America!s participation in the festival of Jesus' birth, and certainly that it had made an indelible mark on New England celebrations. "[Slome of our solemn progenitors," George McWhorter wrote, had attempted "the abolition of Christmas and its pleasures." However, he added that "Nature and reason were against the attempt, and it failed." "In New England the grim spirit of the Puritans prevailed so long that until lately little notice of the feast was taken," noted Catholic World in 1871. George Curtis went so far as to suggest that "[t]he Puritans frowned on Santa Claus as Antichrist" and a relic of "popery." He reminded readers that colonial Massachusetts had levied fines against anyone who observed Christmas. "And Peters, the old historian of Connecticut," he added, "says that one of the blue-laws of Connecticut forbade ... keeping Christmas or saints' days, [or] making minced-pies...

Harper's Monthly did not stray from the theme of condemnation. Believing that "[t]he Puritan element of this country long held old Christmas at bay," the editor recounted a story to illustrate his point. In New England, "one little fellow" had discovered "some old book in the public library" with "glowing descriptions of the ancient [English] customs." But when Christmas arrived, he found "no sign of Christmas in the little town, no peal of chimes, no generous expectation of Santa Claus." Not only did a personal sense of grief oppress the boy, but also "a feeling of something exceptionally wrong and monstrous in such disregard of such a day." His mother, "to whom Thanksgiving was the high feast of the year," then gave him "a purse with a bright silver piece," which he took to the confectioner, an old Frenchman, saying, "That's my Christmas present." "'Christmas! Christmas!' exclaimed the old man, impatiently. 'No, no, nobody know[s] Christmas here!'" In the Frenchman's "depth of scornful repudiation of a community that knew not Christmas," the writer concluded, the little boy "felt that his deep longing for some due observance of the day had been satisfied..."

Ironically, these same writers often attributed improvements on the old Christmas to Puritan sway. "[A] better influence has at last triumphed," wrote McWhorter. Now Christmas was kept "more as a social than a religious holiday, by all those who are opposed to such observances on principle." Curtis felt that, in the end, the Puritans had performed the great duty of stripping the old Christmas of its excess, thereby allowing the emergence of a better holiday. "The purifying spiritual fire, historically known as Puritanism, has purged the theological and ecclesiastical dross away, and has left the pure god of religious faith and human sympathy," he asserted. "Even the New England air, which was so black with sermons that it suffocated Christmas, now murmurs softly with Christmas bells." Curtis judged that Christmas "could not be the most beautiful of festivals if it were doctrinal, or dogmatic, or theological, or local. It is a universal holiday because it is the jubilee of a universal sentiment, moulded only by a new epoch, and subtly adapted to newer forms of the old faith."

The reality observed by Curtis was that the nation's Christmas encompassed the quintessence of American beliefs and values. By restructuring the connection between the holiday and Puritanism, Americans modified the standards of Biblical truth insisted on by Calvinists and also rescued the holiday from the excesses of folk custom. Unmoored from either extreme, Americans could recreate Christmas in the symbols and language appropriate for their time. Thus, the holiday enveloped the often contradictory strains of commercialism and artisanship, liberal Protestantism and spirituality, and nostalgia and hope that defined late nineteenth-century culture.

Surely, though, this American holiday did not evolve by collaboration or design. It disclosed itself by parts, through fundamental traditions that had been recaptured or newly invented. Christmas carols, for example, originated as pagan round dances, which became popular as "occasional entertainments" throughout Europe well before 1020 C.E. For centuries, authorities of the Catholic Church had issued, in the words of one folklorist, a "formidable series of denunciations and prohibitions" against them, but in London and elsewhere, as early as the thirteenth century and as late as the eighteenth, street hawkers sold carol sheets to passersby at Christmas time. By the sixteenth century, the songs had become an intrinsic part of Christmas throughout Europe.

These carols were of two sorts. Chorus-boys or bands of waits usually sang the religious sort. Hired minstrels or full complements of guests sang the festive ones. During Cromwell's rule, Puritans, who objected to all caroling just as they denounced the unrestrained revelry and popery of Christmas itself, briefly stopped the singing. With the Restoration, the heartier carols quickly regained their old popularity, but as quickly waned, causing Englishman William Hone to predict in 1822 that in a few years carols would be heard no more. However, by the mid-nineteenth century, Christmas carols showed the same clear signs of revival as Christmas itself. In England, William Sandys published his Selection of Christmas Carols, Ancient and Modern in 1833 and J. M. Neale published an edition of old carols, Carols for Christmastide, in 1852.

While borrowing from England, Americans also wrote their own Christmas songs, creating what Reginald Nettle has called "the best Christmas hymns of the nineteenth century in the English language." Edward Hamilton Sears, a Unitarian minister in Wayland, Massachusetts, wrote the words to "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear" in 1849. A year later, Richard Storrs Wills, an organist from New York, wrote the melody for it. John Henry Hopkins, Jr., rector of Christ's Church in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, wrote "We Three Kings of Orient Are" around 1857. In 1863, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day" as a poem and later set it to an existing tune. In 1865, Episcopal rector Phillip Brooks wrote "O Little Town of Bethlehem" while en route to Bethlehem, and three years later his organist, Lewis Redner, put it to music. Both events reputedly occurred on Christmas Eve. The authorship of "Away in a Manger" remains unknown, but possibly a German Lutheran in Pennsylvania wrote it. It was first published in Philadelphia in 1885.

Secular Christmas music also appeared. A Unitarian clergyman, Rev. John Pierpont of Boston, wrote "Jingle Bells" in 1856. Godeys, in 1863, announced a sheaf of new music "appropriate to the season." Copies of "Christmas Chimes, a splendid new nocturne by that favorite composer, Brinley Richards; Happy New Year's Schottische, by Ascher; Around the Fire...; Under the Mistletoe...; and Kris Kringle, a charming divertimento" would be "ready by the first of December. It will make a splendid Christmas present," advised the editor, and thousands of copies will no doubt be sold for that purpose alone."

These Christmas songs and carols developed out of the nation's own music preferences. Colonial Puritans had allowed no musical instruments, but they did sing psalms. Other seventeenth- and eighteenth-century colonists favored country fuging and shape-note singing. Among the elite, Haydn, Handel, and other musicians of the classical tradition dominated religious music. In fact, parts of Handel's Messiah had been first heard in America, on January 16, 1770, in the music room of the New York City Tavern, two years before its premiere in Germany. Following the Civil War, huge choruses sang Messiah each year in a New York armory. As Protestant churches adopted more ornate liturgies and settings, their congregations sang more, but the highly evangelical hymns of the early century hardly seemed appropriate for the day and age. Nor did the newer English tunes, which were usually dedicated to moral and social reform, hold appeal. Instead, late nineteenth-century American taste made Martin Luther's Christmas hymns and traditional English carols such as "First Nowell" and "Good King Wenceslas" popular.

The Christmas songs Americans liked revealed a wholly American perspective. Simply arranged and heartily sung, the carols straight-forwardly interpreted religious and human sentiment. They transcended time and change (in much the same way that Americans envisioned Christmas itself) and characteristically avoided the earthly issues of poverty, irreligion, or revelous high spirits. For example, "O, Little Town of Bethlehem" did not teach the lessons of moral responsibility and charity that the English sang in "Christmas is coming, the geese are getting fat..." It skipped past recent histories and took the singer to Biblical times in its description of the setting of Jesus' birth. Pieces that had no specifically religious content betrayed similar penchants for the ideal and mythic. "I Heard the Bells" spoke of peace on earth. "Jingle Bells," while catchy and without lesson, evoked an earlier moment when time paced itself to horses and sleighs, not trains and clocks.

In the 1890s and 1900s, the trend toward reviving older hymns and modern songs in the older manner continued. Americans also began caroling, an old English tradition of carol singing by bands of roving waits. Specifically, one Frederick W. Briggs, of Newtonville, Massachusetts, after "spending a merry and musical evening in an English town," introduced the custom to Bostonians of Beacon Hill. By the late 1890s, caroling had become an annual event in a number of communities. Some 150,000 wandering singers toured Boston's streets in 1895. Hackensack, New Jersey, saw a similar venture. Within another twenty years the tradition had spread throughout the United States. A 1918 survey by the National Bureau for the Advancement of Music found thirty cities with community carol singing, but by 1928, 2000.

Just as caroling revealed the nation's, and especially its ministers', aptitude for creating music that resonated with strains of American optimism and avoided the mire of history and social condition, the popularity of the Christmas tree illustrated the way in which the same culture modernized and reinterpreted "foreign" traditions to make them its own. As trees and ornaments became more widely available in the marketplace, their "German-ness" receded, to be replaced in many cases by a complete acceptance of the tree and rituals associated with it as "American."

The familiar presentation of the Christmas tree provides one illustration of this transition. In diaries and letters home, American travelers recorded their fascination with the way German families assembled on Christmas Eve to admire their lighted and bedecked evergreens. Increasingly, similar scenes could be found in America, but with no reference to Germany or to Germans. One diarist described how "Emily" had spent the entire day decorating the family Christmas tree. In the evening, after a bell had rung, "we were all ushered into the parlor, which was beautifully lighted up with small wax candles placed among the branches of the cedar which stood on the table, with the presents all arranged round it." Patience Price's "Sketch" in Godey's explained women's role in staging a proper tree presentation. On Christmas Eve "under the pretence of secrecy," she wrote, "[t]he folding doors [to one parlor] are closed ... Only the mother and the eldest daughter are suffered to enter into that sacred and private apartment..." These accounts and others echoed closely the pageants that the Ticknors and Storys had witnessed in Germany and similar descriptions that had appeared in magazines such as Harper's. However, they made no self-conscious nod to the foreign antecedents of the rituals. They stressed instead the immediate effect of the tree's unveiling.

Probably most responsible for the "Americanization" of traditions associated with Christmas trees was the growing commonness of the evergreens. By the 1880s, New York City's Washington Square bristled with trees cut upstate and hauled to town for seasonable profits. The New York Tribune estimated in 1881 that 200,000 trees had been supplied to the city's markets. By 1900, one American in five was estimated to have a Christmas tree. In some places, nearly everyone did. In the South and West, however, trees were less common, in many cases not used until the twentieth century.

The absence of a Christmas tree often meant only that one could not be found, and not that the custom was unknown or had been found wanting. One plantation mistress recalled having to put up an althea bush because no evergreens were available. On the tree-bare American plains the undertaking proved even more difficult. None of the children in North Madison, Iowa, saw a Christmas tree until 1872, when a townsman charged each $1 per viewing. Citizens of Westport, Missouri, saw their first fun-sized Christmas tree in 1882, and then only with the aid of Oswald Karl Lux, a cabinet-maker and recent German settler. He had tried to purchase a tree both in Westport and Kansas City, but could not find one over a foot and a half tall, and its branches were too flimsy to hold ornaments. Undaunted, Lux built a tree using a broomstick for the trunk and the curved staves of a barrel keg for the branches, which he wrapped in red paper, tipped with rolled tinfoil, and draped with evergreen branches. In any case, by 1930, Christmas trees were nearly a universal sight throughout the United States.

The decorations that made a tree of any sort a Christmas tree and set it apart from nature reflected the same American willingness to improvise if necessary. Nuts and popcorn, the staples of tree ornamentation, gave way to more sophisticated homemade items or imported ones, the old form overtaken by the urge to make the tree a showpiece for the artistic arrangement of "glittering baubles, the stars, angels, &c." A resourceful hand might add beads, oranges, lemons, or candies to the homemade trinkets used to decorate a tree. Even the casual reader could easily find tips for further improvements. Godeys "Work Department," for example, displayed "Articles for Christmas Trees, Easily Made at Home" in its 1874 December issue. It included bags for sweets, pincushions, and ornamental pen wipers. A small Pennsylvania paper reported that "[c]otton-wool dipped in thin gum arabic and then in diamond dust makes a beautiful frosting for tree branches."

Import trade afforded even greater possibilities for creating a stunning tree. Around the mid-1860s, Germans introduced the first glass ornaments and icicles into the nation. The description, which appeared in Harper's Bazaar (1869), of the fragile glass ornaments that Santa Claus unpacked from his bag gives a clue to why they became so sought after. His treasures included "globes, fruits, and flowers of colored glass, bright tin reflectors, and innumerable grotesque figures suspended by a rubber string." He also took out "clowns with cap and bells, funny little men concealing their faces behind funnier masks ... Bismarck leaping up Napoleon's shoulders, exaggerated seraphim with flapping wings, and strange-looking old women with heads larger than their bodies."

American business quickly perceived the profit potential in selling tree ornaments. As early as 1870 they had begun to import large quantities of all kinds to be sold on street corners and later in toy shops and variety stores. Often these trimmings only replicated home designs of icicles, pine cones, and sweet treats. Doily-lined paper cornucopias, brimming with nuts and candies, became a favorite, but angels and numerous designs in tin also had their partisans. Toy wholesalers such as Amos M. Lyon and Erlich Brothers, both in New York, listed glass beads and balls in assorted bright colors, glass ornaments in all imaginable shapes, tinsel, candleholders, transparent gelatin lanterns, wax angels with spun glass wings, gilt paper, small silk and puffed-satin candy boxes, and even white cotton batting for snow in their Christmas gift catalogues. "So many charming little ornaments can now be bought ready to decorate Christmas trees that it seems almost a waste of time to make them at home," an advertisement in the Pottsville (Pennsylvania) Miners Journal declared in 1889.

As ornamentation changed to reflect international trade, American taste, and modern invention, the illumination of the tree advanced from a few wax candles to a fine art. One guideline recommended 400 candles for a 12-foot tree. The spectacular effect of all those lighted candles, though, was dangerous. Trees bought at city stands were seldom as fresh as the ones newly cut from nearby woods, and the wooden houses they graced proved to be flammable tinder. Each year newspapers reported lurid details of deaths caused by the flames of unwatched candles. Fiction writers added accounts of tree blazes to their tales. Consequently a set of informal rules came to govern tree lighting. In one family, for instance, each member stood ready with a bucket of water as grandfather lit the candle wicks. Other kept blankets near to smother flames should the water prove inadequate. Candles burned but a few minutes, enough for the sensation of their light to be registered, and then were quickly snuffed.

One way to lessen the danger of fire was to find an effective way to fasten candles to a tree's branches. They needed to be upright and steady so that they neither dripped on the floor nor ignited the tree. Originally, candles had been wired onto branches or put in tin holders with sharp points that stuck into the wood. Neither method really worked, giving rise to many ingenious improvements. In 1867, American Charles Krichholf patented a counterweighted candleholder. A weight hanging decoratively below the branch balanced the candle above. Unfortunately, his invention doubled the heaviness of the candle and caused tree branches to droop dangerously. Frederick Arzt, a New Yorker, solved the problem in 1879 with his invention of a spring-clip holder. It did not keep candles as straight as Krichholf's, but they stayed on, and the gadget remained popular until the 1920s, when candles finally went out of fashion.

Despite efforts to make candle light safer for Christmas trees, none of the measures proved reliable. Fires became so common and costly that finally, in 1908, a number of insurance companies announced that they would no longer pay for fires started with candles and trees, and began invoking a standard clause that invalidated a policy if the holder took "knowing risks."

The real solution to the fire problem, of course, was electricity. At least among those wealthy enough to afford their own generators, and those who lived in districts served by Edison Electric, electric lights quickly replaced common candles. Edward Johnson, who lived within the first square mile of New York City to have electricity, claimed in 1882 to be first to add electric lights to his tree. As vice president of the newly formed Edison Electric, he had small balls hand-blown and hand-wired in the company laboratory. Not long after, in Reading, Pennsylvania, "big-hearted Robert H. Coleman and his many employees," enjoyed a 25-foot tree lit with "220 two-candle power electric lamps ... A dynamo run by water power in the basement of the building," reported the local paper, supplied electricity for it. By then, Edison Electric had taken up the manufacture of light bulbs, the rights to which it sold to General Electric in 1890. And by 1895, electric lights had even replaced candles on President Cleveland's White House tree.

Electrical wiring, imported glass balls, tinsel garlands, and fancy needlework did not define the tree for all Americans. Ultimately its interpretation depended on individual creators. The heavy concentration of Pennsylvania Dutch in Pennsylvania, for instance, made the local standard for tree decoration quite different from that enjoyed by the Edward Johnsons and J. P. Morgans of New York City. In the 1880s Pennsylvania farmers, whether because of the scarcity of trees, their own thrift, or some idea of vogue, stripped their Christmas trees of needles and stored them for the following year. When the "evergreens" appeared again in parlors, their branches looked snowy in new cotton batting. After the holiday, the trees would again be returned to the attic, this time in a swath of protective newspapers.

In this same region, many households created elaborate landscapes beneath Christmas trees, a fashion that existed throughout the late century and at least into the first decade of the twentieth. Some went so far as to transform their front rooms in bowers, abundantly decked with greenery.

Others made "landscapes ... a succession of hill and dale, rustic bridge and charming rivulet. This last," one contemporary news article noted, "is rarest and prettiest of them all; rarest because few people have the proper room and requisite degree of artistic taste to form one, and prettiest because most like nature." It was not uncommon for these showpieces to feature earthen hills, three to five feet tall, covered with snow or moss. One house had a mountain, achieved with an estimated half ton of rocks, in its front room. Some boasted streams, waterfalls, and miniature fountains that required a cistern to be temporarily erected in the room above.

Through such extravagance of design and dedication, Christmas trees ceased to be solely (if they ever had been entirely) objects of private delight. Many of their creators constructed them for public display, albeit in a private setting. John Lewis, an Englishman who spent Christmas 1875 in Philadelphia with his son, took this as a characteristic of the entire nation. "The usual arrangement in this country," he wrote, was to place in the parlor as "large & fine a tree" as could be found and cover it 'with every conceivable shape into which coloured & gilt paper & card can be cut, and little pictures, glass balls, chains, garlands, etc., anything to make a gay and imposing display." As fancy dictated, other attractions might be added. At one place Lewis visited, the owners proudly illuminated a complicated scene that included a tree plus a "very handsome," three-foot-long river steamboat made of white, colored, and gilt cards and carrying "about 50 passengers (these last small pictures cut out)" and a "beautiful fire hose carriage.""

Owners kept window blinds raised and brightly lighted their elaborate scenes, allowing the passersby a full view. "Frequently people would knock at the door to be admitted to a closer inspection." Lewis had heard that in two hours' time, 75 spectators had toured a single house. Women, it seemed, were particularly interested, a fact attested to by one Pennsylvanian. Over one hundred people had called to see his tree. "These visitors were almost equally divided between women and children--the men forming a very small proportion. Squads of ladies--as high as ten in number--are to be seen daily going their rounds 'among the trees.'"

Adopted into many households and trimmed according to the dictates of local fashion, the Christmas tree had been Americanized. Its adoption also became an index of cultural assimilation. Christmas trees "bloomed" even in the homes of "the Hebrew brethren," noted a Philadelphia newspaper in 1877. "[T]he little ones of Israel were as happy over them as Christian children. One of them said: 'Oh, we have the trees because other people do.'" In other cases, the tree as much revealed a lack of integration into American culture. A newspaper reporter took an amused and patronizing look at a tree he had discovered in New York City, in the section known as Little Germany. He had spied a tree as tall as a house. It proved to be a butcher's sign, complete with flashing lights, showing off holiday stock. "Pine branches were fastened to the naked limbs of a tree, and rabbits, poultry, links of sausage, and torches were hung all over it."

In 1898, the New York Times distinguished between the ways of rural ethnic populations and the sophistication of the city. "Finery," it reported, had "but little place on the country Christmas tree." On farms near Reading, Pennsylvania, they could be found decorated with "[h]uge honey cakes, ginger cakes," some of them "several feet square and made attractive by sprinklings of red, white and blue sugars," and resembling "great fat hogs, sheep, rabbits, cats, horses, cows and other farm life." Stuffed squirrels and chipmunks perched on the branches, 'while grouped around the base of the tree are opossums, raccoons, and occasionally, a large red or gray fox." All were trimmed with "brilliant-hued home-made taffy, large red apples and Winter pears, with a sprinkling of shell barks, chestnuts and other productions of the farm."

Few people voiced serious objections to the place of the Christmas tree in the holiday, however. Indeed, whatever reservations remained seemed to have narrowed to a point of preference for hanging Christmas stockings over putting gifts beneath trees. A New York Times editorial had called the Christmas tree "a rootless and lifeless corpse--never worthy of the day," and predicted that stockings would replace the evergreen. But a Pennsylvania newspaper reported in 1874 that Christmas trees had "ruled the hanging up of stockings out of order." Another asked, "Is it more stylish to have Christmas trees for the children than to let the little creatures hang up their stockings as their grandmother did?" "No, no," it answered. "We all do as we please in the matter. The high fashion authorities are silent here." And so it seemed to remain a matter to be settled within the family. In 1893 a Brooklyn woman, questioned as to whether she celebrated Christmas with a tree or with her children hanging their stockings, replied, "My husband's people always have a tree, but I was brought up to celebrate in the other fashion, and so we hang up ah--er--We hang up our hosiery."

Some families still arranged their holiday rituals around the old Dutch custom of hanging Christmas stockings. One Connecticut family began Christmas Eve by tying a short rope between two doors in the sitting room. Then, according to one of the youngsters, each of the nine children "brought out, our largest pair of stockings, not forgetting two extra pair, intended for Father and Mother," and pinned them together on the rope. The task completed, the family climbed into the double carriage and, "in spite of wind and snow, all of us went down town, through the crowded streets, and afterward the brilliantly lighted stores, to buy our last gifts, and see the many dazzling sights, of a large city on Christmas Eve." Returning before midnight, each placed newly purchased gifts in the various stockings, and went to bed. "Next morning, early, we went down stairs... [U]nderneath on the floor, were many boxes and bundles with strings tied to each, and the other end of the string fastened to the stocking belonging to the one for whom it was intended. The tips of Ollies stockings rested on this firm foundation, but nothing of the other's could be seen below the ankle, they being packed away among the numerous packages."

While decorating a Christmas tree and hanging a stocking in anticipation of Santa's visit had antecedents in the past, these rituals also reflected the capacity within many American families to adapt customs to conform to their needs and expectations about the holiday. Thus, a family's tradition could be at one and the same time novel and old. Sending Christmas greeting cards, however, was an almost entirely new idea. But Americans approved the practice with the same zeal they did other Christmas traditions.

Christmas cards became essential to fostering friendships and business acquaintanceships. Senders often resorted to them instead of honoring the old customs of writing Christmas letters or making personal holiday visits. Carrying a full supply of ready-made sentiment, a card could lighten one's own workload and free the sender to claim (or disavow) the sentiments written on a greeting card as solely his or her own. Cards also substituted for gifts. "[W]ornout from choosing gifts" for old friends and school mates, one writer noted, "we usually fall back on Christmas cards, which constitute one of the most precious and at the same time inexpensive contributions of these latter days to the neglected cause of sentiment." A new emphasis on formality and manners added to the importance of Christmas greeting cards.

Moreover, increased geographic mobility sometimes made sending cards the only way in which families and friends remained in contact. Following the Civil War, as Congress standardized delivery, mail traveled more rapidly, dependably, and cheaply than it ever had before, taking huge quantities of Christmas cards throughout the nation. "I thought last year would be the end of the Christmas card mania, but I don't think so now," the Washington Star quoted one postal official as saying in 1882. "Why four years ago a Christmas card was a rare thing. The public then got the mania and the business seems to be getting larger every year. I don't know what we will do if it keeps on." By the mid-1890s, publishers had begun to print Christmas greetings on their view cards, either as an over-print or as part of the design. These novel and cheap postcards only accelerated the frenzy of sending holiday messages.

The cards that Americans preferred to send came from the printing presses of Louis Prang. Born in Breslau, Germany, in 1824, Prang left Germany after the 1848 revolution, arrived in New York in 1850, and soon moved to Boston. After several years of working first for himself and then as a wood engraver in the art department of Gleason's Pictorial, he entered into a partnership with Julius Mayer to become a lithographic and copper plate manufacturer. An astute reader of public taste, Prang became sole owner of the business in 1860, renamed it L. Prang and Company, and became known as a printer of business cards, announcements, mailing labels, and forms of small advertising. He also ventured into a new area--album cards and pictures. From this came a series of four oversized cards, "Prang's Illuminated Christmas cards," which Prang intended to decorate homes and Christmas trees.

By 1868, Prang owned perhaps half of the steam presses in America and, by 1870, two-thirds of the total, a success that reflected Prang's business acumen and dedication to the art of printing. He already had improved significantly the quality of his prints by using an expensive new multi-color lithographic printing process that he himself had perfected. He seldom used fewer than eight colors and sometimes as many as twenty to produce some of the finest color "chromo" prints to date. In 1873, he made another improvement on the process, switching from stones to zinc plates.

Having created a thriving business, Prang was ready to enter the international market. He printed a good supply of his own business cards, decorated them with flowers, and went to the 1873 Vienna International Exhibition. So popular were his cards that by the end of the visit he had distributed over 20,000. The following year, on the suggestion of the wife of his London agent, Prang added a Christmas greeting to the cards. He introduced these illustrated Christmas greetings into the United States in 1875, where they proved such a hit that he could not meet demand. The second season found Prang much better prepared. His work force of 300 people began printing over 5 million cards yearly, many for export. `

Although new, Prang's Christmas cards hailed from a long line of greetings. Egyptians and Romans apparently sent messages along with their New Year's gifts. As Christianity took hold, these messages became religious. The practice in general declined during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but a version of the old custom resurfaced in the eighteenth century, minus the religious element, in the form of a card offered to announce a visitor. If the intended recipient was not at home, the caller scribbled a message on a card, thereby making it a token of good wishes and obviating the need to visit in person. Especially in Austria, Germany, and France, industries specialized in extravagant calling cards ornamented with lace, silk, and engraving. 37

Illustrated visiting cards, along with widely popular advertising quodlibets, illustrated notepaper, Christmas letter headings, Valentines, and other paper goods, inspired the format of the earliest Christmas cards. However, the actual invention of the Christmas card, according to the claims of an English historian of the subject, took place in England. One, perhaps the first, bore a handwritten note, "A Happy Christmas to my dear mother 1839." The best-known of the "first" cards was that of painter and illustrator John Calcort Horsley. About the size of a lady's calling card, his featured a portrait of a happy family. Smaller pictures of the poor and hungry banked it on both sides. "A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you" overarched the scenes.

R. H. Pease, an engraver, lithographer, and variety store owner who lived in Albany, New York, distributed the first American-made Christmas card in the early 1850s. As in the Horsely card, a family scene--parents and three children with their presents--dominated the small card's center. In the background a black servant set the table for Christmas dinner. But, unlike its English forerunner, the images on each of the card's four corners made no allusion to poverty, cold, or hunger. Instead, pictures of a "small, rather elf-type Santa Claus with fur-trimmed cap, sleigh and reindeer, a ball-room with dancers, the building marked 'Temple of Fancy,' and an array of Christmas presents and Christmas dishes and drinks" suggested the bounty and joys of the season. The two lines of text only emphasized the contrast between the English and American cards and made Pease's card what some might call typically American. Where the English one wished the season's greetings, the American card added a self-promotional "Pease's Great Varety [sic] Store in the Temple of Fancy.""

None of the early makers of Christmas cards, whether English or American, had the vision or inclination to exploit the market. To them, writes one historian, cards "appeared to be merely ephemeral business ... a temporary vogue." It fell to Prang to create a highly profitable Christmas card industry that catered to American preference. His first Christmas cards did little more than repeat the conventions of Victorian decorativeness and symbolism. Printed on only one side, an elegantly scripted couplet or prose greeting complemented arrangements of flowers, birds, trees, and, occasionally, robin's eggs or butterflies. Only the message was "Christmasy." A summer flower might appear beneath a winter-barren tree to reflect Christmas's association with the solstice. A red rosebud meant "Pure and Lovely." A red double pink meant "Woman's Love." Sometimes birds were incorporated into the design. Robins had at least two meanings. According to one legend, a bird, trying to ease Christ's suffering on the way to the cross, pulled a thorn from his crown and a drop of blood fell on the robin's chest. Another held that a wren flew to Hell to obtain fire for man, and when he returned, he himself was in flames and a robin rushed to his rescue, scorching his breast.

Prang soon found that Christmas pictures and larger sized cards brought even better returns than the small Victorian ones. Christmas themes edged in seasonal greenery became increasingly evident. In the iconography of Victorian flora, the greenery had special significance. Ivy denoted constancy. Holly, whose sharply pointed leaves were said to frighten away witches and other bad spirits, was considered especially good luck. Because it remained glossy green in winter, holly also symbolized life. It had decorated Episcopal churches since colonial times and had become common in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Santa often wore a sprig of it in his hat. At mid-century many still regarded mistletoe, with its pagan and English connection, a curiosity at best. Nathaniel Hawthorne, while living in Liverpool in 1855, had noticed branches of it throughout his rooming house, and discovered that the maids "did their utmost to entrap the gentlemen boarders ... [in order] to kiss them, after which they were expected to pay a shilling." Before the century ended, mistletoe twined gracefully with holly leaves on Christmas card borders. Poinsettias appeared not much later. The red-crowned plants could be found in select greenhouses as early as the 1830s, but in 1870 New York shops began selling them at Christmas. By the turn of the century they had become fully associated with the holiday.

As Prang added Christmas details to his cards, he also enlarged them to 6"x8" and 7"x10", made the verses longer, and decorated both sides. The larger and more detailed could be purchased with or without wide silk fringe, the hallmark of an elegant greeting card. His artists, many of them women, drew children in snowy sledding scenes, girls with gift dolls, penguins on ice, and mishaps of skaters. One card depicted a little girl, beautifully drawn, kneeling in front of a fireplace, praying. Above her, Santa Claus with hand to ear, listened to every word. Underneath it read: "Good Saint Santa, grant, I pray,/To All a Merry Christmas Day." Another, in sepia monochrome, showed six children and two white doves framed by holly leaves and berries and a bit of mistletoe. Each dove carried a blue streamer, one inscribed "joy!" and the other "Mirth!" For these cards, Prang charged from a dime to a dollar, depending on how lavish they were.

Prang did not see his cards solely in terms of their profitability. Far from ordinary, his work exhibited a strong dedication to aesthetic values and set a standard of perfection. English critic Gleason White conceded late in the century that "it is doubtful if any designs this side of the Atlantic [in Europe] were better printed." Prang also refused to make tasteless comic cards or produce trick or mechanical ones. His humorous cards, writes George Buday, "were of the arty, caricature type as opposed to the crude jocularity." Indeed, Prang saw his cards as small works of art, affordable to nearly anyone. He had designed his "Illuminated Christmas cards" (in 1864) as a way to introduce Americans to well-known works of art at reasonable prices, an idea that apparently took his fancy while on a trip to Europe in 1864.

With greeting cards, Prang's plans for the democratization of art expanded. Starting in 1880, Prang sponsored annual competitions for Christmas card designs. Through them he hoped to obtain the best art for his cards, educate public taste, and stimulate an interest in original decorative art among art students. He encouraged entrants with promises of large prizes and a chance to be included in an exhibition at the American Art Association Galleries in New York. Competitors ranged from the ambitious but untrained and untalented to some who would later become important figures in American art, Thomas Moran and J. Alden Weir among them.

Many regarded the contest as the top event of the New York art season, and for artists, it brought recognition and employment. If Prang used an entry for a card, he added the initial of the card's designer and details of the contest on the finished greeting. However, the competitions did not meet Prang's expectations. He thought that they "call[ed] forth a good deal of original talent" but that they resulted "to a great extent ... [in] very crude efforts."

Nonetheless, Prang's determination to use cards as a vehicle of public art education persisted. In the third contest (1882), he approved a two-part competition limited to American artists. Artists and art critics awarded $2000 for the category "Artist's Prizes." Popular vote determined the winner of the "Public Prizes," which carried a second purse of $2000. By the fourth competition, Prang had all but abandoned his idea for promoting the public's talent and decided instead to concentrate on an appreciation of artists. He commissioned twenty-two well-known American artists to design cards and also invited them to enter their same designs in his competiton.

While Prang's card competitions may have failed in their original purpose, they had an unintended effect. They so popularized Christmas cards that other card manufacturers entered the market. "[A]fter 3 or 4 years," wrote Prang, the competition of European imitators "began to press upon me." (Charles) Goodall & Son, Marcus Ward, Joseph Mansell, and Dean & Sons emerged as the best-known English producers of Christmas cards. James A. Lowell and Company of Boston printed cards noted for their fine steel engravings during the 1880s. In the 1890s, German stand-up cards and trade-card greetings dominated the field. Low wages and cheaper materials, Prang declared, "made it impossible to battle successfully against foreign competition in the same line." So, in 1890 Prang withdrew from the card business entirely and turned his attention to the promotion of the "Prang method of education," which focused on developing an artistic awareness in the young, and to the manufacture of art Supplies.

When Charles Dudley Warner had written that Americans had rescued the best of Christmas from the past and made Christmas "no doubt" better than the old, he had observed an essential truth about Christmas, but it was only part of the story. What made the "revived Christmas of our time" seem so much better than the old was that it had been entirely Americanized and therefore felt more comfortably familiar. Americans had rewritten its history. Rather than seeing Puritanism as an impediment to the survival of Christmas, the nation's media credited it with refining the holiday. The German influence on Christmas trees faded to a mere footnote once Americans dragged the evergreens into their parlors and decorated them with tinsel and baubles. Christmas carols and Christmas cards also reflected this American penchant for reclaiming customs and traditions as its own. And so, whether an example of "innovative nostalgia," an exercise in "evasive banality," or, perhaps better, a multi-faceted episode of American cultural invention, Christmas in the late nineteenth century became that old-fashioned holiday to which nearly everyone looked forward.

Gilding Christmas: Gifts, Charity, and Commerce

"Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents," Jo March grumbled to her sisters. It had been a hard winter for everyone, and Mrs. March suggested that the girls not spend money for pleasure when others suffered while fighting the Confederate army. On Christmas morning each cherished her only present, a small book found beneath her pillow, and surrendered the idea of receiving a wealth of gifts. Instead, the March women took armloads of food and clothing to a needy family--a "poor woman with a little newborn baby" and six children, who were "huddled into one bed to keep from freezing, for they have no fire," nor anything to eat.

These events, which open Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, illustrate the key place that gift-giving had taken among America's Christmas rituals and allude to the place charity held in it. Through gifts, Americans mediated the fragile relationships of an increasingly unsettled society. Through charity, they sought at least symbolic solutions to the problems of extreme economic inequality that threatened social peace and conscience.

Perhaps more than any other element, the rise of commerce and consumerism as a central feature of the American economy determined the customs of Christ as charity and, more obviously, gift-giving. Earlier in the century, especially in rural areas and along the frontier, gifts had been of necessity usually simple and homemade (although youngsters regarded "store-bought" candy with particular fondness). Commonly, children received most of them. Mothers knitted, tied, stuffed, laced, stitched, or baked special treats. Fathers whittled and carved toys.

As the nation became more market-oriented, such homey pleasures sometimes seemed inadequate. Stores and shops throughout the nation offered the consumer an ever-growing feast of choices, nearly any of which might be made a gift. Among those described in nineteenth-century diaries and letters were: a "silver slop basin," a breast pin, a gold pencil, the complete works of Robert Bums, a pocket book, a writing desk, a "beautiful box with writing materials of all kinds," a "case with scissors, thimble etc.," a work box, a knife, slippers for everyone but especially for fathers, a camp chair, "a large bottle of colongne [sic], a bottle of liquid court plaster," match boxes, pen wipers, a bonnet, a "beautiful copy of Shakespeare," carbuncle sleeve buttons, a "pretty basket card," a pencil case, a paper case, a velvet bag embroidered with gold, books, marbles, "a morocco case with silver working implements," gold spectacles, a camel's hair scarf, a "magnificent silver tea urn," and a "pair of boots worth seven Dollars." No child could resist "Napoleon's Old Guard, the elephant with the moveable head," a train set, a big doll, or "a little chair."'

By, late century, the definition of gift had broadened to include every category of practical housewares, novelty items, greeting cards, money, extravagant oddities, and simple mementos. There was, in a phrase, something for everyone. Beginning in the 1880s and lasting for many years, cheap and useless novelties known as "gimcracks" enjoyed a vogue. Those seeking more tasteful, but still relatively inexpensive, tokens of goodwill gave Prang Christmas cards. These could be framed, displayed on Christmas trees or on special racks, or made into wallpaper appropriate for home china cabinets. Others turned their attention to more prosaic and efficient wares; household work savers became acceptable gifts for mothers and wives. Parents, aunts, and other well-meaning elders could always rely on a gold piece or a $2 bill as a gift intended to encourage a child's habit of saving.

Meanwhile, gift lists scrolled longer and longer. One young girl covered several pages of a letter to a friend detailing all the treasures she and her family had exchanged and laid out for display. In 1882 President Hayes jotted in his diary that his wife, Lucy, had given presents "to all of her Sunday-school scholars, to all of the servants, and to many friends. Also presents enough to us..." "People are making smaller presents to more persons," one store manager observed. "Where a man would come in years ago and say, 'Give me twenty-five yards of $4 silk,' and sent it to his favorite maiden aunt for a present, he'll buy twenty $5 presents for all his sisters and cousins as well as his aunts."

It would be erroneous to assume, however, that the new marketplace alone determined the importance of Christmas gifts. Several studies of gift-giving in the twentieth century suggest that the custom helps chart and establish hierarchies of social relationships. Gifts act as tangible evidence of ties between and among individuals. Those who participate in a gift transaction determine the worth of an item. David Cheal, for instance, writes that the choice and presentation of gifts "is in fact constitutive of a differentiated gift economy." He demonstrates this point by noting "that the most valuable Christmas gifts are given to close family members, especially spouses; and that women are more active in all forms of gift giving than are men." He interprets women's greater involvement in the process as a "consequence of their participation in a discourse of relationships," not their experience as homemakers. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton concentrate on objects rather than people, but derive a compatible conclusion. They assert that kinship is a major theme in determining the value of an object. Cherished objects, they write, "provide continuity in one's life and across generations." Michael Schudson's work on advertising confirms the power of material objects to preserve intangible relationships. He argues that "we consume materials very often to preserve families." In what he calls our "materials-intensive way of life," a gift often serves as a "social statement."

In addition to materialism, then, it may well have been the need to demonstrate more vividly kinship ties and communal bonds that insured the importance of Christmas gifts. The Gilded Age was a time of particularly challenging social and economic upheaval. Immigration, poverty, and urban crowding, the growth of titanic business organizations and massive personal fortunes, graft, political corruption, labor unrest--all part of the era's history--made personal relationships and associations of home and family all the more dear because of the stability they implied.

Gifts symbolized and helped secure these ties. In an 1875 story in Godey's, "The Holly Wreath," Ino Churchill commented that gifts made "invisible chaplets ... a 'mystical cordage' wherewith to bind heart to heart." Harper's had expressed a similar sentiment in 1856: "Love is the moral of Christmas ... What are the gifts but the proofs and signs of love?" And because social structure had become as complex as the world around it, gifts helped distinguish the nuances within that structure. Thus, Christmas presents became an important language through which to express, maintain, and differentiate a hierarchy of personal association.

The expansion of gift-giving, what has been to often seen as a one-sided "hype" of a traditional holiday by commercial interests, resulted from the closely connected, reciprocal, and always escalating relationship between consumerism and Christmas. Evidence suggests the transition to a Christmas economy in many instances happened only gradually, as demand crept up on merchants. Starting in the mid- to late 1850s, during the take-off phase of that economy, some imaginative importers, craftspeople, and storekeepers began consciously to reshape the holiday to their own ends even as shoppers elevated the place of Christmas gifts in their home holiday. A brief look at F. W. Woolworth's life illustrates the way in which savvy and innovative business people profited from Christmas.

At the beginning of his career, Woolworth had coaxed a small Philadelphia factory owner to sell him his entire stock of gold tinsel garlands and tree ornaments (which had already been contracted for by other buyers). Bigger Christmas profits awaited him when an importing firm persuaded him to stock some German-made glass ornaments. "[T]he first thing they did," Woolworth remembered, "was to drag out a lot of colored glass ornaments the like of which I had never before seen." When the importer explained that they were "oh, such fine sellers," Woolworth laughed. He acceded only when the company guaranteed his sale of twenty-five dollars' worth of them. With "a great deal of indifference," Woolworth put them on the counter of his small store. In two days they were gone and, as Woolworth said, he "woke up."'

So well did the glass balls sell that Woolworth began to make trips to small towns in the Thuringan forest of Germany to buy the fragile decorations. There, Woolworth boasted, he was "pointed out on every comer of the street as the big buyer of tree ornaments and they tackle me everywhere trying to sell me more..." On his visit to Germany in 1890, Woolworth placed an order for 1500 gross of Christmas tree ornaments. These rapidly sold in America, making Woolworth even richer than before.

Woolworth would not have met with such success had Americans not been ready for and demanding the wares he had to sell. Of course, advertising and an increasing variety of stores and services tailored to holiday shopping helped create the milieu in which he could benefit. As early as the 1820s, '30s, and '40s, merchants had already noticed the growing role of gifts and laid in additional wares to be sold during the holiday-rich winter season. In the postbellum era, these efforts changed in magnitude and intensity. What had been the interest of individuals became an undertaking of commerce and industry, and what had been a somewhat modest reaping of December profit spiraled to a windfall as merchants increasingly became more organized, competitive, and aggressive in their bid for the Christmas dollar. They created new schemes for expanding the Christmas market. They opened new stores, advertised new wares, and extended special attention to holiday customers, for, as Godey's pointed out in 1866, "Christmas brings profit and pleasure to the vast world of dealers in beautiful futilities."

Merchants had begun to advertise some seasonal goods in small newspaper notices early in the century (although news text only rarely mentioned holidays or gifts even as late as the 1840s). Intermittently throughout the 1820s, New York and Philadelphia papers advertised New Year's and holiday presents. By the mid-'30s, even frontier Missouri papers carried holiday sales notes. In 1849, the weekly Fort Smith (Arkansas) Herald listed raisins, almonds, horehound, and ketchup for sale as "Christmas and Holliday Articles." St. Louis companies offered silver snuff boxes, earrings, finger rings, breast pins, and "fancy inkstands."

As the nation's market economy grew, larger advertisements, illustrated and adjective-laden, overshadowed modest two- and three-line notices. The Augusta Chronicle printed one of its first major holiday advertisements the day before Christmas in 1845. A three-column, six-inch engraving, displaying unusually large type, announced that F. Lamback's Lafayette Hall would be open that day to offer "Christmas and New Year's presents.... A variety of rich and fancy articles, suitable for the holidays." In 1859 the Wilmington (North Carolina) Daily Journal, which had carried only one or two advertisements for holiday presents each season in prior years, ran an outsized pitch for a "Beautiful and appropriate Christmas gift"--a Singer sewing machine--and illustrated it with a picture of a woman at work.

In December 1856, Godey's canceled, for the first time, its usual domestic discourse. "Our business friends demand some of our space ... and as [Christmas] is the season most favorable to their business, we are glad to tend a helping hand," it explained. Therein, Tyndale & Mitchell's promised "every variety of China-ware." Brodies' advertised "Mantillas, Talmas, &c." E. W. Carryl suggested housekeeping items. C. Oakford & Sons offered "Furs, caps for children, hats for gentlemen." White & Co. tendered fashionable clothing. Upon receipt of a letter, George Fischer promised he would "pick out such toys as will suit" the needs of parents for their children. "

All the while, commerce was becoming more dependent upon Christmas sales. Toy stores, which had multiplied rapidly since the 1850s, offered playthings from all over the world. Christmas was their busiest time. Music supply houses and commercial Sunday-school houses issued Christmas "services," that is, songs, recitation pieces, and inspirational cantatas, to turn themselves a profit. The holiday, reported the Democratic Review in 1854, had "recently become a great harvest for the booksellers, in enabling them to dispose of large numbers of their books ... during the Holydays."

By late century, store owners had developed a number of strategies that made the Christmas season more enjoyable for buyers and, not incidentally, more lucrative for themselves. For example, they raised Christmas-dressed store windows to an art form that enchanted thousands. "One of the signs of the approach of Christmas," reported the New York Tribune in 1882, was the crowds of "sidewalk spectators" that gathered around the windows to watch mechanical toys. Lydia Maria Child noticed that one Boston store owner kept up his "frantic competition for popular favor" by transforming his display window into a snowy fairyland complete with a stout Santa Claus "in a carriage drawn by stuffed reindeers." Early each December Macy's installed a Christmas exhibition of hundreds of mechanical toys and dolls and in 1883, apparently for the first time, added the novelty of steam-powered, moving figures. Santa Clauses also made their appearance in shop windows. D. M. Williams & Co. advertised that "A Real Live Santa" appeared daily at its store or in its show windows that recreated his workshop. F. W. Woolworth directed the clerks and managers of his chain of variety stores to give their emporia a "holiday appearance." He suggested they hang Christmas ornaments and perhaps put a tree in the window. "Make the store look different ... This is our harvest time. Make it pay."

Many businesses kept late hours in order to make holiday shopping easier. In 1867 Macy's stayed open until midnight on Christmas Eve, taking in over $6000. "Such a crowd as I never before saw in a store," wrote Macy's partner, Abiel T. LaForge. The store continued to stay open until ten or eleven o'clock each season, later if the crowds warranted. In Atlanta, Rich's did not lock its doors until nine in the evening. Bloomingdale's, boasting that its "assortments and facilities [were] equal to the greatest task of the year," took out a full-page advertisement in 1894 to announce that it would stay open late for holiday buyers. One could shop at Barrios Diamond Company anytime, since it planned to be "Open All Night" on Christmas Eve. Package delivery improved too. By 1888 Macy's was guaranteeing that purchases made on December 24 would be delivered within the city on the same day or, if desired, on Christmas Day. The following December their messengers took 162,624 gifts to doorsteps throughout New York City.

For all the efforts of businessmen to exploit and shape the season to meet profit goals, or perhaps despite them, Americans persisted in their attempts to separate the influence of commerce from the gifts they gave. Within the gift economy, handmade gifts ranked above purchased ones. Nearly every December, Peterson's, Godeys, and other magazines supplied detailed instructions for knitting comfortable bedroom slippers and cozy shawls, fabricating pen wipers, and creating other homey or useful items. At least in the abstract, hand-worked items epitomized the care and loving thoughts of the giver and were therefore thought to be superior to manufactured ones. They had the bonus of revealing a woman's conscientious use of her own time and saving of her husband's money. Well into the twentieth century, such efforts continued to be held in high regard. As A. L. Gorman asserted in 1908, in Harper's Bazaar, "Gifts which are the product of ones own handiwork are generally the most highly prized for they carry with them the sweet assurance of many moments of painstaking effort and loving thoughts with every stitch and stroke."

Yet the effect of commerce even on handmade gifts could hardly be avoided. By the 1880s it had become fashionable to purchase partially assembled goods to which givers applied their personal, finishing touches. Handkerchiefs that needed hemming, furniture that needed assembling, and patterns still to be colored with embroidery stitches became mainstays of many cottage industries. These so-called "halfway" gifts effectively combined the appeal of mass-produced goods. They did not take too much time to complete, but displayed attributes of a hand-worked gift.

Another way in which Americans moderated the relationship between commerce and giving was by wrapping the gifts they gave. The custom had once been merely to give a gift unadorned and uncovered, a straightforward tribute to the bonds of amity and obligation. A present hidden in paper or some other guise heightened the effect of the gesture, helping to fix the act of giving to a moment of revelation. Children thrilled to find their gifts tied to a tree, tucked beneath their dinner plates, or jammed in the toes of stockings. Alice James recalled her disappointment when, with the encouragement of her father, Henry Sr., she and her brothers annually searched out the hiding places of their Christmas gifts before the 25th. In 1902, Wells-Fargo Company made this excitement of anticipation a staple of the American Christmas when, to lessen the usual crush of business the week before Christmas, it supplied printed labels reading "DO NOT OPEN UNTIL CHRISTMAS."

The drama of surprise led to proposals that gifts might be made better by more elaborate ruses. At one point, Godey's suggested burying wrapped presents in a tub filled "with either bran or sawdust." Allowing the children to "dip" for the gifts, the editor argued, would "afford as much amusement, and give far less trouble than a Christmas tree." (The tip might have been especially appealing to women for, as the editor pointed out, the time consumed in preparation would be much less than for a Christmas tree.) By the 1880s givers had begun routinely to enfold their treasures in white paper, fastened with sealing wax and straight pins. Indeed, the romantic and decorative impulse of the late Victorian era favored the practice of covering nearly everything in a household. It decreed, for example, that lace, velvet, and fringes be draped fashionably over every stick of furniture. Understandably, this criteria applied also to gifts and demanded that even they should be shrouded.

Wrapping also helped designate an item as a gift. As increasingly gifts came from stores, factories, and homes of cottage laborers, paper and string helped redefine an object to meet its social use. Their presence indicated that the item no longer belonged to the realm of the marketplace, but now functioned as a gift to be given. The commercial world also comprehended the importance of this symbolic transformation of goods. The grander stores began to wrap gifts purchased from their stock in distinctive colored papers, tinsel cords, and bright ribbons as part of their delivery service. Thus, while paper might have blurred a present's association with commerce in some cases, in others it advertised a material status associated with patronizing the "right" store.

The dual role of gifts as material evidence of personal ties and as an important source of revenue for commerce and industry did not evolve without conflict and confusion. To choose a gift that appropriately reflected--in value and presentation--the relationship of giver to receiver was an increasingly baffling, costly, and time-consuming task. The Nation pinpointed one aspect of the dilemma. Christmas, it noted in 1883, brought "so much mingled hope and dread- hopefulness over dreams of what we may receive, and dread at the thought of what we shall have to give..." Charles Dudley Warner identified another pervasive concern. Believing that "all holidays, the Christian no less than the others, [tended] to go to excess," he predicted that Christmas would "soon become as burdensome as it formerly was by reason of excessive gifts and artificial social observances." "One-half the populace seems possessed of a wild desire to purchase all the things the other half has for sale," a cynical newspaper editor succinctly wrote.

Such quantities of money were expended on Christmas gifts that the New York Tribune repeatedly advised its readers not to spend what they did not have. Pay the bills owed the shoemaker and butcher before buying gifts for rich friends, it counseled. Even as early as 1861, a character in "Auntie's Merry Christmas" had paired the problem of paying bills and giving expensive gifts: "'No Christmas presents this year--every dollar must be saved for that unfortunate debt to Mr. T----..."

Toward the end of the century, the mad pace and material excess of Christmas had started to wear noticeably on the American public. "The Christmas time I have had 'beggars description,'" John Holmes reflected in January 1889. "Somehow or other Christmas ... doesn't allow you any rest, what with one thing and another. I feel as if I had just returned from a tour on foot to the Rocky Mountains." To him, people seemed "too distracted with sendings and receivings and answerings to enjoy any peaceful satisfaction." The New York Tribune concurred, declaring, "[T]he modern expansion of the custom of giving Christmas presents has done more than anything else to rob Christmas of its traditional joyousness ... [M]ost people nowadays are so fagged out, physically and mentally, by the time Christmas Day arrives that they are in no condition to enjoy it ... As soon as the Thanksgiving turkey is eaten, the great question of buying Christmas presents begins to take the terrifying shape it has come to assume in recent years." In summary, the paper wrote, "the season of Christmas needs to be dematerialized."

The call to "dematerialize the holiday" emphasized the relationship between affluence, which many saw as a reward from God, and Christian duty. Mixing traditional Protestant and American doctrines of individualism with the newer vision of Social Darwinism, many in the Christian community felt that American prosperity was proof and extension of God-ordained success, a link confirmed by lavish Christmas giving. Ministers often used their pulpits to support consumer gain. Rev. Russell H. Conwell, known for his sermon "Acres of Diamonds," and Bishop William Lawrence, who claimed that "Godliness is in league with riches," pressed home the congruence of virtue and success in the commercial world. Significantly, the liberal minister Edward Everett Hale preached an 1880 Christmas sermon entitled "Christ the Giver." In it he listed the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and "modern commerce" as Jesus' gifts to the congregation and mankind. "

However, the growing disparity between rich and poor, and especially the heart-rending scenes of urban poverty on the streets amid the riches of Chicago or New York City, also drew concern. Especially ministers and laypersons who proclaimed their loyalty to the Social Gospel thought that individualism had its limits, and that the gulf between the affluent and the impoverished threatened to destroy American society. "What can be done to bring these scattered, diverse, alienated, antipathetic groups of human beings into a real unity?" asked Washington Gladden, a leading proponent of the Social Gospel. "How can all these competing tribes and clans, owners of capital, captains of industry, inventors, artisans, artists, farmers, miners, distributors, exchangers, teachers, and all the rest, be made to understand that they are many members but one body...?" "The business of the Christian Church," he stated, "is to preach and realize here in the earth the Kingdom of Heaven ... a kingdom of peace and goodwill." This kingdom would come when man realized his obligations to his fellow man.

The Social Gospel never significantly transformed the deep, individualistic current in American Christianity into a force to salve the nation's social ills. However, its sentiments combined with more general Christian social themes to redirect a portion of the nation's materialistic leanings toward the less fortunate at Christmas and, at least on a symbolic scale, to earmark gifts as a form of charity. As the New York Tribune observed, Americans widely felt "a vague sense that our religion is involved in this matter of trees and stockings ... This fever of generosity [to friends, family, and charities] breathes through the paper; it is contagious; the coldest-blooded man begins to glow."

For many Americans, the turn toward others meant only a cheerful holiday interchange with associates or a greeting to strangers on the street. "Certainly no week is so charming as Christmas week," Harper's noted in 1864. People wore "a pleasanter expression" because they now had "an interest for others, and not for themselves. They are hastening to spend money, not to make it ... It is in giving gifts that the 'good-win' of the Christmas season reveals itself most clearly." Godey's noticed a similar phenomenon. "[W]e know nothing more enlivening than a walk through the streets where at this time the show of 'happy human faces' is quite equal to the shining wares in the shop windows."

Although charity and gift-giving clearly emanated from different kinds of social situations and personal motivations, they had comparable effects. Both types of giving acted as cathartic exercises in selflessness. It would not far overreach historical reality to speculate that the same social changes that highlighted gift-giving as a means for reinforcing kin and social bonds at the private level also inspired charitable gifts as a means of, if only symbolically, declaring a unity and safety in society that extended to even the most impoverished.

It was but one more large step to extend those good feelings and generosity to the homeless, hungry, and unemployed and to target Christmas as the time for the amelioration of these conditions. In earlier days, church stewardship had seen to the needy throughout the year, but since the 1830s and '40s the numbers of poor and indigent had multiplied. Ministers might remind their flocks that Jesus preached faith, hope, and charity, but the ability of their churches to tend to such fundamental human needs as food and shelter had faltered in the face of growing demand and a qualitatively different sense of relation to the poor and needy. The growth of cities, impermanence of employment, and separation of communities within urban areas made direct aid from individual churches impractical. The clergy extended sympathy, but had begun to see poverty as a social problem of class-divided communities. An emerging sense of a distinct middle-class order further separated the poor from others, in custom and culture as well as geography.

Increasingly, the call for relief emanated from the public pulpits of the media and from local officials, reformers, and state legislators. Magazines, newspapers, pamphlets, and broadsides served as secular agencies for expounding the obligations of the wealthy to help individuals who lived in poverty. And they generally delivered their sermons at Christmas time. In 1848 the Raleigh Register encouraged the wealthy to visit the city's sick and destitute, "administering from your abundance to their suffering and wants." "Edward," a character in "Christmas Presents" (1848), posed the challenge in a slightly different way: "How many hundreds and thousands of dollars are wasted on useless souvenirs and petty trifles that might do a lasting good if the stream of kind feelings were turned into a better channel?"

During the antebellum period, stories of compassion and action, while not so difficult to find, did bring to mind the patrician concerns that prompted charitable gestures. "The out of doors public in general are inebriated-in honor of Christmas Eve," George Templeton Strong had written on that day in 1841. Yet he was reluctant to "scold our poor day labourers ... the 'scum of the Earth'" for their behavior. "If we were in their shoes," Strong wrote, "as devoid of comforts -as inexperienced in all Enjoyments but those of sense--as ignorant--as uncared for--as homeless--as they are," he only hoped that "we should yet be as respectable as moral as decent & as temperate as we are now."

Lydia Maria Child, who longed to have children of her own, had been so moved by one ragged and homeless waif she had encountered at Christmas in 1843 that she became his benefactor. "The watchmen," she wrote to her friend Anna Loring, had "picked up a little vagabond in the street ... [and] put him in the tombs." He was about ten, too old to go to an orphanage, and "too dirty and disgusting to describe." He said he had lost his way. He had neither father nor mother; his mother used to get drunk and sleep in the streets, but he had not seen her for five years. Child and her husband rescued him. She scrubbed him and gave him new clothes and boots with which he was delighted--"it seemed as if the sun had shone out all over his face." She reported him saying that he would "remember this Christmas the longest day I live."

"Unfeeling obtuseness," a phrase from Walter Bagehot's history of the Victorian era, probably more aptly described the general attitude toward the poor in the early nineteenth century than did Child's kindness. But in the latter part of the century, he notes this feeling "was to be corrected by an extreme--perhaps an excessive--sensibility to human suffering ... The tradition of benevolence reached its peak and added its powerful influence to that of moral earnestness in promoting Victorian charity and social legislation." In America, media, individuals, and private social agencies, as well as churches, became key to poor relief after the Civil War. Often they premised their calls for sympathy and action on the obligations accrued with wealth. "Does it occur to you as you walk up and down Broadway, in the best of all days of the year, the Christmas days, that actual happiness is for sale in those bright shops--happiness, that is, for those who can enjoy it?" Harper's Monthly asked. The text beneath an engraved scene of a Christmas party that appeared in Godey's underscored the illustration's visual message as it directed the reader to "Mark the contrast between the guests entering the brilliantly lighted hall and the poor woman and her child at the door."

A sense that there were those who were worthy of relief and those who were not qualified the attention devoted to poverty relief, though. Children almost always deserved aid, as did honest women. Seldom did the same plea go out for men. A seasonal article in the New York Tribune implored the public to provide for poor children. In 1877, it reminded readers that most Americans were "Christian people," and advised them to try their best to keep children from being deprived at this time "when they think that all good gifts and gladness come straight from Him whose birthday it is." At the same time, the paper advised the sympathetic to ignore plain street beggars.

When popular stories engaged the topic of charity, they revealed a similar inclination to rescue women and children from poverty. "Christmas for the Rich and Poor," by Annie Frost, told the tale of a woman who on Christmas fifteen years earlier had married against her father's wishes and been disowned. Fate treated her cruelly. Her husband died, leaving her with two children. She fell ill, and her little family's poverty forced the children to beg for whatever warmth and sustenance they could find. On Christmas Eve their quest took them to a prosperous street, where one household took them in. As it turned out, the home belonged to their mother's wealthy father. Upon seeing first his grandchildren and then his daughter, the father forgave the wayward daughter and took them all back into the family.

The sentimentalization of "worthy paupers" at Christmas time, whether in fact or in fiction, did not bring into question the essential structure of the market economy that had, if only indirectly, produced their poverty. Instead, it imbued destitute women and vagabond children with admirable qualities that existed apart from materialism, perhaps even as substitutes for tangible wealth. It also aroused the sympathies of readers by giving a face to poverty, and placed the means of solving the problems of hunger and homelessness in the hands of individuals.

Although the dramatic deliverance from financial poverty figured prominently in Christmas pauper tales, the stories often carried another theme, that of the rescue of a wealthy man from a moral poverty expressed in his cold-heartedness. In the case of "Christmas for the Rich and Poor," the wealthy father/grandfather, who had disowned his own daughter and thereby disowned his grandchildren, won, through the simple act of forgiveness, a much fuller life. The mother and two children, although they suffered from cold and hunger, had never relinquished their warm and sustaining love for each other.

Perhaps more than any other single work, Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol provides the paradigm for the moral attitude and obligation that Americans adopted toward Christmas charity. In 1867, the same year that Sarah Hale declared Christmas the "celestial magnet of brotherhood," Dickens made a second tour of American cities. He needed money and believed that since his work had been widely published and read by Americans, often in editions that had been pirated and for which he had received no royalties, he could realize sizable reward by giving readings. He was not disappointed, and found Americans especially responsive to his recitation of A Christmas Carol.

Dickens had written A Christmas Carol in 1842, the winter after he had returned from his first visit to America. A "small, bright-eyed, intelligent-looking young fellow, thirty years of age, somewhat of a dandy in his dress," according to one description, he had enjoyed a lavish welcome from Americans already familiar with his stories. For part of his visit, he stayed in the home of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who allegedly imparted to Dickens a strong sense of the country's spirit and customs. This included Christmas. Prior to then, Dickens had apparently shown no interest in the holiday. "Although he was constantly organizing entertainments for all times and occasions, it never occurred to him to celebrate Christmas. It was New Year's Day, apparently, that held the first place in his affections," reported the New York Tribune in 1900. Only after his visit to America did Dickens begin to give large Christmas parties.

When Dickens returned to England in the summer of 1842, he was desperately short of money. He quickly dreamed up a Christmas story (possibly drawing on his new appreciation for the holiday) and dashed it off just in time for a London paper to serialize it in mid-December. A Christmas Carol, in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas went on the stands on December 19. An immediate and resounding success, the full edition of 6000 copies sold out on the first day.

At first, Americans were less enthusiastic. Dickens's American Notes for General Circulation (1842) had wounded national pride. Americans were also smarting from his treatment of them in Martin Chuzzlewit, which was currently being serialized. But A Christmas Carol proved too compelling to be ignored, and by the end of the Civil War, copies had circulated widely. "Dickens," noted the New York Times in 1863, "brings the old Christmas into the present out of bygone centuries and remote manor houses, into the living rooms of the very poor of to-day." The North American Review asserted: "His fellow-feeling with the race is his genius." John Greenleaf Whittier thought it a "charming book ... outwardly and inwardly!"

With the publication of A Christmas Carol, Dickens articulated the essence of Christmas in strikingly new terms. Previously, he and others had glorified the past in their telling of Christmas tales. In the Bracebridge stories, Washington Irving had explored the way in which the staging of a nostalgic English Christmas might restore a social harmony and well-being ravaged by modern times. Dickens himself had once approached Christmas in a similar manner. "A Christmas Dinner" in Sketches by Boz (1833) pointed out that some people "will tell you that Christmas is not to them what it used to be..." (Dickens, however, advised: "Never heed such dismal reminiscences.") In the Pickwick Papers (1837), he idealized the Christmas of eighteenth-century England at Dingley Dell, making it the focus of fond memories, "companionship and mutual good-will," a "season of hospitality, merriment, and open-heartedness."

But that Christmas no longer existed, if it ever had, especially not for Americans. Irving had realized as much by the time he had finished his Bracebridge stories. George Templeton Strong, the observant New York diarist, recognized the same truth. "0 for the times of old England & the Christmas day ... of three centuries ago," he wrote in 1837. "Those times are most glorious to write about & to dream about-whatever their real character was." But Strong knew that the holiday many imagined Christmas to have been could not exist in his time. If it had, compromises would have to have been made. Merchants would have to keep open house as they used to and in would rush "a mob of promiscuous loafing--Rahag Tahag, & Bohob-tay-d--," breaking glasses and spitting tobacco everywhere. The Yule log would have to burn in the kitchen range or some other "scientific uncomfortable contrivance." No, declared Strong, "Christmas in the glorious antique style was "irrecoverably gone." Dickens knew that too.

In its place, Dickens provided A Christmas Carol. Although it incorporated the familiar feast and conviviality of the "traditional" Christmas, Dickens set his tale of Ebenezer Scrooge's conversion to humanity in the unheated walls of commerce, on dreary city streets, and around the warm hearths of urban homes, away from the baronial countryside. One Christmas Eve, seven years to the day after the death of his partner, Jacob Marley, three Christmas ghosts visit Scrooge. The first takes Scrooge on a journey into distant memories, where the old merchant's tenderer emotions are rekindled. The second spirit, the ghost of Christmas present, transports Scrooge from his cold and dreary bedroom to the homes of Scrooge's nephew and his humble employee, Bob Cratchit, where their families have gathered for Christmas dinner. The third spirit gives Scrooge a glimpse of what his future will be like if he does not learn and act upon what he has just witnessed."

In this tale, past and future affect the most important time, the present. In order to redeem his future, Scrooge has to face his past and repent. His past is hardly a repository for nostalgia, but it is crucial to and even a part of his new self. It is a source of regeneration and salvation. So, on Christmas Day Scrooge rises a new man. He orders the largest turkey delivered anonymously to the Cratchits. To the man who had solicited money from him the day before on behalf of the poor and indigent, he makes a sizable donation. He attends church and then visits his nephew's house, where all have a "wonderful party, wonderful games, wonderful unanimity, wonderful happiness!" The next day Scrooge raises Cratchit's salary and promises to help him with his struggling family. Tiny Tim, Cratchit's lame little son, does not die, as the ghost predicts, and Scrooge becomes "as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knows, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world."

The salvation of Scrooge recalled that of the United States as it emerged from war. Hale, using the language and imagery of family and brotherhood, had pointed out that Christmas symbolized a time of regeneration, when the nation could recapture its past and rededicate itself to the future. In many ways, Dickens sent a similar message; the spirit of Christmas Present accentuated the emotional safety of home. As darkness fell and it began "snowing pretty heavily," Scrooge and his spirit departed from the Cratchits'. In windows along the streets, they saw peaceful domestic scenes, the wonderful "brightness of the roaring fires in kitchens, parlors, and tall sorts of rooms." They observed the "cosy dinner" and the curtains ready to be drawn against the cold and night. Children ran out of houses and into the snow to meet their arriving "married sisters, brothers, cousins, uncles, aunts." These scenes and feelings provided the foundation for redeeming both Scrooge and society's futures.

The redemption of Scrooge underlined the conservative, individualistic, and patriarchal qualities of what came to be known as Dickens's "carol philosophy." It depended on the willingness of a more fortunate individual to look after a less fortunate one. It did not call forth the power of government or any agency to effect changes in an economy that created extremes of poverty and wealth. Instead of offering an antidote to modem depersonalization and greed, the personal patronage that Scrooge bestowed on the Cratchits delineated a narrower interpretation of old forms of noblesse oblige. Where he might have suggested a broader and more tolerant social morality, Dickens relied on a highly personal moral conscience and emphasized individual action. So, after being haunted through what must have seemed to him a nearly interminable night, Scrooge provided the turkey for the Cratchits' Christmas dinner and raised Bob Cratchit's salary. But Cratchit and Tiny Tim had first to demonstrate that they were worthy objects of Scrooge's new found charitable attentions. Moreover, Dickens gave no sign that any other of Scrooge's employees besides Cratchit received an increase in salary. Nor did he indicate that Cratchit's miserable working conditions might improve in other than monetary ways.

However, Dickens's message in A Christmas Carol was not simply, or only, "Give to the worthy poor." It involved a ' significant exchange between giver and receiver. True, Scrooge alleviated Cratchit's dire poverty. But Cratchit, who actually did nothing, gave Scrooge a gift, too, albeit one less concrete; the example of Cratchit's life helped Scrooge realize his own humanity. In fact, the story's message had more to do with Scrooge's rescue from a solitary and miserly life than it did with the Cratchits' poverty of hard currency. The story's real patron proved to be Cratchit, and the wealthy, miserable Scrooge, the recipient. At the story's end, we believe Scrooge to be a better man for being blessed by Tiny Tim and raising Bob Cratchit's wage. Scrooge's reward, as it were, was an intangible calm that he could not find in dreams or in his warehouse, but only in joining the ranks of humankind. Scrooge had undergone a secular spiritual conversion.

In their comprehension of poverty and its solutions, most Americans moved little beyond Dickens. They believed their Christmas generosity praiseworthy. Charles Dudley Warner thought the present American Christmas to be "fuller of real charity and brotherly love, and nearer the Divine intention" than earlier Christmases. The New York Tribune found the holiday "hearty and generous-minded, [full of] good-cheer and openhanded hospitality." "Nowhere in Christendom," it contended, "are the poor remembered at Christmas-tide so generously as they are in American cities, especially in our own."

In this glow of self-congratulation, Americans persisted in seeing poor relief as a matter of individual action to be undertaken on much the same terms as gift-giving within the circle of family. That is, Christmas was the time to give. The best and largest gifts went to those closest to the circle's center. The lesser gifts, in descending order of value, went out to relatives and acquaintances of decreasing importance. The worthy poor, as the outermost members of the larger community family, received gifts too, though the least valuable of all the gifts given.

An advertisement Best and Company placed in 1894 illustrated the hierarchy. It suggested that "while busy buying things for Christmas" for your own children, you might think of other children you know who are "less fortunate than your own." It advised that "a gift of serviceable clothing would be more than welcome." The company thoughtfully had supplied a special group of marked-down goods from which to choose. However, it concluded by noting that "For your own children we have the most desireable articles for Holiday Gifts... " By making charity a personal offering that bound giver to recipient, Americans reinforced social unity as well as the status quo across a broad spectrum of income and background.

Still the economic system that created such poverty remained relatively unchallenged. The case was especially paradoxical in businesses where poorly paid Christmas help labored to supply large profits to clever owners and middlemen. Louis Prang, for example, thought women peculiarly suited to doing the delicate coloring his exquisite Christmas cards required and employed them in large numbers. Yet of all the women in the print industry, his received the lowest pay. When Macy's first began staying open in the evenings to serve the holiday trade, it had provided supper money for the workers. One employee remembered watching Abiel LaForge, part owner of Macy's, escorting with obvious enjoyment a crowd of "cash girls" to a neighboring restaurant. But, during the 1870s at least, Macy's often required its clerks to work into the early morning hours during the hectic holiday rush. Some spent the remainder of short nights asleep on sales counters, using bolts of cloth for pillows.

F. W. Woolworth maintained a consistent attention to his personal profit margin over the interests of employee, supplier, and consumer that exemplified business attitudes associated with the Gilded Age. While buying ornaments wholesale in Lauscha, Germany, Woolworth saw first hand the grim conditions of the trade but showed no signs that he was moved by them. "Tree ornaments," he wrote in a letter home, "are made by the very poorest class there is in Europe and we were obliged to go into their dirty hovels to see what we could use." In one place, he "found a man and a woman in one room with six small children, the youngest not over eight years old, and both man and woman hard at work." "It was the dirtiest and worst smelling place I was ever in," Woolworth continued. "We waded through mud ankle-deep up hill and down in search of marbles and tree ornaments all day." For their labor, a typical family of six working six-day weeks to produce tree ornaments to sell to Woolworth earned the equivalent of $3 per week, about what a bricklayer in America made for a day's work.

Woolworth also believed that wages should be kept low in his own stores. In 1892, just before the December rush, Woolworth made explicit his belief. "We pay out more than one third of our annual expenses for salaries," Woolworth announced in the annual letter of 1892. "We must have cheap help or we cannot sell cheap goods." He paid his "girls" $1.50 per week. That December the women employed in one of his stores went on strike for higher wages. Woolworth wrote his managers: "No doubt they take advantage now while we are so busy, and think we will pay the advance. All such girls you should remember when the dull season comes and give them the 'bounce.'"

Nonetheless, employee demands cut into the company's profit margin, an ideal Woolworth set at 40 to 55 percent. By 1899, Woolworth, whose Christmas trade alone for 1899 totaled nearly half a million dollars, had worked out a system of bonuses in which he paid $5 for each year of service with a limit of $25. "Pay this present just before Christmas or the day after," Woolworth directed his managers. "Our object is to secure the services of our clerks at a time of the year when competitors are tempting them with higher wages."

The culture's use of Christmas charity to balance symbolically the rapacious acquisitiveness of the age helped obscure these and other questionable or scandalous labor practices. The rich man was not condemnable if he recognized publicly that his riches meant little compared with his responsibility to humanity. That truth perceived and acted upon in highly public, seemingly generous fashion, he had made his peace. Thus, the age that inspired Thorstein Veblen to write of "conspicuous consumption" also produced a variety of philanthropy that might have been called "conspicuous charity."

The drama of wealth and charity, in many ways an American version of Dickens's story, could be found at its sentimental best in Thomas Nelson Page's Santa Claus's Partner (1899). On Christmas Eve, while figuring his accounts, one Berryman Livingstone (his name, no doubt, an observation on the contradiction that one so cold-hearted could actually be alive) discovered that he had become rich. The road had not been without sacrifice. He had forgone marriage to Catherine Trelane to pursue wealth. When he had finally proposed, she refused to marry him on the grounds that he brought her wealth but not himself

That Christmas night Livingstone had a conversion experience that only the self-made man could have: He saw the hollowness of his life. Immediately Livingstone went to the home of Clark, his faithful clerk, who had a sick wife and eight children, and persuaded Clark's daughter to help him pick out toys. These he instructed her to deliver to a children's hospital in the guise of Santa!s partner. More important, Livingstone, who had suddenly realized that he owed his wealth to Clark's advice and loyalty, paid off the rest of the mortgage on Clark's home (thereby indirectly helping Mrs. Clark recover), made Clark his business partner, and provided dinner and an abundance of toys for all Clark's family. "It is no use to deny it, Clark," he confessed, "--I have--I have!--I have been a brute for years and I have just awakened to the fact!" Later that day Livingstone saw Catherine Trelane, now widowed, and began again to hope he might marry her.

Livingstone had been saved, his single-minded pursuit of riches rectified by a burst of generosity. This material means of salvation indicated a broader truth about Christmas and its gifts. In a world dominated by commerce, one important ritual of grace was spending money on others.

The American Santa Claus

Santa Claus, with his fur-trimmed red suit, sackful of toys, reindeer, sleigh, and home at the North Pole, became in the late nineteenth century as central to the American Christmas as gift-giving. His actions set into motion the excitement of Christmas Eve and morning. In Santa, a child could find solace and hope. Parents could depend on him to shape their children's attitude toward the world. He raised serious religious questions for some and represented simple Christmas charity to others. He helped merchants sell their wares. As a successful factory owner, philanthropist, and quasi-religious figure, Santa Claus bespoke the wistful yearnings of a nation that could neither fully embrace its wealth nor forsake its search for spiritual meaning. As a folk hero, he reflected the state of American society, providing a symbolic figure through which to experience, discuss, and criticize the effect and meaning of Christmas in the culture. A character who began as Clement Moore's exercise in family whimsy had been transformed by late in the century into a mediator between spiritual and material worlds for a culture torn by change. In short, Santa Claus became an American folk icon whose legend at one celebrated the myths of the Gilded Age and critiqued its realities.

Clearly, Santa Claus had traveled a long way since the early nineteenth century, when representations of him had depended mainly upon associations with Belznickel, St. Nicholas, Father Christmas, and similar folk figures. Even Clement Moore's enormously popular "An Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas" at first circulated only as a literary piece in a relatively narrow social setting. Yet by the Civil War, in part because of the new prominence of the Christmas holiday and new printing technology, a novel and uniform visual perception of Santa had begun to develop. He assumed an increasingly human dimension and, at the same time, his supernatural powers expanded. In a Protestant culture that traditionally looked upon visual representations of God, Jesus, and saints with great suspicion, this transition was significant.

The first pictures of Santa testified to the variety of ways in which Americans had once imagined the saint. A juvenile annual, The Children's Friend, A New Year's Present to the Little Ones from Five to Twelve (1821), supplied one of the earliest images when it illustrated a lengthy poem about "the children's friend" with eight color lithographs. One of them pictured Santa in a red outfit that was neither quite like a suit of clothing an American might wear, nor like a flowing robe a bishop, such as Saint Nicholas, might wear. Neither did it resemble the old Dutch garb that St. Nicholas wore in descriptions written by Washington Irving and James K. Paulding.

In 1837, nearly two decades after the first lithographs had been published, Robert Weir who taught art at West Point, painted the first American portrait of Santa. He posed the saint just as he readied to ascend the chimney, the penultimate scene of Moore's poem. Perhaps inspired by his friend Gulian Verplanck, Moore's closest friend at the General Theological Seminary and an enthusiast of Irving's St. Nicholas, Weir depicted Santa as a short, beardless man, dressed in high boots, short coat, and stocking cap. He gave him a frightening sneer and a sack overflowing with toys for good children and switches for bad.

Weir's Santa reflected a number of influences. His dress and clay pipe suggested that American Dutch lore animated the rendering. Weir added a red cape edged in fur, reminiscent of traditional bishop's clothing, and daubed in what looked like a rosary. This melding of European, American Dutch, and perhaps even German imagery produced a figure of confused heritage. Apparently not even Weir was exactly certain of what he had created, for he titled his work "Santa Claus, or St. Nicholas."

Other early versions of Santa reflected equally jumbled lineages. The "mysterious chimney-friend, 'Chriscringle,'" that Parkinson's Confectionery in Philadelphia displayed in 1841, mixed German tradition and American fancy. Dressed "in antique costume, with striped pants and stockings, and flying doublet; a tasselled cap on his head and a broad, benevolent grin on his face," and hands and pockets full of toys and candy, he was "reascending a chimney after having filled the stocking hung up by the faith of some young urchin, full of divers bagatelles," Isaac Mickle wrote. In 1859, a New York City woman described St. Nicholas as "a jolly, rosy-cheeked little old man, with a low-crowned hat, a pair of Flemish trunk-hose and a pipe of immense length..." This Santa distinctly recalled New York's Dutch tradition, but this time he came from the cold north in a reindeer-drawn sleigh. The St. Nicholas Society of New York City distributed yet another vision of Santa. As it rededicated itself to civic purpose in mid-century, it circulated a woodcut of St. Nicholas, "good holy man," that it had commissioned Dr. Alexander Anderson to carve in 1810, over fifty years earlier.

Over the years, Godey's presented a number of versions of a gift-bringer. Its December 1867 issue opened with an engraving of a bearded "Old Father Christmas" wearing a long tunic. He carried a staff in one hand and held out a doll toward a crowd of children with the other. In 1868, December's "Crafts" section carried instructions for making an "Old Father Christmas" from pine cones. This prickly Santa had a pack full of toys, apples, and nuts and carried a Christmas tree, "a nutcracker and a birchrod." Flowing robes, long white hair and beard, and an odd, tall, peaked hat lent an aura of spirituality to the visitor in "Welcome, Kriss Kringle, Come In," the opening engraving in the 1878 Christmas edition. The same variety showed in the magazine's fiction. In "A Story About a Goose: A Christmas Story" (1862), Father Christmas brought the gifts; in "Journeying in the Cradle," a poem (1866), "old Santa Claus in his blue tiny sleigh" brought them.'

As Americans continued to experiment with his image, Santa's live appearance revealed an equally wonderful range of interpretation. When Santa finally got to Michigan (in 1864), one woman wrote to her brother that she had "often heard Santa Claus described, but never before saw the old fellow in person." He wore a buffalo coat with "presents fastened on his coat-tail ... [and] a com-popper on his back." However, when Santa visited a New York ball one Christmas Eve, he appeared clad in large buckskin boots, dark brown coat, fawn-colored pants with a blue stripe, and a red vest with big brass buttons that "encircled a truly aldermanic paunch." An "ample cloak of scarlet and gold" completed his attire, the New York Herald reported. "He was laden with toys--they hung from his arms, round his neck, his waist, and his back was heavily freighted." He distributed gifts to everyone as he chuckled "good humoredly" to himself. When he visited 800 children at New York's Five Points Mission in 1884, he arrived "wrapped in a great coat of siberian wolf skins, over which his long beard hung down to his knees.

Although Santa would continue to don an assortment of costumes, the nation grew most familiar with Clement Clark Moore's idea of Santa. Reprinted in magazines, newspapers, books, and copybooks, "An Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas" stimulated a common impression of Santa as a generous and genial American saint. At a quickening pace, innumerable artists, authors, editors, and doggerel poets elaborated on Moore's setpiece, reinforcing public opinion not only about how Santa acted but also about how he looked. Imagined in light of Moore's vivid word-pictures, Santa assumed a consistently cheerful and witty visage. Thus, when F. 0. C. Darley illustrated Moore's poem in 1862, he drew a plump Santa, a pipe in his teeth, wearing a furry jacket and pointed hat. Indeed, by mid-century artists seldom portrayed Santa Claus except in association with "A Visit."

Even Thomas Nast, the talented young cartoonist employed by Harper's Weekly, when he first illustrated an edition of "A Visit" in 1863 hewed closely to Moore's perception of St. Nick. His sketches of Santa changed little during the Civil War. Soon after, however, Nast began what would become a thirty-year project to create an entire world for Santa. "Santa Claus and his Works" (1866) was his first significant installment. At the center stood Mr. Claus himself, a figure so short that he needed a chair to reach the fireplace mantle. Around him, Nast composed a set of small drawings that revealed the environment in which Santa lived and the nature of his work--at home, in his ice palace, in his workshop, and looking through his telescope for "Good Children." Other scenes depicted him poring over a massive, waist-high "Record of Behavior" and resting his feet before an open fireplace during holiday week. Still another revealed the world that Santa represented to children--the toys, dollies, stockings, and Christmas tree. When Nast redrew these same images of Santas life for a book of children's verse the following year, he gave Santa what was to become his characteristic dress, a bright red suit trimmed in white ermine.

Another of Nast's contributions to the lore of Santa Claus was a drawing that has become something of an official portrait of Santa. It appeared in Harper's Weekly in 1881 and presented a round-cheeked, white-haired and bearded old fellow clad in a furry red coat. One hand cradled a long stemmed pipe. The other rested lightly on his generously rotund middle, enabling him to hold a wooden horse, a doll, and other playthings in the crook of his arm. Nast trimmed Santa's hat with a sprig of holly and made him in other ways "traditional" in appearance. The strap, imprinted with "US" that Nast draped over Santa's forearm and the prominent fan of toys beneath it reminded onlookers of the importance of nation and children.'

At the same time, others also had begun to describe a life for Santa outside the confines of the house in which "A Visit" took place. Some experimented boldly. Julia F. Snow, for example, called upon the romance of the American West when she described Santa's home as "a cave under Mount Hecla ... supplied with water from a domesticated Geyser." His fireplace, she wrote, was "wide enough to give place to all the juvenile stockings of Brigham Young's family." Still, Nast provided the most compelling imagery, perhaps because he energetically and inventively engaged in the Christmas rituals of his own household. Together with his wife, he delighted in arranging the armloads of gifts that stores delivered to their home on Christmas Eve. On Christmas mornings, their children recalled, there was always a multitude of paper dolls--marvelously big and elaborate paper dolls ... arranged in processions and cavalcades, [and] gay pageants that marched in and about those larger presents along the studio mantel."

In all, Nast's fanciful Christmas drawings illuminated a wide sphere of Santa's rule in the late nineteenth century. Moore had already supplied him with eight reindeer to pull his sleigh. Nast gave him more stockings to stuff, a workshop, ledgers to record children's conduct, and more children to please. He made him taller and dressed him in red. To this, Nast and others added a home at the North Pole, elves, a wife, and even, by some accounts, children. These amplifications drew upon conditions of the nation's material and spiritual life and imparted to Santa an ever more human and credible dimension.

Consider, for example, Santa's home at the North Pole. Exactly how it came to be is not clear. One historian suggested that after Santa adopted the sled as his mode of transportation, it was easy to move his homeland progressively northward to where the snow lasted year round. But he offered no evidence of earlier homelands. The beginning point of Santa's journeys had always been rather vague and often mysterious. John Pintard wrote that Santa Claus arrived from Spain, in a Dutch ship filled with toys, and docked each Christmas Eve in New York. A later version, from New York City, said that he came "from the frozen regions of the North." More frequently, however, Santa seemed simply to appear and then to disappear after distributing his gifts.

Perhaps the idea of an Arctic homeland reflected contemporary geographic and political concerns. The existence of a north pole had been known since ancient times and, according to Isaac Asimov, "there were many who held that beyond the snow and ice there was open sea and a pleasant environment." When John Franklin, an English navigator and naturalist, set out in the late 1840s to locate the Northwest Passage and failed to return, curiosity about the north swelled, becoming more intense in the early 1850s as two New York expeditions went to search for Franklin. Throughout the remainder of the century, articles on the North Pole sustained American interest in the geography of the Arctic.

As Americans began to conceive of the existence and then geography of the North Pole, they also began referring to it as Santa's home. In 1859, one woman attended a church event where a mock post office had been set up. There she received a letter from one E. M. Morse, who claimed not only to have written from that place, but to have hoisted the stars and stripes on the pole itself. "Although this pole has been used for more than 6,000 years," he wrote her, "it is still as good as new." It was not long before the notion of such a frozen and unknown place gripped Nast's imagination: In 1866, as part of his drawing of "Santa Claus and His Works," Nast housed Santa in an ice palace. Eventually, he specified the North Pole as Santa's home, the "one entirely original touch," according to one historian, that Nast added to the Santa legend. Nast's grandson asserted that Nast chose the pole because it was equidistant from most countries in the Northern Hemisphere. It was also a place where Santa could work without interruption and one which no country could claim as its own.

With his home at the Pole, Santa no longer needed to materialize out of winter skies. He could leave and then return at the end of his Christmas rounds to a warm hearth, just like any ideal Victorian head of house did after a long day of labor. But Santa did not reign over a typical household. Until 1899, when Katherine Lee Bates created a Mrs. Claus character in Goody Santa Claus on a Sleigh Ride, he had no wife. Nor did Santa have any children, at least in public lore. Indeed, Santa's work, the preparation and annual delivery of toys to children in other families, seemed much more important than home life. In this aspect, Santa also reflected the work-centered life of many Americans, although the circumstances of his work were inarguably unique.

To meet the yearly demand for toys, Santa relied on helpful elves who worked long hours in their polar workshop. The idea for creating such a workplace apparently sprang from Nast's own imagination (perhaps as a nostalgic took at pre-factory production). Nast, however, did not invent the elves. A staple of Victorian literature, ghosts, elves, or fairies were a natural addition to a fairy tale such as that being spun about Santa Claus. Santa's elves had appeared as early as 1856, when Louisa May Alcott completed, but never published, a book titled "Christmas Elves." Elves had also been sighted in an engraving in Godey's from 1873, which showed them surrounding Santa at work. Edward Eggleston gave them additional recognition in 1876, with "The House of Santa Claus, a Christmas Fairy Show for Sunday Schools."

A work force of skilled and reliable elf labor helped secure Santa's place in the pantheon of American financiers, manufacturers, and industrial moguls. These North Pole elves were not unlike immigrants working in the nation's sweatshops. Unassimilated, isolated from the rest of society, and undifferentiated by individual name or character, the best of them worked hard, long, and unselfishly. Their existence made manifest a maxim that hard work and a cheerful attitude benefited all.

Godey's drew an implicit parallel between Santa's workshop and elves and the foreign manufacture of toys. "The Workshop of Santa Claus," the frontispiece illustration for its 1873 Christmas issue, showed Santa encircled by toys and elves. The caption beneath it read: "Here we have an idea of the preparations that are made to supply the young folks with toys at Christmas time." The accompanying editorial addressed the realities of the situation; dolls, boats, tops, and toy soldiers were not fabricated in a magical workplace. Foreigners who were "very poor," not elves, made them. "Whole villages engage in the work, and the contractors every week in the year go round and gather together the six days' work and pay for it. They [i.e., the toys] are taken to their destination and packed for transportation," she wrote. "The cost of these toys is small; and yet there is a profit in them."

The charming notion that Santa and his tiny helpers supplied all the Christmas toys encoded another highly romantic vision of American capitalism: Santa reigned without opposition over a vast empire, truly a captain of industry. Nearly everyone had whispered his name in awe at one time or another. From his fur coat to his full girth, he looked not unlike the portraits of the nation's Presidents or its well-fed financial moguls. The pocket watch he fingered, in Nast's 1870 portrait, suggested the clock by which the nation's economy kept time. It also symbolized Santa's dependability. Every year, his workshop turned out a seemingly limitless supply of quality goods. These Santa managed to distribute in an innovative, orderly, and timely fashion.

Santa's credibility as a folk hero depended on his ability to exist in the world of practicality as a highly successful manufacturer and distributor of toys. Yet any analogies that might be drawn between his work and late nineteenth-century capitalism lay enmeshed in paradox, for, in significant ways, Santa Claus also represented values at odds with the system. Rather than acquire wealth, he shed it yearly. He was a robber baron in reverse. He never purchased gifts, but (with elf help) made his own to give away without regard for financial profit. Whereas industrialists prospered from the innocence and naivete of the populace, Santa rewarded the most innocent and naive of all--the children. With his quaintly antiquated sled-and-reindeer transportation, this old, secular saint recalled idyllic earlier times in which competition, progress, prosperity, and efficiency mattered little. Distant from the calumnies and banalities of everyday life, Santa Claus issued from a realm of dreams, hopes, wishes, and beliefs, not from the realities and compromises necessary to negotiate contemporary life.

Ultimately, the invention of Santa in all his many aspects, while perpetuated as a child's story, depended on adults to sustain and embellish it. Artists, poets, editors, and women "scribblers" helped to construct the myth and describe its minute details in the magazines for which they wrote and drew.

Parents enumerated Santa's most essential and convincing traits, vouchsafing his authenticity for their children. This could be as simple and persuasive as a mention of Santa's omniscience to a recalcitrant child. For others, it might be as elaborate as it was ill-conceived. One devoted father, this one in Newcastle, Pennsylvania, decided to surprise his family by impersonating Santa on Christmas Eve in 1893. He safely scaled the chimney and began his downward slide. About halfway down, he got stuck. His muffled cries for help succeeded only in frightening his family into fleeing from their home. Neighbors eventually rescued him, but only after they had torn the chimney down to roof level so that they could lower a rope.

Some parents penned letters to their children over Santa's forged signature. In at least one instance this became a rather elaborate and ongoing embroidery. On St. Nicholas's Eve, 1879, "Santa" wrote to two young sisters explaining that his reindeer had fallen through the ice on a prior trip to New London and that its replacement had been killed by a bear. The bear also "came near killing my youngest son, a little fellow only about 65 years old, but very bright and cunning and not at all afraid of bears." Santa wrote next on Christmas Eve, 1882, this time to the children's father. He promised that if he were unable to visit that night, he would send "one of my boys" in his place, that is if he could get another pair of deer. Bears had already killed two deer and "eaten them allmost up" before Santa could kill them. Besides, his 85-year-old "little boy" had a bad case of croup, forcing Santa "to send one of my other boys to you who had never been away Christmasing before wh[ich] was the reason for his cutting up as he did."

Most fascinating in such stories as these is the degree to which adults became involved in vivifying the Santa myth. The phenomenon has led some scholars to concentrate on the meaning of Santa to adults rather than to children. One anthropologist, Wendell Oswalt, suggested that Santa personified "the idealistic world we have tried to create for small children." Santa brought whatever a child wanted, hardly what adults experienced in the world. "By supporting the myth of Santa," he argued, "we express our own misgivings about the psychological satisfactions derived from our materialistic cultural system." (One might also observe that, by distributing material gifts to children--the most innocent and therefore deserving recipients of bounty--Santa confirmed the prevailing nineteenth-century social and religious thought that equated wealth with goodness.) Warren 0. Hagstrom speculated briefly on a Marxist interpretation of the Santa rituals, suggesting that they might be seen as a parental tool of control and oppression of children; or, conversely, that "belief in Santa is the sigh of the oppressed children ... It is the opium of childhood."

At the time, many Americans began to worry that Santa would overshadow Christmas itself. This "Santa Claus folly has infected family life, literature, church services, everything almost, at this season," wrote "Germanicus" for the Lutheran Observer in 1883. He especially faulted Calvinists, "the denominations that have had no other holy-day but Sunday, and that have only recently adopted the Christmas," and charged them with embracing only the "outward and oftentimes most objectionable features" of the holiday.

A number of writers, preachers, poets, and others who published their thoughts on the subject of Santa feared that children might compare Santa with God and that their belief in Santa might hinder or pervert faith. Some even worried that Santa had become a substitute and rival for Jesus. Centuries earlier, Puritans, concerned that saints might stand for God, had excluded them from their beliefs. Although the faith not only of Puritan Calvinists but of all Christians had modified over the intervening years, America's Protestant culture still looked upon an iconographic, human-like embodiment of Christmas with great suspicion. A letter to the Philadelphia Lutheran (December 22, 1881) came directly to the point when it cautioned, "do not substitute for the Babe of Bethlehem, the figure of a Santa Claus." One little girl, an evangelical magazine reported in 1906, was told that Santa did not exist. A few days later she refused to attend Sabbath school, reasoning, "Likely as not this Jesus Christ business will turn out just like Santa Claus.""

The simple equation of Jesus owith Santa, however, did not illuminate the subtle ways in which a belief in Santa Claus had become entangled in the nuances of American Protestantism. As science increasingly collided with and overpowered faith, the existence of religious belief in many instances had become dependent upon reason and scientific proof. Santa, while not a religious figure per se, acted as a sometimes demonstrably palpable medium through which children and adults in late nineteenth-century America experienced and acted upon spiritual impulses.

A poem printed in Demorest's Monthly illustrated one way in which Santa acted as the catalyst through which a church's needs were met. In its few lines, a minister pondered the message of his Christmas sermon. He felt "a wave of trouble [run] over his heart, because [his congregation] thought much less of Jesus Christ than they did of Santa Claus." He had heard them eagerly whispering, one to another, "What will I get on Christmas? What will Santa Claus bring?"

In the end, the preacher dodged the implied challenge that believing in Santa posed to believing in Jesus. Rather than chastise his flock for their anticipation of Santa's gifts, he decided to give his lesson on the theme that it is "more blessed to give than to receive." The result, he discovered, was that his parishioners overwhelmed him with their generous spirit, and thereby justified the minister's strategy.

More complicated were the ways in which the belief in Santa Claus had become a way in which Americans perceived the nature of religious belief. Commentary scattered throughout contemporary popular media indicated that even as they offered critiques on Santa, many were trying to assess the relationship of a child's belief in a generous secular saint to the condition of their own religious feelings.

Jacob Riis, famous for his work among the poorest of the nation, insisted that Santa would lead the believer to Jesus. "Because--don't you know, Santa Claus is the spirit of Christmas," he wrote in answer to his own question, "Is There a Santa Claus?" "[W]hen the dear little Baby was born after whom we call Christmas ... that Spirit came into the world to soften the hearts of men and make them love one another ... Don't let anybody or anything rub it [Spirit] out," Riis pleaded. "Let them tear Santa's white beard off at the Sunday-school ... These are only his disguises. The steps of the real Santa Claus you can trace all through the world ... and when you stand in the last of his tracks you will find the Blessed Babe of Bethlehem smiling a welcome to you."

The editor of Open Court, a Chicago publication, compared the literal belief in Santa to a naive and undeveloped sense of spirituality. He also noted that this belief constituted a first step in religious faith. To argue the case, he drew an analogy between the reality of presents brought by Santa as a representation of parental love and the realities of life brought by the concept of God. "[T]he idea of Santa Claus," explained the author, "was simply an allegorical expression of the love of parents and grandparents who wished to give Christmas joy to good little children." He observed that "in the absence of the traditional characters which by the experience of centuries have become typical representations of certain spiritual realities of life," children tended to create their own inferior substitutes. This childish belief they would naturally outgrow. The editor also addressed the adult usage of Santa, albeit obliquely. "There are still many among us who believe that unless the letter of a myth be true there can be neither beauty nor truth in religion," he wrote. An adult's "belief in a God and Heaven is more like the children's belief in Santa Claus than a genuine faith in the grand realities that are symbolised in these names."

Unquestionably, however, Frank Church, editor of the New York Sun, provided the most persuasive, and best-known, discourse on the spiritual meaning of Santa. A letter from one Virginia O'Hanlon, written in 1897, asked the plain question, "Is there a Santa Claus?" "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus," came the terse reply. Church's answer, though, was not a patent fib designed to placate a youngster. It proved an exposition on belief itself. "Virginia, your little friends are wrong," he wrote. "They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see." Drawing on the same imagery so authoritatively used by Jonathan Edwards to shame his Puritan congregation into humility before God, Church told Virginia that "In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge." Without Santa, he argued, "There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence ... Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus." He concluded with an indirect but by no means weak assault on positivism and science. "The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see ... Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world."

Source: Penne L. Restad, Christmas in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 105-22.