The Battle for Christmas by Stephen Nissenbaum Read Free Book Online

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    In 1702 the Boston almanac-maker Samuel Clough reported (disapprovingly, to be sure) that December was a time when men of the lower orders—“Coasters and Boat-men”—gathered in taverns to gossip and drink:
    Some ask a Dram when first come in,
Others with Flip or Bounce begin;
Tho’ some do only call for Beer,
And that i’ th’ morn is but mean chear.
    And in 1729 Nathaniel Whittemore warned simply: “Extravagancies bring Sickness.” 39
    New England almanacs occasionally addressed the sexual barriers that were breached by the license (and the cold temperatures) of the Christmas season. Thus in 1749 Nathanael Ames wrote (at December 15–17):
    This cold uncomfortable Weather,
makes Jack and Jill lie close together.
    On a similar note, George Whetens almanac for 1753 noted in a quadruple rhyme: “The weather that is cold[,] that makes the maid that is old for to scold for the want of a Bed-fellow bold.” 40
    But most common of all were the references to interclass eating and drinking—the familiar social inversion in which the low changed places with the high. At one extreme was John Tully’s 1688 verse that Christmas was a season when “poor men at rich men’s tables their guts forrage.” Another Boston almanac, this one by Nathaniel Whittemore for the year 1719, contains an interesting piece of advice interlineated at the dates December 18–21. It warns householders about a practice we can recognize as another familiar element of the wassail ritual (once again, “abroad” means outside): “Do not let your Children and Servants run too much abroad at Nights.” 41

    A Warning for Late December . Christmas is not named in this December page from Nathaniel Whittemores 1719 Boston almanac, but between the dates December 18 and 21 can be found, in italics, an admonition to householders: “Do not let your Children and Servants run too much abroad at Nights.”
(Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society)
    Several decades later, Nathanael Ames’s almanac for 1746 put at the dates December 20–23 a concise but rather cynical description of interclass merriment (the words recall the 1679 Salem Village wassail, when old John Rowden was visited by four young men who came “to call for pots”):
    The Miser and the Sot
together they have got,
to drink a Pot. 42
A “Yankee Doodle” Christmas
    Finally, even closer to the center of New England popular culture, there is the eighteenth-century song that can almost be regarded as the first American national anthem. “Yankee Doodle” was not a single song but a variable cluster of verses, all composed in a meter that could be sung to a version of the still-familiar tune. What all the verses have in common is that they are about backcountry manners. 43 (Most of these verses are unknown today, but all are written in the same meter, the meter of the line
Yankee Doodle goes to town, riding on his pony.)
Several of the verses dealt with sexual antics:
    Two and two may go to Bed,
Two and two together;
And if there is not room enough,
Lie one a top o’to’ther. 44
    A number of “Yankee Doodle” verses refer to such seasonal events as election day or cornhusking (a “frolic” at which “[t]hey’ll be some as drunk as sots”). 45 One of these seasonal verses is about Christmas. “Christmas is a coming Boys,” the verse begins:
    Christmas is a coming Boys,
We’ll go to Mother Chase’s,
And there we’ll get a sugar dram [i.e., rum]
Sweetened with Mêlasses.
    And the verse continues by shifting from alcohol to sex:
    Heigh Ho for our Cape Cod,
Heigh ho Nantasket,
Do not let the Boston wags
Feel your Oyster Basket. 46
    Cotton Mather himself could not have stated the issue more tellingly.
C HRISTMAS E NTERS THE C ULTURAL M AINSTREAM , 1730–1800
A Temperate Christmas
    Christmas was becoming respectable, too. Even orthodox Congregationalists were beginning to concede that the observance of Christmas would be rendered less obnoxious if the holiday were celebrated with