The Battle for Christmas by Stephen Nissenbaum Read Free Book Online Page A

piety and moderation, purged of its seasonal excesses. The first New England clergyman to make such a concession, at least implicitly, may have been Cotton Mather himself. In his 1712 anti-Christmas sermon Mather paid only token attention to the purely theological arguments against the holiday—that it was man-made and not divinely ordained. 47 “I do not now dispute,” Mather said, “whether People do well to Observe such an
Uninstituted Festival
at all, or no.” And he continued with a statement that shows how far he had moved from a position of strident Puritanism: “Good Men may love one another, and may treat one another with a most Candid Charity, while he
that Regardeth a Day, Regardeth it unto the Lord
, and he that
Regardeth not the Day
, also shows his
Regard unto the Lord
, in his
not Regarding
of it…” 48 In other words, live and let live: On the issue of observing Christmas, there was room for legitimate differences among people of goodwill.
    What Mather went on to emphasize was the
manner
in which Christmas was commonly observed—as a time of drunken revels and lascivious behavior.
(That
was “a thing, that there can be
no doubt
about.”) Cotton Mather’s father, Increase, would have readily agreed with his son’s angry warning about the bad things that went on at Christmas. But he would never have gone along with Cotton Mather’s idea that it was possible for good Christians to differ in “candid charity” about observing the holiday at all. For Increase Mather, as for other seventeenth-century Puritans, the licentious fashion in which Christmas was commonly practiced was just an intrinsic expression of its non-Christian origin as a seasonal celebration; the holiday was “riotous” at its very core. For Cotton Mather, writing a generation later in the early eighteenth century, the essence of the holiday could be distinguished, at least in principle, from its historical origins and the ordinary manner of its celebration.
    From a modern perspective, the difference between Mather
pere
andMather
fils
may seem trivial. The young people whom Cotton Mather addressed in 1712 may not have noticed the difference themselves. But it mattered nonetheless. Cotton Mathers concession, small as it was, left little room to contest the legitimacy of any movement that managed to purify Christmas of its seasonal excesses. And such a movement was not long in coming about.
    Signs of change began to emerge in about 1730. Once again, some of the best evidence comes from almanacs. In 1733 James Franklin printed the following couplet on his almanac’s December page: “Now drink good Liquor, but not so, / That thou canst neither stand nor go.” Of course, the most famous of all eighteenth-century American almanac-makers was James Franklins younger brother Benjamin. Raised in New England (and trained as a printer by James), Benjamin Franklin became the century’s preeminent exponent of moderation, sobriety, and self-control. In 1734, in the second number of his almanac,
Poor Richard
, Franklin applied that philosophy to the Christmas season. The December verse, written in the voice of “Poor” Richard Saunders’s wife, Bridget, chastised a husband who “for sake of Drink neglects his Trade, / And spends each Night in Taverns till ’tis late.” But on the same page, in an interlineation placed at the dates December 23–29, Franklin made it clear enough (in a rhymed but characteristically Franklinesque piece of advice) that he was no hater of Christmas: “If you wou’d have Guests merry with your Cheer, / Be so yourself, or so at least appear.” And similarly in 1739: “O blessed Season! lov’d by Saints and Sinners, / For long Devotions, or for longer Dinners.” 49
    The emphasis on
temperate
mirth intensified at mid-century, when Nathanael Ames (New England’s most popular almanac-maker) began to mix calls for charity and cheer with admonitions against excess. In 1752 Ames offered his first warning: