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

“Bad times, Dull-Drink and clouded Minds make heavy, listless, idle bodies.” And in the 1760s similar warnings came thick and fast. Ames’s verse for December 1760 was a warning against getting drunk. His 1761 almanac included a similar piece of advice: “The temperate man enjoys the most delight, / For riot dulls and palls the appetite.” And in 1763: “The temperate Man nor ever over feeds / His cramm’d Desires with more than Nature needs.” In 1764 dietary strictures actually took over Ames’s entire almanac, constituting the subject matter for the accompanying material in all twelve months of the year. 50
    What Benjamin Franklin and Nathanael Ames were calling for was a Christmas that combined mirth and moderation. Both of these men were shopkeepers—versatile, thrifty, and self-made. 51 What they were trying to do was actually similar to what the Puritans had done a centuryearlier: to restructure people’s work habits by having them do away with periodic binges. But unlike the Puritans, their strategy did not entail the elimination of Christmas. Instead, they were spreading the idea—a new idea—that Christmas could be a time of cheer without also being a time of excess.
Christmas in the Household of Martha Ballard, 1785–1811
    The single best personal account of what such a “moderate” Christmas season may have been like can be found in the diary of Martha Ballard, the Maine midwife whose social world has been painstakingly and brilliantly reconstructed by the historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. For twenty-six years, between the ages of 50 and 76, Martha Ballard recorded her daily activities as wife, mother, midwife, and resident of the Maine community of Hallowell. During the twenty-six years between 1785 and 1811, Ballard chose seven times in her diary to name December 25 as
Christmas
. In six other years, she had reason to omit such a reference: She was occupied in delivering someone’s baby; December 25 was just another working day for her.
    But Martha Ballard’s diary also makes it clear that December 25 was just another working day in
any
case, even when she was not delivering babies—and even when she named the day as Christmas. In 1788, for example, Martha’s husband, Ephraim, was away from home on business; Martha herself stayed home, finishing “a pair of Stockins” for one of her daughters. In 1807 (“it is Chrismas day”), she noted laconically, “I have done a fortnit’s wash.” And on December 25, 1811, the final Christmas of her life, the 76-year-old woman reported simply: “I have done hous wk Se knit Some.” 52
    The younger generation in Hallowell observed Christmas more actively than Martha Ballard herself did. In 1801 Martha reported nothing special for herself on December 25, but she wrote that her two unmarried children celebrated the day in the company of two members of the opposite sex: “Ephm & Patty kept Christmas at Son Lambards, his partnr [was] Polly Farewell [and] hers [was] Cyrus.” 53 (Sure enough, a couple of years later Ephraim Ballard, Jr. and Polly Farwell got married.) Some years earlier, two of the Ballards’ young live-in servants likewise took Christmas as an opportunity for courtship: On December 23, 1794, “Dolly & Sally went to a daunce [dance] at mr Capins, were atended by a mr Lambart and White.” (The previous day they had prepared for this event by purchasing at the local shop “a pair Shoes & other things.”) ButMartha Ballard quickly reasserted her control over this frolicsome pair: On Christmas Day itself, she reported, “Dolly & Sally have washt, Scourd my puter & washt the Kitchen.” 54
    Christmas may have been a time of work for Martha Ballard, but what is equally striking is how often that work involved the preparation of special meals for the season. It is on this very point that her diary is most revealing. On December 24, 1788: “Dan’l Bolton & his wife Dined here, we made some mins Pies.” Three years later, Ballard spent