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In England, Christmas celebrations were restored along with the monarchy and the Anglican Church in 1660, but the Massachusetts ban on Christmas wasn’t repealed until 1681.
Nevertheless, Christmas remained an unpopular “Popish” holiday throughout colonial New England. Indeed, even in the early years of the American republic, Christmas was almost exclusively celebrated by Anglicans—that is, Episcopalians—as well as Methodists, Lutherans, and Catholics, and regionally, Southern states, which were mostly Anglican and Methodist, celebrated it more than Northern ones.
But throughout the United States, self-proclaimed “Bible-based” Christians avoided it as best they could for much of the nineteenth century. In fact, Christmas did not become a federal holiday until 1870, but many Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Baptists, and obscure sects continued to shun Christmas on principle.
In terms of current Christmas traditions, the “spirit of Christmas” really came to us from England, because despite our origins as a country, we have a long history of Anglophilia, and in the mid-nineteenth century it was perhaps best exemplified by the popularity of the writers Washington Irving and Charles Dickens.
Irving was America’s first best-selling author and is now most famous as the author of the short story, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow; however, the vast majority of stories from his most popular collection, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., are set in England.
Of the 34 stories in the book, no fewer than five express Irving’s fondness for a “traditional” English Christmas, in other words, the type of Christmas celebration he witnessed among the English gentry in the early-19th century. Irving’s depiction of Christmas as a celebration of gentle paternalism and social harmony in The Sketch Book was in turn one of many influences upon his friend, Charles Dickens, whose books were widely pirated and read in the United States.
For Dickens, Christmas was a celebration of domesticity and the nuclear family, which he, like many early Victorians in Britain and America, saw as the bulwark of stability, warmth, and love against the cold indifference of the marketplace.
This is essentially the moral of A Christmas Carol. What else are the Cratchits if not Dickens’s ideal, loving family and the one he wished he had had? And what is Ebenezer Scrooge if not the embodiment of callous capitalism?
It is Christmas, and all that it symbolizes for Dickens, that eventually transforms Scrooge from a stingy taskmaster into a warm and generous patriarch. But Dickens’s argument that there are or at least should be higher values than profit-maximization was hardly a blow to commercial capitalism. After all, how does Scrooge respond to his own spiritual self-awakening? By giving gifts, of course!
So, while Dickens’s idea of Christmas is a rebuke to the values of the marketplace, it simultaneously helped to lay the foundation for making Christmas the most commercial of all Christian holidays.
The American Civil War sent American manufacturing into overdrive, producing and consuming manufactured goods like never before. In this environment, the American retail industry could hardly fail to see the opportunity to profit by taking Dickens’s belief that the joy of Christmas is found in giving small gifts to family, especially children, and expanding it into the belief that the joy of Christmas is found in buying and giving gifts to family and friends of all ages. Add to this the fact that by 1890 every US state or territory had made Christmas a holiday, and shopping for gifts now had a “season” with a clear denouement.
So, while the English via Irving and Dickens were largely responsible for inventing the sentimental aspects of modern Christmas, it was American retailers who gave us “Christmas parades,” “Christmas sales,” and all the anticipation of the “Big Day.” Not surprisingly, it was retailers who also invented so many “traditional” American Christmas icons and images, including Santa’s image as a portly, white-haired, white man or Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer.
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