A Tale of Two Christmases

For 150 years, Americans have divided over the religious and secular celebrations of Christmas--for some it’s a happy combination and for others a source of discouragement.

The heavy commercial emphasis on Santa Claus and expensive gift-giving is bemoaned by churchgoers who see religious images of the birth of Jesus pushed to society’s pious margins.

Following the end of World War II, slogans such as “Keep Christ in Christmas” and “Jesus is the Reason for the Season” have reflected that kind of reaction.

Yet, a new book by a Southern California-raised scholar shows that religious goals for the holiday and the American retail encouragement of Christmas celebration have not always been at cross purposes. In fact, the commercial impulse often aided the church goals of creating a family-oriented holiday imbued with the spirit of generosity.

The book is “Consumer Rites, The Buying and Selling of American Holidays,” by Leigh Eric Schmidt, an associate professor of religion at Princeton University. Born in San Bernardino, Schmidt went to UC Riverside as an undergraduate.

As Schmidt points out, in the early 1800s the New Year’s holiday--not Christmas--was the year-end occasion for gift-giving.

Newspaper ads for New Year’s gifts to children proliferated between 1800 and 1830, Schmidt wrote. “The coddling of children, perhaps the quintessential characteristic of the modern Christmas, first appeared in the rites of the New Year,” he said.

“Among the devout, New Year’s was invariably held up as a time for religious renewal and spiritual resolve,” the author said. Vows were made to be a better Christian in the new year. (More secular New Year’s resolutions for self improvement only came into vogue as the 1900s arrived.)

The more religious often found the New Year’s holiday, with drinking, feasting and raucous celebrations which extended over many days, distasteful.

Christmas in the 1820s and 1830s was also associated with food and drink, but Schmidt found that American Protestants started to view Christmas as a better candidate to emphasize Christian moderation and piety than New Year’s.

For churchgoers, the Gospel story about the gifts of the wise men sanctified the family celebration of gift-giving. The Christmas tree, a German import, provided the perfect symbol for domestic celebration, Schmidt said.

“Many of the dilemmas of the modern Christmas concerning the contested mixture of religion and market would have been avoided if the focus of holiday gift giving and commercial promotion had remained on New Year’s, instead of being focused on the celebration of Christ’s nativity,” according to Schmidt.

The Rev. Clement C. Moore’s poem “The Night Before Christmas” (1823) boosted the secular side of Christmas. By the mid-1800s, Santa Claus/St. Nicholas became patron saint of a commercial Christmas, as merchants depicted him either as a jolly giftgiver or an elfish gnome from a mysterious world.

And there were other personifications before the Civil War, including a stern bishop with a rod for children who misbehaved, a puckish elf dressed in wild furs or a Yankee peddler with a wondrous pack of gifts. One 1850 account described “a fire-breathing monster” who sent flames at bad children through the keyhole, Schmidt said.

After the Civil War, Santa Claus’ image--and girth--became more standardized, in part because of the Harper’s Weekly illustrations from 1863 to 1886 by cartoonist Thomas Nast, whose Republican elephant and Democratic donkey also became enduring symbols.

Religious and secular Christmas images mixed freely in many cases in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

In some large department stores, particularly at the Wanamaker chain, the religious was incorporated into secular decorations, at times dominating huge central displays. By the early 1900s, “climbing onto the lap of a flesh-and-blood Santa Claus in a department store was something of a sacrament for modern children,” Schmidt said.

Christmas cards sometimes depicted presents as God’s blessings, the answers to children’s prayers. “Santa Claus was God’s peculiar messenger in these errands,” Schmidt said.

Although church leaders a century earlier had lamented the drawn-out celebrations of New Year’s, the Dry Goods Economist, a trade paper, advised retailers in 1902 that Nov. 15, or even Nov. 1, was “none too early” to open the “holiday campaign” for Christmas sales.

Schmidt said that one hundred years ago, America’s Puritan heritage recommended avoiding the secular-influenced celebrations, but Episcopalians, Catholics, Lutherans and others sought to consecrate the family and gift-giving aspects of the holiday by emphasizing the religious.

Sermons in the 1930s and 1940s criticized the commercialization of Christmas, but the feelings coalesced in 1949 in “Put Christ Back Into Christmas” campaigns. Alternative observances, such as giving gifts in recipients’ names to projects for the poor and supporting “toys for tots” programs, may have supplemented now-traditional gift-giving rather than supplanting the practice.

The American marketplace has been a revealing site for competing meanings of Christmas, Schmidt said.

“The contest has revealed deep ambiguities in the culture--fundamental tensions between asceticism and indulgence, simplicity and affluence, piety and spectacle, religion and consumerism, Christ and culture,” he wrote.