Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things (14 page)

We do know with greater authority that by the sixteenth century, fir trees, indoors and out, were decorated to commemorate Christmas in Germany. A forest ordinance from Ammerschweier, Alsace, dated 1561, states that “no burgher shall have for Christmas more than one bush of more than eight shoes’ length.” The decorations hung on a tree in that time, the earliest we have evidence of, were “roses cut of many-colored paper, apples, wafers, gilt, sugar.”

It is a widely held belief that Martin Luther, the sixteenth-century Protestant reformer, first added lighted candles to a tree. Walking toward his home one winter evening, composing a sermon, he was awed by the brilliance of stars twinkling amidst evergreens. To recapture the scene for his family, he erected a tree in the main room and wired its branches with lighted candles.

By the 1700s, the
Christbaum
, or “Christ tree,” was a firmly established tradition. From Germany the custom spread to other parts of Western Europe. It was popularized in England only in the nineteenth century, by Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s German consort. Son of the duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (a duchy in central Germany), Albert had grown up decorating Christmas trees, and when he married Victoria, in 1840, he requested that she adopt the German tradition.

The claim of the Pennsylvania Germans to have initiated the Christmas tree custom in America is undisputed today. And it’s in the diary of Matthew Zahm of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, under the date December 20, 1821, that the Christmas tree and its myriad decorations receive their first mention in the New World.

It is not surprising that, like many other festive Christmas customs, the tree was adopted so late in America. To the New England Puritans, Christmas was sacred. The Pilgrims’ second governor, William Bradford, wrote that he tried hard to stamp out “pagan mockery” of the observance, penalizing any frivolity. The influential Oliver Cromwell preached against “the heathen traditions” of Christmas carols, decorated trees, and any joyful expression that desecrated “that sacred event.”

In 1659, the General Court of Massachusetts enacted a law making any observance of December 25 (other than a church service) a penal offense; people were fined for hanging decorations. That stern solemnity continued until the nineteenth century, when the influx of German and Irish immigrants undermined the Puritan legacy. In 1856, the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow commented: “We are in a transition state about Christmas here in New England. The old Puritan feeling prevents it from being a cheerful
hearty holiday; though every year makes it more so.” In that year, Christmas was made a legal holiday in Massachusetts, the last state to uphold Cromwell’s philosophy.

Interestingly,
Godey’s Lady’s Book
, the women’s publication of the 1800s that did so much to nationalize Thanksgiving, also played a role in popularizing festive Christmas practices. Through its lighthearted and humorous drawings, its household-decorating hints, its recipes for Christmas confections and meals, and its instructions for homemade tree ornaments, the magazine convinced thousands of housewives that the Nativity was not just a fervent holy day but could also be a festive holiday.

Xmas
. The familiar abbreviation for Christmas originated with the Greeks.
X
is the first letter of the Greek word for Christ, Xristos. By the sixteenth century, “Xmas” was popular throughout Europe. Whereas early Christians had understood that the term merely was Greek for “Christ’s mass,” later Christians, unfamiliar with the Greek reference, mistook the
X
as a sign of disrespect, an attempt by heathen to rid Christmas of its central meaning. For several hundred years. Christians disapproved of the use of the term. Some still do.

Christmas Cards: 1843, England

A relatively recent phenomenon, the sending of commercially printed Christmas cards originated in London in 1843.

Previously, people had exchanged handwritten holiday greetings. First in person. Then via post. By 1822, homemade Christmas cards had become the bane of the U.S. postal system. That year, the Superintendent of Mails in Washington, D.C., complained of the need to hire sixteen extra mailmen. Fearful of future bottlenecks, he petitioned Congress to limit the exchange of cards by post, concluding, “I don’t know what we’ll do if it keeps on.”

Not only did it keep on, but with the marketing of attractive commercial cards the postal burden worsened.

The first Christmas card designed for sale was by London artist John Calcott Horsley. A respected illustrator of the day, Horsley was commissioned by Sir Henry Cole, a wealthy British businessman, who wanted a card he could proudly send to friends and professional acquaintances to wish them a “merry Christmas.”

Sir Henry Cole was a prominent innovator in the 1800s. He modernized the British postal system, managed construction of the Albert Hall, arranged for the Great Exhibition in 1851, and oversaw the inauguration of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Most of all, Cole sought to “beautify life,” and in his spare time he ran an art shop on Bond Street, specializing in decorative objects for the home. In the summer of 1843, he commissioned Horsley to design an impressive card for that year’s Christmas.

Horsley produced a triptych. Each of the two side panels depicted a good
deed—clothing the naked and feeding the hungry. The centerpiece featured a party of adults and children, with plentiful food and drink (there was severe criticism from the British Temperance Movement).

The first Christmas card’s inscription read: “merry Christmas and a happy New Year to you.” “Merry” was then a spiritual word meaning “blessed,” as in “merry old England.” Of the original one thousand cards printed for Henry Cole, twelve exist today in private collections.

Printed cards soon became the rage in England; then in Germany. But it required an additional thirty years for Americans to take to the idea. In 1875, Boston lithographer Louis Prang, a native of Germany, began publishing cards, and earned the title “father of the American Christmas card.”

Prang’s high-quality cards were costly, and they initially featured not such images as the Madonna and Child, a decorated tree, or even Santa Claus, but colored floral arrangements of roses, daisies, gardenias, geraniums, and apple blossoms. Americans took to Christmas cards, but not to Prang’s; he was forced out of business in 1890. It was cheap penny Christmas postcards imported from Germany that remained the vogue until World War I. By war’s end, America’s modern greeting card industry had been born.

Today more than two billion Christmas cards are exchanged annually-just within the United States. Christmas is the number one card-selling holiday of the year.

Santa Claus: Post-4th Century, Europe, Asia, America

The original Santa Claus, St. Nicholas, was born in the ancient southeastern Turkish town of Lycia early in the fourth century. To show his piety as a child, he adopted a self-imposed twice-weekly fast (on Wednesdays and Fridays). Then, upon the early death of his parents, he fully dedicated his life to Christ, entering a Lycian seminary. It was on a boat journey to Palestine that he is supposed to have extended his arms and stilled a violent sea, the first of his many miracles. Later, he would become the patron saint of sailors.

At an early age, Nicholas was appointed bishop of Myra, in Asia Minor. His success in winning converts, and his generosity toward the poor, incensed Roman officials. During a great Christian persecution, he was imprisoned and tortured under orders of the despotic Roman emperor Gaius Diocletianus. The ruler, after a reign of terror and profligacy, abruptly abdicated at age sixty in favor of the simple life of farming and raising cabbages. This pleased many Romans and was most fortunate for Nicholas. The new emperor, Constantine (who would later convert to Christianity), freed the bishop. And when Constantine convened the first Church council at Nicaea in 325, Nicholas attended as a prominent member. He is believed to have died on December 6, 342, and eventually was adopted as the patron saint of Russia, Greece, and Sicily.

Two aspects of St. Nicholas’s life led to his becoming Santa Claus: His generosity was legend, and he was particularly fond of children. We know this primarily through Roman accounts of his patronage of youth, which eventually led to his becoming the patron saint of children. Throughout the Middle Ages, and well beyond, he was referred to by many names—none of them Santa Claus.

Children today would not at all recognize the St. Nick who brought gifts to European children hundreds of years ago—except perhaps for his cascading white beard. He made his rounds in full red-and-white bishop’s robes, complete with twin-peaked miter and crooked crozier. He was pulled by no fleet-footed reindeer, but coaxed an indolent donkey. And he arrived not late on Christmas Eve but on his Christian feast day, December 6. The gifts he left beside the hearth were usually small and disappointing by today’s standards: fruit, nuts, hard candies, wood and clay figurines. They were better, though, than the gifts later European Santas would leave.

During the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, St. Nicholas was banished from most European countries. Replacing him were more secular figures, such as Britain’s Father Christmas and France’s Papa Noël. Neither was known as a lavish gift-giver to children, who in general were not at center stage at that point in history. Father Christmas, for instance, was more the fictive sponsor of adult fetes concerned with
amor
.

The Dutch kept the St. Nicholas tradition alive. As the “protector of sailors,” St. Nicholas graced the prow of the first Dutch ship that arrived in America. And the first church built in New York City was named after him.

The Dutch brought with them to the New World two Christmas items that were quickly Americanized.

In sixteenth-century Holland, children placed wooden shoes by the hearth the night of St. Nicholas’s arrival. The shoes were filled with straw, a meal for the saint’s gift-laden donkey. In return, Nicholas would insert a small treat into each clog. In America, the limited-volume shoe was replaced with the expandable stocking, hung by the chimney with…expectations. “Care” would not come until 1822.

The Dutch spelled St. Nicholas “Sint Nikolass,” which in the New World became “Sinterklass.” When the Dutch lost control of New Amsterdam to the English in the seventeenth century, Sinterklass was Anglicized to Santa Claus.

Much of modern-day Santa Claus lore, including the reindeer-drawn sleigh, originated in America, due to the popularity of a poem by a New York theology professor.

Dr. Clement Clarke Moore composed “The Night Before Christmas” in 1822, to read to his children on Christmas Eve. The poem might have remained privately in the Moore family if a friend had not mailed a copy of it (without authorial attribution) to a newspaper. It was picked up by other papers, then it appeared in magazines, until eventually every line of
the poem’s imagery became part of the Santa legend. Dr. Moore, a classical scholar, for many years felt that to acknowledge having written a child’s poem might damage his professional reputation; as a result, he did not publicly admit authorship until 1838, by which time just about every child across the country could recite the poem by heart.

Cartoonist Thomas Nast, who published this drawing in Harper’s Weekly, January 1, 1881, established the prototype for the modern Santa Claus
.

It was in America that Santa put on weight. The original St. Nicholas had been a tall, slender, elegant bishop, and that was the image perpetuated for centuries. The rosy-cheeked, roly-poly Santa is credited to the influential nineteenth-century cartoonist Thomas Nast. From 1863 until 1886, Nast created a series of Christmas drawings for
Harper’s Weekly
. These drawings, executed over twenty years, exhibit a gradual evolution in Santa—from the pudgy, diminutive, elf-like creature of Dr. Moore’s immortal poem to the bearded, potbellied, life-size bell ringer familiar on street corners across America today. Nast’s cartoons also showed the world how Santa spent his entire year—constructing toys, checking on children’s behavior, reading their requests for special gifts. His images were incorporated into the Santa lore.

Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer: 1939, Chicago

“Rollo, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” “Reginald, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” Both names were considered for the most famous reindeer of all. And the now traditional Christmas song began as a poem, a free handout to department store shoppers.

In 1939, the Montgomery Ward department store in Chicago sought something novel for its Santa Claus to distribute to parents and children. Robert May, an advertising copywriter for the store, suggested an illustrated poem, printed in a booklet, that families would want to save and reread each holiday season.

May conceived the idea of a shiny-nosed reindeer, a Santa’s helper. And an artist friend, Denver Gillen, spent hours at a local zoo creating whimsical sketches of reindeer at rest and at play. Montgomery Ward executives approved the sketches and May’s poem, but nixed the name Rollo. Then Reginald. May considered other names to preserve the alliteration, and finally settled on Rudolph, the preference of his four-year-old daughter. That Christmas of 1939, 2.4 million copies of the “Rudolph” booklet were handed out in Montgomery Ward stores across the country.