The Battle for Christmas
UU Fellowship of Midland, MI
December 4, 2005
Jane Thickstun

Reading
The reading today is a poem by Clement Clarke Moore. It's a poem most people know by the title "Twas the Night before Christmas."

Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
In hopes that St Nicholas soon would be there.

The children were nestled all snug in their beds,
While visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads.
And mamma in her ‘kerchief, and I in my cap,
Had just settled our brains for a long winter's nap.

When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from the bed to see what was the matter.
Away to the window I flew like a flash,
Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash.

The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow
Gave the lustre of mid-day to objects below.
When, what to my wondering eyes should appear,
But a miniature sleigh, and eight tinny reindeer.

With a little old driver, so lively and quick,
I knew in a moment it must be St Nick.
More rapid than eagles his coursers they came,
And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name!

"Now Dasher! now, Dancer! now, Prancer and Vixen!
On, Comet! On, Cupid! on, on Donner and Blitzen!
To the top of the porch! to the top of the wall!
Now dash away! Dash away! Dash away all!"

As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,
When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky.
So up to the house-top the coursers they flew,
With the sleigh full of Toys, and St Nicholas too.

And then, in a twinkling, I heard on the roof
The prancing and pawing of each little hoof.
As I drew in my head, and was turning around,
Down the chimney St Nicholas came with a bound.

He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot,
And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot.
A bundle of Toys he had flung on his back,
And he looked like a peddler, just opening his pack.

His eyes-how they twinkled! his dimples how merry!
His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry!
His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow,
And the beard of his chin was as white as the snow.

The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,
And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath.
He had a broad face and a little round belly,
That shook when he laughed, like a bowlful of jelly!

He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,
And I laughed when I saw him, in spite of myself!
A wink of his eye and a twist of his head,
Soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread.

He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,
And filled all the stockings, then turned with a jerk.
And laying his finger aside of his nose,
And giving a nod, up the chimney he rose!

He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle,
And away they all flew like the down of a thistle.
But I heard him exclaim, ‘ere he drove out of sight,
"Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night!"

Sermon

Are you ready for Christmas? Got the cards written, the presents bought, the decorations up, the cookies baked? What would you think if the celebration of Christmas were made illegal? Pretty outrageous, right? But that's exactly what our own religious forebears, the Puritans, did.

In Massachusetts between 1659 and 1681, it was illegal to celebrate Christmas, and it was suppressed for the first two centuries of European settlement in New England. People were expected to go to work as usual and the day wasn't even marked on calendars.

But the celebration the Puritans were trying – not altogether successfully – to suppress was not at all like Christmas as we celebrate it today. It was a raucous, rowdy entire season of excess, when people could behave badly and get away with it. "It involved behavior that most of us would find offensive and even shocking today – rowdy public displays of excessive eating and drinking, the mockery of established authority, aggressive begging (often involving the threat of doing harm), and even the invasion of wealthy homes." (p. 5)

Historian Stephen Nissenbaum has written a fabulous book, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, called The Battle for Christmas, where he describes the evolution of the holiday in America. Much of what I'm talking about today is drawn from this book.

The traditions the settlers brought to New England came from an agricultural economy, where good food wasn't available year-round. Nissenbaum says, ". . . early modern Europe was above all a world of scarcity. Few people ate much good food at all, and for everyone the availability of fresh food was seasonally determined. Late summer and early fall would have been the time of fresh vegetables, but December was the season—the only season—for fresh meat. Animals could not be slaughtered until the weather was cold enough to ensure that the meat would not go bad; and any meat saved for the rest of the year would have to be preserved (and rendered less palatable) by salting. December was also the month when the year's supply of beer or wine was ready to drink. And for farmers too, this period marked the start of a season of leisure. Little wonder, then, that this was a time of celebratory excess.

Excess took many forms. Reveling could easily become rowdiness, lubricated by alcohol, making merry could edge into making trouble. Christmas was a season of ‘misrule,' a time when ordinary behavioral restraints could be violated with impunity…Christmas misrule meant that not only hunger but also anger and lust could be expressed in public." (pp. 5-6).

But the idea of misrule wasn't just bad behavior; it was a ritualized way of dealing with the inequities of the society. As Nissenbaum says, "Christmas was an occasion when the social hierarchy itself was symbolically turned upside down, in a gesture that inverted designated roles of gender, age and class. . . . The most common ritual of social inversion during the Christmas season involved something [like our modern notion of charity]. But . . . it was usually the poor themselves who initiated the exchange, and it was enacted face-to-face, in rituals that would strike many of us today as an intolerable invasion of privacy."

"At other times of the year it was the poor who owed goods, labor, and deference to the rich. But on this occasion the tables were turned – literally. The poor– most often bands of boys and young men– claimed the right to march to the houses of the well-to-do, enter their halls, and receive gifts of food, drink, and sometimes money as well. And the rich had to let them in– essentially, to hold ‘open house.' Christmas was a time when peasants, servants, and apprentices exercised the right to demand that their wealthier neighbors and patrons treat them as if they were wealthy and powerful. The Lord of the Manor let the peasants in and feasted them. In return, the peasants offered something of true value in a paternalistic society– their goodwill."(p. 8-9)

The Puritans were Protestant reformers who were aware that there was no mention of a date in the bible for Jesus' birth, and that December 25th had been selected by the church to coincide with the pagan celebrations. They felt that if Christians were supposed to celebrate the birth of Christ, it would be in the bible.

By the mid-1700s, there was a feeling that "the observance of Christmas would be rendered less obnoxious if the holiday were celebrated with piety and moderation, purged of its seasonal excesses." (p. 26) And by the early 1800s, the movement to reclaim Christmas took the form of holding church services on December 25th.

Nissenbaum says, "In the forefront of [those leading the movement] were the Universalists. Largely a rural sect, Universalists openly celebrated Christmas from the earliest stages of their existence in New England. The Universalist community in Boston held a special Christmas Day service in 1789, even before their congregation was officially organized…The Unitarians were close behind. Compared with Universalists, Unitarians were more genteel, and (for all their theological liberalism) more socially conservative. . . .Unitarians were calling for the public observance of Christmas by about 1800. They did so in full knowledge that it was not a biblically sanctioned holiday, and that December 25 was probably not the day on which Jesus was born. They wished to celebrate the holiday not because God had ordered them to do so but because they themselves wished to. And they celebrated it in the hope that their own observance might help to purge the holiday of its associations with seasonal excess and disorder." (Nissenbaum, p. 45)

By 1817, businesses were closed and churches were holding services on Christmas day. But it only lasted three years. "What happened," Nissenbaum writes, "was that in New England, as elsewhere, religion failed to transform Christmas from a season of misrule into an occasion of quieter pleasure. That transformation would, however, shortly take place – but not at the hands of Christianity. The "house of ale" would not be vanquished by the house of God, but a new faith that was beginning to sweep over American society. It was the religion of domesticity, which would be represented at Christmas-time not by Jesus of Nazareth but a newer and more worldly deity – Santa Claus." (p. 48)

Santa Claus was essentially invented by Clement Clarke Moore, with his poem, "A Visit from St. Nicholas," better known to us as "The Night before Christmas." It was written in 1822 and within ten years was being widely published every year at Christmas time.

Moore's Santa Claus was only loosely based on an old Dutch tradition about a bishop who was St. Nicholas. The main difference was that Moore's Santa Claus had become a plebeian, of the lower classes. This Santa Claus came into the house like the revelers and wassailers, but instead of demanding food and drink, he was a bringer of gifts.

Moore was of the class of wealthy landowners in New York City, who felt threatened by the Christmas revels, and the turn that the tradition of misrule had taken in an urban setting in an industrial economy. What the concept of Santa Claus did was to bring Christmas indoors, within the family; it domesticated it. It made children the focus of the holiday. This turned the old ritual of misrule on its side – instead of giving to the dependents who farmed the gentry's land, now the well-off were giving to the dependents in their own household.

But the wife and children already received the best food and drink of the household, so what could they be given? This is when the idea of the Christmas present was born. And this is when Christmas became commercial. Every generation since then has bemoaned the commercialization of Christmas, something that always feels like a recent phenomenon, different from the purity of the holiday we experienced in our childhood.

Christmas presents had to be luxury items, because otherwise there's nothing to distinguish them from the daily provision of needs that happens within the family. Before he was even twenty years old, Santa Claus was being used by merchants to market their products.

This new child-centered Christmas posed new problems of its own – as Nissenbaum says, "Consumerism was coming to supplant chaos as the new problem of the holiday season." (p. 177) People were worried it was creating greedy, selfish children.

Nissenbaum tell us that "this is the context in which the Christmas tree became an American holiday tradition." (p. 177) The introduction of the Christmas tree began a tradition where children gave as well as received.

Unitarians are central to this piece of the story. Charles Follen, a radical German immigrant, Harvard professor, and Unitarian minister, had a Christmas tree in his house in 1835. It wasn't the first Christmas tree in America, but it was written about by two Unitarian women friends of Follen, and the practice quickly spread throughout the country. Harriet Martineau, a British Unitarian author visiting the States, was present when the Follens surprised their son with a tree decked out with presents and candles. Catherine Sedgwick, an American Unitarian author, wrote a short story that same year that featured a Christmas tree very much like the one at the Follen's house. The story, according to Nissenbaum, "deals with the redemption of a sinful mother by her selfless young child." (p. 198)

Unitarians of the time were changing the way Americans viewed children. Having rejected the belief in original sin, they saw children as innocent. In the words of Nissenbaum, "Child-rearing practices were linked to theological beliefs. Whether parents chose to beat their children, for example, or lavish attention on them at Christmas was linked to whether they believed in original sin. A central tenet of early-nineteenth-century Unitarians . . . was the belief that human beings were not born for damnation. . . . [They] believed that the will should be trained rather than broken; it might be imperfect, but it was not fundamentally corrupt." (p. 202)

Louisa May Alcott is another Unitarian woman of that era who wrote an extensive Christmas scene into her most famous novel, Little Women. In that scene, the four girls voluntarily give their Christmas presents to a poor neighboring family. And Unitarian Margaret Fuller wrote for Universalist Horace Greeley's newspaper, the New York Tribune, the following thoughts about Christmas:

"Christmas would seem to be the day peculiarly sacred to children, and something of this feeling shows itself among us. . . The evergreen tree is often reared for the children on Christmas evening, and its branches cluster with little tokens that may, at least, give them a sense that the world is rich, and that there are some in it who care to bless them. It is a charming sight to see their glittering eyes, and well worth much trouble in preparing the Christmas tree . . ." (p. 216)

My colleague, Rev. Richard Nugent, writes about some other Unitarians who have influenced our celebration of Christmas. He tells of political cartoonist Thomas Nast, a Unitarian whose 24 years of Christmas drawings gave us the image of Santa Claus as we know him today. This includes introducing the idea that Santa's home was in the North Pole. "In this way," Nugent says, "Santa didn't belong to any one country, but to the world. The idea of Santa having a workshop with elves to help him was also Nast's. Nast also introduced the European tradition of kissing under mistletoe to the United States." (Sermon, 12-7-03)

The English Unitarian, Charles Dickens, shaped the way we view Christmas with his classic, "A Christmas Carol" in 1843. According to Nugent, "Dickens helped re-craft the spirit of Christmas toward a focus on the family and the spirit of generosity. Dickens succeeded in transforming Christmas from a sacred festival into a family feast accessible to lower-middle class families." And "Dickens does not focus on the religious nature of Christmas. The Christ event is not the focus, but rather how one lives a life in keeping with the spirit of Christ. It is the theology of Jesus not about Jesus that is found on the pages of "A Christmas Carol."" (Sermon, 12-7-03)

The Christmas carol that we sang earlier, "It Came upon the Midnight Clear," was written in 1849 by Unitarian minister, Edmund Hamilton Sears. In 1864, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, another Unitarian, wrote "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day." These songs focus on the theme of peace and justice, lifting up the spirit of Jesus' message. And a Universalist, James Pierpont, wrote "Jingle Bells" in 1857.

By the turn of the century, Christmas had pretty much evolved into the holiday as we know it today. One by one, states made it an official holiday, so that workers can have a day off. Far from having a month of leisure, the lower classes might now see their work increase in December as they make and sell the Christmas products. The only vestiges of the old celebration are on New Year's eve, when people still often drink to excess and revel in the streets.

There is still, however, a tradition of holiday giving to those less fortunate than we are. No longer do they come to our doors to demand it, trick-or-treat style, but there is a sense that this time of year is a time to open our hearts and our pocketbooks. The Salvation Army rings bells out in the cold and solicitations come in the mail. This time of year, as a song the choir sang recently reminded us, it's time to remember the poor.

Unitarians in particular have shaped the holiday into one that lifts up the innocence of children, and the values of peace and justice and generosity. They have kept the focus on celebrating the spirit of Jesus. Unitarian Universalists today can still celebrate Christmas in this spirit. The real spirit of the season is in the values we hold dear, and perhaps a bit of eggnog. Acting from those values makes this season holy. May you all have a holy holiday season.

The Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Midland is recognized by the Unitarian Universalist Association as a Welcoming Congregation. We welcome, affirm, promote and celebrate the full participation of all persons in all of our activities without regard to age, gender, sexual orientation, race or any other such category of exclusion.

Please feel free to contact us with any feedback, corrections or questions at jaham@delta.edu