The Twelve Days of Christmas. Kris Kringle. St. Nicolas and Santa Claus. Yule logs, candles, and Christmas trees. Holly, mistletoe, and poinsettias. Parades and carols. Feasts and presents galore! Ahh! What a tingle of excitement these thoughts bring! Not to mention a rush of memories wrapped in family traditions and lore.

The customs that symbolize Christmas in America are a testament to our wondrous blend of cultures. We celebrate now a spirit that united a nation in the childhood of our grandparents. We see, in our own time, a reshaping of Christmas into a greater season of goodwill that embraces even more cultures. But beyond our memories and our lore, what do we know about the ways this holiday shaped the lives of our distant forebears?

For family historians striving to portray ancestors with historical accuracy, Christmas can be a season of surprises. As mirth and reverence jostled cheek to jowl amid a whirligig of beliefs, where did our own ancestors stand? Was it for them a carnival, a blank slate, or a judgment day that demanded penances and handed out rewards? 1

The Twelve Days of Christmas
Like all Biblical begats, Luke's account of the birth of Jesus to the carpenter Joseph and his wife Mary left this vital event undated. Predictably, a host of traditions eventually filled the void, with two dates dominant by the fourth century. In the East, Christians celebrated 6 January, the Feast of the Epiphany. In the West, they adopted an older Pagan holiday—celebrated throughout Europe during the winter solstice—and set their Feast of the Nativity at 25 December.

Bridging that divide, the Old World created The Twelve Days of Christmas, although some cultures clung to festivities on other days. In Britain, where the Old English Cristes Maesse (the Mass of Christ) gave the day its modern name, Cromwell's Parliament of 1643 outlawed the celebration entirely—arguing that it was a “Popish Custom.” After the Restoration of 1660 ousted the fundamentalists, the Christmas holiday (but not, holy day) was set at 25 December.

In the New World, explorers and settlers transplanted these conflicting ideologies. The 25th of December 1492 found Christopher Columbus celebrating off the coast of Haiti, where he would build a fortress in that day's honor, La Navidad. Northward, in Virginia during the winter of 1608/1609, John Smith and his followers held their feast among the Indians—on 6 January.

The Puritans who landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620 denounced the celebration entirely for its pagan roots. Writing of their second Christmas, founding fathers William Bradford and Edward Winslow reported:

“The Govr caled them out to worke … but the most of this new-company excused them selves and said it wente against their consciences to work on that day. So the Govr tould them that if they made it [a] mater of conscience, he would spare them till they were better informed. So he led-away the rest and left them; but when they came home at noone from their worke, he found them in the streete at play, openly.… So he … tould them that was against his conscience, that they should play and others worke.… Since [then] nothing hath been attempted that way.” 2

Two centuries passed before most New Englanders accepted Christmas as a holiday. In 1898, the octogenarian Rev. Henry Ward Beecher recalled:

“I was not brought up, among the Litchfield hills of Connecticut, to know anything about Christmas or Christmas Eve. I have but one recollection of my youth in connection with that festival.… On a snowy night … I passed the little box that was called an Episcopal Church. The door was open, the light shone out, and I could see the evergreens that had been put inside, and hear the music of the choir. … As for … the columns … twined with green and … such services as they observed, I had a feeling of mixed wonder and pity.” 3

Elsewhere, Americans merrily decked their homes and churches with the “pagan” greenery that troubled Rev. Beecher, but the Puritan view of Christmas as just another day can still be seen. Records show courts convening on Christmas Day 1706 in Maryland, 1792 in Kentucky, and 1869 in Kansas; and many millhands were forced to labor on Christmas Day by factory owners who juggled shifts to prevent their going to church.

Colonial Era
Among those who opposed Yuletide rituals, the rejection lay not just in the holiday's pagan roots but in the manner of celebration.

For centuries, festivities were dominated by the young, the rowdy, and the lusty. In the English colonies, staid souls denounced the custom of wassailing, in which bands of noisy, tipsy, and often costumed males roamed the streets and invaded homes, demanding gifts, money, and liquor in exchange for songs, gags, or the promise of not being harmed!

Ministers such as Cotton Mather decried the wanton carousing, the bawdy gangs, and the tipsy damsels who joined this sport—particularly in maritime communities such as Nantucket, Marblehead, and the Isle of Shoals, where inhabitants were considered “incorrigible.” In retrospect, ministerial concern seems justified. Modern historians of several New England towns calculate from vital records that half the firstborn children were premature—with illegitimate births peaking nine months after the Christmas season.

Wassailers, of course, had their counterparts elsewhere. Irish Catholics brought mumming to America, although their revelry favored musical instruments over ribald verse. And others turned that custom into caroling—street fêtes in which both males and females cross-dressed for their revels to disguise themselves.

French Catholics who brought charivaris to Louisiana made merry with everything imaginable that made music or noise. African-Americans, who introduced jonkonnus to North Carolina—and New Orleans under other labels—favored fantastic costumes, along with demands for gifts from masters.

Post-Revolution
By 1800, revelry lost some rougher tones in the seaboard states, as celebrations became a courtship ritual for youth and embraced tamer uses of caroling and mistletoe. The Christmas entries that the Maine midwife Martha Ballard wrote in her diary, 1785–1812, were typical. Speaking of herself, she described her darning, her laundry, and her housework. Of the unmarried members of her family, she wrote of dances and other occasions for romantic pairings. 4

As settlements moved westward, festivities remaining secular for most of the nineteenth-century. Frontier Christmases were rowdy celebrations for males, while genteel ladies kept to their homes. Visiting San Francisco in 1849, John W. Audubon wrote:

“Christmas Day! Happy Christmas! Merry Christmas! Not [for] me … in this pandemonium of a city. Not a lady to be seen, and the women, poor things, sad and silent, except when drunk or excited. The place full of gamblers, hundreds of them, and men of the lowest types. … Sunday makes no difference, certainly not Christmas, except for a little more drunkenness, and a little extra effort on the part of the hotel keepers to take in more money.” 5

The peripatetic Frederic Law Olmsted, in Texas during Christmas 1853, found the scene only a tad more civilized:

“Late on Christmas eve, we were invited to the window by our landlady, to see the pleasant local custom of The Christmas Serenade. A band of pleasant spirits started from the square, blowing tin horns, and beating tin pans, and visited in succession every house in the village, kicking in doors, and pulling down fences, until every male member of the family had appeared, with appropriate instruments, and joined the merry party.” 6

Historians have dubbed this “Christmas Serenade”—which was often punctuated by the firing of guns—a Welsh tradition; but it could just as easily be English, Irish, or French. Curiously, all this street revelry grew out of the Christian custom of gift-giving that indulged the poor in house-to-house begging on Christmas Day. In late nineteenth-century America, all would morph into church-based caroling and more-restrained parades.

Victorian Influences
With Christmas, as elsewhere in society, Victorian America managed, somewhat, to “civilize” the rowdy. Boston ministers of 1817–1819 failed in their efforts to close businesses and institute church services, but increasing wealth and social graces eventually drew menfolk from the street and into the parlor, where feasts became more refined. The South Carolina scene described by Mary Boykin Chesnut in 1861 could have occurred in most settled states:

“The table was very long. [Guests] sat, stiff and lifeless as pins stuck in rows, showing only heads. … There was everything nice to eat… Romeo is a capital cook—and the pastry looked as good, with his plum puddings and mince pies. There was everything there that a hundred years or more of unlimited wealth could accumulate as to silver, china, glass, damask—&c&c.” 7

The Gift-Giver
Christmas as a children's fête came late to America. It is generally credited to Pennsylvania Germans, among whom the Christmas tree was first noted in the early 1800s. But child-centered gift-giving during the holy season had much older origins.

Borrowing from legends of St. Nicolas, a fourth-century bishop of Asia Minor who gave presents to the poor, Germans adopted St. Nicolas Day in the Middle Ages. However, their gift-giver came not at Christmas but on 6 December. Nor did he pass at night while children dreamed of sugar plums. Instead, he came in daylight, questioning them on their catechism and their behavior, before deciding whether they merited rewards or penances.

From Germany, the custom spread with countless variations. Dutch lore gave St. Nicolas a companion, a servant named Swarte Piet (Black Peter), to whom children gave apples. In France, St. Nicolas became Père Noël, who left treats on Christmas Eve. Across the channel, after Prince Albert married Victoria, England adopted Germany's white-bearded, red-robed gift-giver, calling him Father Christmas.

The Santa Claus whom Clement Clarke Moore and Washington Irving created in 1822 borrowed from all these customs and more. From Switzerland, they lifted the sleigh and reindeer in which a Christ-child figure was paraded. From Northern Europe they adopted another bit of fancy: when fireplaces were cleaned for the winter season, parents tantalized children with a promise that good behavior would bring St. Nicolas, a gnome, or an elf down the chimney with presents.

Throughout these centuries, however, popular emphasis upon the gift-giver would also conflict with religious emphasis upon the Christ Child.

The Christ Child
In Spain, as well as America's Spanish settlements, Christmas worship of the Christ Child created child-centered celebrations at both ends of the Old Twelve Days. Children brought their gifts to the crèche during Christmas Mass, for distribution to the needy. (From this rite, a poor Mexican boy, who had no gift but a red flower he found in the snow, gave America its custom of decorating with poinsettias.) In return for those gifts, children reaped a reward on Epiphany Eve. The shoes they set out that night would be filled by King Baltasar, one of the three Magi, as he passed through on his way to the Holy Land.

Protestant Germans, after the Reformation, adapted the Spanish emphasis on the Christ Child (in German, Christkindl). Making him their gift-giver, their “Kris Kringle,” they hastened the adoption of Christ's birth as the focal point of Christmas celebrations.

The Spirit of Giving
A theme runs throughout all these customs rooted in the gifts of the Magi: those with privilege and power should share with the lowly and the subservient—rich with poor, masters with servants, parents with children. The last two relationships (masters to servants and parents to children) were in fact viewed as one and the same. Those with legal rights were responsible for those without, while those who were “incompetents” under the law owed obedience to those who governed them.

Only at Christmas did custom allow underlings to taste privilege—centering that license upon charity and social indulgences. The lower classes could roam from door to door, begging gifts. Slaves might shuck the role of sycophant and address their masters openly. Still others were lent their masters' finery for balls at which, one night of the year, they could fancy themselves lords and ladies.

In other pockets of America with British and German roots, both slaves and children reveled in another Christmas indulgence that upturned social order. Those who “surprised” masters or parents—even in bed before they stirred on Christmas morn—with shouts of “Christmas Gift! Christmas Gift!” were entitled to presents.

Writers on antebellum society, however, point to another practical basis for many of the indulgences extended by masters. Christmas gifts of liquor, money, and clothes—as well as feasts and week-long holidays—were also control mechanisms used to reward the obedient and to penalize the obstinate. 8

Reflections
The holiday heritage we celebrate in 2003 reflects many of the toys we give our children. In it, we see a cultural seesaw and a kaleidoscope of customs—a game board, even, on which human lives were moved like chess pieces. But the charming vignettes that grace our Christmas cards reflect an idyll our ancestors might not recognize; and experiences we treasure may have had radically different meanings to our forebears. In Yuletide observances, as in all other aspects of life, the deeper we probe into yesteryear, the more we appreciate L.P. Hartley's observation that the past is a foreign country where people lived differently.

Notes
1. Two excellent books covering the general points made in this paper are Stephen Nissenbaum, The Battle for Christmas (Knopf, 1996); and Penne L. Restad, Christmas in America: A History (Oxford Univ. Press, 1995).
2. William T. Davis, ed., Bradford’s History of Plymouth Plantation, 1606–1646 (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908), 126–27.
3. Henry Ward Beecher, Autobiographical Reminiscences (Frederick A. Stokes, 1898), 86–87.
4. Robert and Cynthia McCausland, eds., The Diary of Martha Ballard, 1785–1812 (Picton Press, 1992).
5. John W. Audubon,Audubon’s Western Journal, 1849–1850, Frank Hodder, ed. (Arthur H. Clark, 1906), 193.
6. Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom (reprint; Knopf, 1953), 292.
7. C. Vann Woodward, ed., Mary Chesnut’s Civil War (Yale Univ. Press, 1981), 270.
8. Slave roles and rituals during the Christmas season, ignored in most literature, is addressed at length in Nissenbaum’s Battle for Christmas and in William D. Piersen, “African American Festive Style and the Creation of American Culture,” in William Pencak et al., eds., Riot and Revelry in Early America (Pennsylvania State Univ., 2002).

Elizabeth Shown Mills, CG, CGL, FASG, is a generational historian who finds that historical context not only adds depth and dimension to ancestral lives but also helps to resolve difficult research problems involving identity and relationship. Her published works include Evidence! and Professional Genealogy: A Manual for Researchers, Writers, Editors, Lecturers, and Librarians.

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