'Tis the Season!

'Tis the Season!

by Emma L. Powers

Some years ago it devolved on me to become this department's "expert" on Christmas in colonial Virginia. It's an assignment I take seriously and one that involves a surprising amount of my time. I've read as many books on the topic as possible, strained my eyesight poring over faint manuscript diaries and letters, searched out prints and paintings, and read histories of the holiday in other parts of the world. After nearly twenty years, I've reached a major conclusion: the history of Christmas is truly a very sticky ball of wax.

Hanging Wreath Ball

Understanding the modern holiday is difficult because we hold wildly different sets of expectations—and these are often unstated, even to ourselves. For many, the occasion is first and foremost a religious holiday, while some put more emphasis on gathering family and friends for seasonal feasting, togetherness, and catching up. Still others see Christmas as a magical time for children, the chance to make their dreams come true. Certain people spurn it on religious, social, or financial grounds.

What most of us seem to have in common is a sense that Christmas is no longer what it used to be. Without real evidence, we maintain that in the past the holiday was more meaningful in every way, as well as more enjoyable and "authentic." The longing for Christmases past and "how it used to be" affects us all. Nostalgia may be the strongest single feeling we have about this season. No other holiday is so clouded with contradictory emotions. I've never heard anyone complain about a modern Thanksgiving, for example. A few old fogies, myself included, are beginning to think that Halloween is getting out of hand, but that's beside the point.

Christmas in the Country

Nostalgia for bygone Christmas celebrations is not new in the late twentieth century. Eighteenth-century Englishmen also suffered from it. The anonymous author of Round about our Coal-Fire, published in London about 1740, bewailed the end of hospitality as traditionally offered in the English countryside.

Wreath, Lantern, Tri-corner hat, and clay pipe

The manner of celebrating Holydays, is vastly different now to what it was in former Days: There was once upon a time Hospitality in the Land; and (a true) English Gentleman at the opening of the great Day, had all his Tenants and neighbours enter'd his Hall by Day break, the strong Beer was broach'd, the Blackjacks went plentifully about with Toast, Sugar, Nutmeg, and good Cheshire Cheese; the Rooms were embow er'd with Holly, Ivy, Cyprus, Bays, Laurel and Mistletoe, and a bouncing Christmas Log in the Chimney, glowing like the Cheeks of a Country Milk-Maid… the great Festival was in former Times kept with so much Freedom and Openness of Heart, that every one in the Country where a Gentleman resided, possess'd at least a Day of Pleasure in the Christmas Holy days; the Tables were all spread from the first to the last, the Sirloins of Beef, the Minc'd-pyes, the Plumb-porridge, the Capons, Turkeys, Geese, and Plumb-puddings were all brought upon the Board, and every one who had sharp stomachs, and sharp Knives, eat heartily, and were welcome.

At about the same time, some Englishmen envied the Christmas traditions of Virginians, whom they saw as perpetuators of old-fashioned English customs. A London Magazine article in 1746 claimed that "All over the Colony, a universal Hospitality reigns…full Tables and open Doors, the kind salute, the generous Detention, speak somewhat like the old Roast-beef Ages of our Fore-fathers… Strangers are sought after with Greediness, as they pass the country, to be invited."

Purdie and Dixon's Virginia Gazette on December 29, 1774, reprinted an Englishman's disdain for the new, stylish ways of observing Christmas.

I am an old Fellow, and confess that I Like old Things. Among the chief of these, I hold old Fashions and Customs; and, among all the Refinements of the present Age, I do not think that in these [fashions and customs] they have refined greatly for the better. This is Christmas Morning; and… it promises but a dull Holiday. The Times, Sir, are changed. On such a Day as this, an English Kitchen used to be the Palace of Plenty, Jollity, and good Eating. Every Thing was plain, but plenty. Here stood the large, plump, juicy Buttocks of English Roast Beef, and there smiled the frothy Tankards of English Beer; here smokes the solid sweet-tasted Mince Pies, and there the curling Fumes of plum-pudding perfumed the Sky with delicious Fragrance. Humour and Eating went Hand in Hand; the Men caroused, and the Women gave loose to gay but innocent Amusements.

Now mark the Picture of the present Time: Instead of that firm Roast Beef, that fragrant Pudding, our Tables groan with the Luxuries of France and India. Here a lean Fricassee rises in the Room of our majestick Ribs, and there a Scoundrel Syllabub occupies the Place of our well-beloved Home-brewed. The solid Meal gives Way to the slight Repast; and, forgetting that good Eating and good Porter are the two great Supporters of Magna Charta and the British Constitution, we open our Hearts and our Mouths to new Fashions in Cookery, which will one Day lead us into Ruin.

Alas! alas! that it should come to this! Our Nobles absolutely subsist upon Macaroni and Negus [a hot and spicy, wine-based beverage], and our very Aldermen have almost forgot the Use of Barons [of beef] and Custards. What will this World come to at last!

For much of the eighteenth century, Christmas traditions in Virginia were indeed simple. No trees, no Santa, few gifts, no "stockings hung by the chimney with care." Many of our favorite customs came along later—most in the nineteenth century. In colonial Virginia, Christmas was an entire season, not a single day; the Twelve Days of Christmas stretched from December 25 to Epiphany on January 6. Dinners, balls, and other social occasions were arranged throughout the twelve days. Weddings, too, often took place at this time of year (the Jeffersons' and the Washingtons' are just two examples). Twelfth Night parties, usually held on the evening of January 5, signaled the end of the season. New Year's Day was often noted in diaries of the period with sentiments like "Another Year is gone!," but New Year's Eve parties were not common. Twelfth Night gatherings seemed to have served much the same purpose as ours on December 31.

Table Cone Decoration

Philip Vickers Fithian's diary for 1773 and 1774 gives us an unusually detailed look at Virginians' holiday practices. For example, on Christmas Eve and again on Christmas morning, Fithian noted that guns were fired—presumably as a means of sending greetings to faraway plantations. They also seem to have functioned as a release of the high spirits brought on by the season. Fithian wrote that the household slaves at Nomini Hall solicited gifts (about which, more below).

Wreath with Fruit

Among Anglicans in Virginia, Christmas, the Feast of the Nativity, was a major religious holiday, second only to Easter; therefore, attendance at service on that day was expected. It was one of the three or four times in the year that Eucharist was celebrated. In rural parishes short on clergy, church services may not have been possible on December 25 itself, so folks in the countryside observed the holiday on the Sunday closest to that date. In 1773, for example, Christmas fell on a Saturday; Frances Carter, her children, and their tutor, Philip Fithian, did not attend church that day but went instead on Sunday the 26th. Several years later, a young London merchant, Robert Hunter, Jr., visit ed a relative in Tappahannock over the holidays. On the morning of December 25, 1785, a Sunday, he wrote in his diary, "I lament more and more every Sunday that we have no public place of worship to go to. There is a church to be sure, about three miles off, but unfortunately there happens to be no preacher. Being Christmas Day you miss it more than common, as [being] so universal a day of worship in all parts of the civilized world."

Unfortunately, there is little evidence about how denominations other than Anglicans celebrated. Fithian spent the Christmas of 1775 in western Virginia as a Presbyterian "missionary" to the Scots-Irish settlers there. That holiday was very different from previous ones at Nomini Hall. He wrote, "Not a Gun heard—Not a Shout—No company or Cabal assembled—To Day is like other Days every Way calm & temperate—People go about their daily Business." In December 1776, Nicholas Cresswell was stranded in Frederick County, Virginia, where he found that "Christmas Day, but very little observed in this country, except it is amongst the Dutch."

After church on Christmas Day, dinner was the next order of business. Most people tried to get more and better things to eat and drink for the holiday. For the gentry, of course, this presented no problem at all. Fithian described his meal at Nomini Hall on Christmas Day 1773 as "Our Dinner was no otherwise than common [that is, it was just like their dinner everyday], yet as elegant a Christmas Dinner as I ever sat Down to." Those lower down the social scale, of course, had few choices of food and drink. Preparing and serving these meals, whether elaborate or simple, required work, so housewives, slaves, and servants probably worked as hard or harder on the holiday than at other times. Especially when guests were included, their duties must have been much more onerous. (Later in this article I will return to the subject of slaves' observance of Christmas.)

Decorations

The Grand Illumination of the Historic Area is an adaptation of an eighteenth-century practice, but it was not a Christmas custom. On occasions such as the monarch's birthday or arrival of a new governor, the town was "illuminated" with fireworks and candles in the cupolas of public buildings and in the windows of gentlemen's houses. This has been adapted as a way of marking the Foundation's opening of the Christmas season.

Our present-day decorations, too, are adaptations: they are rather more splendid than any that townspeople put up in the eighteenth century. So far, I have found absolutely no descriptions of Christmas decorations in colonial America. That being the case, we must rely on English precedents, both verbal and pictorial. Here is a chronological selection of quotations that gives information about both materials and methods of "decking the halls" in England.

The custom of decorating churches has been traced to the Old Testament lesson appointed for the Anglican service on Christmas Eve. The thirteenth verse of Isaiah, chapter 60 reads "the glory of Lebanon shall come unto thee, the fir-tree, the pine-tree, and the box together, to beautify the place of my sanctuary."

Thomas Tusser's Five Hundred Pointes of Good Husbandrie, published in several editions between 1573 and 1580, includes a Christmas section and clearly indicates that even at this early period homes too were donned with greens. His verse commands the housewife, "Get Iuye and hull [ivy and holly] woman deck up thyne house."

Holly Branch

By the late sixteenth century there is evidence of outdoor decorations. George Wither, an English poet, wrote in 1588:

So, now is come our joyful'st feast; Let every man be jolly; Each room with ivy leaves is drest, And every post with holly.

John Stowe in his Survey of London, 1598, included homes, churches, and outdoor decorations in his description of holiday greens. He cites a source from 1444 saying it was the custom at "the Feast of Christmas, every man's house, as also the parish Churches" to be "decked with holme [holly], ivy, bayes, and whatsoever the season of the year afforded to be green. The Conduits and Standards in the streets were, likewise, garnished."

We have very little information about changes in Christmas customs in England during the Interregnum. Parliament abolished the observance of Christmas and other holy days on June 3, 1647. Parish officers of St. Margaret's, Westminster, London, were fined for adorning the church with rosemary and other greens that Christmas of 1647. But it is not clear how strictly and widely the law was enforced. Did ordinary people obey this law and give up their own private practices? Virginians were probably not affected by this change and so continued their earlier traditions. Likewise, it is impossible to say that the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 brought back each and every former holiday practice in England. Poor Robin's Almanack in 1695 linked decking the halls with the monarchy:

With holly and ivy So green and so gay; We deck up our houses As fresh as the day, With bays and rosemary, And laurel compleat, And every one now Is a king in conceit.

Robert Herrick, a seventeenth-century English poet, often wrote about rustic rites and superstitions. One of his verses lists the greens appropriate for the holidays. These, it was believed, had to be removed by Candlemas, February 2.

Down with the rosemary, and so down with the baies and mistletoe, Down with the holly ivie, all Wherewith you drest the Christmas hall.

John Gay's Trivia, written in 1716, indicates that by the early eighteenth century Christmas greenery was already an item of commerce. Holiday foliage was gathered and taken for sale in London. Notice the specific plants included in his lines:

When rosemary and bays, the Poet's crown, Are bawl'd, infrequent cries, through all the town, Then judge the festival of Christmas near, Christmas, the joyous period of the year. Now with bright holly all your temples strove, With lawrel green, and sacred mistletoe.

John Brand's Observations on the Popular Antiquities of Great Britain, first published in 1777, includes the following rhyme, specifying not only the kinds of foliage to use, but where to place the decorations and even the types of containers to hold the greens in eighteenth-century English homes:

From every hedge is pluck'd by eager hands The holy [holly] branch with prickly leaves replete And fraught with berries of a crimson hue; Which, torn asunder from its parent trunk, Is straight way taken to the neighboring towns, Where windows, mantels, candlesticks, and shelves, Quarts, pints, decanters, pipkins, basons, jugs, And other articles of household ware, The verdant garb confess.

At the end of the century, a country parson's diary tells us that holly was still used to decorate windows. The Reverend James Woodforde wrote on Christmas Eve, 1796, "We were obliged to have Hulver-branches [holly] without berries to dress up our Windows &c. against Christmas, the Weather having been so several all this Month, that the poor Birds have entirely already stript the Bushes." Four years later, he noted "This being Christmas Even we dressed up our Windows with Hulver Branches as usual."

A handful of English prints show very simple arrangements of greens. In a fairly crude print called "Christmas Gambols," holly has been put in decorative vases on the mantel shelf. Two or three more show sprigs of holly or other greens arranged flat against windowpanes. (For the record, I have no idea how these were attached. Is it possible that the glass was so loosely set in the dividers that stems could be worked between the two? There is no reference to any kind of adhesive.) Nearly always, a large cluster of mistletoe shows up. It is usually in the center of the main public room. Mistletoe, associated with kissing, brought mischief and even chaos. There is licentious behavior well beyond an innocent kiss on the cheek. Both property and propriety are destroyed. More than one print points to an overindulgence in punch or other strong drink as well.

Christmas Trees

The earliest description of a Christmas tree I have found thus far dates from 1605. The observer wrote that in Strasbourg, France, "they set up fir-trees in the parlours… and hang thereon roses cut out of manycoloured paper, apples, wafers, gold foil, sweets, &c." A German immigrant to London, the Princess Lieven, continued the Christmas tree tradition in her new home. In December 1729 (although some sources say it was 1726), one of her visitors described the scene: "Three trees, in great pots, were put upon a long table covered with pink linen. Each tree was illuminated with three circular tiers of colored wax can dies-blue, green, red, and white. Before each tree was displayed a quantity of toys, gloves… and various [other] articlespresents made to the owner of the tree. It was very pretty."

The princess's trees did not immediately convert the English to the German tradition, although the decorations were not unknown. A London diarist in 1789 recorded "This Christmas Mr. Papendiek proposed an illuminated tree, according to the German fashion." The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge visited Germany during the winter of 1825-26. One of his letters described a German Christmas tree as "a great yew bough is fastened on the table at a little distance from the wall, a multitude of little tapers are fixed in the bough, but not so as to burn it till they are nearly consumed, and colored paper, etc., hangs and flutters from the twigs."

To most English people the Christmas tree was still a foreign thing well into the nineteenth century. And so it remained until the Victorian period when the German-born Prince Consort had a tree trimmed for his family at Windsor Castle. An 1848 print showing Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, and the princes and princesses royal with their decorated Christmas tree brought the custom into wide use in English homes. American magazines soon ran this print too, and the German tree soon became a holiday custom in this country.

There were other and earlier ways in which the Christmas tree came to America—not through Prince Albert alone. European settlers certainly brought the custom with them when they immigrated. Without a doubt, German settlers in Pennsylvania and the Valley of Virginia had Christmas trees long before the mid-nineteenth-century one at Windsor Castle.

Sometime between 1810 and 1817, Germantown, Pennsylvania, artist John Lewis Krimmel sketched a family group gathered around their small tabletop Christmas tree, trimmed with what appear to be cookies or fancy cakes. Beneath it is an arrangement of toy animals inside a picket fence. The Henry Francis duPont Winterthur Museum owns this drawing of Krimmel's Christmas tree. (There is a story going around that Hessian troops had a Christmas tree during the Revolution. I have not yet located primary source material verifying the tale.)

Although it was not the first Christmas tree in America or even in Virginia, the 1842 tree at the St. George Tucker House is the earliest Virginia tree of which we have a description, and it was certainly the very first Christmas tree in Williamsburg. The description was made in 1928, eighty-six years after the fact, by a 95-year-old eyewitness. Martha Vandergrift, age 9, was visiting her cousins in 1842 when Dr. Charles Minnigerode decorated a "German tree" for Nathaniel Beverley Tucker's family.

Gift Giving

The giving of Christmas gifts has proliferated in this century and grown far beyond anything colonial Virginians took part in. Coins, small toys, and educational books were typical holiday presents—and these were just as likely to be given at New Year's as at Christmas. In the eighteenth century, gifts were not exchanged but bestowed by a superior upon an inferior-parents to children or masters to slaves, servants, or apprentices. The local newspaper in December 1738, for example, advertised a new book, The Church Catechism Explain'd, as "very proper for a New-Year's Gift to Children." Robert Wormeley Carter of Richmond County "gave 12/6 [12 shillings sixpence] to my five children & 10/ [10 shillings] to Mrs. Carter" on December 25, 1769. In 1770, Yorktown resident Martha Goosley sent two Christmas turkeys to John Norton and his family in London. St. George Tucker's relatives in Bermuda sent him "a pair of silk Stockings for a Christmas Box" on January 4, 1773. Palace kitchen accounts show that two shillings sixpence were sent as a "Christmas box to the millar's servt." on January 23, 1770. House slaves at Nomini Hall expected tips from Fithian on Christmas morning 1773. His expenditure totaled "five Bits" when he had given something to one who served him. Fithian could not pay up completely until the middle of the next month.

These small gifts of money were sometimes called Christmas boxes, but there is no evidence that ceramic boxes for collecting tips were used here as in England. Such receptacles were by definition temporary, both by their seasonal function and because they had to be broken to get at their contents. Archaeologists have yet to identify Christmas boxes among artifacts retrieved from Virginia sites. Nor was the collection of such tips an event that took place on a specified day. As you can see by Fithian's tipping and by the payment to the miller's helper by the governor's kitchen staff, tips were either paid or promised on the holiday itself, but all the coins might not actually change hands for several weeks. So far, I have found no record of a Christmas box actually dated December 26, which is the traditional Boxing Day celebrated in England and Canada. I suspect that, like so many other holiday customs, Boxing Day became a settled practice with its own set date in the nineteenth century.

Holiday Customs among African Americans

As usual, our sources are biased toward the gentry and upper middling sort. There is no information about how poor whites and free people of color celebrated Christmas in early Virginia. For some of them, the religious aspects of the holiday probably prevailed. With limited incomes, of course, material manifestations of the season—gifts, special meals, decorations, and so on—were simply not possible. We know more about slaves' treatment at this time of year because of letters, diaries, and other documents written by the masters, mainly gentry planters. A February 1726/7 law that established patrols to guard against invasions and insurrections mentions that slaves usually congregated in some numbers at the three main yearly festivals. As part of the rationale for the patrols, the legislators called to mind the "great danger [that] may happen to the inhabitants of this dominion, from the unlawful concourse of negros, during the Christmas, Easter, and Whitsuntide holidays, wherein they are usually exempted from labour."

Lorena Walsh's research on plantation management in the colonial Chesapeake shows that slaves were allowed three to five days' holiday at Christmastime. In 1786, for example, George Washington noted on December 29, "The hollidays being over, and the People [slaves] all at work, I rid to the Ferry, Dogue run, and Muddy hole Plantations." A Christmas respite must have been allowed to field hands more readily than to domestics; house servants had more work than usual when guests were in the house for extended visits or if the master and mistress expected special meals and entertained during the holidays.

Santa Claus Statue.

Traditionally, slave owners allowed their workers to have alcohol during the Christmas break. Some masters actually made gifts of rum and other spirits to their bondsmen. This was a very manipulative move and not offered strictly for the slaves' benefit and enjoyment. Frederick Douglass and others explained that slave owners actually encouraged drunkenness at Christmas and a few other occasions to keep slaves from running away. Some individuals, it was said, drank so much that they could not enjoy their temporary freedom. Holiday imbibing troubled certain slave owners. James Gordon, an "Old Side" Presbyterian in Lancaster County, Virginia, recorded in his diary on Christmas Day 1759: "Some of our negroes got drunk, that has given me some uneasiness."

Naturally, what a master could give, he could also take away. On the last day of 1774, Colonel Landon Carter congratulated himself for his wisdom in suppressing the slaves' celebration at Sabine Hall that year. "I can't but fancy that I have been quite happy in not letting my People keep any part of Christmas." Carter thought his strictness had averted a slave revolt.

Christmas Greetings

Commercially printed Christmas cards first became available in 1843, but for many, many years previously people had written their holiday salutes to family and friends in letters. Even business communications sent toward the end of the year might include wishes for a happy Christmas and healthy New Year. The Christmas card's antecedents may be Christmas Pieces from the eighteenth century and up to 1840. These "Pieces" were large sheets of good quality writing paper with engraved borders. In the center of the pages schoolboys copied out, in their best possible penmanship, some seasonal tribute to their parents. The pupil's words were not the point; these were not compositions but displays of fine writing dutifully learned from the writing master. Thus far, I know only of English examples, but American pieces may yet come to light. Colonial printers could easily have created them, and they certainly would have wanted to get in on this market.

Modern Christmas

Like Christmas trees and Christmas cards, most of our favorite Christmas customs date from the nineteenth century. The writers Charles Dickens, Washington Irving, and Clement Clarke Moore freely interpreted customs from other times and parts of the world—or created them out of the whole cloth. The nineteenth-century political cartoonist Thomas Nast drew a Santa Claus that any modern child would recognize and love. Eighteenth-century Christmases were certainly different from today's version, but most of us would feel right at home at a Victorian-era celebration.

Emma L. Powers is a historian in the Department of Historical Research. This paper was published in the Colonial Williamsburg Interpreter, Volume 20, No. 4 (1999).