It’s
Christmas week here in Milwaukee. The streets are lighted, the houses are
decorated, and all is ready for a collective effervescence of peace and good
will. It’s a time when family members come together to bask in their reciprocal
generosity. What a wonderful life...or is it?
The
traditions of Christmas here in the northern cities of the United States have a
long and wondrous history, but maybe not so wonderful.* And it is worth reflecting
on this history, lest we allow ourselves to be simply swept along by the tide
of the season, the, uh, yule tide.
Between
1500 and 1800 in Europe and America, Christmas meant one thing and one thing
only, getting drunk. The baby Jesus may have been back there somewhere, but way
back. What was front and center was a good long tug at the bottle. The liquor
helped dull the pain of the season.
The
pain? Around 1800, the collective pain was obvious. The rivers froze which
meant that the mills stopped working, which meant that the laborers were laid
off, which meant that their families went hungry. In their poverty, most
workers had little else to look forward to but booze.
The
liquor loosened folks up and, as a result, they acted out more freely in public.
They developed a tradition of going door-to-door, begging—no, demanding—gifts
from wealthy citizens. Such behavior echoed the long-established table-turning
that had prevailed during the carnivalesque Christmas celebrations of the late
Middle Ages. That is, the poor became demanding and the rich became acquiescent
for just this short season of the year. The powerless became momentarily
powerful.
But,
such behavior was getting out of hand by 1820. It was about then that Clement
Clarke Moore wrote “A Visit from St. Nicholas” (‘Twas the Night Before
Christmas), a poem that he and his cronies hoped would both entertain New
Yorkers and dial down the turmoil of the season.
Central
to his story is St. Nick, Santa Claus, a cross-over figure if ever there were
won. Nick wore the ermine-tipped red-velvet of a bishop, signs of his elite
status. But he was dirty and he smoked a short-stem stump of a pipe, signs of
his low-class affiliation. With this combination of high and low
characteristics, he passed as neither drunken carouser nor haughty mill-owner,
but as an in-betweener. He was the perfect figure around which to organize a
Christmas cease-fire.
This
in-betweener was altogether acceptable as a magical elf who could silently
infiltrate a house, where he could give gifts instead of demanding them. He was
neither patron nor pauper, but a bit of both. And being a bit-of-both, he
managed to appease the poor, while simultaneously calming the fears of the
well-to-do.
Besides
creating and positioning this new Christmas hero, Moore engineered a second
feature for the Christmas holidays, an ingenious shift of focus away from the
warring social classes outside households and toward the children within
households.
In
the past, children had been treated as simply dependents, not much more
distinguished than household servants. But now, by making them central to the
holiday, Moore reconstructed the carnivalesque power-reversals of yore,
defusing class conflicts, and infusing family life with a central importance it
never had. Rather than having the poor on the street demanding gifts from the
wealthy, he featured children in the household receiving gifts and feeling like
kings.
The
empowerment of children that he fostered seemed to suit bourgeois sensibilities
ever so much more comfortably than did the erstwhile momentary empowerment of
the lower classes. And, voila, the ferocity of the streets was kept at bay.
Thereafter, Ma in her kerchief and I in my cap could relax, get fat, and watch
the world go by.
So,
here we are in Milwaukee, dizzied by the lights and sounds of Christmas. We are
eager to buy gifts for the kids, and we are suffused with a sense of our own
generosity towards mankind. But, after looking into the history, we can't help
but wonder...
*Stephen
Nissenbaum, The Battle For Christmas, 1996.
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