Every year I browse the shelves at the local bookstore to see what new titles are available for Christmas reading. I really enjoy Christmas mysteries and Christmas drama books, but I tend to shy away from sappy Christmas romance books. That being said, I recently read several short stories in a collection titled American Christmas Stories published by The Library of America. It contains many classics and newer stories in a variety of genres. They are good, because they are all short and can be read in a few minutes during a lunch break or before going to bed.
I love Christmas. I never complain about the crash at the stores or the decorations going up before Halloween - or Labor Day - or having to buy presents. I like buying presents and mailing cards and going caroling and watching "A Christmas Carol" or "White Christmas". I like lights and snow and eggnog lattes - pretty much everything about the holiday season, except saccharine Hallmark TV movies.
And among all the things I love about Christmas, one of the best is the stories. I still spend way too much time every Christmas reading Dickens's The Chimes and Jean Shepherd's A Christmas Story and David Sedaris, and, as I clean up the post-holiday mess and face the bleak despairs of January, SW.H. Auden's For the Time Being.
Many of the stories I enjoy this time of year are American stories, though I never really gave it much thought - Christmas is such a universal holiday. I had never really thought about the history of the American Christmas story, and how it had come to exist, which is, in itself, a fascinating story.
Neither the Pilgrims nor the Puritans approved of Christmas, that pagan, Papist, raucous holiday, and by 1659, they had outlawed Christmas and imposed a fine of five shillings for anyone caught celebrating it. Even worse, as relations between the colonists and the British deteriorated and the Revolutionary War approached, what little of Christmas there was, was deemed an English holiday and therefore unpatriotic. Not at all a promising beginning and certainly not anything to write stories about in America.
Nevertheless, as they say, Christmas persisted, thanks largely to immigrants from Germany, the Netherlands, Central Europe, and Scandinavia, who were coming over to the colonies (and then the newly formed United States), bringing their Christmas traditions from back home with them - the Dutch custom of hanging stockings, the German Christmas tree, the Moravian Christmas star, midnight mass and mistletoe and cookies and Father Christmas, all of which began working their way into the observance of Christmas and then into American stories. Early American holiday stories by Washington Irving and Nathaniel Hawthorne were basically accounts of English Christmases transplanted to New York and New England, but as the holiday evolved, so did the stories.
In 1812, when Washington Irving wrote the revised and expanded second edition of his History of New York, he added two wholly new passages describing Saint Nicholas "riding jollily among the tree tops, or over the roofs of the houses" in a wagon, dropping presents for children down chimneys, smoking a pipe and "laying his finger beside his nose." In 1823, an anonymous poem titled "A Visit from St. Nicholas," more commonly known as "The Night Before Christmas" appeared in the Troy, New York Sentinel. Clement C. Moore later claimed authorship, though a compelling case has been made that the author was actually Major Henry Livingston Jr., a good friend of Washington Irving.
Whoever wrote it, the poem repeated Irving's mention of the pipe, flying vehicle (now a sleigh), and children's gifts, and added other details - reindeer, a sack full of toys, and "visions of sugarplums," though no one then nor since has ever had a clear idea of what a sugarplum actually is.
"The Night Before Christmas," along with tales about Christmas festivities in England in Irving's Sketch Book (1819-1820) and accounts of American Christmases by Hawthorne, James Fenimore Cooper, and, later, Harriet Beecher Stowe, began to shape the image of a distinctly American holiday, though American Christmas stories remained thin on the ground for most of the nineteenth century.
Then, in the 1860s, three pivotal things happened. The first was the Civil War. The first chapter of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women gave a loving portrayal of wartime Christmas.
The second thing to happen was the appearance of a number of pictures depicting Christmas. A pair of engravers, Currier and Ives, produced a set of hand-colored prints depicting ice skating on frozen ponds, sleigh rides through snowy landscapes and jolly homecomings. At the same time, Thomas Nast began drawing depictions of Santa Claus for Harper's Weekly. Those drawings gave Christmas a face, Currier and Ives gave Christmas a setting, and together they brought the image of Christmas into focus for Americans.
Lastly, Charles Dickens came to America in 1867, on a speaking tour during which he read A Christmas Carol to American audiences for the first time. Dickens was a gifted speaker with an already devoted following, but this was not just any speaking tour and A Christmas Carol was not just any story. It had everything - humor, pathos, drama, redemption, unforgettable characters, and a truly happy ending. It also had ghosts, which had been a Christmas tradition since the Middle Ages, and great lines. It was the embodiment of everything a Christmas story should be and Americans loved it.
The coming together of these three forces had the effect of touching a match to tinder. The celebrating of Christmas - and the writing about it - ignited, and soon Christmas stories by Americans were appearing everywhere.
By the 1920s the Christmas story was as firmly established and as quintessentially an American tradition as the Christmas tree and Santa Claus. It was also omnipresent.
Today's American Christmas is a hopelessly tangled mishmash of religious holiday, national holiday and historical holiday. It is also becoming increasingly international, as writers have brought customs and traditions from their homelands together under the umbrella of American Christmas traditions.
Stories are a big and enduring part of Christmas.
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