The Invention of Santa

PETER: Okay, the holidays are over. You might even say, they’re history. So what better time to look at the history of the holiday season?

BRIAN: I suppose there are worse ways we could peg that. What do you have for us, Peter?

PETER: Awhile back, I spoke with Steve Nissenbaum about the commercialization of Christmas that began in the 1820s.

In this segment, Steve Nissenbaum tells a fascinating story about how and why we invent traditions. In this case, how a holiday we think we know keeps being reinvented. You’ll look at Christmas a little differently after hearing this segment.

BRIAN: Now, I don’t want to get ahead of this Peter, and I really haven’t listened to this for years, but as I recall class warfare breaks out in this segment.

PETER: Yes, Brian it’s class warfare, at least it begins that way with rowdiness on the streets. But it turns into something more interesting. It turns into a transformation of family life. It’s the moment, you might say, when the kids took over.
Brian and Ed help introduce this interview from our show “Naughty & Nice: The History of the Holiday Season.”

BRIAN: We’re talking today about the history of the so called holiday season. When we left off, our 18th Century guy, Peter was explaining that the Puritans not only didn’t celebrate Christmas, but actually made the holiday illegal which wasn’t too surprising considering that for centuries it had basically consisted of a multi-day bonanza of booze-fueled partying. But despite the Puritan’s best attempts, people continued celebrating Christmas the old fashioned way well into the 19th Century.

AYERS: And then in the 1820’s, something began to change. Newspapers started running Christmas themed ads for local merchants. This was a new development; buying gifts for people, after all, it wasn’t a part of the old Christmas and a lot of those ads featured a certain character who is also a new addition to the holiday, Saint Nicholas AKA Santa Claus, first popularized in American newspapers in the form of a poem.

VOICEOVER: Twas the night before Christmas when all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse…

AYERS: A visit from Saint Nicholas was written in 1823 by Clement Clark Moore, a theology professor and a member of New York’s very upper crust. Now he owned a huge estate on New York’s West side. He was just the kind of guy likely to be visited by Christmas beggars demanding the masters’ best food and drink.

VOICEOVER: …When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter. I sprang from bed to see what was the matter.

AYERS: What was the matter of course was that there was a little old fat man on the lawn just the kind of guy who would have joined up with those traditional holiday beggars. Here is historian Stephen Nissenbaum.

Nissenbaum: He is dressed in sooty fur. He is carrying what amounts to a beggars pack on his back. He looks like a Plebeian but this particular figure of Santa Clause doesn’t come to make demands, he comes to give gifts to the narrators kids.

Onuf: Now the character of Saint Nick wasn’t entirely new to American audiences. He had first appeared in a mock history of old New York written by Morris’ good friend, Washington Irving, but that Saint Nick was portrayed as he had appeared back in Holland as a Patrician Bishop. It was Clement Clark Moore’s defrocking of Santa that signaled the beginning of Christmas as we know it.

Nissenbaum: The simplest, really over simplest way to put the deeper change that caused the new Christmas to come about in the 1820’s was really rapid urbanization and the early stages of capitalism and what those two things coming together did was it took the traditional kind of begging rituals, the traditional trick or treat rituals which had gone on for centuries and it sort of intensified the tension that was involved in them because now, since we’re dealing with densely populated cities, the poor who go around in bands, are no longer poor people who were known personally to the rich people whose houses they banged the doors of. Now they’re in an anonymous (to use a fancy word) proto proletariat, I mean they’re in the process of being transformed from being traditional apprentices and clerks into what’s within a generation going to become an urban proletariat.

Onuf: To some extent you’re talking about changing conceptions of the social order from a notion of status and familiar position in the community to a more anonymous what we might call “class” like the dangerous classes. The streets are dangerous places.

Nissenbaum: The streets are becoming dangerous places.

Onuf: But meanwhile the other thing that’s happening in the house is that children are in effect stepping up and demanding gifts. Where did kids get off becoming kids in the way they are today?

Nissenbaum: Well here is one way to talk about that: those bands of roving beggars at Christmastime would have consisted of the poor, but also would have consisted rather promiscuously of young people, even sometimes young people from wealthy households. That essentially is going to risk subverting the social order in a rather profound way. So white people in New York, some very wealthy, conservative people in New York, started doing in the 18 teens and 1820’s was in fact to come up with a new kind of holiday that barracked the doors, if you like, against beggars from the outside and that then sanctioned giving gifts to your own children within the family, so what you’re simultaneously beginning to get is the fortress household, the fortress family and the whole new idea of children as people who should be deferred to. Previously in a sense had been servants within their own households.

Onuf: Dependents in the household.

Nissenbaum: Dependents in the household, but on Christmas day, given this very old tradition of inverting the social order and now limiting that inversion to the internal workings of the family itself, I think for many families, Christmas is the first moment when you begin to look at your children in a new way and look at them as objects affection and objects of sentiment and I think that the new Christmas that gets devised in the 1820’s is really part of that process by which the family that we know of today, the modern family, which we think of as being traditional family is itself being invented.

Onuf: Steve, I was to press you on gift giving because it’s so central to our modern understanding of Christmas and it seems to me gifts carry a heavy burden. They’re supposed to be deeply personal expressions of the love that cements family relations and yet, at the same time, to put it simply they are commodities. How have Americans, particularly in this kind of founding era of modern Christmas, how do they resolve the tension of commodity exchange, after all that’s the nasty business of the marketplace that’s suppose to be what we’re escaping when we turn towards the home and we’re the heartless world outside, we come into the warm, sentimental bosom of our family. So how do Americans deal with the commodity status of gifts?

Nissenbaum: Yeah. In a phrase, Santa Clause, from the very beginning that part of it got disguised to use the bluntest word by saying that Santa Claus brought these gifts. Also the fact that they’re wrapped. They’re gift wrapped so they’re somehow special. So it’s a combination of gift wrapping and Santa Clause, essentially takes them out of the marketplace. They magically appear. In fact, by 1840, you’re, in a very common way, beginning to get Santa Clause used by merchants to advertise his wares. You get adds in the newspapers saying this is Santa Clauses’ favorite haunt and buy these goods and that’s, of course, defeating the whole purpose. And one of the most fascinating things that I’ve found is that beginning in the 1830’s, a group of wealthy Bostonians for the most part decided that they needed a new ritual that would de-commercialized Christmas in a way that Santa had failed to do and that new ritual was the Christmas tree. They thought, mistakenly, that the Christmas tree was an old German ritual in which children actually gave gifts to their parents.

Onuf: Does that ever actually happen Steve?

Nissenbaum: It apparently happened in one family in one town in Northern Germany called Ratzeburg and it so happened that that family was being visited in the 1790’s by the future poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge essay that he published around 1810 and what happened is that the press started picking this up in the 1830’s after the Coleridge essay got reprinted. The fact that it was limited to his observation of a single household got lost.

Onuf: And who said individuals don’t matter in history?

[laughs]

Nissenbaum: Individuals matter in history. Well of course Coleridge wanted to see something like that and Americans were ready for something like that so they decided that the Christmas tree was this pure completely uncommercial ritual that was common place in Germany which is was not.

Onuf: So in a way, folk rituals were juxtaposed to commercial practices when in fact they were part and parcel of the same thing.

Nissenbaum: They were. I mean I think that you can almost see the history of Christmas as an ongoing series of efforts to de-commercialize it and every effort to de-commercialize it and purify it then becomes appropriated or co-opted. It’s really almost inevitable.

Onuf: Well Steve, thanks so much. It’s been great talking to you.

Nissenbaum: You’re very welcome and thank you Peter so much for having me on the show.

PETER: Steve Nissenbaum is professor of history emeritus at the University of Massachusetts. He’s the author of The Battle for Christmas.