By Edwin Cooney
Deck the halls with boughs of holly, Fa la la la la, la la
la la,
Tis the season to be jolly, Fa la la la la, la la la la
It’s that time again—and I love it. Perhaps a little of the magic dwindles over
the years, but only the tiniest bit of it.
I don’t anticipate where Santa might be at any hour on
Christmas Eve anymore -- but I know he’s surely somewhere.
Mary, Joseph and the Christ child, Christmas carols, Santa
Claus, stockings, Christmas cookies with hot chocolate or fruit juice are as
much a part of my boyhood as the turkey on Thanksgiving, Jack O’Lanterns,
doughnuts and apple cider on Halloween, and the importance of the baseball
World Series. So since I believe that the history of a nation is the sum of all
of our life experiences, I thought it might be entertaining as well as
instructive to visit, however sketchily, the history of Christmas in America.
Most of us like to think that Christmas is as American as
Christopher Columbus (who isn’t at all American), the Pilgrims, Ben Franklin
and George Washington. However, such is not the case!
As you’ll recall, Massachusetts was settled first by the
Pilgrims or Separatists (who wanted to separate totally from the Anglican
Church) and then by the Puritans whose aim was to purify rather than leave the
Anglican Church.
The Puritans, who became dominant in Massachusetts over the
Separatists, eventually took over in England under Oliver Cromwell during the
1650s. They banned the celebration of Christmas partly because it was practiced
by the former royalists and partly because they considered it a symbol of
Popery, a leading characteristic of the much unreconstructed and therefore
maligned Roman Catholic Church of that day.
By the 1660s, the Puritans had lost power in London and
throughout the rest of England, but they were very much in power in Boston as
well as throughout the rest of Massachusetts.
Thus, Christmas was officially banned in Boston between 1659 and
1681. It should be noted however that
while Christmas was banned in Massachusetts, it was celebrated in both the
Virginia and the New York colonies.
After the British monarchy was restored, Christmas was once
again celebrated in England although its restoration in Massachusetts took
another twenty-one years. Once William
and Mary took over as more or less equal partners as British monarchs in 1688
and Catholicism was on the decline there, Christmas began to be practiced in a
more secular way in Britain.
One of the casualties of our Revolutionary War at the hands
of our founding fathers, incidentally, was Christmas. Christmas in the era of Patrick Henry, Ben
Franklin, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson,
James Madison, et al, was considered an English holiday and was,
publicly at least, unwelcome in the hallowed halls of liberty until the
mid-nineteenth century.
Three writers, Washington Irving and Clement Clarke Moore --
both Americans -- and Charles Dickens -- an Englishman -- were primarily responsible
for introducing Christmas as a family holiday to the American people.
Washington Irving, who traveled and wrote extensively from
both Europe and Britain, published short Christmas stories in “The Sketchbook
of Geoffrey Crayon” as well as a story entitled “Old Christmas” during the late
1820s and early 1830s.
Most significant was the 1822 poem “A Visit from St.
Nicholas” attributed to Clement Clarke Moore and Charles Dickens’ 1842 story “A
Christmas Carol.”
Americans, with their eternal love of the underdog and
sympathy for the reformed, fell hard for Mr. Dickens’ Bob Crachit and the
crippled Tiny Tim, and readily forgave old Ebenezer Scrooge once he’d seen the
error of his ways and showered the Crachit family with gifts and plenty of
Christmas cheer.
As for Clement Moore’s Santa Claus, everyone could identify
with a little old white bearded man whose little round belly “shook when he
laughed” and whose pipe smoke “encircled his head like a wreath” as he joyfully
delivered toys to little children.
Santa was everyone’s idea of Grandpa!
By the 1850s, German and Irish immigration had changed the
face of America’s largest cities and had, most notably, tapped the strongest
American incentive: the profit motive.
Thus, Christmas was truly on its way in America -- led, of
course, by Santa Claus!
Information describing how American presidents historically
have celebrated Christmas is a bit sketchy.
Apparently, Thomas Jefferson, despite his contempt for Britain and all its
institutions and traditions (including Christmas) did privately celebrate
Christmas at the White House in 1805.
Andrew Jackson was said to have held private family Christmas
celebrations as well.
The first president to set up a Christmas tree in the White
House was Franklin Pierce. Franklin
Pierce, the once handsome and energetic Democratic presidential candidate known
as “Young Hickory of the Granite Hills” (after the great Democrat Andrew
Jackson) was by then a listless, defensive, melancholy and defeated incumbent
President. The year was 1856. Franklin and Jane Pierce were spending their
last unhappy months in the White House.
Tragically childless by now and heavily burdened by political and
administrative misjudgments, President Pierce purchased the first White House
Christmas tree for the children of his Sunday school class.
Christmas was declared a federal holiday in 1870. It would be hard to imagine that President
Ulysses S. Grant didn’t have something to say about that, but so far I haven’t
found any reference to President Grant in the accounts of the establishment of
Christmas as a federal holiday.
In 1889, President Benjamin Harrison installed a tree lit
with candles on the second floor of the White House. He also purchased turkeys and gloves for
members of the White House staff.
In 1895, First Lady Frances Cleveland attached the first
electric lights to the White House Christmas tree.
In 1923, President Calvin Coolidge began the tradition of a
National Christmas tree on the White House lawn. The following year, sadness prevailed at the
White House despite President Coolidge’s re-election, due to the death from
blood poisoning of President and Mrs. Coolidge’s sixteen-year-old son Calvin
Jr. the previous July. Nevertheless, the
ceremony was held with the participation of Calvin and Grace Coolidge.
Jacqueline Kennedy began the Christmas theme for the
National Christmas tree in 1961 by decorating it with figures from
Tchaikovsky’s ballet “The Nutcracker”.
In 2001, Laura Bush’s theme was “Home For the Holidays”
which used replicas of the homes of previous presidents.
What do you suppose this all means? What do the forces of
religion, politics and commercialism say about what we do? Which one of these forces has had the
greatest beneficial effect on our celebration of Christmas? Which one of these forces has had the most
detrimental effect?
The answers to the above questions I’ll leave up to
you. However, I’ll close this week’s
effort with my favorite presidential Christmas story.
It was December of 1921 and President Warren G. Harding
faced a dilemma, a struggle between his conscience and his need to be
politically effective. A small town
Republican, he was sensitive to and even shared the suspicions of his fellow
townsmen of what might be called foreign ideologies.
As president, possessing the pardoning power as he did,
Warren Harding had received pleas for the release of Socialist party
presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs from federal prison. Debs had been convicted during the “Great
War” of sedition for public opposition to the war once it had been declared by
Congress and signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson.
Now the war was over.
Since the League of Nations had been rejected by the Senate in 1919 and
again in 1920, the U.S. government under the direction of Secretary of State
Charles Evans Hughes had negotiated a separate peace treaty with Germany which
President Harding had signed during a golf game the previous July.
Thus, Mr. Debs was no longer a threat to America’s national
security. However, many of the
president’s closest friends and political advisors were dead set against any
sympathy for Debs whom they strongly believed had deliberately undermined the
patriotic efforts of those who had made the “supreme sacrifice” in France
during the war. To them, Debs as a labor
leader was little more than a life long troublemaker inspired lately by foreign
ideologies and interests. One of those
who drove home that point most vigorously was the president’s personal hometown
buddy Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty.
(Note: Mr. Daugherty himself
would need presidential tolerance within a few years once he was indicted in
the Teapot Dome scandal).
For President Harding, however, the question was whether or
not justice would be further served by keeping a 66-year-old pacifist in jail
or whether the spirit of Christmas required him to be charitable. Earlier in 1921, outgoing President Woodrow
Wilson had bitterly rejected pleas for Debs’ pardon.
Christmas was on a Sunday in 1921 thereby giving the
celebration of the birth of Christ a special intensity. About the 20th of December,
President Harding had made up his mind.
Attorney General Daugherty was called in and told to prepare the
necessary papers. They were prepared and
sent to the federal prison in Atlanta.
By lunchtime on Friday, December 23rd, Eugene
Victor Debs was in President Harding’s office.
Shortly thereafter, Mr. Debs was home.
When asked why he had pardoned Debs, the President is said
to have replied in words similar to these:
“At Christmas time, a peaceful man ought to be home with his wife.”
While it is true that the pardon didn’t reinstate Mr. Debs’
citizenship to allow him to vote or seek public office as before, he could act
as a political consultant, write, and lecture.
Most significant, thanks to the conscience and humanity of Warren
Gamaliel Harding, Eugene Victor Debs was once again a free man.
If any president has given a gift more noble and worthy of
the spirit of Christmas, I haven’t heard of it.
Christmas, wow! What a season!!!
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY
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