An amiable history of Christmas - Books About Antiques

Magazine Antiques, Dec, 2002 by Alfred Mayor

The author of this handsomely designed book is the retired chairman of the advertising firm Ogilvy and Mather (now Ogilvy One) and his brother is the retired editor-in-chief of Newsweek. Both these modern-day titans love Christmas and still give each other what they call "early morning" presents to keep them happy until it is time to raid the stockings. The advertising brother, Jock Elliott, has collected everything to do with Christmas for many years and has now set down what he has learned about its origin.

The opening spread of the Introduction is composed of facsimiles of letters to Santa Claus written by the author when he was small. His wish lists were both extensive and expensive. One year he lobbied Santa for a fountain pen and pencil, a "big trick box," an electric steamroller, roller skates, a Christmas tree, a combination knife with fork, spoon, and blade and a cowboy suit. He also included his brother's list: a wristwatch, roller skates, "one runner" ice skates, a trick box, a steam derrick, a two-wheel bicycle, "and that is all." After this refreshing admission of greed, the author affirms that in case of conflicting stories about Christmas, of which there are many he will pick the one he considers the most likely, which sets the ground rules for this amiable tale.

In pagan time the winter solstice, when the days begin to lengthen, was a time of revelry, although of a considerably more boisterous nature than the modern Christmas office party. Masters and slaves exchanged roles and both "ate and drank themselves insensible; they would lurch to the vomitorium and stagger back for the next course. One way or another, everyone had a very good time." The church hoped to woo the pagans "from worship of the sun-god to worship of the Son of God," but succeeded only in establishing a two-track celebration--one pious and one raucous. In 1647 Oliver Cromwell forbade the celebration of Christmas, and in 1659 the Puritan government of Massachusetts declared Christmas illegal. Charles II reinstated the holiday in England after the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, and the 1659 law was abolished in 1681 in the American colonies.

By the end of the eighteenth century Santa Claus, Christmas shopping, presents, trees, and cards had yet to be invented. Saint Nicholas, a benevolent fourth-century Greek priest, was brought to the United States by Washington Irving, John Pintard, and Clement Clarke Moore, all New Yorkers. Irving made Saint Nicholas the patron saint of the city in Diedrich Knickerbocker's History of New York (1809), and in the 1821 edition he has him riding over the treetops in a wagon, distributing presents to children. Pintard, once-prosperous merchant and antiquarian, in 1810 commissioned a broadside of "Sancte Claus" carrying presents for children on the occasion of a banquet he gave on December 6 in honor of Saint Nicholas's name day. Moore was probably the author of the now familiar poem The Night Before Christmas (1823), possibly deriving his ideas from the ancient German myth of the god Wotan, who "rode through the skies on a white stallion, showering rewards on the good folk and punishment on the bad." Or he may have drawn on the Scandinavian myth about the god Thor who "was supposed to travel the night skies in a chariot drawn by two large goats named Cracker and Gnasher." The image of Santa Claus was fixed by the political cartoonist Thomas Nast, who drew him entertaining the Union forces in 1863 like a proto-Bob Hope. Nast invented the North Pole as the site of Santa's work shop and the fact that Santa kept records of good children.

As for Christmas presents, the first might be considered the three kings' offerings to the baby Jesus. Then there was a long hiatus until the brief popularity of the gift book in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. These illustrated compilations of stories poems, and essays were wrapped in elaborate bindings and exchanged at Christmas. Although rarely read, they became required presents, soon generalized into the diversity of loot traded today.

The Christmas tree, or rather the idea of a Christmas tree, spread from the German settlers in Pennsylvania in the 1820s, while the Christmas card is an English invention in 1843 created by Henry Cole, who was also involved in founding what is now the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and inventing the perforated postage stamp and the postcard. His first Christmas card, a hand-colored triptych designed by John Calcott Horsley is illustrated in this book, among many other rarities. In the central panel carousers raise a glass (enraging the temperance people) with flanking panels showing the poor being fed on one side and clothed on the other. There is a dotted line at top and bottom on which to write in the recipient and the sender.

The author's even-handed approach to his holiday is nowhere better illustrated than in a facsimile of a Christmas note from Kate Greenaway the popular creator of small girls with rosebud mouths bearing bouquets of flowers. A great many of her watercolors were used to illustrate Christmas cards, and she headed her letter with a watercolor of such a lass. The letter says: "Just a line to wish you a happy new year--though I know you dislike Christmas as much as I do--everythings put out by it our morning's letters came at past 12 this morning and now it lasts for days I really do dislike it."