Keeping the Holidays

As a youngster I was always surprised each year when I read Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol, or heard the radio broadcast starring Lionel Barrymore (This was before television.) Later, I enjoyed the various television specials. I think my favorite is the one in which the late George Scott portrayed Ebenezer Scrooge. At the climax of the story, when Scrooge goes to the window of his bedroom and asks the young man in the street what day it is, the boy replies, “Christmas.” Delighted, the reformed Scrooge is grateful he did not miss it and promptly dispatches the young man to the poultry shop to buy the prize turkey in the window for the Cratchett family. As a child, I could never understand why a store would be open on Christmas Day. In the Midwest of the 1940s, where I grew up, that was unheard of.

Years later I learned the celebration of Christmas as we know it today is relatively new, certainly no earlier than the 19th Century.

For example, when George Washington crossed the Delaware River the night of December 25, 1776, he could count on the Hessian soldiers being drunk and sound asleep after a day of carousing; but for Washington’s troops, Christmas was just another day.

It wasn’t until 1836 that the first state – Alabama – declared Christmas a holiday. Many of the Pilgrims who landed in Massachusetts more than three hundred years ago thought the idea of celebrating Christmas downright sinful, and anyone who took the day off could be fined. In Charles Dickens’ time, though there were religious celebrations around the festival of Jesus’ birth, many people kept their shops and stores open. For many shopkeepers it was business as usual.

Much of the secular trappings of Christmas were a conscious and deliberate invention of mid-nineteenth century literary and newspaper folk such as Washington Irving, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Clement Moore, and cartoonist Thomas Nast.

Even Christmas trees of the 19th Century were topped with American flags or sugar plum fairies, never a star. Washington Irving’s Knickerbockers History of New York, published in 1809, turned St. Nicholas from a Dutch bishop into Jolly St. Nick, a fictional character who brought gifts to good children in Manhattan.

An Episcopal Deacon in 1822 borrowed a leaf from Irving’s book when he wrote that memorable poem, An Account of a Visit of St. Nicholas. Thanks to the Rev. Clement Moore of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church near General Seminary in New York City, and cartoon illustrations by Thomas Nast, we have our present-day picture of Santa Claus.

Probably the newest “Christmas tradition” is the shopping spree which leaves most checking accounts, credit cards and debit cards as flat as leftover champagne on New Year’s Day. In the 1880s, Christmas “sales” didn’t begin until December 23rd. As recently as the 1920s, advertisements for Christmas buying did not appear until at least December 15.

For the Church, the gathering to celebrate the birth of Christ is among the most lovely and mystically sweet experiences of the Christian year. It has none of the pain and passion of Holy Week and Good Friday which precede Easter. Keeping Advent, Christmas and Epiphany is still an exciting and wondrous experience. Never mind the fact the shopping malls and other stores put out decorations and gifts for sale before Halloween, and Frank Capra’s film, It’s a Wonderful Life, first started its seasonal play at Thanksgiving.

Rev. Andrew Rank is a Canon of the Cathedral.