Note: Yet
another look at a story that reflects the development of Christmas have we have
come to know it. This one from the
American side of the puddle. And yes, I
know it’s a re-run.
“Christmas
won’t be Christmas without any presents,” grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.” With those words Louisa May Alcott began the much beloved children’s novel, Little
Women.
Louisa
Alcott laid her classic tale during the 1860’s Civil War. In fact, the
story is essentially autobiographical and describes Louisa’s own childhood in Concord, Massachusetts in the 1840’s.
The real reason for the poverty in her home was not that her beloved father,
Bronson Alcott was away at war. It was because he was a starry eyed idealist
and dreamer who could not make a living as a school master, the very bottom
rung of middle class respectability.
Bronson Alcott was a protégé of Ralph
Waldo Emerson who had invited the family to a home next door to his own in
Concord.
Emerson,
known as the Sage of Concord, was at
the center of Transcendentalism, an
American literary and religious movement related to the German and British Romantics with an overlay of personal
mysticism borrowed from a first exposure to Hindu religious texts.
Directly or indirectly Emerson subsidized the Alcott family and kept
them from starvation. Young Louisa
idolized Emerson and visited him frequently in his home. The wealthy Mr. Lawrence, who becomes the March
family benefactor in Little Women,
was modeled on Emerson, although he was much younger when Louisa was a girl
than the man depicted as Mr. Lawrence.
In
Louisa’s novel, by the time the first chapter is over, Jo and her sisters have
received a heartwarming lesson in the true meaning of Christmas from their
mother, Marmee. Marmee convinces the girls to gather up the
delicacies of their holiday table, very special in this home mired in genteel
poverty, and bring them to the hovel of an ill and starving woman and her
children.
And
the story will conclude several Christmas Days later with the unexpected fulfillment of Jo’s two great dreams—the publication
of a novel based on her childhood and the return of the shy Professor Bhaer who had been her mentor
and who she had secretly loved.
Many
readers will be less surprised by the character of this story, than by the
revelation that Alcott in Little Women
was among the first in American literature to depict a middle-class family
celebrating Christmas day.
The
early Puritans who settled New
England despised Christmas for being Papist—Catholic—on the one hand and pagan on the other. In old England Christmas had devolved into
debauchery, drunkenness and street revelry so, these early Americans banned
Christmas celebrations by law.
Thanksgiving, held late in November
after the crops were harvested and the snow had fallen, became the New
Englanders’ big holiday, not Christmas.
Even after authorities allowed private Christmas observances in homes,
they required businesses to stay open and children to attend school on
Christmas day. Most people who valued
the respect of the community abstained from celebrating, even privately.
By
about the turn of the 19th Century,
more folks, and even respectable Congregational
Church people, had begun to chafe at the rigid restrictions of
Puritanism. German Romanticism had
begun its “warmth-of-heart” influence.
Within the Standing Order of
the established Congregationalist Churches two groups began to emerge. Some congregations split off and became Unitarian. The Unitarians in particular and the
Transcendentalists who emerged from them in particular warmed to Christmas
celebrations. Whatever the causes,
people began to change their attitudes about the holiday. By the time Louisa was a girl, celebrating
Christmas had become a social norm.
Charles Follen, a poet and
Unitarian minister, who was also a Harvard
professor and an immigrant from Germany,
had introduced the first Christmas tree to New England in 1832. The custom caught on. And he was a friend of Louisa’s family. Although Follen died in 1840, at 44 years old
when Louisa was just 8, he so impressed her that Louisa modeled the love of Jo Marsh’s life, Professor Bhaer,
on Follen.
Besides mentioning the greenery and Christmas tree,
Alcott made a passing reference to the children hanging their stockings
and even to a visit from Santa Claus.
The Dutch settlers of New York had brought their celebration of St.
Nicholas, or Sinterklaus, with them.
An Anglo-New Yorker named Clement Clark Moore had written
a poem about St. Nick visiting a home on Christmas Eve that was first published
in a Troy, New York newspaper in 1823. By the 1830s this poem circulated widely.
Christmas in Louisa’s time, at least in New England,
had become a sentimental, family holiday centered on children and was little
connected to the religious celebration of Christ’s birth. Most New England Churches still did not offer
worship services on that day.
Christmas celebrations in the later 19th Century
began to be centered more on the birth of Christ with the widespread
introduction of crèche scenes and religious carols emerging through
large influxes of Catholic and Lutheran immigrants of that period
— people who had never had a Puritan interregnum and for whom Christmas had
always been a religious festival.
Christmas has continued to evolve in the 20th
and 21st Centuries and to evolve in many different directions, some
patently contradictory to others.
Movements to “Put Christ back in Christmas” and the alleged “War
on Christmas” are symbolic of just one divide. And we have those who both enjoy and those
who decry its “commercialism.” Our
ongoing multi-ethnic, multi-national, and multi-faith evolution has caused some
to embrace the variety of Festivals of Light common at this time
of year in many cultures. Others see that as a threat to their cherished
traditions —traditions in many cases not much older than their great
grandparents.
No comments:
Post a Comment