Christmas

Christmas was illegal in Massachusetts for twenty-two years. The Puritans banned it in 1659 on the grounds that it had no scriptural basis and had become an excuse for drinking, and the ban shaped New England attitudes long after it lapsed. As late as the 1850s, Boston public schools held classes on December 25 and expelled children who stayed home.

So the American Christmas in these photographs is a nineteenth-century construction, and most of it can be dated.

The tree came with German immigration and got its national push from a picture. An 1848 engraving of Victoria and Albert around a decorated tree ran in the Illustrated London News, and Godey’s Lady’s Book reprinted it in 1850 with the queen’s crown and the prince’s mustache removed, so it read as an ordinary American family. That single altered image did more to establish the household tree than any sermon.

Santa Claus was assembled in print over about sixty years. Clement Moore’s poem in 1823 gave him the sleigh, the reindeer and the chimney. Thomas Nast gave him everything else, in a run of drawings for Harper’s Weekly from 1863 to 1886 — the workshop at the North Pole, the list of good and bad children, the fur suit, and the heavy build. Nast started drawing him during the Civil War, in a picture of Santa visiting a Union camp.

Christmas became a federal holiday in 1870. It is worth knowing that the country had to legislate it, and that it did so partly to give workers a day that a good many were already taking.

The electric lights are datable too. Edward Johnson, who worked for Edison, wired eighty red, white and blue bulbs onto a tree at his New York house in December 1882 and the newspapers came to look. Grover Cleveland had an electrified tree in the White House in 1895. For decades after that the lighting was a rich man’s novelty because it required a wireman to install, and candles clipped to branches remained the norm — with a bucket of water standing by, which appears in more period photographs than people expect.

What the cameras actually recorded is commerce. Tree markets on city sidewalks, with cut spruce leaned against buildings and men in overcoats standing in the slush. Department store windows, which became a competitive art form in the 1880s and drew crowds that stopped traffic. Toy departments. Salvation Army kettles, which started in San Francisco in 1891 as a way to fund a Christmas dinner for the poor.

And the post office. The volume of Christmas mail in the first decades of the twentieth century was a genuine civic event, and photographs of clerks working in canyons of parcels are common because newspapers ran the story every single year. Christmas Seals, sold to fund tuberculosis work from 1907, ride along in the same pictures.

One caution on captions. Snow in a studio Christmas photograph is usually cotton, and interior tree photographs before about 1900 required a long exposure with flash powder, which is why the children in them look startled or blurred. The stiffness is the equipment, not the mood.

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