Happy holidays to you all! As I planned for this post, I intended something quick and simple about our ancestors’ holiday traditions. I thought it would be fun to pick a Christmas, any mid-nineteenth-century Christmas in my region of interest, and discuss how the local newspaper treated the holiday. I was in for a surprise.
In Search of Christmas in Jacksonville, Alabama, ca 1850
I chose the charming historic town of Jacksonville, just ten minutes up the road from my new home at Fort McClellan. I counted myself lucky to discover a weekly newspaper published on Christmas Eve, 1850: the Jacksonville Republican. Pouring over its four print-packed pages, I looked for clues as to what the day meant to the people who lived here 170 years before me.
To my surprise, I found absolutely nothing about Christmas in this paper. Not even the announcement of a special church service. I could not even find a casual mention of Christmas like, “closed Christmas Day” or “classes resume after Christmas.” There was not even a Christmas advertisement. How could this be? I looked at later papers, finally finding a story of a Christmas murder in 1854. There was a mention in the 1856 Jacksonville Republican that a missionary had preached in London on Christmas Day. There are three mentions of the word “Christmas” in the 30 Dec 1858 edition. Two simply say that something will be done “till Christmas,” and the third merely hopes someone has a “merry Christmas.”
I searched for the word “Christmas” through the entire publishing history of the Jacksonville Republican available on Newspapers.com. The 1840s only show eight mentions, 25 throughout the entire decade of the 1850s, and double that in the 1860s. Most mentions are not descriptive of the holiday at all. They are simply referring to a milestone on the calendar—with phrases like “by Christmas,” “till Christmas,” or “after Christmas.
Writing this blog post was going to be a lot harder than I thought. To know more about my ancestors’ holiday experience, I would have to go broader in time and space.
Searching Wider and Deeper
Any of us seeking knowledge of our ancestors’ experience of Christmas will have to get creative. Well, unless they left a diary or other written memory. We will need to look more broadly, in search of indirect clues that begin to fill in the historical haze. The closer we can get to their time and place, the better, to be sure. But when the tight search is leaving you dry, go wider until the hard subject starts to soften.
I started with what I know—and it was not much. I recalled hearing in graduate school that people in the American colonies, particularly the Puritans, had desired to shed themselves of what they considered pagan, commercialized, and rowdy British traditions. Christmas took a hit. The early U.S. Congress worked on Christmas Day, distinguishing themselves as decidedly un-British.[1] I wondered, though, how this anti-Christmas zeal played out in the U.S. South and whether it lasted into the mid-nineteenth century. This region had tended to be less puritanical and much more fond of rowdy traditions than its northern counterparts.
The state of Alabama and some others began to acknowledge Christmas in the late 1840s.[2] It finally became a national holiday around 1870. So we at least can assume legislatures were discussing Christmas in the mid-nineteenth century.
Oddly, though, the newspapers apparently did not find Christmas newsworthy. On the rare occasion you see Christmas actually described, with adjectives, it is the British version of Christmas, with its ancient underpinnings. In fact, such an article will usually be reprinted directly from a British newspaper. We have to take caution, therefore, with assuming we are reading about American practices. Even an article titled “Christmas Day” in a decidedly American paper like the Western Carolinian needs to be read with a careful eye. (It follows the fine-print credit, “From a Liverpool Paper.”)[3]
I broadened my newspaper search. I continued to find that most mentions of the word “Christmas” were a simple reference to a moment in time. Phrases like “till Christmas”— a mark on the calendar, and not an event or tradition. I ruled out these calendar-driven references and the regurgitation of English traditions. Fortunately, a small group of other references began to hint at what Christmas might have been like for American ancestors. We have to be willing, however, to tease the references out of articles that might bury the jewels. Your Christmas insight might be found in a bit of gossip having nothing to do with Christmas.
An article titled “The Ladies Man,” for example, found in Livingston, Alabama’s Voice of Sumter on 1 Nov 1836, is poking fun. Their Ladies Man, stereotypical in every circle, “seldom arrives at perfection until the age of thirty-five, when he is usually of short stature, and somewhat bald at the top of the head.” In a lengthy non-Christmas essay, we extract one tiny piece of knowledge about Christmas activities. Amidst the snark, it says the gentleman “takes the children to see the Christmas pantomimes.” Hm. Pantomimes as a Christmas tradition. That adds a new layer to my picture of how my ancestors might have enjoyed their Christmas Day.
Now and then, and most often in East Coast urban newspapers, organizations announced grand Christmas events. The New York Evening Post of 24 December 1833, for example, announced the Christmas Eve Ball at Euterpean Hall. It advertised the availability of “Ornamental Cakes” — ”by far the largest and handsomest assortment of cakes to be found in this city.” It promised “every description of ornament for parties.” The Masonic Hall on Broadway exhibited throughout the holiday “The Mysterious Lady,” a seer who could minutely describe objects out of her sight. The American Museum was open through the holidays, too, until 10 PM each night. Children could view the wonders of natural science for 25 cents.
The Boston Post, on Christmas Day 1834, advertised “Theatres, Museums, Ventriloquists, Jugglers, Menageries, Toy-shops, Confectioners, and Bookstores” open throughout the holidays. It also noted, “This Day being Christmas, public services will be held in many of our churches, and a large portion of citizens suspend business.”
A short news snippet in the Daily Selma (Alabama) Reporter 29 December 1838 also suggested that southern cotton markets tended to slow commerce during the Christmas holidays: “The past week having been Christmas,” it reported, “not much has been doing in the Staple.”
In some early-nineteenth-century American newspapers, mentions of Christmas are tied to distasteful, if not illegal, behaviors. The Daily Selma Reporter of 30 January 1836, described a bull-baiting incident in Patterson, New Jersey. “Hundreds of boys and men, shouting and yelling like so many Hottentots,” let dogs torture the bull to death. They also “insulted and abused” the local magistrates who tried to bring an end to it. The Democrat (Huntsville, Alabama) of 18 October 1836, in describing the horrors of war, says, “It is not an undertaking to be risked in the light dare-devil fashion with which we enter upon a Christmas frolic.” Dare-devil frolics at Christmas? The picture grows more colorful.
By 1869, my nearby Jacksonville Republican had begun to have ads for Christmas and New Year’s gifts. But it also reflects Christmas as a time of bad behavior. In an article warning the town council of “increasing disorder in our Town,” it says, “We do not object to a cheerful, festive Christmas, but earnestly protest against so many making it the excuse and occasion for drunkenness, profanity and roRdyism (sic), which is a disgrace to civilization.”
I confess, the newspapers had offered a few interesting anecdotes but were inadequate to answer to my satisfaction the question, “What was Christmas like for my ancestors?” They at least confirmed that Christmas was celebrated, whether as a Bacchanalian festival or religious observance. But the detail was too thin. There also remained the question of the influence of place, time, and economic bracket on a person’s experience of my favorite holiday.
I decided to look to another source. Fiction is questionable for some purposes, but it offers something special in asking the sort of question we are addressing today. Novelists take pains to paint a full-bodied portrait of experiences. And in describing Christmas, perhaps they would give me some of the missing detail. At the very least, they would be telling me what seemed like a reasonable description of Christmas for the time and place they knew.
I looked at two very different novels by two very different American writers, at two different times. James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers, published in 1823, takes us to the cold North American frontier, where people of numerous European backgrounds are interacting with disparate native populations. The novel Beulah by Augusta Evans Wilson, published in 1859, paints the picture of a poor-but-well-educated orphaned young woman in an elegant, rich environment in Mobile, Alabama. Neither book is about Christmas, but both describe the holiday in detail.
Cooper’s Christmas is rustic, wintry, multicultural, and spiritual. People are bundled in hides and eating venison and wild birds. It also makes an interesting mention of “Santaclaus,” with a footnote talking about the people remembering the Santaclaus tradition “until the emigration from New England brought in the opinions and usages of the puritans.” The main event of Cooper’s Christmas Eve was a “public worship, after the forms of the Protestant Episcopal Church.” “A primitive people,” dressed in all variety of garb, populated the congregation. Christmas Day was a time of games, frolic, hunting, and shooting.[4]
Beulah painted the most robust image of a c. 1859 Christmas I found in this week’s search. In temperate Mobile, Alabama, icy conditions were not the issue; yellow fever was. Beulah, infected after nursing the sick, describes her memories of Christmases past, while this holiday seems doomed to be her last. She recalls: “Store windows were gay with every conceivable and inconceivable device for attracting attention. Parents, nurses, and porters hurried along with mysterious looking bundles, and important countenances. Crowds of curious, merry children thronged the sidewalks.” Beulah also encountered the raucous bad behavior reported in some of the news accounts of the time. In her case, it was young people setting off firecrackers to spook horses and create mayhem in the streets. But she also remembered that “childish voices prattled of Santa Claus and gift stockings, and little feet pattered along these same pavements, with tiny hands full of toys. Fond parents, too, had gone eagerly in and out of these gay shops, hunting presents for their darlings.” The Christmas celebration central to Beulah’s holiday experience was a dinner with many guests. Attendees dressed in costumes, eager to play roles in a “tableaux” of the nativity scene. Singers performed for the guests. She describes removing the “outer wrappings” of a watch in a papier-mâché case — a treasured gift.[5]
Without a first-hand account of our own ancestor’s holiday experiences, we are likely to know no more than we can glean from the sort of sources I have found here. Adding sources from magazines, religious newspapers, and published sermons could add nuances. Also, the Cooper novel gave me a new clue to follow: “Santaclaus,” with no space in the word. Searching on this term brought a new set of newspaper articles and confirmed for me that at least as early as 1840, the tradition of Santa Claus putting gifts into the stockings of only good children had been revived (or never disappeared) for children in Alabama.
The one thing that is clear to me from this experiment in data gleaning is that Christmas could be vastly different in one time or place than another. Finding descriptions of the holiday — the good, the bad, and the ugly of it — in sources close to your ancestors’ home and from a similar economic background will bring you closest to a depiction of reasonable value.
Call to Action
What do you know about the Christmas or other holiday traditions of your ancestors? Please share some. Perhaps you can do a search of the newspapers in your ancestral homeland and see if you find descriptive accounts of the holidays of old.
As always, I encourage you to share this post with others who might value it. And if you are not yet getting my emails, you can sign up using the form at the bottom of this page.
Most importantly of all, have a wonderful, safe, and memorable holiday season. Perhaps you might do for your descendants what was not done for you: write down your memories of childhood Christmases. Your own memory will mean more than any general image they might build from the scraps that have survived in newspapers and books.
[1]I recall mention of this in graduate school, as true of the early U.S. Congresses. But in researching for this piece, I find that they were working Christmas Day in 1838. I do not know if this was still standard practice or a momentary crisis.
[2] Debbie Pendleton, “The Myth of Alabama Christmas,” produced by the Alabama Department of Archives and History, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FBJZyP8ux0. Pendleton’s video talk debunks a myth, widely believed in Alabama, that Alabama was the first state to make Christmas a legal holiday. It is an excellent illustration of the way that myths begin with misunderstandings repeated so often they become “documented truth.” My own earlier edition of this article included the myth, which seemed to me reliable at the time, having been reported in a reputable newspaper.
[3] “Christmas Day.” Western Carolinian. July 23, 1822.
[4] Cooper, James Fenimore. Cooper’s Novels: Afloat and Ashore. W. A. Townsend, 1859, 54, 112, 203ff. https://books.google.com/books?id=nhYUAAAAIAAJ.
[5] Evans, Augusta Jane. Beulah. New York: Derby & Jackson, 1859, 259ff.
I give you and myself a holiday break from computer instruction in this post. I suspect most of you who are reading the Zotero Notes already have your copy of either Zotero for Genealogy or The Zotero Solution or both. Perhaps your holiday break will give you time to dig in a little deeper into my tool of choice for research. Send questions, if you have them. Or join our forum to talk about the creative ways we are working through the many unique problems we encounter in our work.
Happy Holidays to you all!
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Thanks for your idea! I found a notice for a December 23, 1830 Christmas Ball at Sturgis Library’s Digital Newspaper Archive (https://www.sturgislibrary.org access to newspaper archives is free). The library is in Barnstable, Massachusetts where many of my ancestors started. The paper had just begun publishing in May of 1830. Given the very small population at the time I suspect “ball” is a bit of an exaggeration. And LOL I sent picture to your email because I couldn’t figure out how to do that here. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
That’s a good one, Roberta. I love how they invited “young persons.” Thanks!
What a wonderful blog! This story was picked up in the 31 Mar 1870 edition of “The Idaho World” of Idaho City, Idaho.
“A Radical Steals From the Hungry.–
The N.Y. Herald says that Gideon Haynes, Warden of the Massachusetts State Prison, has been sued by Mr. H.L.C. Dorsey of Pawtucket, the well known philanthropist, whose charities are partial of the nature of endeavoring to ameliorate the condition of inmates of prisons. On certain days in the year Mr. Dorsey provides the means for furnishing prisoners with roast turkey dinners. On Christmas Day, 1868, Mr. Dorsey sent the sum of $750 to Haynes for this purpose. Mr. Dorsey, it appears, took a notion to visit the prison on the day on which the prisoners were to have their turkey dinner, and he went under an alias, bearing a letter of introduction from himself. He found that notwithstanding the money had been received, the terms of the donation had not been complied with, as the dinner which he intended was not given to the prisoners, and the text which he had selected for the sermon was not preached from by the Chaplain. Of course he felt indignant, and “went for” the Warden, who returned part of the money, and Mr. Dorsey is determined he shall come out with the balance. It is strange what a fondness Radicals have for money, and what means they will resort to in order to accumulate a supply of “filthy lucre,” especially “blue light” Radicals.”
I found it interesting that at least one person was trying to provide special meals to prisoners.
For my own family, my mother grew up relatively poor during the Depression Era. A highlight of their year was Christmas when she and her three siblings received a Christmas orange in their stockings. My mother (and later myself) kept up this tradition, and my fondest Christmas memories involve eating my Christmas orange.
Thanks for sharing that, Jill. Now, I find myself wanting to know what a “‘blue light’ Radical” might be. And I wonder how many prisoners would have received a Christmas turkey dinner for $750.
I love the orange tradition. My mother grew up poor, also, and I’ll need to find out what she and her four sisters did on Christmas mornings. I do know that a bus they called a “rolling store” rolled up to their farm on Thursdays with dry goods and Saturdays with groceries. The Saturday bus had a refrigerated Coca Cola vending machine, so they got a cold Coca Cola once a week. How drastically the world has changed in one lifetime.