Hundred Dollar Holiday

The Case For A More Joyful Christmas

Bill McKibben

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781476754796
• eBook ISBN: 9781439142554
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Too many people have come to dread the approach of the holidays, a season that should -- and can -- be the most relaxed, intimate, joyful, and spiritual time of the year. In this book, Bill McKibben offers some suggestions on how to rethink Christmastime, so that our current obsession with present-buying becomes less important than the dozens of other possible traditions and celebrations.Working through their local churches, McKibben and his colleagues found that people were hungry for a more joyful Christmas season. For many, trying to limit the amount of money they spent at Christmas to about a hundred dollars per family, was a real spur to their creativity -- and a real anchor against the relentless onslaught of commercials and catalogs that try to say Christmas is only Christmas if it comes from a store. McKibben shows how the store-bought Christmas developed and how out of tune it is with our current lives, when we're really eager for family fellowship for community involvement, for contact with the natural world, and also for the blessed silence and peace that the season should offer. McKibben shows us how to return to a simpler and more enjoyable holiday.Christmas is too wonderful a celebration to give up on, too precious a time simply to repeat the same empty gestures from year to year. This book will serve as a road map to a Christmas far more joyful than the ones you've known in the past.

This book, and the church-based campaign it grows out of, is not an exercise in nostalgia, a search for some perfect and un-corrupted Christmas in the past to which we can return. Christmas has been, and always will be, a product of its time, shaped to fit the particular needs of people, society, and faith in particular moments of history. And nowhere is that clearer than at the very beginning.

The Gospels offer no clues whatsoever to the date of Jesus’ birth—not even to the season. And the earliest Christians worried little about such matters. Expecting an imminent Second Coming, they kept their hearts fixed firmly on the future. As the church aged and grew, however, some began to try and pinpoint the date of the Savior’s birth. The guesses ranged all over the place, as Penne Restad points out in her Christmas in America. Clement, Bishop of Alexandra, chose November 18; Hippolytus declared that Christ must have been born on a Wednesday, the same day God created the sun. Other authorities picked March 28 or April 19 or May 20. It was only in the fourth century that December 25 emerged as the date for the Feast of the Nativity—a date that on the old Julian calendar marked the winter solstice, the longest night of the year. It happened not because church leaders had unearthed some new clue, but because they needed to compete with the pagan celebrations that marked that dark season. Wild Saturnalia began on December 17 and continued through the first of January; the Emperor Aurelian declared that December 25 would in particular be observed as the feast of the Invincible Sun, the solar god Mithras. A couple of decades later, when the Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity, he built the Vatican atop the very hill where the Mithras cult worshipped the sun, and may himself have instituted the new holiday. In any event, veneration of the Sun was quite intentionally replaced by veneration of the Son.

And the switch certainly worked. Christmas spread around the Roman world (and into Scandinavia, where it combined with the Norse Yule feast). By the end of the thirteenth century, Restad notes, all of Europe marked Jesus’ birth. But success came at an ironic price. The old elements of the pagan midwinter rites never completely dropped away—the solemn celebration of the Nativity always overlay a foundation of revelry, abandon, blowout. And who could blame folk? The midwinter feast was a rational response to the lives they lived. As the preeminent Christmas historian Stephen Nissenbaum points out in The Battle for Christmas, December was a major “punctuation mark” in the agricultural calendar of the northern nations, the moment between gearing down from the harvest and gearing up for the planting. There was lots of meat from the just-slaughtered animals, and the wine and beer from that year’s crop of grapes and grain had just fermented. In this life of extremely hard work and frugality, this season was the sole exception—there was no other time of year, for instance, to eat fresh beef and pork, since animals couldn’t be killed till the weather was cold enough to keep the meat from rotting, and any meat that was going to be saved for later would have to be salted. “Little wonder, then,” writes Nissenbaum, “that this was a time of celebratory excess.”

The rowdiness took many forms. Strong drink fueled every kind of merrymaking—using only the list provided by Puritan minister Cotton Mather, we find “Reveling, Dicing, Carding, Masking, and all Licentious Liberty.” Men dressed as women and women as men; Christmas caroling often meant bawdy songs; as Nissenbaum points out, there were vast numbers of illegitimate births in September and October, clear evidence of the Christmas debauch of the year before. On these shores Christmas and rowdiness have been connected from the start. One eighteenth-century British traveler reported attending a ball in Alexandria, Virginia, where the elegant company stayed all night, “got drunk, and had a fight”; in the nineteenth century, great explosions and gunfire were popular frontier celebrations, with one Missouri lad remembering how he and his friends had saved all the hog bladders from the butchering, inflated them, and then “popped them with paddles” on Christmas Day. Even in the twentieth century we have the Christmas office party, perhaps our last link to those old celebrations (and appropriately enough, since the fast-paced and hierarchical life of the office is our last faint link to the brutally hard work of the medieval era).

The wild abandon of Christmastime led the Puritans to try and ban the celebration. For a century in New England revelers faced a fine for “keeping Christmas” within the borders of the domain. But it wasn’t just the boisterousness of Christmas celebrations that increasingly annoyed the “better class” of people throughout Christendom. As Nissenbaum points out, the revelry had a particular character: this was the one moment of the year when people who still lived in great poverty turned the tables on their feudal masters who usually dominated their lives. The various lords were expected to offer the fruits of the harvest to the peasants (i.e., to almost everyone), and the peasants were more than willing to show up and demand them. Thus began the tradition of wassailing—bands of boys and young men would walk into the halls of the rich to receive gifts of food, of drink, even of money. It was a sort of wild trick-or-treat. One wassail song went like this:

We’ve come here to claim our right . . .

And if you don’t open up your door,

We’ll lay you flat upon the floor.

But once the wassail bowl was safely in hand, the men and boys would drink to the health of their masters—in a way, the whole business helped legitimize the basically un- fair life of a serf. It was, like the wild revelry, an understandable response to the life that people found themselves living—a chance for the powerless poor to blow off steam and for the rich to buy goodwill (and buy it cheaply). And if you make sure and leave the garbage man a Christmas tip, partly from sheer good cheer and partly so your cans won’t be scattered across the lawn all year, then you hear a faint echo of this practice.

That kind of Christmas, however, depended on that kind of world—stratified by class but bound by geography and tradition. And as the economy changed, that world vanished. As cities grew and factories replaced farms, the powerful people in society no longer knew the mass of poorer men and women who worked for them, and so the custom of Christmas revelry grew increasingly threatening. It was one thing for your tipsy serfs to knock on the door demanding a roast beef dinner; it was another, as Nissenbaum points out, to have “bands of roaming young street toughs . . . traveling freely and menacing wherever they pleased.” Instead of a pause in the agricultural cycle, these young men now often faced seasonal unemployment. Disguised, as in the old days of mumming, sometimes beating on drums and kettles, these gangs would invade the rich districts of American cities and then sometimes head on to the black neighborhoods where they would trash churches and beat up passersby. The “beastly vice of drunkenness among the lower laboring classes is growing to a frightful excess,” fretted an upper-class New Yorker in the early 1800s. “Thefts, incendiaries, and murders—which prevail—all arise from this source.”

And so, more or less self-consciously, a group of upper-class New Yorkers set out to reinvent the holiday, an effort that proved to be of far more long-lasting importance than the earlier Puritan effort to stamp out the celebrations entirely. Washington Irving was one key figure; in 1820 he published to great acclaim his Sketch Book, which included Rip Van Winkle and the Legend of Sleepy Hollow, but also five Christmas stories. Set in an English manor, Bracebridge Hall, they nostalgically recalled the earlier agricultural Christmases with their roaring fires and horse-drawn carriages and tables groaning under the feast, which “brought the peasant and the peer together, and blended all ranks in one warm generous flow of joy and kindness.” Popular as the stories were, however, as Nissenbaum points out, “Washington Irving’s vision did not exactly offer a practical model for anyone who was tempted—and many must have been—to celebrate Christmas in this fashion.” The task of inventing a “traditional” Christmas more appropriate to modern lives was left to others, especially Clement Clark Moore.

Moore, an extremely rich professor of Hebrew, grew up on a rural estate called Chelsea. Present-day New Yorkers will know the spot as . . . Chelsea, the part of Manhattan that stretches from Nineteenth Street to Twenty-fourth Street and from Eighth Avenue to Tenth Avenue. Indeed, Ninth Avenue was dug smack through the middle of his estate in 1818, right about the time he was writing “A Visit from Saint Nicholas,” which is the poem we know as “The Night Before Christmas.” Moore did not take kindly to the changes going on around him; as Nissenbaum discovers, he believed that the city was being taken over by a conspiracy of “cart-men, carpenters, masons, pavers, and all their host of attendant laborers.” And he feared that the mob would abolish all the old elite life of New York: “We know not the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Introduction: Who Stole Christmas?
• Chapter One: Christmas Never was Christmas
• Chapter Two: Who Are We Now?
• Chapter Three: Making Merrier
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Copyright