During a week when so many Americans have experienced
some combination of joy, rage, and frustration in seeking the perfect holiday
gifts for their children, it seems appropriate to pause and ask: Where did the
practice of giving Christmas gifts to children come from?
There does not appear to be an easy answer. Gifts do not
primarily serve as rewards: Commentators on the political left
and right
have in recent years asked parents to abandon the “naughty and nice” paradigm
that suggests such presents are prizes for good behavior, and indeed historical
evidence suggests that proper conduct has not been a widespread prerequisite for
young Americans to receive Christmas gifts.
Nor do presents seem to have a clear connection to
Christian faith. Some American families have established a “three-gift”
Christmas in an effort to link the practice to the generosity
of the three wise men in the story of Jesus’s birth, but again no broad
historical precedent exists for this link. In fact, religious leaders have long
been more likely to decry the commercialization of Christmas as detracting from
the true spirit of the holiday than to celebrate the delivery of purchased goods
to middle-class or wealthy children. (Donating gifts to poor children is a
different matter, of course, but that practice became common in the United
States only after gift-giving at home became a well-established
ritual.)
Critics of the commercialization of Christmas tend to
attribute the growth of holiday gift-giving to corporate marketing efforts.
While such efforts did contribute to the magnitude of the ritual, the practice
of buying Christmas presents for children predates the spread of corporate
capitalism in the United States: It began during the first half of the 1800's,
particularly in New York City, and was part of a broader transformation of
Christmas from a time of public revelry into a home and child centered
holiday.
This reinvention was driven partly by commercial
interests, but more powerfully by the converging anxieties of social elites and
middle-class parents in rapidly urbanizing communities who sought to exert
control over the bewildering changes occurring in their cities. By establishing
a new type of midwinter celebration that integrated home, family, and shopping,
these Americans strengthened an emerging bond between Protestantism and consumer
capitalism.
In his book The Battle for
Christmas, the historian Stephen Nissenbaum presents the
19th-century reinvention of the holiday as a triumph of New York’s elites over
the city’s emerging working classes.
New York’s population grew nearly tenfold
between 1800 and 1850, and during that time elites became increasingly
frightened of traditional December rituals of “social inversion,” in which
poorer people could demand food and drink from the wealthy and celebrate in the
streets, abandoning established social constraints much like on Halloween night
or New Year’s Eve.
These rituals, which occurred any time between St. Nicholas
Day (a Catholic feast day observed in Europe on December 6th) and New Year’s
Day, had for centuries been a means of relieving European peasants’ (or American
slaves’) discontent during the traditional downtime of the agricultural cycle.
In a newly congested urban environment, though, aristocrats worried that such
celebrations might become vehicles for protest when employers refused to give
workers time off during the holidays or when a long winter of unemployment
loomed for seasonal laborers.
In response to these concerns, a group of wealthy men who
called themselves the Knickerbockers invented a new series of traditions for
this time of year that gradually moved Christmas celebrations out of the city’s
streets and into its homes. They presented these traditions as a reinvigoration
of Dutch customs practiced in New Amsterdam and New York during the colonial
period, although Nissenbaum and other scholars have established that these
supposed antecedents largely did not exist in North America.
Drawing from two
story collections by Washington Irving, their most well-known member, these New
Yorkers experimented with domestic festivities on St. Nicholas Day and New
Year’s Day until another member of the group, Clement Clark Moore, solidified
the tradition of celebrating on Christmas with his enormously popular poem “A
Visit from St. Nicholas” (better known as “The Night Before Christmas”) in
1822.
The St. Nicholas that Moore presented in his famous poem
was not a wholesale invention, but like the other traditions the Knickerbockers
borrowed and transformed, he was not a well-established part of New York’s
winter holiday rituals. Similarly, his delivery of presents to children aligned
with a newly emerging practice in 1820's New York, although the giving of
homemade gifts during the winter holidays appears to have begun by the late
1700's. Moore’s poem does not explain why children are receiving presents on
Christmas, although they clearly have the expectation of receiving special
treats (“visions of sugar plums danced in their heads”).
Understanding why giving gifts to children (and by
gradual extension, to adults) became part of this new Christmas tradition
requires an expansion of Nissenbaum’s story. The Battle for
Christmas focuses on the tensions between New York’s elites
and its working classes, but during this same period, a middle class began to
emerge in New York and other northern cities, and the reinvention of Christmas
served their purposes as well.
Like their wealthier contemporaries, middle-class
families worried about what rapid population growth and expanding market
capitalism would do to their children—particularly because an expansion of goods
and services on offer was reducing young people’s household responsibilities at
a time when alternative pathways to adulthood, such as public education, had yet
to emerge.
In response to the increasing uncertainty surrounding
this stage of life, urban families that aspired to prepare their children for
life in the middle and upper ranks of American society widely adopted new
strategies for child-rearing. As work and home became increasingly separated for
these families, parents kept children within the home (or at church or in
school) as long as possible in order to avoid what many of them perceived as the
corrupting influences of commerce on kids’ inchoate moral character. Elites’
efforts to domesticate Christmas aligned neatly with these parents’ interests,
for they encouraged young Americans to associate the joys of the holiday with
the morally and physically protective space of home.
Meanwhile, even if parents were concerned about
commercial influences outside the home, they were not bothered by the idea of
letting children’s commodities into it, in limited doses. In the 1820's, an
American toy industry began to emerge, and American publishers started producing
books and magazines for children. (The first three self-sustaining children’s
magazines in U.S. history debuted between 1823 and 1827.) Much of the initial
demand for these items reflected parents’ recognition of the instructional power
of consumer goods. As an 1824 review of the evangelical children’s magazine
The Youth’s Friend noted,
Let the Youth’s Magazine be called his own paper, and how will the juvenile reader clasp it to his bosom in ecstacy [sic] as he takes it from the Post-Office. And if instruction from any source will deeply affect his heart, it will when communicated through the medium of this little pamphlet.
If early 19th-century newspaper ads promoting bibles as
children’s Christmas gifts are any indication, parents during this era seem to
have retained a similar focus on delivering spiritual value to their children.
After the Civil War, the spread of consumer products in American cities made it
increasingly difficult to control children’s access to toys, books, and
magazines, so in order to keep young people at home, parents gradually
acquiesced to purchasing products intended to amuse as well as instruct their
offspring.
Postbellum Christmas traditions followed this broader
trend by becoming more child-focused, particularly through the reconstructed
image of St. Nicholas. Clement Clark Moore’s St. Nick was an elf who was jolly
but also a bit scary (as indicated by the narrator’s repeated reminder that he
had “nothing to dread”).
During the 1860's, the cartoonist Thomas Nast created a
new image of Santa Claus that replaced this ambiguous figure with a warm,
grandfatherly character who often appeared with his arms full of dolls, games,
and other secular toys. One of the earliest publications in which Nast’s Santa
figure appeared was the December 1868 issue of the magazine
Hearth and Home.
Christmas gift-giving, then, is the product of
overlapping interests between elites who wanted to move raucous celebrations out
of the streets and into homes, and families who simultaneously wanted to keep
their children safe at home and expose them, in limited amounts, to commercial
entertainment. Retailers certainly supported and benefited from this implicit
alliance, but not until the turn of the 20th century did they assume a proactive
role of marketing directly to children in the hopes that they might entice (or
annoy) their parents into spending more money on what was already a
well-established practice of Christmas
gift-giving.
