Stephen Nissenbaum

A well-researched (but slow, I probably wouldn't have made it through if I was only reading with my eyes) history of Christmas customs primarily in the United States -- how they got here, when they started, how they changed. The book dives into how (like most holidays) the mythos & traditions were invented and discusses the many other holidays & traditions that have come together to give us Christmas as we know it today (Saturnalia, John Canoe, Winter Solstice, Yule, Purim, Misrule, show more Belsnickel, end of harvest). There are deep dives into how we came to gift-giving, Christmas trees, and Santa Claus which were equally fascinating. I mean, Christmas trees are because of literature including traditions in a town (or single family) and then someone else said, "YES! Great idea! I too will write about that!" The book also discusses how the invention of the Christmas tradition(and gift-giving) played a part in the creation of childhood (instead of children being tiny adults).

I just saw on Threads someone being a smart-ass about how The Odyssey is fiction, and someone else saying, actually WE think it's fiction, but to the Greeks that were living in the time of Homer (and before), it was as real as Biblical stories are to some Christians. It was a culmination of centuries of oral tradition. And reading this at the same time as that conversation reminds me of how all holiday traditions are inventions of the cultures that celebrate them. We all want to believe our customs are ancient and true because we are humans that love stories to help us make sense of the world.

Being an "invented tradition" doesn't make the underlying idea less authentic or even take away from the importance or fun (the concerns of over-commercialization and "greedy children" have been around since the beginning). We're still inventing traditions today, example: Elf-on-the Shelf -- as invented as they come and has created an entirely new way for parents to spend money (I mean, they wrote a book; they created a brand; there are secondary markets for outfits and props; there are elf influencers and accounts dedicated to ideas!). The fact that it was recently invented doesn't make it less fun, doesn't make it less real for a kid who's been taught to believe, it doesn't take away from it at all. (And it's also totally OK if someone hasn't bought into the elf-hype.)

So invent away. Celebrate it however you want, but don't think for a second that it's always been this way and since it hasn't always been this way, we can all celebrate in whatever way is best for our family.

Merry Christmas! Happy Holidays! Gorge on food, make some good trouble, and may your days be filled with blessings & light. show less

Everybody knows about the Salem witch trials – if for no other reason than their constant use as a metaphor for everything from the McCarthy hearings to the War on Terrorism. However, that knowledge generally starts and stops with the trials and hangings. The authors of Salem Possessed, using a prodigious amount of research on obscure original sources (church records, land titles, wills, etc.) plausibly contend that the witch trials were the culmination of years of controversy and show more infighting in Salem Village, most of which had nothing to do with witches.


First off, the authors set the background by pointing out that the trials were held in Salem Village, not Salem Town. If you’re not from the eastern US, you should note that “town” is a political subdivision smaller than a county, which may or may not be associated with a particular conglomeration of buildings. As it happened, most of the population of Salem Town lived in the built up zone, but most of the actual town area was rural farmland. This dichotomy was the original cause of conflict. The rural farmers lived some distance from the town center (up to 20 miles), yet were supposed to pay town taxes, appear in town when it was their turn to participate in the watch, and attend church in town.


Authors Boyer and Nissenbaum go into detail over the difference between attending church – in 17th century New England, everybody attended church – and being a member of a church. Church membership was supposedly limited to a fraction of the community. I had never heard of this distinction before, but it figures in the subsequent history. (Annoyingly, Boyer and Nissenbaum don’t specify what someone had to do to become a church member).

The residents of Salem Village (once again, there’s just a scatter of farm buildings, with a slight concentration along the Ipswich Road) wanted their own church, so they wouldn’t have to trudge all the way to Salem Town (technically, this was to be a “meetinghouse” rather than a “church”). However, only church members could “call” a minister, and almost all the church members lived in Salem Town and had no particular interest in losing the tax revenue from Salem Village (a good chunk of the taxes went to pay the minister’s salary, and if Salem Village had their own minister they wouldn’t be paying that part of the taxes to Salem town any more). As a result, in 1672 the inhabitants of Salem Village petitioned the General Court of Massachusetts Bay Colony to allow a vote by all the inhabitants on a minister, rather than just the church members. And the General Court granted the request. This set up Salem Village as a unique political entity; with a small degree of independence from Salem Town, but without political institutions – the only power the village had was to elect a five-member Committee, and the only power the Committee had was to collect the minister tax. Nevertheless, the village tended to treat the Committee as if it was a governing body, and the Committee tended to act that way. And, in the American tradition, the village immediately split into two contending political parties; those who supported the current minister (first James Bayley (1672-1679), then George Burroughs (1680-1683), then Deodat Lawson (1684-1688), then Samuel Parris (1689-1697)) and those who opposed him.


Samuel Parris, then, was the village minister when Satan showed up in 1692. Everybody probably knows the witchcraft part of the story; three preadolescent girls (one of them Parris’s daughter and another his niece) undertook an apparently innocent attempt to predict their future husbands by observing the shape of an egg white dropped in a bowl of water. One of the girls was frightened when her egg white looked like a coffin. Shortly afterwards, the girls began exhibiting “strange” behavior; disordered speech, random motions, and “fits”. This is what got Parris into trouble; what he should have done was call in the legal authorities – witchcraft was a civil crime, not a religious one. What he did instead was hold prayer meetings and give sermons. This gave ammunition to his opponents, who began arresting and jailing suspected witches themselves. (Many previous commentaries have cast Parris as some sort of evil inquisitor, while in fact he was clearly very reluctant to let matters go to the civil authorities. However, once the trials started he participated). Matters were further complicated because at the time Massachusetts Bay Colony had no legal government; the previous Royal Governor had been deposed in the aftermath of The Glorious Revolution and no new one had been appointed. Thus the accused witches (including a four year old girl) were held without trial until it could be done legally.


There were six accused witches in jail by the end of March, 22 more in April, and 39 more in May (interesting numbers considering the Salem Village population was just over 200). In June the new Royal Governor arrived and trials and executions began. Apparently the witches were not impressed and accusations continued until the authorities no longer bothered to keep track of them. In total, 19 people died; one in prison, one by pressing to death for refusal to plead, and the remainder by hanging (nobody was burned at the stake, despite numerous movies to the contrary). One of the fatalities was George Burroughs, the former minister who hadn’t lived in the village for 9 years (he was serving as a minister in Maine). However, after testimony that he had done wizardly feats while in the village (“picking up a heavy gun using only his finger thrust in the barrel”) and had appeared as a specter to some of the afflicted girls in Salem Village while his physical body was in Maine, he was arrested, brought back to Salem, tried, and hanged.


Contrary to the popular myth of inquisitorial religious persecution, it was two of the prominent religious figures in Massachusetts Bay Colony – Increase Mather and his son Cotton Mather – that finally slowed down and stopped the trials and executions, mostly by casting doubt on the reliability of evidence. I was especially surprised by Cotton Mather, since he’s always been cast as one of the villains in the whole episode (see the Stephen Vincent Benét poem). The author’s yeoman work on available documentary evidence suggests what was actually going on. Most of the accused – and there are maps showing where everybody lived – were not neighbors of their accusers but lived at some distance; people’s immediate neighbors tended to defend them in court rather than accuse them. Interestingly, this seems to conflict with another of the authors’ claims – that people tended to accuse those toward whom they had behaved in an un-neighborly fashion – for example, those that the had refused to lend equipment.


Not the world’s easiest read; the text tends to jump around chronologically depending on what point the authors are making – but interesting from a historical debunking standpoint. show less

A collection of primary sources, including the actual court record and follow up to the Salem Witch Trials. Using these, the reader can see a pattern emerges. Acts of witchcraft become more elaborate only after the accused are arrested.

For example, Ann Putnam Jr. says she saw the apparition of Sarah Good. Elizabeth Hubbard follows suit, verbatim, 3 days later. Suddenly Good can call familiars, shapeshift among other wondrous acts. But why Sarah Good? Good was poor, and often quarreled with show more those who boarded her out of charity. The same goes to Rebecca Nurse. Rebecca Nurse is accused by Ann Putnam Jr and 3 days later, Ann's mother supports this testimony and adds Martha Corey's name for good measure. But, as it turns out, Nurse had quarreled years ago with neighbors over pigs trampling her field. Bridget Bishop later falls into the same situation over unpaid debt.

This is just a fraction of what is included here. The book also includes land transactions, comments from outside authorities, family relations and remarks from Salem ministers. If you had no idea how deep Salem factions and grudges were before, well with this resource, you can definitely draw some obvious conclusions. show less

12 Books of Christmas

#9 History

A stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,
And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath

A memorable little detail from Clement Clark Moore’s St. Nicholas. Not the mitred Dutch bishop who visited on December 6 (his saint’s day), rewarding obedient children and punishing naughty ones. An authentic American descendant, “a jolly old elf,” small enough to slide down chimneys but with enough of a belly to get his furry suit “tarnished with ashes and show more soot.” Elfin. That’s important. NOT the obese, human immortalized by the drawings of Thomas Nast and resurrected every year in thousands of department stores, holiday parades, and office parties. Moore’s was probably a bit craggy, a working man’s elf.

The stump of a pipe is important. As everyone in those days knew, the aristocratic, affluent man (or woman) puffed on a long pipe, the longer the more dignified. Indeed, these people were called the Long Pipes, as noted in the 1812 edition of Washington Irving’s History of New York. The short, stumpy pipe belonged to lower-class, working people, not because they were cheaper, perhaps at first because they could be held clamped in the teeth more conveniently while laborers went about their work, but eventually as a proud, public gesture of class identity. Some workers even purchased long pipes and broke them off at the stem to show they had deliberately chosen a short pipe – “a stump of a pipe,” if you will.

Such tidbits of information, you will find in every section of Professor Stephen Nissenbaum’s scholarly history, The Battle for Christmas (Knopf, c1996). The scholarly nature of the tome is announced in its subtitle: A Social and Cultural History of Christmas That Shows How It Was Transformed from an Unruly Carnival Season into the Quintessential American Family Holiday. Professor Nissenbaum has done his research well. His text is filled with quotations, anecdotes, and documentary evidence gathered from personal letters, diaries, journals, local newspapers, church and government documents as well as works published at the time and long since relegated to archives, rare books collections, and attics.

What he shows his readers, in effect, are the efforts of a healthy, cozy “American family holiday” to emerge. In Puritan New England any celebration of Christmas as a holy-day, or holiday, was strictly forbidden. Pastors insisted that so-called Christmas was simply a pagan festival covered with a Christian veneer; and, of course, they were right historically. Even so, the winter solstice continued to prove a seductive time for ordinary folk to make merry. Harvests were over but the coldest, hardest winter months were yet to come, so there was a time when workers were relatively idle. Cellars and granaries were full, beer and wine were fermenting just right, fresh meat was available – animals could not be slaughtered and their flesh preserved until these first cold spells. It was a time for feasting and drinking and reveling, for hunger and thirst and passions to be satisfied. With inebriation rampant, misrule became the rule. Anger and lust found expression in riotous behavior. In some cases a Lord of Misrule was named; he was worked up with rich food and liquor and then expected to have sex publicly with a woman provided him.

So what Nissenbaum describes for us is a tug of war lasting several centuries – between restraint and excess, self-control and self-indulgence, severity and debauchery. One of the ways to keep people off the streets, of course, was to transform Christmas into a domestic holiday – to emphasize family feasts, homes decorated with evergreens, gift exchanges among family, family “traditions” (sometimes historic, sometimes invented), eventually focusing almost exclusively on young children. So, to this historian, the “battle” for Christmas has been between a boisterous, loud, unruly carnival, and quieter, but cheerful, family parties.

Legislative recognition of Christmas as a legal holiday began in the mid-1800s, eventually supported by laborers as a guaranteed release from toil in factories and offices. Himself Jewish, Nissenbaum pays relatively little attention to religious pageants, cantatas, and the like. He concludes with an epilogue in which he traces efforts to highlight other holidays, in addition to or even as substitutes for Christmas revelry: e.g., Thanksgiving, Kwanzaa, Chanukah, even First Night (a more sober New Year’s Eve).

For all its scholarly documentation (50 to 100 detailed end notes per chapter) and detailed piling up of repetitious evidence, The Battle for Christmas is a very readable book. The curious tidbits, the accounts quoted from letters and autobiographies, the surprising transformations can be genuinely entertaining as well as informative. I recommend it for browsing or sampling. I never read (or reread) the whole thing during any holiday season, but instead enjoy a chapter or two. The eight chapters focus on Puritan opposition to Christmas, the “invention” of Santa Claus, the Victorian parlor and the creation of “childhood,” a history of gift-giving, the Christmas tree as a symbol of domesticity (especially among abolitionists), Christmas charity drives, and “wassailing” among slaves in the antebellum South. With the commercialization of Christmas, the “battle” took on a new form: selfishness replaced dissipation as the problem to be overcome.

The Battle represents social and cultural history as its best. If you don’t devour the whole thing (and you probably won’t), at least treat yourself to morsels. And, by all means, read Chapter 2, “Revisiting ‘A Visit from St. Nicholas’.” Nissenbaum concludes, “Between being a jolly plebeian elf and a jolly fat uncle, the real St. Nicholas would surely have found it difficult to choose.” The latter won out, and was domesticated and idealized. In their famous editorial, beginning “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus,” the New York Sun used the child’s vision to strike out against “the skepticism of a skeptical age.” Clement Moore’s work became “an oasis of respectability,” and to this day has helped preserve the “childlike faith,” the poetry, the romance of Christmas.

Professor Nissenbaum deserves recognition and gratitude for his exemplary history, but also for his contribution to the "joys of Christmas." show less