Page 5 - HSLChristmasAnthology

HSL Christmas Anthology Page 5

safely tucked away inside of the nuclear family home. Christmas
became the high holiday of the new secular religion of domesticity.
The rising prosperity of the middle class, the corresponding new
interest in the nurture of children, and transformation of
preindustrial family businesses into separate spheres of industry
and business for men and home life for women, were all important
elements in this change.

Bringing Christmas into the family home, however, came with its

own set of challenges. Domestic keepers of Christmas wrestled
mightily, for example, with how to exchange gifts. Previously, the
home invaders of Christmas misrule simply took their “gifts” of the
manor house’s best food and drink (which often, or course, were
also the products of the invaders’ hard and poorly compensated
work in the field or mill). Members of the family already enjoying
the best that the house had to offer could hardly offer each other
gifts of their regular fare. Hence, contrary to popular belief, the
very first Christmas gifts were not lovingly hand-made; they were
explicitly commercial mass-produced goods whose value derived
precisely from the fact that they could not have been made inside of
the home.

But even as the newly indulgent parents of the time were delighting
in offering commercial holiday gifts to their children, they faced new
dilemmas. They loved their child-centered homes, but they also
wondered if lavishing attention on children might create spoiled,
greedy adults. And this is where Christmas trees enter our story,
explicitly introduced by Unitarians (and Abolitionist Unitarians at
that!) as a corrective to holiday greed.

Part Three: Abolitionist Unitarians Evangelize the Christmas
Tree

In 1835, the British Unitarian author Harriet Martineau published
an account of her travels in the United States. In the chapter on
cold weather customs, she claimed to have been present at the first
American introduction of the German Christmas tree tradition. She
described a touching holiday scene in a family home in Cambridge,