Page 5 - HSLChristmasAnthology
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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,
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