Radio Script #1069

Little Talks on Common Things
December 21, 1975

Following our custom of the past 26 years, the broadcast on Christmas Sunday is devoted to the subject of Christmas.

The twentieth century is not the first time that many people have come to deplore the almost complete secularization of Christmas, its diversion from observance of the Advent of the Savior to rank commercialism. In his recorded message to the ecumenical service in Waterville on Thanksgiving eve of this year, Senator Muskie pointed out that about forty years ago pressure from the nation’s merchants and manufacturers induced Congress to name the third, rather than the fourth, Thursday in November as Thanksgiving Day, so that there could be a week longer for promotion of sales between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Happily the new law did not last long, and the nation soon returned to observing Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday.

Just as we today may deplore the commercialization of Christmas, so did the Puritans of the 17th century see in the observance another deviation from its original intent. By the end of Queen Elizabeth I’s reign in 1603, Christmas had become not merely a day of gay festival, but too often of boisterous and even drunken revelry. The Puritans felt that the sacred day had become wretchedly profaned.

If history teaches any outstanding lesson, it is that in respect to behavior, as well as in most social and political activities, it seems to show that an inevitable characteristic of human nature is to go to extremes. Mankind had never been willing to accept what Aristotle called the golden mean – a middle ground between too little and too much. So, when the British Puritans gained control of Parliament, that body in 1644 passed a law forbidding the observance of Christmas in any manner whatsoever.

By that time the Massachusetts Puritans and their fellow Separatists, the Pilgrims, were in firm control in New England. It was wholly natural that those early Americans should frown upon any recognition of Christmas. A careful study of the beginnings of our New England history reveals that the Puritans have been unjustly maligned as solemn-faced pietists, determined to take all the joy out of life.

It is true that both Pilgrims and Puritans took their religion seriously. Only five years before the landing at Plymouth, had come the publication of the King James Bible, by all odds the most influential printed book in the English-speaking world. It placed the scriptures in the hands of all who could read, and one outstanding reason for establishing schools in New England was to teach children to read the book.

So, Puritan and Pilgrim alike, the Bible became a guide to right conduct. The Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule told folks what to do in their relationships with others and their respect for their creator. It was inevitable, given that starting assumption, that our first New Englanders should seek to translate the Bible into everyday behavior. They determined, that by such guidance, they would be intelligently and consistently moral. What sort of behavior did they set as standard? Clean living, uprightness, truthfulness, integrity, loyalty to principal, conduct dominated by conscience.

To those early Americans nothing was so deplored as loss of moral standing. However, it is wrong to assert that the Puritans and Pilgrims had no fun. In that first-hand contemporary account of the colony at Plymouth, a book called “Bradford’s Relation,” the’ colony’s first governor wrote, “Amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms.” It may seem curious to us that he considered militia drill as recreation, but when we read accounts of militia exercise right here in. Waterville in the early 19th century, we know he was right. In this town, 150 years after Bradford was dead, a militia muster was a day of sport.

But Bradford refers to “‘other recreations.” What did he mean? He tells us that the Pilgrims enjoyed contests of running, jumping, and wrestling, and began to take up the new British game of “rounders,” the fore-runner of baseball. What Puritans and Pilgrims condemned was not sport, but turning sacred observances into sporting events. That is why they banned the sportive, secular 17th century Christmas.

There seems no danger today of our making the Puritan mistake of throwing out the baby with the bath. No one now suggests that we ban Christmas altogether as they did. But there are many of us who devoutly wish we could all give more consideration to the historical sacredness of the day and much less to its rampant commercialization.

During the past quarter century this program has discussed numerous aspects of Christmas – so many, in fact, that it is difficult to find anything new to tell you. But this year, thanks to recent publicity given by the Smithsonian Institute, I can tell you something about Christmas that may be new to most of you.

In the Thuringian mountains of Germany, about 50 miles north of Nuremberg, the city that became famous for the trial that followed the Second World War, lies the small town of Lauscha, with about 6,000 people. As late as 1930, most of the glass ornaments on American Christmas trees came from that town. Nearly a hundred years earlier, about 1840, Lauscha became the birthplace of a cottage industry that supplied virtually all the blown-glass Christmas tree ornaments used in the Western World.

In Lauscha, an ornament-maker’s home was his factory. His wife, children, and sometimes other relatives were his workers, and never did the town have a large factory. Those family craftsmen continued to dominate even the American market for such ornaments until World War II.

The Smithsonian tell us that, if we had dropped in at the home shop of a Lauscha craftsman in the 1930’s, we would have seen him perched on a high stool, clad only in long underwear. Behind him, safely away from the flame of his gas burner, were lacquer drums and a pot of silvering solution for which every such craftsman had his own family formula. It was the wife who had the tiresome job of silvering the inside of the ornaments, by filling each a quarter full of the solution, then shaking it vigorously. Then she hung the ornaments in rows from the rafters to dry.

The ornaments themselves were made of blown glass, and their formation was the task of the family head, the master craftsman. All members of the family helped to decorate the ornaments with paint. When they were dry, the oldest child had the job of smoothing down the stems or pikes that protruded where the glass-blower had withdrawn his blowpipe. Then, the youngest child put on the little metal caps over the pike hole. By all hands working from 10 to 15 hours a day, a family could make as many as 500 ornaments a day, six days a week.

The first glassmakers came to Lauscha in about 1590, when religious persecution drove them from their homes in Swabia. They came to the mountain region because of the abundance of wood and limestone, two indispensable necessities for glassmaking.

Gradually Lauscha became the center for the making of drinking glasses, sold wholesale to peddlers. By 1750, a few of these craftsmen began to make glass beads, supplying jewelers and milliners allover Europe. But Bohemian glassmakers were soon turning out shinier, more attractive beads, and Lauscha nearly lost its industry. But by 1775, the year when our own Revolution began in America, a particularly enterprising glassmaker of Lauscha succeeded in duplicating the Bohemian formula, but he sensibly decided not to try to compete with their small beads. Instead he turned to the making of thick-walled glass balls, and after that time Lauscha craftsmen continued to experiment to see how large a glass ball could be blown successfully. They improved the inner coating process by using lead or zinc to make the balls give reflection. Some of the largest balls were capped with crowns and hung from the ceiling during the Christmas season. The first written record of glass Christmas tree balls appeared in 1848, when a Lauschan glassblower entered in his accounts, “made six dozen Christmas tree ornaments in three sizes, and sold them at once.”

Late in the 19th century, American store buyers including representatives of F. W. Woolworth, began making side trips to Lauscha, while buying toys and dolls in Nuremberg. In 1890, the Lauschan glassblowers perfected the use of molds. By this means, over the years, they duplicated in glass every kind of fruit and vegetable, even several varieties of pickles. Out of those molds came figures of cats, dogs, monkeys and bears. Then, came figures of clowns and characters from Mother Goose and Hans Christian Andersen. By 1920, a whole village of little glass houses could be hung on a Christmas tree. One of the most popular products was a bird with a spun glass tail.

The Smithsonian tells us that there are people who still sentimentally preserve the fragile glass bird that once hung on grandmother’s tree.

The life of the Lauschan glassblower was totally disrupted in 1939. After the war, the town found itself ten miles inside Communist East Germany. A few Lauschans took refuge in Neustadt in West Germany, only a mile across the East German border, and to this day they continue to make a few of the old-time ornaments. But as a unique industry of one German town the business is gone. Now big factories in Germany produce poor imitations of the old hand-made Christmas ornaments. Now, instead of the glass fruit and animals and Santas, an American tree is more likely to be decorated with plastic.

And that is the story of our first Christmas tree ornaments.

Year: 1975