\nEveryone of the past 22 years of this program our broadcast for the Sunday before Christmas has been devoted to the subject of that ancient festival. This year must be no exception. Though the observance of Christmas has changed greatly from the days of long ago, it is still marked by the hymns and the carols that were sung by our grandparents. They too knew the familiar words and tunes of “Away in a Manger”, “Little Town of Bethlehem” and “Silent Night”.<\/p>\n
It is well to be reminded that Christmas was not a festive occasion, not even a holiday, for the Puritans in Boston two hundred years ago. We remember what a fuss they made about the May Day sporting at Merrymount, bringing the participants into court, fining some and placing others in the stocks.<\/p>\n
In the course of the past quarter of a century I have examined scores of diaries and account books. In that examination I have been struck by the almost complete absence of any reference to Christmas before the middle of the 19th century. The diary of William Bryant of Fairfield makes no reference to Christmas Day until after 1860, in the closing years of his long life. Jacob Pillsbury, great-grandfather of Miss Ellen Pillsbury, worked every Christmas Day from 1833 to 1843, according to his carefully kept account book. On that day in 1833 he shod the hind feet of six oxen. The next Christmas and the one after that he was shoeing oxen all day. On Christmas Day in 1837 he drove to Belfast to buy cattle. On that day in 1838 he used a neighbor’s winnowing machine all day to sift out nine bushels of grain. On Christmas Day in 1840 he took four calf skins to Page’s store and traded them for molasses, spices, calico and tobacco. On all three Christmases from 1841 to 1843 he chopped wood for a neighbor at 75 cents a day.<\/p>\n
That record is typical. All through the 1830’s and 1840’s Christmas in Maine was just another day.<\/p>\n
In the early years of the Civil War, the Waterville Mail did make some slight mention of Christmas. The issue that appeared the day after Christmas in 1862 had only this to say: “Christmas made a call of ceremony at various localities on the evening before December 25. In Winslow there was a public reception at the Congregational Church, at which a number of hearts, young and old, little and big, were made glad and sunny enough to last through the year. The following afternoon and evening saw the Congregational meeting house in Waterville, a scene of joy, and there was a pleasant occasion at the home of Deacon Stevens, a gathering of the scholars of the Baptist Sabbath School, of which he is superintendent.”<\/p>\n
During the month of December in 1862, the Waterville Mail carried just one ad in any way remindful of Christmas. In fact that sole ad might have referred to the old-time practice of giving presents at New Years, rather than at Christmas. It was the ad of George Merrifield, who ran what he called the Parlor Shoe Store. It said: “Buy something substantial in the shape of these furlined boots, rubber boots or overshoes for your wife or sweetheart, the whole year.”<\/p>\n
In the next year, 1863, the Mail published two holiday ads. One was again by Merrifield who said: “Merrifield is looking for the present-making part of the community. Gents’ and ladies’ slippers, boots and shoes of all kinds, will be found at the Parlor Shoe Store. Give your friends a sensible present, one that will do them good and keep their feet warm.” The other ad said: “Lewis has just received a large lot of toys, candies, etc., suitable for the Santa Claus presents.” And that Lewis ad was the first mention of Santa Claus in any issue of the Waterville Mail.<\/p>\n
Maxham and Wing, publishers of the Mail, did manage to mention Christmas in their 1862 editorial announcement of a raise in subscription rates. Bear in mind that the Mail was then a weekly newspaper; it did not become a daily until long after 1862. The publishers said: “We are finally compelled by the rise in the cost of paper as well as everything else used in printing to raise the price of the Mail from $1.50 to $2.00 a year. We promise our best efforts to increase the value of the paper. As a prelude to our liberal intentions, we wish every man, woman and child who reads the Mail a Merry Christmas.”<\/p>\n
In 1863 the Mail published a letter from the Reverend Dinsmore, pastor of the Winslow Congregational Church, telling what Christmas had meant to his family. Let us now have it in Mr. Dinsmore’s own words: “Christmas was not forgotten in Winslow and one family, at least, enjoyed it very much. We had invited our Sabbath School to come to the parsonage on that day. A merry group of 36 children came in the afternoon and returned home delighted with their visit. In the evening not only older members of the Sabbath School, but also the whole parish, decided to cause their minister to have a merry Christmas by replenishing his larder with full rations and his purse with that which answereth all things. They came one after another until they had nearly filled the house. At nine o’clock devotional exercises were held and the people, with joyful countenances, returned to their homes, leaving behind $30 in money, and in the larder provisions to the amount of $20, including a barrel of flour. Furthermore, the minister was promised that his woodpile would be replenished during the winter free of expense.”<\/p>\n
Even Mr. Maxham and Mr. Wing, publishers of the Mail, were remembered on that Christmas of 1864. In their columns appeared the following thank-you note: “Through the generosity of Mr. James Freeman of Portland and the courtesy of Mr. E.A. Hilton, our attentive and faithful express agent, we and our households enjoyed a treat of luscious oysters on Christmas Day. Both Freeman’s heart and his oysters are unusually large.”<\/p>\n
Now back a bit to the Puritan attitude toward Christmas. Those ardently pious people surely knew that Christmas was a sacred day of the Christian Church, commemorating the Savior’s birth. Next to Easter, it had for centuries before the landings at Plymouth and Boston in the New World, been in the Old World the most sacred day of the Christian year. Why then did they refuse to celebrate Christmas? The answer makes us stop to think about what Christmas has become in this year of 1970, three hundred and fifty years after the landing of the Pilgrims.<\/p>\n
In Elizabethan England, Christmas had become much as we know it today, a day of festive celebration and gaiety. It was in the Merry England of Shakespeare and Walter Raleigh that the phrase “Merry Christmas” originated. Before they left England, the dissenters who became the Puritans had already rebelled against the loose living of the time, the decreasing hold of religion on moral conduct, the intent of so many people to make pleasure life’s chief goal. Christmas Day had become less and less religious, more and more secular. To be sure, the crass commercialism that marks Christmas in our time had not taken hold 350 years ago, but a day devoted to a child in a Bethlehem manger had become a day of sport and revelry.<\/p>\n
We may well ask, has today’s commercializing of Christmas nearly blotted out its sacred meaning? In spite of the creches set up in homes and on lawns, in spite of the sounds of “Silent Night” and “Little Town of Bethlehem”, in spite of reminders in our churches including the profoundly impressive Christmas Eve mass, how many of us give any serious thought to the original meaning of Christmas? How many of us are willing to do anything to help achieve the everlasting message of Christmas, recorded in the angels’ song, “Peace on earth among men of Good Will”.<\/p>\n
With all our lavish giving, with all the mailing of five hundred million Christmas cards, I wonder if we appreciate Christmas any more than did the people in small Maine towns 70 years ago, when persons of my age were children. I have always been grateful that I was a member of a reading family, and Christmas in my boyhood always meant books. Of course I received toys and games, sleds and home-made skis, and good things to eat; but it was those Christmas books that made me a life-long reader. The record came in my tenth year, when that Christmas brought me twelve books. I was fortunate to have a flock of aunts and uncles, as well as fond parents and grandmothers, and they saw that I got plenty to read.<\/p>\n
Everyone turned out, in our Maine village, for the Christmas Eve party at his particular church. It was, like the one at Deacon Stevens’ home in Waterville in 1862, actually a Sunday School party, but because small children were not let out alone in the evening, the parents were all there. Santa Claus distributed gifts from the big tree and the church people saw to it that no child, however poor his home, was forgotten. Women had spent the day making the cheesecloth bags and had filled them with candy and popcorn. Sticky, molasses corn balls were also hung on the tree, and the resulting sticky hands messed up many a present in the handling. Besides his bag of candy, every kid got a candy cane. Parents saw to it that two or three gifts were brought from home for their own children. Most, like my own parents, saw to it that those items were few, and not the most cherished gifts, left for their first appearance at home on Christmas morning. The two or three families that brought all their children’s gifts to the church party were conspicuous and called “show offs” for wanting their kids’ names called out by Santa Claus oftener than the others. None of the gifts were ever very expensive. There were no hundred dollar skis, no fifty dollar ski boots, no forty dollar cameras, no five hundred dollar colored TV sets. I recall what a thrill my father got when, for one Christmas in the store, he sold a man an entire dinner set as a present for the man’s wife. That whole set of 112 dishes cost $16. Every Christmas father did sell many parlor lamps, costing from $2.50 to $5.00. Those table lamps with their painted globular shades were a favorite gift.<\/p>\n
Christmas was simpler in those days, but I am sure people had just as good a time as they have today. And they could happily do without something that today makes the after taste of Christmas rather bitter. Seventy years ago there weren’t any credit cards.<\/p>\n
And with that we must say goodbye until next week.<\/p>\n
Year: 1970<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Read the script for “Little Talks” program #872, Broadcast on December 20, 1970<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":405,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1205,35296],"tags":[],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9102"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/405"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9102"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9102\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}