On the mezzanine floor of the Parker House Hotel in Boston hangs a mirror, still today. In the late fall of 1867, this mirror hung in the apartment at the hotel occupied by the great English novelist Charles Dickens, and he spent hours studying himself in it as he practiced for what would become immensely popular readings of his classic story, A Christmas Carol, which had been circulating in America for 25 years. Dickens gave his first public performance, with great success, on December 2, 1867, at the Tremont Temple in Boston. This was the same temple at which Frederick Douglass and thousands of others had waited for word of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation just a few years earlier, in the midst of the Civil War.
After his Boston readings, Dickens traveled for months as far north as Portland, Maine, inland to Buffalo, New York, south to Washington, D.C., and always back to Boston, performing A Christmas Carol and other stories before enthusiastic audiences. Since that time, Americans have seen Dickens’ story adapted in every medium invention can imagine, from the stage to silent films, radio, talking feature films, and animations. There is a Mickey Mouse version, a Fred Flintstone version, and a Muppet version. There have been television musicals, HBO specials, and video games accessible in cloud-based gaming libraries.
As was noted in The New York Times in the 1860s, “Dickens brings the old Christmas into the present out of bygone centuries and remote manor houses, into the living rooms of the very poor of today”—and over time, Dickens’ Christmas became an inseparable part of American Christmas. Every year, the elderly miser Ebenezer Scrooge is transformed once again by visits, on Christmas Eve, from the ghost of his former business partner Jacob Marley and the spirits of Christmases Past, Present, and Yet to Come. Every year, Scrooge puts behind him his “Bah! Humbug!” response to Christmas and becomes as good a keeper of Christmas as any man alive and as good a man as could be found in good old London, or any other good old city, town, or borough in the good old world. And every year, Tiny Tim ends the story: “God bless Us, Every One!”
At the time of the American Founding, celebrations of Christmas in America varied widely, from Puritans and Quakers who shunned or ignored it, to other Protestant sects and Catholics who honored it in their own Christian ways, to those who spent the day in “riot and dissipation,” like an ancient Roman Saturnalia. But E Pluribus Unum—out of many one—was the American motto on the Great Seal, and over the generations, out of many ways of celebrating or ignoring Christmas, came a recognizably American way.
At the time of the American Founding, celebrations of Christmas in America varied widely, from Puritans and Quakers who shunned or ignored it, to other Protestant sects and Catholics who honored it in their own Christian ways, to those who spent the day in “riot and dissipation,” like an ancient Roman Saturnalia. But E Pluribus Unum—out of many one—was the American motto on the Great Seal, and over the generations, out of many ways of celebrating or ignoring Christmas, came a recognizably American way.
Washington Irving, renowned author of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle, contributed to this with Christmas sketches he published in 1819 describing the charms of old English Christmases, when all around is joyful, and sacred solemnity is blended with mirth and conviviality; where pious worship is joined by revelry, feasting, spiced wine, dancing, caroling, mistletoe, presents, decorations, Yule logs, and a “general call to happiness.”
Irving became a special advocate for St. Nicholas and helped found the Saint Nicholas Society of the City of New York. Independently of his efforts, in 1823, the anonymously published poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” created rhymes and images that became part of American Christmas ever after:
’Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there. . . .
When what to my wondering eyes should appear,
But a miniature sleigh, and eight tiny reindeer,
With a little old driver, so lively and quick,
I knew in a moment it must be St. Nick.
As years went by, cities grew, and commerce flourished, the private celebrations of American Christmas became more public. City, town, and village centers were decorated for the season. Department stores like Macy’s and Woolworth found increasing numbers of customers shopping for Christmas gifts. They put on elaborate Christmas displays with lights, decorations, mechanical toys, and live Santas. By 1856, President Franklin Pierce put up the first Christmas tree in the White House. In 1870, President Ulysses S. Grant signed legislation declaring Christmas a federal holiday. In 1923, President Calvin Coolidge lit the first National Christmas Tree on the Ellipse.
