Why Children Get Gifts on Christmas: A History
Why Children
Get Gifts on Christmas: A History
In 1800s New York, the overlapping interests of
middle-class families and the wealthy produced a cultural practice that’s still
in place today.
During
a week when so many Americans have experienced some combination of joy, rage,
and frustration in seeking the perfect holiday gifts for their children, it
seems appropriate to pause and ask: Where did the practice of giving Christmas
gifts to children come from?
There
does not appear to be an easy answer. Gifts do not primarily serve as rewards:
Commentators on the political left and right have in
recent years asked parents to abandon the “naughty and nice” paradigm that
suggests such presents are prizes for good behavior, and indeed historical
evidence suggests that proper conduct has not been a widespread prerequisite
for young Americans to receive Christmas gifts.
Nor do presents seem to have a clear connection
to Christian faith. Some American families have established a “three-gift” Christmas in an effort to link the practice to the generosity of the
three wise men in the story of Jesus’s birth, but again no broad historical
precedent exists for this link. In fact, religious leaders have long been more
likely to decry the commercialization of Christmas as detracting from the true
spirit of the holiday than to celebrate the delivery of purchased goods to
middle-class or wealthy children. (Donating gifts to poor children is a
different matter, of course, but that practice became common in the United
States only after gift-giving at home became a well-established ritual.)
Critics
of the commercialization of Christmas tend to attribute the growth of holiday
gift-giving to corporate marketing efforts. While such efforts did contribute
to the magnitude of the ritual, the practice of buying Christmas presents for
children predates the spread of corporate capitalism in the United States: It
began during the first half of the 1800s, particularly in New York City, and
was part of a broader transformation of Christmas from a time of public revelry
into a home- and child-centered holiday.
This
reinvention was driven partly by commercial interests, but more powerfully by
the converging anxieties of social elites and middle-class parents in rapidly
urbanizing communities who sought to exert control over the bewildering changes
occurring in their cities. By establishing a new type of midwinter celebration
that integrated home, family, and shopping, these Americans strengthened an
emerging bond between Protestantism and consumer capitalism.
In his book The Battle for Christmas, the historian Stephen
Nissenbaum presents the 19th-century reinvention of the holiday as a triumph of
New York’s elites over the city’s emerging working classes. New York’s
population grew nearly tenfold between 1800 and 1850, and during that time
elites became increasingly frightened of traditional December rituals of
“social inversion,” in which poorer people could demand food and drink from the
wealthy and celebrate in the streets, abandoning established social constraints
much like on Halloween night or New Year’s Eve. These rituals, which occurred
any time between St. Nicholas Day (a Catholic feast day observed in Europe on
December 6th) and New Year’s Day, had for centuries been a means of relieving
European peasants’ (or American slaves’) discontent during the traditional
downtime of the agricultural cycle. In a newly congested urban environment,
though, aristocrats worried that such celebrations might become vehicles for
protest when employers refused to give workers time off during the holidays or
when a long winter of unemployment loomed for seasonal laborers.
In response to these concerns, a group of wealthy
men who called themselves the Knickerbockers invented a new series of
traditions for this time of year that gradually moved Christmas celebrations
out of the city’s streets and into its homes. They presented these traditions
as a reinvigoration of Dutch customs practiced in New Amsterdam and New York
during the colonial period, although Nissenbaum and other scholars have
established that these supposed antecedents largely did not exist in North
America. Drawing from two story collections by Washington Irving, their most
well-known member, these New Yorkers experimented with domestic festivities on
St. Nicholas Day and New Year’s Day until another member of the group, Clement
Clark Moore, solidified the tradition of celebrating on Christmas with his
enormously popular poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” (better known as “The Night
Before Christmas”) in 1822.
The
St. Nicholas that Moore presented in his famous poem was not a wholesale
invention, but like the other traditions the Knickerbockers borrowed and transformed,
he was not a well-established part of New York’s winter holiday rituals.
Similarly, his delivery of presents to children aligned with a newly emerging
practice in 1820s New York, although the giving of homemade gifts during the
winter holidays appears to have begun by the late 1700s. Moore’s poem does not
explain why children are receiving presents on Christmas, although they clearly
have the expectation of receiving special treats (“visions of sugar plums
danced in their heads”).
Understanding
why giving gifts to children (and by gradual extension, to adults) became part
of this new Christmas tradition requires an expansion of Nissenbaum’s
story. The Battle for
Christmas focuses on the tensions between New York’s elites
and its working classes, but during this same period, a middle class began to
emerge in New York and other northern cities, and the reinvention of Christmas
served their purposes as well. Like their wealthier contemporaries,
middle-class families worried about what rapid population growth and expanding
market capitalism would do to their children—
particularly
because an expansion of goods and services on offer was reducing young people’s
household responsibilities at a time when alternative pathways to adulthood,
such as public education, had yet to emerge.
In
response to the increasing uncertainty surrounding this stage of life, urban
families that aspired to prepare their children for life in the middle and
upper ranks of American society widely adopted new strategies for child-rearing.
As work and home became increasingly separated for these families, parents kept
children within the home (or at church or in school) as long as possible in
order to avoid what many of them perceived as the corrupting influences of
commerce on kids’ inchoate moral character. Elites’ efforts to domesticate
Christmas aligned neatly with these parents’ interests, for they encouraged
young Americans to associate the joys of the holiday with the morally and
physically protective space of home.
Meanwhile,
even if parents were concerned about commercial influences outside the home,
they were not bothered by the idea of letting children’s commodities into it,
in limited doses. In the 1820s, an American toy industry began to emerge, and
American publishers started producing books and magazines for children. (The
first three self-sustaining children’s magazines in U.S. history debuted
between 1823 and 1827.) Much of the initial demand for these items reflected
parents’ recognition of the instructional power of consumer goods. As an 1824
review of the evangelical children’s magazine The Youth’s Friend noted,
Let the Youth’s Magazine be called
his own paper, and how will the juvenile reader clasp it to his bosom in
ecstacy [sic] as he takes it from the Post-Office. And if instruction from any
source will deeply affect his heart, it will when communicated through the
medium of this little pamphlet.
If early 19th-century newspaper ads
promoting bibles as children’s Christmas gifts are any indication, parents
during this era seem to have retained a similar focus on delivering spiritual
value to their children. After the Civil War, the spread of consumer products
in American cities made it increasingly difficult to control children’s access
to toys, books, and magazines, so in order to keep young people at home,
parents gradually acquiesced to purchasing products intended to amuse as well
as instruct their offspring.
Postbellum Christmas traditions followed this
broader trend by becoming more child-focused, particularly through the
reconstructed image of St. Nicholas. Clement Clark Moore’s St. Nick was an elf
who was jolly but also a bit scary (as indicated by the narrator’s repeated
reminder that he had “nothing to dread”). During the 1860s, the cartoonist
Thomas Nast created a new image of Santa Claus that replaced this ambiguous
figure with a warm, grandfatherly character who often appeared with his arms
full of dolls, games, and other secular toys. One of the earliest publications
in which Nast’s Santa figure appeared was the December 1868 issue of the
magazine Hearth and Home.
Christmas
gift-giving, then, is the product of overlapping interests between elites who
wanted to move raucous celebrations out of the streets and into homes, and
families who simultaneously wanted to keep their children safe at home and
expose them, in limited amounts, to commercial entertainment. Retailers
certainly supported and benefited from this implicit alliance, but not until
the turn of the 20th century did they assume a proactive role of marketing
directly to children in the hopes that they might entice (or annoy) their
parents into spending more money on what was already a well-established
practice of Christmas gift-giving.
In
the nearly two centuries since New Yorkers instigated the invention of today’s
Christmas rituals, American families have invested gift-giving and other widely
practiced holiday traditions with their own unique meanings. Identifying the
origins of these rituals as historical rather than eternal reinforces their
power to do so.
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