Christmas In Americ The First Industrial Revolution

Christmas in America has had different meanings to many people through history. Farmers, workers, and religious adherents practiced their traditions in the public sphere in respective periods of time. However, the modern understanding of Christmas celebration stems from the experience of a growing middle class as it set out to define its identity. Christmas as a domestic, commercial holiday originates from the middle class engagement with the vehicles of the first industrial revolution and the subsequent adoption of a culture of consumerism.
Rural farmers traditionally celebrated the end of the harvest and the beginning of the long winter with feasting and celebration at Christmas during the eighteenth century. Ingrained in Americans and Europeans
since the beginning of feudal society was the agricultural cycle. Particularly, this entailed the “overconsumption” of food and drink while inventories were high. As Stephen Nissenbaum comments on European agricultural societies: “[Christmas] was a time when people let strange things happen to their sense of what was acceptable behavior, their sense of limits.” Consuming beyond a normal amount, while abnormal when considering the daily habits of eighteenth century peasants and farmers, was not out of the ordinary because of the seasonal cycle. Farmers could afford to “splurge” since this was a disruptive tradition which happened only annually. On the whole, the traditions of a seventeenth century peasants translated well to their socioeconomic counterparts of the nineteenth century: the urban workers.
With a significant portion of nineteenth century American urban workers originating from rural hinterlands, peasant/farmer traditions--particularly in regards to the seasonal cycle--migrated likewise to the great cities. In most cases, winter time for wage laborers also saw a reduction in employment. Susan Davis notes that Philadelphian laborers, in order to cope with the shutdown of ports and other means of employment, turned to extreme forms of revelry and merrymaking. Many of these workers liked to masquerade in blackface and dress in burlesque through the main thoroughfares of the city, much to the ire of other members in the community. A key divergence between earlier rural end of season celebration and revelry of urban proletariats like those of Philadelphia is in the integration of various classes in celebratory traditions. Rural feasts, while masculine events, incorporated people across classes whereas urban merrymaking, similarly masculine, discriminated especially along class lines. Chiding the behavior of the plebiscite, the New England Puritan Minister Cotton Mather asked his congregation whether celebrations “by Mad Mirth, by long Eating, by hard Drinking, by lewd Gaming, [and] by rude Revelling” appropriately captured the reasons for seasonal festivities. During the practice of end-of-harvest rituals, Mather was not alone in expressing that the rancor of the day unamused him; the budding urban middle class took consequence with the actions of their socioeconomic inferiors. As such, middle class city dwellers wanted to distinguish themselves from the crassness and vulgarity of masculine urban working culture.
Celebrating Christmas was integral to developing fledgling urban white middle class identity; Christmas was about integrating home with market: domestic with commercial.
This was the origin of mass consumer culture in America. A series of changes during the opening decades of the nineteenth century provided the opportunity for this integral component of modern American ethos to manifest. Primarily, the first industrial revolution provided the materials which fuelled the transformation of the American consumer. Urban dwellers experienced the greatest impact to the social and economic landscape with establishment of department stores with affordably priced goods. With industrialization, America increasingly urbanized allowing manufacturing centers to easily employ wage laborers who produced en masse the consumer goods which would fuel the new economy. One Christmas in 1858, George Templeton Strong, a prominent New York lawyer and firm member of the upper middle class, bought for his two sons a “cavalry regiment, and the cow with the movable head, and the steamboat that runs about on the floor, and that stupendous village” while for his wife he acquired “a silver soup-tureen, and a pair of gilt and glass brackets to be hung against the wall and hold flowers.” As a gendered understanding of the holiday permeates the consciousness of middle class identity, the appearance of gendered gift exchange is noteworthy. Most interestingly, Strong’s gifts to his wife are extensions of the
feminine domestic, whereas his sons received rather masculine toys. At any rate, the sheer number of presents exchanged in the Strong household demonstrates the ability of the revolutionized industrial system to produce luxury consumer goods to meet the demand of a growing public. Ultimately, the transformation of the economy made luxury goods both accessible and affordable for a growing middle class.
To bring about a culture of consumption, however, intensive advertising in newspapers and catalogues targeted middle class families to foster consumer tendencies. Early Christmas advertisements specifically featured presents designed for the entertainment of children, though one in 1809 “focused on the decoration of women” by displaying all kinds of available jewelry. Ultimately, by design, Christmas was a domestic holiday. This desire for mass produced luxury goods eventually transcended solely middle class consumers and permeated across all socioeconomic levels of society.
In addition to fostering desire among consumers, advertisers needed to normalize this heretofore societally abnormal behavior. As part of a series of illustrations depicting the celebration of Christmas, Winslow Homer presents a vision what children expect to be brought to them. Titled “Santa Claus and His Presents,” Homer’s image depicts a sleeping child in his bedroom as all types of presents stuffed into stockings hang from his headboard. Homer clearly indicates to his audiences that this child’s gifts have not originated from a mythic man. Though named “Santa Claus and His Presents” there is a distinct lack of any Santa Claus figure. Homer cued audiences to understand that the child’s parents were the “Santa Claus” of this Christmas. Furthermore, a dedicated bedroom for a single child clearly signals that this family has a large home with available space to let their children (if there are more) reside in separate bedrooms. Homer, unfortunately, leaves little signs as to whether the family lives in an urban or rural space, but clearly they enjoy the comforts of the economy of mass production. Material wealth is on display in this picture, and this is how Homer, like advertisers in other magazines, defined a proper celebration of Christmas.
Not only did middle class consumers desire luxury goods, they felt compelled to buy them as if they were necessities. During Christmas, people especially felt an intense pressure to buy gifts of value, or to reciprocate the value of a gift. In 1869, Strong recalled a purchase he felt pressured to make for his wife:
Was weak enough to stop at Tiffany’s, resolving this year to be parsimonious this year and spend not more than $20 on a present for Ellie. But I was enflamed by a pretty cameo brooch, and involved myself to the extent of $200 [...]. She already got herself certain gimcrackeries which she insisted should be her Christmas present, but I could not let Christmas Eve go by without producing something new.

Societal pressure impressed upon Strong the desire to purchase a fairly expensive consumer good simply by the virtue of self-imposed guilt. Of course, his guilt is a product of the forces of developing consumer culture at work: the greater transformation in psychology of American consumer behavior.
Magazines normalized the bourgeois commercial Christmas by defining improper celebrations of the holiday.
In the text of Harper’s Weekly, the editors sought to remind audiences to be aware of people who do not celebrate Christmas indoors, and to pity those “poor shivering creatures cowering under the storm, many of them, perhaps, with ‘nowhere to go.’” Not only do Harper’s editors normalize the domestic celebration of Christmas, they label outdoor celebrations of Christmas as abnormal. Furthermore, the editors implicitly suggest that anyone who does prefers to celebrate outdoors without family and refuses to partake in the commercialized giving of gifts are homeless and not members of the urban middle class. Considering that celebrating the season with outdoors was the normative behavior only a few decades ago, defining outdoors celebrations abnormal demonstrates the middle class behavioral shift towards a bourgeois domestic materialism. While the editors may have been attempting to channel a enlightened middle class benevolence, they impress societal norms upon members of the middle class with implicit warnings to conform to the domestic, commercial celebration of Christmas, or otherwise be socially ostracized as a helpless vagrant. As a New York Times article in 1864 suggested, the purpose of it was to be with family at this time of rest. The author writes: “We are beginning to pay more attention to Christmas in this country [...]. It is a sign of progress in the right
direction. It shows that our people begin to acknowledge that man cannot live by work alone.” Clearly this author writes to a middle class audience. He is effectively rewriting the history of Christmas traditions by ignoring the traditions and practices of working class groups in American history. Earlier artisans and his contemporary proletarian socialists, would, for example, disagree with the idea that “man cannot live by work alone.” It was an artisanal idea, after all to seek perfection in craft. The press worked to suppress and shape the way Christmas was viewed by Americans: a domestic and commercial middle class Christmas was the best, and only way to conduct Christmas celebration.
Homer reinforced the implications of the editors’ of Harper’s Weekly commentary in his depictions of “Christmas out of Doors.” This picture is a tale of two worlds: the concealed middle class domestic and the lower class public. A majority of the subjects outside are clearly members of the working class, the exceptions being the family of four rising up the stairs depicted in the image to join the party indoors. Glaringly, the difference between the quality of the man’s top hat on the left and the hats of the two men on the right delineate socioeconomic status. Perhaps the men on the right are engaging in some sort of revelry or merrymaking, but audiences are not meant to identify with these folks. Instead, Homer purposefully includes the interaction between the top hat man and the boy to evoke the feeling of holiday benevolence.