Hello? Hello? Is anyone actually there?
As long as I am once again stuck posting on Black Friday, the day after American Thanksgiving that marks the start of the Christmas shopping season, I might as well take a bold, clickbaity tack and blame the commercialization of Christmas on short story writers.
Yes, fellow scribes, j’accuse!
In years past, I talked about how Christmas in America went from being
a holiday marked by drunken hooliganism to one supposedly dedicated to blissful domesticity. The agent in that drama was Santa Claus, whose literary popularization in the 1820s allowed civic-minded adults to focus the holiday on children. That twist also forced young men to be responsible. They could no longer wander the streets on wintry days off; they had to earn and spend wisely if they were to produce presents for children (and eventually all their loved ones) on Christmas Day.
I am not making this up. It all comes from a fantastic book,
The Battle for Christmas: A Cultural History of America’s Most Cherished Holiday, by historian Stephen Nissenbaum. (A terrible title, but a wonderfully instructive book nonetheless.)
Americans had a huge hurdle to overcome to finally embrace Christmas. The nation’s earliest settlers, Puritans, banned the holiday. But by 1680, Professor Nissenbaum argues, their cultural impact had begun to wane in the colonies and in England as well. Slowly, printed materials such as almanacs began denoting December 25th as Christmas-Day once again. Hymnals began including Christmas hymns. By the 1730s, Benjamin Franklin prescribed what Nissenbaum calls “
temperate mirth” (Nissenbaum’s italics, not mine or Franklin’s) for the season.
And when our historian studies the diaries of Martha Ballard, a Maine midwife, he finds that Mrs. Ballard often worked on Christmas. By the 1790s, if Mrs. Ballard did anything special at all to mark the holiday, she and her husband visited friends and family. She shopped for ingredients such as rum, sugar, ginger, allspice, and other fancy ingredients, and spent the run-up to the Christmas week baking cakes or pies. The implication was that good, honest, industrious folks did moderately festive things for Christmas. They might sip a cup of drink or eat a slice of mince meat pie. They’d sit in someone’s home and chat or sing. They didn’t extort money from their neighbors on a wanton parade of inebriated wassailing, as was the custom in big cities. They also didn’t buy presents for each other. That just was not part of the early U.S. Christmas tradition.
Mrs. Ballard—who was, remember, a midwife—did note that young people of her acquaintance did apparently go a-courting during this time of year. (Dutiful historian Nissenbaum notes that, statistically, babies in this era were often born in great numbers in September or October, indicating that Christmas-time was indeed busy for some people.)
The poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” became popular in the 1820s, and by the 1830s publishers in the U.S. major cities cranked out annual books intended to be purchased by adults to give to children. They had names like The Girl’s Own Book, or The American Girl’s Book, and were filled with stories, games, puzzles, poems, that promised to be absolutely wholesome and edifying for the child you loved. There were books for boys, too. In one of these books in the 1840s, Nissenbaum discovers a reprint of E.T.A. Hoffman’s “The Nutcracker,” which was first written in 1816.
The earliest advertisement for “Christmas Gifts” that Nissenbaum was able to find dated to 1806, in a Salem, Massachusetts, newspaper. Tellingly, the ad was placed by a bookseller. Eventually, adults also became recipients of the book-buying tradition. These books were more lavish, with gold-leaf paper edges, embossed covers, colored engravings, and “presentation plates”—a page at the front where the giver would inscribed the book to their loved one. Husbands and wives gifted each other these books; suitors presented them to young ladies who were the object of their affection.
Today, we would call these books anthologies, because they included a mix of stories and poems by different writers. Back then, they didn’t yet have names for such tomes. At first, these books—whether for adults or children—were called “Christmas Boxes,” co-opting the term Brits used for the tradition of Boxing Day. Eventually, these books and any other gift offered to a loved were dubbed Christmas presents. (Hence my italics in the previous paragraph.)
And because tokens of love back then were typically jewelry and flowers, these hardcover volumes were often named after those things, suggesting that they were of equal value. Indeed, these were probably the most expensive books Americans of this time ever bought, aside from fancy family Bibles, which were also bought in profusion at Christmas.
Nissenbaum enumerates a long list of the annuals:
“Thus, for jewelry, there were the Amaranth, Amethyst, Brilliant, Coronet, Diadem, Gem, Gem of the Season, Jewel, Literary Gem, Lyric, Opal, Pearl, and Ruby. For flowers, there were Autumn Leaves, Bouquet, Christmas Blossoms, Dahlia, Dew-Drop, Evergreen, Floral Offering, Flowers of Loveliness, Garland, Hyacinth, Iris, Laurel Wreath, Lily, Lily of the Valley, Magnolia, May Flower, Moss-Rose, Primrose, Rose, Rose Bud, Violet, Winter-Bloom, Wintergreen, Woodbine, and Wreath.”
To carry the analogy to the present day, it would be as if readers in our genre looked forward to year-end anthologies such as Mr. Pachter’s Christmas annual,
The Poinsettia, or Mr. Bracken’s Christmas
Silver Bell.
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| Cover of the 1844 edition of The Opal. |
I tracked down a 1848 copy of
The Opal: A Pure Gift for the Holy Days. With nine engraved plates and gilt-decorated moroccan leather, this copy will sent you back $3,000 today, not because of the book’s scarcity, but because this particular copy was once
owned and inscribed by FDR. The
scanned copy I found online contains 42 different poems and stories, written by as many writers and poets.
During the colonial period in America, publishers in the colonies and across the pond shamelessly plagiarized works to fill their newspapers, almanacs, and magazines. But the 1820s and 1830s marked a shift, a time when editors began paying decent rates to writers for original work. For the first time in U.S. history, one could earn a living as a writer.
That said, the only two bylines I recognized in the 1848 Opal were those of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and the book’s editor, Mrs. Sarah Josepha Hale, aka “The Mother of Thanksgiving.” And yes, as I began reading some of the pieces at random, my eyes began to bleed. Victorian prose is not my cup of tea.
Mrs. Hale, you might recall from one of
my earlier posts, was once the most influential “editress” in the country. For
Godey’s Lady’s Book, which had the highest circulation of any publication in the nation, she bought the work of countless writers, now famous or otherwise. Throughout the year, as she worked on her lady’s magazine, she also compiled stories destined for her Christmas edition. In May 1844, when she was buying for the 1845 edition, to be published in the fall of 1844, a writer wrote to say that he’d offered a story to one editor, N.P. Willis, who declined it, suggesting he send it to Mrs. Hale for her Christmas
Opal.
Under these circumstances, I have thought it best to write you this letter, and to ask you if you could accept an article from me—or whether you would wish to see the one in question—or whether you could be so kind as to take it, unseen, upon Mr Willis’s testimony in its favor. It cannot be improper to state, that I make the latter request to save time, because I am as usual, exceedingly in need of a little money.
With high respect
Yr. Ob. St. Edgar A Poe
Those of you who write short stories really ought to try this gambit sometime.
Hi. Remember me, the penurious writer? Will you buy a story someone else rejected sight unseen because I need a little casheesh?
This becomes all the more hilarious when you consider that the story Mr. Poe offered Mrs. Hale was in fact
“The Oblong Box.” Good editors then and now hew closely to some sort of theme when selecting their stories. Mrs. Hale would later tell readers of the 1845
Opal that she choose stories that “all harmonize in one deep holy sentiment of Christian love.”
Gee—I suppose we cannot fault her for choosing
not to include a seafaring tale of a dead-wife-in-a-wooden-crate in her
pure gift for the holy days.
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| Pure and holy: the title page of the 1845 Opal. |
But she did dangle a carrot before Mr. Poe, who had written a snoozer of a travel essay (
“The Elk”) for the 1844
Opal. He jumped on it:
New-York. May 31rst 44.
My Dear Madam,
I hasten to reply to your kind and very satisfactory letter, and to say that, if you will be so good as to keep open for me the ten pages of which you speak, I will forward you, in 2 or 3 days, an article which will about occupy that space, and which I will endeavour to adapt to the character of “The Opal.” The price you mention—50 cts per page—will be amply sufficient; and I am exceedingly anxious to be ranked in your list of contributors.
Should you see Mr Godey very soon, will you oblige me by saying that I will write him in a few days, and forward him a package?
With sincere respect.
Yr Ob. St
Edgar A Poe
At the time he accepted
her $5 payment, which amounts to about $210 in 2024, his most famous stories (“The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Gold Bug,” etc.) were all behind him, and he was a well-known lecturer, poet, and critic. It was also five years before his death.
The “Christmas” article he submitted, and which Mrs. Hale did publish, was a ruminative essay about art, its creators, and personal growth entitled
“A Chapter of Suggestions.” As one modern writer says, it’s an article filled with
“profound sh*t” that discusses, among other things, why artists tend to drink heavily, and why creators are never appreciated for the genius they inject into the world. As for
Mr. Godey, Mrs. Hale’s Philadelphia publisher, I cannot imagine what Mr. Poe was sending in that package.
COPY BOY: Mr. Godey, sir? You have a package from Mr. Poe in New York. It’s..um… leaking.
History reveals that Mrs. Hale was just crazy enough to print “The Oblong Box,” his horror/detective tale, in the September 1844 issue of Godey’s Lady’s Book, which did not at all scare the bloomers off hundreds of thousands of American women living in remote areas of the country with taciturn husbands and poor night-time lighting.
So you see, Christmas shopping would not be what it is without the contributions of us short story scribes. From Christmas annuals, it was a hop, skip, and a jump to expensive kicks, Gameboys, the sports car with a giant bow parked in the driveway, piles of shredded gift wrap, and gluttonous feasting in the company of family members we detest. If you give an American a great short story, in three decades or thirty, they will crave Burberry scarves and winter trips to Turks and Caicos. It’s inevitable.
And when it all became too much, Professor Nissenbaum says, everything we complain about today—the crass commercialization and materialism, the fatigue, the unflagging sense of obligation—was also expressed by a writer in a Christmas short story entitled “Christmas; or, the Good Fairy.” In that piece, a harried female character muses:
“Oh dear! Christmas is coming in a fortnight, and I have got to think up presents for everybody! Dear me, it’s so tedious! Everybody has got everything that can be thought of…
There are worlds of money wasted, at this time of year, in getting things that nobody wants, and nobody cares for after they are got.”
The writer of those words was Harriet Beecher Stowe, and she expressed them in a story published in 1850, not long before Americans heard of her bestseller, Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Christmas shopping is a horror, and short story writers helped make it so.
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The Oblong Box card
from the Poe Tarot Card Deck. |
* * *
Happy Thanksgiving to readers who are celebrating it this week.
See you in three weeks!
Joe
