By Randall Conrad
Celebrating Christmas didn’t come easily to Massachusetts.
As early as 1659, the colony declared it a crime to observe December 25th except in church. The Revolution came and went; the separation of church and state became a reality in Massachusetts in 1832; and still the Commonwealth held out, outlawing Christmas until the middle of the nineteenth century.
And as late as 1856, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow could still remark, “We are in a transition state about Christmas here in New England. The old Puritan feeling prevents it from being a cheerful hearty holiday; though every year makes it more so.”
Nevertheless, secular celebration did make inroads in the 1820s and 1830s. In Massachusetts, whether or not you celebrated a “cheerful, hearty” Christmas had mostly to do with which side of the Congregational and Unitarian fences your family lived on, and what generation you belonged to.
Take Concord, for example. Both lifestyles coexisted around 1830. Future senator George Hoar recalled, “Little account was made of Christmas. The fashion of Christmas presents was almost wholly unknown.”
In the same town, the Thoreau family represented a vanguard generation, primarily Unitarians of progressive beliefs, who practiced a joyful celebration of Christmas as a family tradition. Henry David Thoreau was a little boy when (according to his brother) the future philosopher and his siblings would hang their stockings at the fireplace, fully expecting Santa Claus to arrive by the chimney, leaving fruits and sweets. (Santa, by the way, was “a very good sort of sprite, who rode about in the air upon a broomstick.”)
Santa on a broomstick? Clearly, the secular Christmas of the 1830s was far from standardized. It was only in 1833 that Clement C. Moore dramatized Santa’s sleigh and reindeer in “A Visit from Saint Nicholas” (“The Night Before Christmas”). Thomas Nast’s cartoons, which finally standardized a roly-poly Santa, didn’t appear till 1884.
In a very engaging and spirited book, The Battle for Christmas, historian Stephen Nissenbaum traces the evolution of America’s traditional Christmas celebration. His chapter, Under the Christmas Tree: A Battle of Generations examines the Rev. Charles Follen’s legendary 1835 introduction of the candle-lit, gift-bearing tree – and places it in the broader cultural context of nineteenth-century social transitions. As it turns out, Rev. Follen’s anti-slavery activism played a part, too. From Nissenbaum’s book:
Legend has it that Charles Follen, a German-American professor at Harvard, introduced America’s first Christmas tree. The source of that legend is a popular book written by a very famous British visitor to the United States, a woman named Harriet Martineau, who happened to witness the Follens’ tree while she was touring New England. As Martineau wrote, ‘I was present at the introduction into the new country of the German Christmas-tree.’
Though this was not the first American Christmas tree, it is certainly true that Charles Follen set up a Christmas tree in Martineau’s presence for his son and namesake, an endearing 5-year-old whom everybody called ‘little Charley.’
When Martineau arrived, Follen and his wife Eliza were fastening little candles to the tree, actually the cut-off tip of an evergreen, and hanging toys and sweets from the branches before little Charley and his playmates got home.
Finally, the double doors were thrown open and the children poured in, their voices instantaneously hushed. ‘Their faces were upturned to the blaze, all eyes wide open, all lips parted, all steps arrested,’ wrote Martineau. ‘Nobody spoke, only Charley leaped for joy.’
The children proceeded to the sweets, the adults guiding the little hands around the bright candle flames.
Martineau concluded her account by predicting that the Christmas tree ritual would surely become an established American tradition.”
Harriet Martineau’s story of little Charley Follen’s Christmas tree was accurate enough, even if this was not the first American Christmas tree. But in an important way the story was misleading.
Martineau’s evening with the Follens was anything but an accident of travel, and it hardly took place as part of the ordinary New England seasonal cycle… Harriet Martineau had gone to visit the Follens that evening to chart their mutual plans at a moment of crisis, a crisis that was forcing them to make a difficult choice between their personal principles and their professional careers. The issue that precipitated the crisis was nothing less than the movement to abolish slavery in America.
The year 1830 was a banner year for the politically radical German émigré Karl (now Charles) Follen: he became a US citizen, a minister in the Unitarian Church, a full-time professor of German literature at Harvard, and the father of little Charley.
But within less than five years, the radical commitments that had brought him to America in the first place brought him down once again. This time the issue was slavery, a subject that was just beginning to arouse feelings of urgent intensity in a handful of Americans… His fall was heroic.
By 1834 Follen, who was coming up for the equivalent of tenure at Harvard, was a confirmed and uncompromising abolitionist. “But radical abolitionism did not sit well with most Northerners, even with the Boston Unitarian establishment, whose members were offended by what they regarded as its vulgar style as well as its constant insistence that abolition be total and immediate.”
Harvard did not renew Follen’s contract in 1835. Fortunately, his admirers found him a salaried position directing the education of two children whose rich merchant father had died in Boston.
Unfortunately, Follen proved to be a radical in education too. He believed that education, instead of drilling lessons by rote, should draw out the character and energies already present in a child’s young soul. These progressive ideas, Nissenbaum relates, represented “the kind of approach that struck many people (including many Unitarians) as leading inevitably to an indiscriminate parental indulgence of children in their immature desires and whims.”
As his detractors apparently maneuvered against him, the abolitionist educator and staunch Unitarian stuck to his principles – and lost his job only weeks before Christmas of 1835.
“Through these trying hours, as always,” writes Nissenbaum, “Follen maintained his characteristically calm, patient demeanor, but he did not retreat a single inch. He was a man of extraordinary principle and tenacity.”
