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Clement Moore, Hebrew Scholar and Reluctant Author of ‘A Visit from St. Nicholas’

Clement Moore took far more pride in the Hebrew dictionary he wrote than in A Visit from St. Nicholas, which he also wrote.

He never even intended to publish the poem also known as Twas the Night Before Christmas. He thought it too unscholarly. Moore came up with it for the private enjoyment of his children — but then things got out of hand.

Clement Moore, To the Manor Born

Clement Clarke Moore was born July 15, 1779, on a large estate called Chelsea in Manhattan. His father, Benjamin Moore, served as the Episcopalian bishop of New York and twice as president of Columbia University. His mother, Charity Clarke, was the daughter of the wealthy landowner who owned Chelsea.

Moore would later inherit Chelsea and subdivide it into what is now the Chelsea section of New York. But his wealth didn’t stop him from working. He taught Biblical Learning and, later, Oriental and Greek literature at the General Theological Seminary of the Protestant Episcopal Church.

Moore wanted people to remember him for his opus, the first American Hebrew dictionary, Compendious Lexicon of the Hebrew Language In Two Volumes, published in 1809.

His dictionary, a guide to the literature of heaven, hell and sacred things, is largely forgotten. Instead he is remembered for creating the American conception of Santa Claus from the mid-19^th century until today. It is arguably the best-known poem written by an American.

Illustration from the 1864 edition of Clement Moore’s poem A Visit from St. Nicholas

Merry Christmas

Moore wrote A Visit from St. Nicholas for his six children in 1822 as a Christmas present. Then a friend copied it and submitted it to the Troy, N.Y., Sentinel.

Clement Moore

The newspaper published it on Dec. 23, 1823, and for many years thereafter. It wasn’t until 1837 that he was identified as the author. Moore himself didn’t acknowledge authorship until 1844 – and only because his children insisted.

Sometime in the 1850s, Moore bought a home in Newport, R.I., and stayed there in the summer.

The house is known as ‘Cedars,’ ‘Clement C. Moore House,’ and ‘The Night Before Christmas House.’ It still stands at 25 Catherine St., though it has been broken up into apartments. Some people have claimed he wrote A Visit from St. Nicholas in Newport. The Redwood Library tells us that’s unlikely as the house hadn’t been built when the poem was written.

Clement Moore left his mark on Newport. He was one of 26 people who donated money for what would become Touro Park. He died at his Newport home on July 10, 1863.

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The Christmas holiday actually began in ancient Rome — and so did Italian cookies. The New England Historical Society’s book, Italian Christmas Cookies, tells you how to make those delicious treats. It also bring you the history of the Italian immigrants who brought them to New England. Available now in paperback on Amazon; just click here.

This story about Clement Moore was updated in 2023.

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Black Cake, A Christmas Treat Emily Dickinson Loved To Bake

If something called a black cake sounds like a perfect Christmas sweet from a famously reclusive poet prone to contemplate death – well, it is.

Emily Dickinson not only wrote stunning poetry, she was a terrific baker. She baked for her family, and often sent cakes and breads to her friends along with odd little notes.

Critic R.P. Blackmur wrote in 1937 “[S]he was a private poet who wrote as indefatigably as some women cook or knit.”

You can turn that around: She was a private cook who baked as indefatigably as she wrote. And one of the things she baked was a black cake.

Retouched daguerrotype of Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson was born into a prominent Amherst, Mass., family on Dec. 10, 1830. Her father, Edward Dickinson, was a trustee of Amherst College; her mother, Emily Norcross, was a homebody who spent decades of her life bedridden with chronic illnesses.

Emily had two siblings, brother Austin and sister Lavinia. They grew up in a large home in Amherst, where she lived all her life. When Austin married one of Emily’s friends, Edward Dickinson built a house for them next to the family homestead.

Emily attended the Amherst Academy for seven years, and went to Mount Holyoke (then Mary Lyon‘s Mount Holyoke Female Seminary). Whether troubled by depression, ill health or homesickness, she only lasted there for 10 months. Austin brought her home.

She then helped managed the household, handling the kitchen chores and caring for her mother while Lavinia did the marketing and housekeeping. Neither sister married, and Emily became more and more reclusive.

When she reached her 30s, she pretty much stayed close to home all the time. Lavinia later said their mother needed constant attention, which Emily provided.

The Black Cake

One of the delicacies Emily Dickinson baked was a black cake. It started out in England as a fruitcake or plum cake, cakes made with dried or fresh fruit. As Bruce Kraig explains in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, English women in the early 1800s began to make their plum cakes darker. They did it with treacle, a syrup made during the refining of sugar.

The so-called black cake spread to the British colony of Jamaica, where it got darker and boozier.

American women began to make it too. In 1832, Lydia Maria Child wrote a cookbook recommending using molasses (also made from the sugar-refining process, but whether treacle is molasses is a debate we won’t enter into here).

Lydia Maria Child

“A little molasses makes it dark colored, which is desirable,” wrote Child. (Click here for the recipe.) She didn’t call it black cake, though. She called it wedding cake and iced it. Princess Diana and Prince Charles served a tiered fruitcake at their wedding that lasted quite a long time. An auction house put a piece up for sale in 2018 for $1,200.

In the Caribbean, black cake has more to do with Christmas than weddings. For some, Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without a slice of black cake. It takes a year, say some, to make a proper black cake, and burnt sugar creates the distinctive black color.

It has rum in it, too. According to Wikipedia, “It is possible to become intoxicated from consumption of an excessive amount of rum cake.”

Baking the Black Cake

Emily Dickinson learned to bake bread at the age of 14. She wrote to a friend, “I am going to learn to make bread to-morrow. So you may imagine me with my sleeves rolled up, mixing flour, milk, salaratus, etc., with a great deal of grace. I advise you if you don’t know how to make the staff of life to learn with dispatch.”

She developed into an accomplished baker as well as a poet. She wrote some of her poems on kitchen paper and even wrote one on the back of a recipe for coconut cake.

And she loved to do it. Her kitchen in Amherst was her favorite room, with pale green walls illuminated by the sunlight that streamed through the yellow windowsills.

The Dickinson home.

Her father would only eat bread she baked, which she did every day. Emily’s rye-and-Indian bread took second prize at the 1856 Amherst Agricultural Fair.

In 1883, when she had reached her early fifties, she sent her recipe for black cake with a bouquet of flowers to Nellie Sweetser.

In June of 1884, she collapsed in the kitchen with an apparent nervous breakdown.

“I was making a loaf of cake…when I saw a great darkness coming and knew no more until late at night,” she wrote. Her health continued to suffer, and she died on May 15, 1886 of Bright’s disease.

The Belle of Amherst

In 1976, William Luce’s play about Emily Dickinson, The Belle of Amherst, opened on Broadway. Julie Harris, who starred in it, won a Tony for her performance.

In the play, “Emily Dickinson” recites the actual recipe for a black cake: “two pounds of flour, two pounds of sugar, two pounds of butter, nineteen eggs, five pounds of raisins, one and a half pounds of currants, one and a half pounds of citron, one half pint of brandy — I never use Father’s best — one half-pint of molasses, two nutmegs, five teaspoons of cloves, mace and cinnamon, and — oh, yes, two teaspoons of soda, and one and a half teaspoons of salt.”

Remember, 19^th-century bakers used to do a lot of baking all at once.

Then “Emily” goes on to tell the audience to beat the butter and sugar together, add the 19 eggs one at a time without beating. Beat again, adding the brandy alternately with the flour, soda, spices and salt, which have all been sifted together. Then add molasses. Take the raisins and citrons and gently sprinkle into the batter. Bake for three hours if you use cake pans, six or seven if you use a milk pan.

You can get a more modern (smaller) version of the recipe here, but don’t plan to serve it until next Christmas.

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With thanks to Carol Dommermuth-Costa · Emily Dickinson Singular Poet. This story was updated in 2024.

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A.C. Gilbert, The Man Who Saved Christmas (and Invented the Erector Set)

In 1918, America was at war. The country needed to devote all of its industrial might to victory in Europe. A war council considered banning all toy production and prohibiting gift-giving at Christmas. It took A.C. Gilbert, inventor of the Erector Set, to save Christmas.

Gilbert led a remarkable life. He was a medical doctor, an Olympic gold medal winner, a magician, a toy millionaire, a big-game hunter and, most of all, a kid at heart.

A.C. Gilbert and his Erector Set

He wore old gabardine suits and rubber soled shoes, and he always carried a pipe that he sometimes stuck into his pocket while lit. In late October 1918, he brought a satchel full of educational toys to Washington, D.C., and let a room full of Cabinet secretaries play with them.

He persuaded them that children needed toys because the nation needed scientists and engineers. The war council decided to give Santa free rein after all.

“The toys did it,” Gilbert said.

A.C. Gilbert

Alfred Carlton Gilbert was born in Salem, Ore., on Feb. 13, 1884. His strict Congregationalist father, a banker, “viewed his son with puzzled pride,” according to his obituary.

Though frail, he had a competitive streak, winning a tricycle race at the age of seven. As a boy, he turned the family barn into a fire department, cutting a hole in the haymow floor and installing a wooden pole and cots. A neighbor would set a small brushfire while he and his friends would pretend to sleep on the cots. The neighbor then rang an alarm, and the boys would rush to the fire in a wagon rigged with a 110-foot garden hose.

Gilbert loved magic, and practiced his tricks relentlessly. He got so proficient he once matched a professional magician trick for trick. “My boy, you will be a great success,” the magician said.

Olympic Gold

Gilbert also loved athletics, but only grew to 5 feet 7 inches and weighed 135 pounds. Still, he excelled at track, gymnastics, wrestling and boxing. Gilbert attended Pacific University, where he met and later married Mary Thompson. While dating, he’d put one arm around her and practice magic tricks with his free hand, she recalled.

A.C. Gilbert as a young athlete

He went east in 1904 to study medicine at Yale, but he didn’t intend to open a physician’s practice. Instead, Gilbert wanted to stay in sports as a health advisor.

He competed at the Olympic games in London in 1908, winning a gold medal for pole vaulting. During the trials he set a world record; he was the first man to top 13 feet.

After earning his medical degree in 1909, he borrowed $5,000 from his father and started the Mysto Manufacturing Co. in New Haven. The company made magic kits for kids – cards, interlocking rings, instructions. Soon he opened a store in New York.

Erector Set

One day in 1912 he rode into New York on the train. The railroad was converting from steam to electricity, and Gilbert watched the construction out the train window. The network of girders erected to carry the electricity lines fascinated him. He thought, “What fun to make things with miniature girders.”

At home that night he and his wife sat at the dining room table and cut miniature girders out of cardboard. He then asked a local toolmaker to make him a set from steel.

The Erector Set flew off the shelves. Gilbert renamed his company after himself, and it thrived. It turned out chemistry sets, electric trains, tool chests, minerology sets and, into the 1960s, magic sets.

For more than 50 years, the A.C. Gilbert Co. ranked as the top producer of learning toys n the world.

“I’ve remained a boy at heart and only introduced items that appealed to me. I figured they would appeal to all boys,” he said.

He insisted on punching the time clock just as his employees did, and he stood in line with them in the morning. The company offered benefits like paid maternity leave and health insurance contributions. From the early 1930s to the late 1950s, A.C. Gilbert employed as many as 5,000 people, the largest employer in New Haven.

Vintage Erector Set.

World War I

As the United States prepared to enter World War I, President Wilson appointed government officials to the Council of National Defense. He tasked them with coordinating resources and industry for the war effort. The war council turned the country’s industrial might to making war materiel, banning the manufacture of nonessential goods.

The council asked A.C. Gilbert to make munitions instead of toys, and he did. It asked him to promote War Bonds, and he did. Then the war considered banning gift-giving at Christmas.

A.C. Gilbert could not let that happen.

As president of the Toy Manufacturers of America, Gilbert wangled a meeting with the war council. They gave him 15 minutes to persuade them not to kiss off Santa at Christmas.

American Flyer locomotive

Gilbert packed a bag with toy submarines and trains, picture books and air rifles, and took the train to Washington.

As he sat outside the office of Navy Secretary Josephus Daniels, bureaucrats walked past and glanced at his toys. He tried to hide them behind his satchel.

A.C. Gilbert Saves Christmas

Finally his name was called. A naval guard inspected his toys before he could bring them in.

Gilbert spread the toys out on the table. Daniels focused on a toy submarine, asking where one could buy it.

Navy Secretary Josephus Daniels. He liked the toy subs.

Secretary of Commerce William Redfield pushed a toy train around the table. “I learned the rudiments of engineering on an engine like this,” he said.

Interior Secretary Frank Knight Lane picked up a book on aviation.

According to the Boston Post, Gilbert told the war council.

The greatest influence in the life of a boy are his toys.

A boy wants fun, not education. Yet through the kind of toys American toy manufacturers are turning out, he gets both. The American boy is a genuine boy, and he wants genuine toys. He wants guns that really shoot, and that is why we have given him air rifles from the time he was big enough to hold them.

It is because of toys they had in childhood that the American soldiers are the best marksmen on the battlefields of France.

Finally, he said, toys that educate help boys visualize their future.

The Post ran a photo of Gilbert with his Erector Set above the caption, “The man who saved Christmas.”

Not for the Money

After the war, A.C. Gilbert Co. grew into the largest toy company in the world. “He did it for the satisfaction of competition and to accomplish his goal more than he did it for money,” recalled Herb Pearce, Gilbert’s former plant manager.

Gilbert with his ever-present pipe

Gilbert called his workers “co-workers,” not “employees.” He visited the night shift once a week to see how things were going, and almost always found something to change or improve.

The company had a credit union, offered free legal advice and threw a Christmas party for children. Co-workers could take their grievances directly to the man they knew as A.C.

But the company really stood out, said Pearce, because of its broad range of manufacturing equipment and skills. It had big presses, screw machines, die casting and toolmaking equipment. It made its own dies and plastic molds, did its own printing, made its own boxes, formed its own wires. In addition to toys, the Gilbert company made small appliances as well as educational toys.

A vintage Gilbert chemistry set

Then in 1938, Gilbert bought American Flyer, a struggling toy train manufacturer. During World War II, the company retooled its electric train factory to make parachute flare casings.

“I love to see the wheels go ’round, love to see people develop, it’s not for profits alone,” he told the New Yorker in an interview. “Sure, that’s part of it because no one has any fun going busted, but I know this: just the object of making money has never meant anything to me.”

Living in Paradise

Glibert made plenty of money, however. He bought a country estate in Hamden with two lakes, a golf course and a lodge filled with his stuffed big-game trophies. He shot every kind of American game that had any importance, according to his obituary in the New York Times.

His Paradise Farm had a dairy herd and a pasteurization system that provided milk for the company cafeteria. He bred hunting dogs and champion German shepherds. Gilbert also developed Old Orchard Road in North Haven, one of the town’s finest residential neighborhoods.

At 70, when he wrote his autobiography, he titled it, The Man Who Lives in Paradise.

The U-238 Atomic Energy Lab

In 1950, the A.C. Gilbert Co. introduced the U-238 Atomic Energy Lab, one of the companies few flops. It carried a price tage of $49.50, about $530 today.

The kit included Electroscope, Spinthariscope, a cloud chamber, four glass jars containing uranium-bearing ore samples and batteries. It also featured a comic book, “How Dagwood Split the Atom.” The instructions suggested playing hide-and-seek with hidden radioactive samples and a Geiger counter.

The atomic energy lab didn’t sell because of its price tag rather than its danger.

In 2006, Radar Magazine listed it as the second most dangerous toy of all time. First on the list: lawn darts.

The Gilbert cloud chamber

The A.C. Gilbert Legacy

A.C. Gilbert died in Boston on Jan. 24, 1961. His son, also A.C., had been running the company, but it didn’t survive long after the founder’s death.

Gilbert had a showroom in New York called The Gilbert Hall of Science, a forerunner of today’s science museum. Today, the Eli Whitney Museum & Workshop in Hamden has an exhibit on A.C. Gilbert. It also collects and studies the products and legacy of A.C. Gilbert and his company.

The Erector Set has a legacy of its own. Bill Sewell, a Yale Medical School student, in 1948 built a heart bypass device in 1948 with Erector Set parts and an Erector Set motor. origins of the artificial heart.

Then in the early 1990s, Mark Summers had an assignment to build a virtual reality ride for Disney’s California Adventure in Anaheim. He used Erector set parts to design a way for cars to fly over the virtual-reality screen.

Dr. Jack Kevorkian created his suicide machine from an Erector set, old toys and some jewelry.

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The Christmas holiday actually began in ancient Rome — and so did Italian cookies. The New England Historical Society’s book, 24 Historic Italian Christmas Cookie Recipes, tells you how to make those delicious treats. It also tells you the history of the Italian immigrants who brought them to New England. Available now in paperback and as an ebook from Amazon; just click here.

With thanks to the Library of Congress Inside Adams blog, A.C. Gilbert’s Successful Quest to Save Christmas and to Mental Floss, A.C. Gilbert, The Toymaker Who (Actually) Saved Christmas.

Images: Atomic Energy Lab By Tiia Monto, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=62037438. Early Erector set: By Cullen328 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=75997438. Santa: CCO public domain. American Flyer locomotive: By James G. Howes, Attribution, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6096168. Gilbert Chemistry Set By Joe Mabel, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3344050. Cloud chamber By Science History Institute, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29337436. This story updated in 2024.

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I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day — Hope Surfaces from Despair

On Christmas day in 1863, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was inspired to write the poem we now know as the Christmas carol, I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day. It was a testament to the resilience of the human spirit.

I heard the bells on Christmas Day was born out of Henry Wadsworth Longellow’s depression.

Longfellow had fallen into a depression in 1861 when his second wife Fanny died. She had been sealing envelopes with hot wax when a flame caught her clothes on fire. Henry had rushed to her aid and tried to smother the flames. But by the time the fire was out, Frances had been burned beyond recovery.

She died the next day. Henry, burned badly as well, was too sick to attend her funeral.

The death marked a turning point in Longfellow’s life. His physical appearance changed dramatically as he began growing his beard because the burns disfigured his face. Mentally, he sank into depression.

Fanny Appleton Longfellow with sons Charley and Erny

Winning Frances’ affection had taken Longfellow years, and their 18-year marriage was the happiest time of his life. In the wake of her death, he spent much of his time translating other works and less on his own creation.

Christmas 1862

On Christmas day in 1862 he would record in his journal: “A merry Christmas’ say the children, but that is no more for me.” And even 18 years later he would still be mourning Frances’ loss, when he wrote The Cross of Snow:

In the long, sleepless watches of the night,
A gentle face–the face of one long dead–
Looks at me from the wall, where round its head
The night-lamp casts a halo of pale light.

Here in this room she died; and soul more white
Never through martyrdom of fire was led
To its repose; nor can in books be read
The legend of a life more benedight.

There is a mountain in the distant West
That, sun-defying, in its deep ravines
Displays a cross of snow upon its side.

Such is the cross I wear upon my breast
These eighteen years, through all the changing scenes
And seasons, changeless since the day she died.

In 1863, Longfellow suffered another blow. The poet was a staunch abolitionist, but he, like the entire country, was troubled by the Civil War. His son Charley in March of 1863 had decided that, regardless of his father’s wishes, he would join the fight. He ran off to Washington to enlist in the 1st Massachusetts Artillery.

Dear Papa

A friend posted a letter for him after he left:

Dear Papa

You know for how long a time I have been wanting to go to the war I have tried hard to resist the temptation of going without your leave but I cannot any longer, I feel it to be my first duty to do what I can for my country and I would willingly lay down my life for it if it would be of any good God Bless you all. Yours affectionately

Charley.

Charley’s commanding officer soon discovered the boy’s influential family ties, and promoted Charley to lieutenant. Charley believed his aunt had probably helped procure the commission for him.

Charley Longfellow and friend, D.H.L. Gleason, 1863

Longfellow feared for his son’s future. In June, Charley came down with fever. Longfellow went to Washington and brought him back to spend summer on leave at the family cottage in Nahant, Mass.

Though committed to the fight, the romance of war was stripped away for Charley in the coming months of battles. In one letter home, he described seeing a fellow soldier lose his leg and other close calls:

“They may talk about the gaiety of a soldiers life but it strikes me as pretty earnest work when shells are ripping and tearing your men to pieces.”

In November, Charley’s own luck ran out. At New Hope, Va., his unit was engaged in a battle and he was shot. The bullet went through him from back to shoulder, just nicking his spine.

Again Longfellow had to travel to Washington to retrieve his son from the hospital. They arrived back at their Cambridge home on December 8, and a grim Longfellow set about the months-long process of trying to nurse his son back to health.

I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day

The circumstances challenged his resolve, but he was inspired when he heard the bells. He found in them a message that peace would come again to the troubled nation. They inspired him to write the poem, Christmas Bells.

I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along
The unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Till, ringing, singing on its way,
The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime,
A chant sublime
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Then from each black, accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South,
And with the sound
The carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

It was as if an earthquake rent
The hearth-stones of a continent,
And made forlorn
The households born
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And in despair I bowed my head;
“There is no peace on earth,” I said:
“For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!”

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead; nor doth he sleep!
The Wrong shall fail
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men!”

Charley never did return to fight, despite his wish to. He received an honorable discharge in February of 1864. Longfellow’s poem, published originally in a magazine, would be set to music in 1872, but with the middle stanzas often removed.

Charles Appleton Longfellow

To hear Burl Ives sing I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day, click here.

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You’ll enjoy the story of Longfellow’s love affair with Fanny–and 14 other sad, funny and inspiring romances–in “Love Stories From History.” Click here to order your copy today.

This story about the carol, ‘I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day,’ updated in 2024.

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We Won’t Go Until We Get Some: New England Colonial Christmas Traditions

Just how rowdy was a New England colonial Christmas? It depended on who was celebrating. But it bore little resemblance to Christmas today, and New Englanders found it a touchy subject from the start.

Illustration of Gov. William Bradford putting down the Christmas revels in the earliest days of Massachusetts. (Howard Pyle)

Illustration of an early New England colonial Christmas tradition: Plymouth Gov. William Bradford putting down the Christmas revels. (Howard Pyle)

The Pilgrims who arrived in Plymouth were a mix of people. They were led by separatists who despised the Christmas traditions of the Anglican Church as well as the Roman Catholic Church. They wanted to establish their own protestant churches, free of Christmas.

But many of the Pilgrims did not come to America for religious reasons at all. They were craftsmen or farmers recruited to ensure the colony would survive, and they simply wanted to make a better life in America.

New England Colonial Christmas

On their first Christmas at Plymouth, the Pilgrims celebrated the best way they knew how: They worked right through it. By the next year, Christmas traditions began infiltrating the group, and Gov. William Bradford had to put down the celebrations. He went so far as to call the Christmas treat mincemeat pie ‘idolatrie in a crust.’

As the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony gained ascendance, they had plenty of disagreements with the Pilgrims in Plymouth. But they largely agreed in their dislike of Christmas.

There remained in their midst, however, people who did celebrate Christmas with gusto. The fishing communities especially embraced the New England colonial Christmas, with their less-literate members mostly celebrating the holiday. Much of what actually happened was never recorded. What was recorded was seen through the eyes of the Puritan theocracy, and they painted an ugly picture of Christmas indeed.

Paganism

The Puritans complained that Christmas arose from an unnatural ideological marriage between the Roman Catholic Church and the pagans. They thought it originated in the Roman festival Saturnalia.

Just how pagan is Christmas? We won’t try to settle that debate. But the New England colonial Christmas increasingly irritated the Puritans, and they decided to stomp it out.

In 1647, the reformers in England outlawed Christmas. And the Puritans in Massachusetts and Connecticut soon followed suit. People who celebrated Christmas would be subject to a fine of five shillings.

In 1662, a Beverly, Mass., man found himself in court for hosting a drunken gathering on Christmas Day. He was a troublemaker whose family frequently tangled with Puritan society. His wife would eventually die on the gallows, but that’s another story.

More Mayhem

A second glimpse of Christmas mayhem occurred on Christmas Day in 1679 in Salem, Mass. Joseph Foster, Benjamin Fuller, Samuel Brayebrooke and Joseph Flint decided they wanted some booze for the holiday. They knew 72-year-old John Rowden had made perry, a liquor made from pears. So they dropped in to pay him an unscheduled visit.

Rowden told them to get out. Fuller refused, saying, “it was Christmas Day at night and they came to be merry and to drink perry, which was not to be had anywhere else but here and perry they would have before they went,” according to court records. The encounter ended in a fight and stolen property.

Twelfth Night (The King Drinks), by David Teniers the Younger (1634-1640), foreshadowing the New England colonial Christmas.

Drinking was just the tip of the iceberg when it came to Christmas debauchery. The New England colonial Christmas included wassailing, mumming, gambling and feasting.

The Puritans constantly struggled to keep Christmas under control. The hoi polloi embraced the New England colonial Christmas as quite a good time.

With the harvest over, the cupboards full and the long winter yet to come, December seemed a perfect month for a ripping good celebration.

Lord of Misrule

In England and elsewhere in the colonies, towns would appoint a “lord of misrule.” This custom borrowed from Saturnalia as well. Generally the towns appointed someone of lower standing to this role to serve as master of ceremonies of the Christmas celebration either up to or including the Twelfth Night festivities.

The reason? During the New England colonial Christmas, people reversed their roles and the poor ruled over the wealthy. In addition to the feasting and drunkenness, the more outgoing celebrants used the holiday as an excuse for wassailing. Wassailing involved barging into the houses of the wealthier citizens, singing a song or two or putting on a short skit, and demanding food, drink and money.

Figgy Pudding

Perhaps you’ve sung the Christmas carol, We Wish You a Merry Christmas, with its chorus of “Oh, bring us a figgy pudding…we won’t go until we get some.” They meant it.

Figgy pudding with flaming brandy

The more obliging citizens would fork over the goods. Others, however, declined — resulting in fights, rock-throwing and hard feelings. Even more abhorrent to the Puritans was the sexual promiscuity that accompanied Christmas. Celebrants cast aside their inhibitions.

One of the more colorful New England colonial Christmas traditions was mumming, in which men dressed like women (and vice versa) or simply disguised themselves in a range of costumes. Mumming could be as innocent as street theater or as bawdy as a loosely disguised roving orgy.

The Puritan objected to the custom because a person disguised could slip into a neighbor’s house for an assignation without raising eyebrows. How commonplace was the debauchery? It’s probably impossible to say, though the good Puritans wanted nothing to do with it.

In 1681, with the Civil War over in England, the crown began pressuring Massachusetts to embrace the Anglican Church and roll back Puritan reforms. The colony complied by repealing the laws against Christmas. But the holiday remained frowned upon.

The Ghost of Christmas Past

Mad Mirth

In 1687 the Puritan minister Increase Mather railed against Christmas. He declared that those who celebrated it “are consumed in compotations, in interludes, in playing at cards, in revellings, in excess of wine, in mad mirth.”

No one really disagreed. It just didn’t bother some people the way it did Mather and the Puritan leadership.

It would take more than 100 years for Christmas to develop the wholesome, twinkly veneer it has today. While the southern colonies and New York, with its Dutch roots, embraced Christmas earlier, New England Protestants would hold out well beyond 1800.

The rest of the nation also felt the influence of the New England colonial Christmas tradition. In 1789, for instance, Congress held a session on Christmas Day. Businesses throughout New England always opened on Christmas. And children attended school on Christmas well into the 1800s.

The New England Colonial Christmas Gets a Facelift

By the early 1800s, however, with Episcopalians and Catholics already celebrating Christmas, the holdout Protestants felt pushed to join in. Most, though, still considered Christmas a pagan holiday that the Catholic Church had co-opted for its own purposes.

The holiday got a facelift with the poem Twas The Night Before Christmas, published in 1822. and Charles Dickens’ classic A Christmas Carol in 1843. The opposition in the church then began to relent.

Marley’s Ghost, from A Christmas Carol. Original illustration by John Leech from the 1843 edition

After the Civil War, the battle ended. New England joined the rest of the country in embracing Christmas. And Christmas, by the way, embraced New England values, at least to some degree. The over-the-top debauchery and drunkenness gave way once and for all to the quieter, conventional celebrations we know today.

* * *

The Christmas holiday actually began in ancient Rome — and so did Italian cookies. The New England Historical Society’s book, Italian Christmas Cookies, tells you how to make those delicious treats. It also bring you the history of the Italian immigrants who brought them to New England. Available now on Amazon; just click here.

This story about New England colonial Christmas traditions was updated in 2023.

Images: Figgy pudding By Ted Kerwin – originally posted to Flickr as Figgy Pudding with Flaming Brandy, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7162734. Twelfth Night by David Teniers By David Teniers the Younger – PradoWeb Gallery of Art: Image Info about artwork, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15885934.

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