"I don't mean to hate December, it's meant to be the happy time of year."
-- Merle Haggard
We don't make a big to-do about the holidays.
On the first weekend of December, I climb a ladder and get down a box that holds ornaments and a small collection of kitschy seasonal items we've collected over the years. (The Criss-Moose and his buddies. Arkansas Santa with a white razorback emblazoned on his left breast.) We unfold and smooth out the wire branches of our two-foot tall "tree."
We have a single strand of colored lights that drape over the banister.
"A Christmas Gift for You from Philles Records," Sugar Chile Robinson's "Christmas Boogie" and James Brown's "Santa Claus Go Straight to the Ghetto" are optional. Old Fashioneds are not. The whole setup ritual might take 20 minutes.
It's not a maximalist display, but it's not intended ironically either. I like the play of colored lights, and most of our ornaments come with a story. We didn't buy most of them, and those we did we got at the old ARTament bash/fundraiser I wish the Arkansas Arts Center-- excuse me, the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts--would bring back. To paraphrase Quentin Compson, I don't hate the holiday season. I don't. I don't.
I just hate most of the music. (And people like my brother-in-law who puts up his Christmas lights before Thanksgiving and takes them down in March.)
I don't think my friend who annually hangs an effigy of Scrooge on his front porch in December really hates the holidays either. They just make him tired, with all the striving toward merrymaking and the freighted homecomings and the giant inflatable snow globes and penguins that start popping up the week before Thanksgiving.
We tend to think of our holiday traditions as ancient; and maybe relative to our lives, they are. Baby boomers like me can get misty-eyed when someone brings up the old Sears "Christmas Wish Books" we pawed through when we were children. (The 1965 edition, which was mailed out in late August, was 675 pages, 232 of which were devoted to toys.)
That's how a lot of us learned to covet, staring at those slicked pages. For $34.95 you could have a slot car race set--a 51-inch by 34-inch three-dimensional roadway--modeled after James Bond 007's "Road Race," where Bond's Aston Martin squares off against a Mustang Fastback. A Jaguar XKE and a Ferrari 250 GTO were also available for an additional $2.99 each. (Slot cars were pretty big in 1965; the Wish Book devoted 13 pages to them and their accessories, about twice as much space as it devoted to model trains.)
Sears started mailing out Wish Books in 1934, which means that most of the parents of the boomers also experienced the dopamine hit of desiring something you didn't know existed until you stumbled across it.
While Christians might hold the tradition of Christmas presents as symbolic of the tributes made to the baby Jesus by the Magi, the tradition of gift-giving goes back long before the founding of Christianity, with roots in the festivals of the ancient Roman festival of Saturnalia, where thanks were given to the bounty provided by the agricultural god Saturn. Saturnalia festivities took place Dec. 17-24; the menu included sacrifices, public banquets, wild partying where the swells mixed with the common folk and their slaves, and the exchanging of gifts.
But most of our Christmas-season traditions were born in the 19th century. Clement Clarke Moore's "A Visit From St. Nicholas" (which more of us know as "The Night Before Christmas") was first published in 1823; Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" in 1843.
Thomas Nast's drawings of Santa Claus, which codified the modern image of the jolly fat man, debuted in 1862. There was an overtly political message in that first drawing: Nast drew Santa giving out presents in a Union Army camp, wearing a star-covered jacket and striped pants. The toy he holds in his hand is a puppet with a rope around its neck and the face of Confederate president Jefferson Davis.
The Christmas tree is also genuinely ancient, with roots in paganism. Martin Luther (probably) began the tradition of decorated and lighted Christmas trees in Germany in the 1600s, but it wasn't until 1848 that Prince Consort Albert introduced the Teutonic idea into England.
President Franklin Pierce erected the first Christmas tree at the White House in 1856, and within 15 years they were a fixture in the homes of most middle-class Americans. By 1870, glass ornaments were being sold at Macy's.
These trees were lit with wax candles. Every year, dozens if not hundreds of house fires were caused by Christmas trees. Prudent people only lit their trees once, on Christmas Day, and had buckets of water handy when they did so.
In 1882, Edward Hibberd Johnson, an inventor who worked with Thomas Edison, hand-wired a string of 80 twinkling, walnut-sized electric lights--colored red, white, and blue with crepe paper-- around the Christmas tree in his Manhattan home. The lights became a media sensation, and among the wealthy who happened to live in areas where home electrical service was available, a status item.
In 1894, President Grover Cleveland had the first electrically lit Christmas tree in the White House, with more than 100 multicolored lights. The first commercially produced Christmas lights were manufactured in strings by Edison's General Electric Company of Harrison, N.J., and advertised in the December 1901 issue of Ladies' Home Journal. A string of 16 bulbs sitting in brass sockets sold for $12, the equivalent of about $350 today.
By 1914, a similar string of lights cost just $1.75. (Which is about $49 in today's dollars.) And by the time the Sears Christmas Wish Book appeared (in the depths of the Great Depression), colored Christmas lights were ubiquitous in America.
All traditions have to start somewhere. In my house we have our pirate holiday rituals. We observe Festivus, particularly that part about the airing of the grievances. We secretly rejoice whenever any social engagement is canceled. We use the Spode Christmas tree glasses all month. Most of all, we avoid retail stores.
We hunker down. If we make it through December, we'll be fine.