Notes from my Knapsack 12-21-17

Notes from my Knapsack 12-21-17

Jeff Gill

 

Christmas and customs in early Granville

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It is probably worth noting that Bushnell's early history of Granville, published in 1889 and written over the previous decades with resort to some of those first generation settlers, has not one mention of Christmas in it.

 

Not in the index, not in a search of the pages word by word. Many details of the life of the original Christian bodies here, Congregational and Methodist and Episcopal and Baptist (the Congregational Church ultimately adopting the Presbyterian form of governance), and about their feasts and frolics, but of Christmas there is not a word.

 

Recall that it was a Congregational body that pioneered the formal settlement of Granville in 1805, with roots going back through Massachusetts to Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans – who had abolished and banned Christmas celebrations in the 1640s. The Scottish Kirk, forerunner to what we know as Presbyterians today, had forbidden Christmas observances back in the 1560s.

 

So when you learn that Charles Dickens gets called "The Man Who Invented Christmas" in a recent (and delightful) movie, and you know "A Christmas Carol" was written in 1843, you start to see the ebb and surge of the cultural and churchly markers of what we call a "traditional Christmas."

 

New Englanders in general were not a Christmasy people, thanks to that Puritan substrate, and the early pioneers across the Western Reserve and here in central Ohio and on across the Northwest Territory . . . they didn't "do" Christmas.

 

In Newark, the noted Father Jean-Baptiste Lamy, later the Archbishop of Santa Fe of whom Willa Cather so wonderfully writes in fictional form through "Death Comes For the Archbishop," is recorded as having encouraged his parishioners in the 1840s to decorate their new church, the first St. Francis de Sales parish, with evergreen boughs and candles, and the Protestants would crowd around the windows outside to see this strange sight.

 

In majority Catholic countries, there were religious observances around Christmas, and especially northern Europe and Scandinavia had cultural customs involving Sinter Klass and magic reindeer and the like. Cities on the east coast, like New York, had immigrant populations through whom some of these traditions began to infiltrate the population, including the strange and marvelous idea of cutting down a tree outdoors and dragging it into your house.

 

So when Washington Irving began to write about the ancient rural Christmas customs of Great Britain in 1819, and Charles Dickens catches that spark to blow into the warm hearth of his "Carol" in 1843, they are bringing back a set of practices over 200 years set aside. The urban flicker of interest in all this, shown in pieces like Clement Clarke Moore's "A Visit From St. Nicholas" of 1823, becomes a bonfire across the country following the Civil War, when soldiers in camp from Ohio and Iowa and Missouri meet troops from Boston and Philadelphia and NYC and then, in 1865, bring home the customs of gifts and trees and the full-blown commemoration of Christmas itself as a national celebration.

 

Just so, in Granville you see in the old records very little mention even of December 25 as a date for religious or social celebration, let alone the word Christmas. But after our Civil War veterans return home, they bring new customs like bearded men, men and women sitting together in church, and Christmas much as we know it today.

 

May your Christmas be a season of joy however you celebrate it!

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he's got his stockings hung by the chimney with care. Tell him about your family traditions at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.