Chapter 1

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Our American Holidays

Edited by

Robert Haven Schauffler

and Others

A series of anthologies for the use of students and teachers in schools and colleges; consisting of the best verse, plays, stories, addresses, special articles, orations, etc. Applicable to the holidays listed as follows:

CHRISTMAS.........................._December 25th_ DEMOCRACY DAYS.................................... EASTER............................_March or April_ GOOD WILL DAYS.................................... HALLOWE'EN.........................._October 31st_ INDEPENDENCE DAY........................_July 4th_ LINCOLN'S BIRTHDAY................._February 12th_ THE MAGIC OF BOOKS....................._Book Week_ THE MAGIC OF MUSIC...................._Music Week_ MEMORIAL DAY............................_May 30th_ MOTHER'S DAY................_Second Sunday in May_ PAN-AMERICAN DAY......................_April 14th_ PEACE DAYS........................................ ROOSEVELT DAY......................._October 27th_ THANKSGIVING..........._Last Thursday in November_ WASHINGTON'S BIRTHDAY.............._February 22nd_

* * * * *

Our American Holidays

CHRISTMAS

Its Origin, Celebration and Significance As Related in Prose and Verse

Edited by

ROBERT HAVEN SCHAUFFLER

New York Dodd, Mead and Company 1968

* * * * *

CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

I ORIGIN

Is There a Santa Claus?............... _F.P. Church_ O Little Town of Bethlehem............ _Phillips Brooks_ The Glad Evangel...................... _Kate Douglas Wiggin_ The Shepherds......................... _William Drummond_ A Christmas Carol..................... _James Russell Lowell_ A Christmas Hymn...................... _Alfred Domett_ Sons of the Morning................... _Reginald Heber_ God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen.......... _Dinah Maria Mulock_ The Christmas Silence................. _Margaret Deland_ A Christmas Lullaby................... _John Addington Symonds_ Hymn for the Nativity................. _Edward Thring_ Masters in this Hall................... _Anonymous_ The Adoration of the Wise Men......... _Cecil Frances Alexander_ The Shepherds in Judea................ _Mary Austin_ Christmas Carol....................... _James S. Park_ Neighbors of the Christ Night......... _Nora Archibald Smith_ Cradle Hymn........................... _Isaac Watts_ An Ode on the Birth of Our Saviour.... _Robert Herrick_ Christmas Song........................ _Edmund Hamilton Sears_ A Hymn on the Nativity of My Saviour.. _Ben Jonson_ The Shepherd's Song................... _Edmund Bolton_ A Christmas Carol..................... _Aubrey de Vere_ A Christmas Hymn...................... _Anon_ Christmas Day......................... _Charles Wesley_ Christmas............................. _Anonymous_ Christmas............................. _Nahum Tate_ "While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks by Night"............. _Margaret Deland_ Colonial Christmases.................. _Alice Morse Earle_ The Angels............................ _William Drummond_ Hymn for Christmas.................... _Felicia Hemans_ New Prince, New Pomp.................. _Robert Southwell_ The Three Kings....................... _Henry Wadsworth Longfellow_ Hymn on the Nativity.................. _John Milton_

II CELEBRATION

Christmas Eve at Mr. Wardle's......... _Charles Dickens_ A Visit from St. Nicholas............. _Clement C. Moore_ A Christmas Piece..................... _Fred S. Cozzens_ Wassailer's Song...................... _Robert Southwell_ Christmas Eve......................... _Hamilton Wright Mabie_ Christmas In The Olden Time........... _Walter Scott_ Sly Santa Claus....................... _Mrs. C.S. Stone_ The Waits............................. _Margaret Deland_ The Knighting of the Sirloin.......... _Anonymous_ The Christmas Goose at the Cratchits'. _Charles Dickens_ God Bless Us Every One................ _James Whitcomb Riley_ Bells Across the Snow................. _Frances Ridley Havergal_ Christmas Bells....................... _Henry Wadsworth Longfellow_ Minstrels and Maids................... _William Morris_ Inexhaustibility of the Subject of Christmas................ _Leigh Hunt_ Song of the Holly..................... _William Shakespeare_ Under the Holly-Bough................. _Charles Mackay_ Ceremonies for Christmas.............. _Robert Herrick_ Santa Claus........................... _Anonymous_ The Ceremonies for Christmas Day...... _Robert Herrick_ December.............................. _Harriet F. Blodgett_ The Festival of St. Nicholas.......... _Mary Mapes Dodge_ The Christmas Holly................... _Eliza Cook_ To the Fir-Tree....................... _From the German_ The Mahogany-Tree..................... _William Makepeace Thackeray_ Christmas............................. _Washington Irving_ Church Decking at Christmas........... _William Wordsworth_ So, Now is Come Our Joyful'st Feast... _George Wither_ Fairy Faces........................... _Anonymous_ Merry Christmas....................... _Anonymous_ A Merry Christmas to You.............. _Theodore Ledyard Cuyler_ Christmas Bells....................... _Anonymous_ The Birth of Christ................... _Alfred Tennyson_ The Christmas Carol................... _William Wordsworth_ Christmas at Fezziwig's Warehouse..... _Charles Dickens_ Christmas Bells....................... _John Keble_

III SIGNIFICANCE AND SPIRIT

A Christmas Carmen.................... _John G. Whittier_ The Spirit Of Christmas............... _Charles Dickens_ On Good Wishes at Christmas........... _Friswell_ A Christmas Song...................... _William Cox Bennett_ Sery.................................. _Richard Watson Gilder_ A Christmas Song...................... _Tudor Jenks_ Christmas............................. _Alexander Smith_ Christmas Carol....................... _Phillips Brooks_ The End of the Play................... _William Makepeace Thackeray_ Christ's Nativity..................... _Henry Vaughan_ Christmas Dreams...................... _Christopher North_ Keeping Christmas..................... _Henry Van Dyke_ Mark Well My Heavy, Doleful Tale...... _Anonymous_ A Christmas Carol..................... _Christina G. Rossetti_ The Glorious Song of Old.............. _Edmund H. Sears_ A Christmas Carol for Children........ _Martin Luther_ On Santa Claus........................ _George A. Baker, Jr._ A Christmas Carol..................... _Josiah Gilbert Holland_ An Offertory.......................... _Mary Mapes Dodge_ Christmas Song........................ _Lydia A.C. Ward_ A Christmas Carol..................... _Christian Burke_ A Simple Bill of Fare for a Christmas Dinner.............. _H.H._ A Ballade of Old Loves................ _Carolyn Wells_ Ballade of Christmas Ghosts........... _Andrew Lang_ Hang Up the Baby's Stocking........... [Emily Huntington Miller] The Newest Thing in Christmas Carols.. _Anonymous_ A Christmas Letter from Australia..... _Douglas Sladen_ Christmas............................. _Rose Terry Cooke_

IV STORIES

The Fir Tree.......................... _Hans Christian Andersen_ Little Roger's Night in the Church.... _Susan Coolidge_ Mr. Bluff's Experiences of Holidays... _Oliver Bell Bunce_ Santa Claus at Simpson's Bar.......... _Bret Harte_

V OLD CAROLS AND EXERCISES

God Rest You, Merry Gentlemen Old Christmas Returned Christmas Carol In Excelsis Gloria The Boar's Head Carol Christmas Carol

ADDITIONAL PIECES

A Christmas Insurrection.............. _Anne P.L. Field_ The Night After Christmas............. _Anne P.L. Field_ When the Stars of Morning Sang........ _Anne P.L. Field_ A Prayer at Bethlehem................. _Anne P.L. Field_ The Christmas Fires................... _Anne P.L. Field_ The Mother (A Story).................. _Robert Haven Schauffler_

NOTE

The Publishers desire to acknowledge the kindness of Messrs. Charles Scribner's Sons; Houghton, Mifflin and Company; Little, Brown and Company; Dodd, Mead and Company; Bobbs-Merrill Company and others, who have granted us permission to reproduce selections from works bearing their copyright.

PREFACE

Christmas is our most important holiday, and its literature is correspondingly rich. Yet until now no adequate bundle of Christmas treasures in poetry and prose has found its way into the library of Santa Claus.

While this book brings to children of all ages, in school and at home, the best lyrics, carols, essays, plays and stories of Christmas, its scope is yet wider. For the Introduction gives a rapid view of the holiday's origin and development, its relation to cognate pagan festivals, the customs and symbols of its observance in different lands, and the significance and spirit of the day. This Introduction endeavors to be as suggestive as possible to parents and teachers who are personally conducted and introduced to the host of writers learned and quaint, human and pedantic, humorous and brilliant and profound, who have dealt technically with this fascinating subject.

INTRODUCTION

It was the habit of him whose birthday we celebrate to take what was good in men and remould it to higher uses. And so it is peculiarly fitting that the anniversary of Christmas, when it was first celebrated in the second century of our era should have taken from heathen mythology and customs the more beautiful parts for its own use. "Christmas," says Dean Stanley, "brings before us the relations of the Christian religion to the religions which went before; for the birth at Bethlehem was itself a link with the past."

The pagan nations of antiquity[A] always had a tendency to worship the sun, under different names, as the giver of light and life. And their festivals in its honor took place near the winter solstice, the shortest day in the year, when the sun in December begins its upward course, thrilling men with the first distant promise of spring. This holiday was called _Saturnalia_ among the Romans and was marked by great merriment and licence which extended even to the slaves. There were feasting and gifts and the houses were hung with evergreens. A more barbarous form of these rejoicings took place among the rude peoples of the north where great blocks of wood blazed in honor of Odin and Thor, and sacrifices of men and cattle were made to them. Mistletoe was cut then from the sacred oaks with a golden sickle by the Prince of the Druids, between whom and the Fire-Worshippers of Persia there was an affinity both in character and customs.

[Footnote A: An account of the early history of Christmas may be found in Chamber's Book of Days.]

The ancient Goths and Saxons called this festival Yule, which is preserved to us in the Scottish word for Christmas and also in the name of the Yule Log. The ancient Teutons celebrated the season by decking a fir tree, for they thought of the sun, riding higher and higher in the heavens, as the spreading and blossoming of a great tree. Thus our own Christmas fir was decked as a symbol of the celestial sun tree. The lights, according to Professor Schwartz, represent the flashes of lightning overhead, the golden apples, nuts and balls symbolize the sun, the moon and the stars, while the little animals hung in the branches betoken sacrifices made in gratitude to the sun god.[B]

[Footnote B: A delightful account of the origin of the Christmas tree may be found in Elise Traut's Christmas in Heart and Home.]

As Christianity replaced paganism, the Christians, in the tolerant spirit of their Master, adopted these beautiful old usages, merely changing their spirit. So that the Lord of Misrule who long presided over the Christmas games of Christian England was the direct descendant of the ruler who was appointed, with considerable prerogatives, to preside over the sports of the Saturnalia. In this connection the narrow Puritan author of the "Histrio-Mastix" laments: "If we compare our Bacchanalian Christmasses with these Saturnalia, we shall find such a near affinitye between them, both in regard to time and in manner of solemnizing, that we must needs conclude the one to be but the very issue of the other."

"Merrie old England," writes Walsh,[C] "was the soil in which Merrie Christmas took its firmest root." Even in Anglo-Saxon days we hear of Alfred holding high revelry in December, 878, so that he allowed the Danes to surprise him, cut his army to pieces and send him a fugitive. The court revelries increased in splendor after the conquest. Christmas, it must be remembered was not then a single day of sport. It had the preliminary novena which began December 16, and it ended on January 6, or Twelfth Night. All this period was devoted to holiday making.

[Footnote C: Curiosities of Popular Customs.]

It was a democratic festival. All classes mixed in its merry-makings. Hospitality was universal. An English country gentleman of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries held open house. With daybreak on Christmas morning the tenants and neighbors thronged into the hall. The ale was broached. Blackjacks and Cheshire cheese, with toast and sugar and nutmeg, went plentifully round. The Hackin, or great sausage, must be boiled at daybreak, and if it failed to be ready two young men took the cook by the arm and ran her around the market-place till she was ashamed of her laziness.

With the rise of Puritanism the very existence of Christmas was threatened. Even the harmless good cheer of that season was looked upon as pagan, or, what was worse, Popish. 'Into what a stupendous _height_ of more than pagan impiety,' cried Prynne (...) 'have we not now _degenerated!_' Prynne's rhetoric, it will be seen, is not without an unconscious charm of humor. He complained that the England of his day could not celebrate Christmas or any other festival 'without drinking, roaring, healthing, dicing, carding, dancing, masques and stage-plays (...) which Turkes and Infidels would abhor to practise.'

Puritanism brought over with it in the Mayflower the anti-Christmas feeling to New England. So early as 1621 Governor Bradford was called upon to administer a rebuke to 'certain lusty yonge men' who had just come over in the little ship Fortune. 'On ye day called Christmas day,' says William Bradford, 'ye Gov^r caled them out to worke (as was used), but ye most of this new company excused themselves and said it went against their consciences to worke on ye day. So ye Gov^r tould them that if they made it matter of conscience, he would spare them till they were better informed. So he led away ye rest, and left them; but when they came home at noone from their worke, he found them in ye streete at play, openly: some pitching ye barr, and some at stoole-ball and such like sports. So he went to them and tooke away their implements, and tould them that it was against his conscience that they should play and others worke. If they made ye keeping of it matter of devotion, let them kepe their houses, but ther should be no gameing or revelling in ye streets. Since which time nothing hath been attempted that way, at least openly.'

In England the feeling culminated in 1643, when the Roundhead Parliament abolished the observance of saints' days and "the three grand festivals" of Christmas, Easter, and Whitsuntide, "any law, statute, custom, constitution, or canon to the contrary in any wise notwithstanding." The king protested. But he was answered. In London, nevertheless, there was an alarming disposition to observe Christmas. The mob attacked those who by opening their shops flouted the holiday. In several counties the disorder was threatening. But Parliament adopted strong measures, and during the twelve years in which the great festivals were discountenanced there was no further tumult, and the observance of Christmas as a general holiday ceased.

The General Court of Massachusetts followed the example of the English Parliament in 1659 when it enacted that 'anybody who is found observing, by abstinence from labor, feasting, or any other way, any such day as Christmas day, shall pay for every such offense five shillings.'

The restoration of English royalty brought about the restoration of the English Christmas. It was not till 1681, however, that Massachusetts repealed the ordinance of 1659. But the repeal was bitter to old Puritanism, which kept up an ever attenuating protest even down to the early part of the present century.

There are many superstitions connected with the coming of Christmas itself. The bees are said to sing, the cattle to kneel, in honor of the manger, and the sheep to go in procession in commemoration of the visit of the angel to the shepherds.

Howison in his "Sketches of Upper Canada" relates that on one moonlit Christmas Eve he saw an Indian creeping cautiously through the woods. In response to an inquiry, he said. 'Me watch to see deer kneel. Christmas night all deer kneel and look up to Great Spirit.'

In the German Alps it is believed that the cattle have the gift of language on Christmas Eve. But it is a sin to attempt to play the eavesdropper upon them. An Alpine story is told of a farmer's servant who did not believe that the cattle could speak, and, to make sure, he hid in his master's stable on Christmas Eve and listened. When the clock struck twelve he was surprised at what he heard. 'We shall have hard work to do this day week,' said one horse. 'Yes; the farmer's servant is heavy,' answered the other horse. 'And the way to the churchyard is long and steep,' said the first. The servant was buried that day week.

There is a beautiful superstition about the cock that Shakespeare put into the mouth of Marcellus, in _Hamlet_--

"Some say, that ever 'gainst that season comes Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated, The bird of dawning singeth all night long: And then, they say, no spirit can walk abroad; The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike, No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm; So hallow'd and so gracious is the time."

No other holiday has so rich an heritage of old customs and observances as Christmas. The Yule Log has from time immemorial been haled to the open fire-place on Christmas Eve, and lighted with the embers of its predecessor to sanctify the roof-tree and protect it against those evil spirits over whom the season is in everyway a triumph. Then the wassail bowl full of swimming roasted apples, goes its merry round. Then the gift-shadowing Christmas tree sheds its divine brilliance down the path of the coming year; or stockings are hung for Santa Claus (St. Nicholas) to fill during the night. Then the mistletoe becomes a precarious shelter for maids, and the Waits--descendants of the minstrels of old--go through the snow from door to door, singing their mellow old carols, while masquerades and the merry Christmas game of Snapdragon are not forgotten.[D]

[Footnote D: An exhaustive study of the history and customs of Christmas has been made by W.F. Dawson in "Christmas and its Associations."]

Even the Christmas dinner has its special observances. In many an English hall the stately custom still survives of bearing in a boar's head to inaugurate the meal, as a reminder of the student of Queens College, Oxford, who, attacked by a boar on Christmas day, choked him with a copy of Aristotle and took his head back for dinner. The mince pie, sacred to the occasion, is supposed to commemorate in its mixture of oriental ingredients the offerings made by the wise men of the East. As for turkey and plum pudding, they have a deep significance, but it is clearer to the palate than to the brain.

Elise Traut relates the legend that on every Christmas eve the little Christ-child wanders all over the world bearing on its shoulders a bundle of evergreens. Through city streets and country lanes, up and down hill, to proudest castle and lowliest hovel, through cold and storm and sleet and ice, this holy child travels, to be welcomed or rejected at the doors at which he pleads for succor. Those who would invite him and long for his coming set a lighted candle in the window to guide him on his way hither. They also believe that he comes to them in the guise of any alms-craving, wandering person who knocks humbly at their doors for sustenance, thus testing their benevolence. In many places the aid rendered the beggar is looked upon as hospitality shown to Christ.

This legend embodies the true Christmas spirit which realizes, with a rush of love to the heart, the divinity in every one of "the least of these" our brethren. Selfishness is rebuked, the feeling of universal brotherhood is fostered, while the length of this holiday season by encouraging the reunion of families and of friends, provides a wonderful rallying place for early affections. A wholesome and joyous current of religious feeling flows through the entire season to temper its extravagance and regulate its mirth.

"Under the sanctions of religion," writes Hervey,[E] "the covenants of the heart are renewed.... The lovers of Earth seem to have met together."

[Footnote E: For a beautiful and extended discussion of the significance of the day, see Hervey's "The Book of Christmas."]

Christmas is the birthday of one whose chief contribution to the human heart and mind was his message of boundless, universal love, He brought to the world the greatest thing in the world and that is why the season of his birth has won such an intimate place in our hearts and why its jubilant bells find this echo there:

"Ring out the old, ring in the new, Ring, happy bells, across the snow; The year is going, let him go; Ring out the false, ring in the true.

"Ring out the grief that saps the mind, For those that here we see no more; Ring out the feud of rich and poor, Ring in redress to all mankind.

"Ring out a slowly dying cause, And ancient forms of party strife; Ring in the nobler modes of life, With sweeter manners, purer laws.

"Ring out the want, the care, the sin, The faithless coldness of the times; Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes, But ring the fuller minstrel in.

"Ring out false pride in place and blood, The civic slander and the spite; Ring in the love of truth and right, Ring in the common love of good.

"Ring out old shapes of foul disease; Ring out the narrowing lust of gold; Ring out the thousand wars of old, Ring in the thousand years of peace.

"Ring in the valiant man and free, The larger heart, the kindlier hand; Ring out the darkness of the land, Ring in the Christ that is to be."

R.H.S.

ORIGIN

IS THERE A SANTA CLAUS?

_The following, reprinted from the editorial page of the New York Sun, was written by the late Mr. Frank P. Church:_