At the beginning of the 19th century, the celebration of Christmas in the English-speaking world was in a state of disrepute and dis favor.
Observing the festival had been banned by Puritan governments in Scotland, England, and the New England colonies, and even when it became legal again to mark the holiday, Christmas had become Stripped of its religious significance by Enlightenment freethinkers.
In the cities of Great Britain and the United States, the Twelve Days of Christmas were marked by vandalism, interruption of church services, attacks on religious and racial minorities, and urban gangs bent on mayhem.
But just when Christmas seemed on its last legs, the first decades of the 1800s saw the festival almost miraculously revived by writers, poets, musicians, and thinkers in America and England.
In the United States we must thank, among others, the writer Washington Irving and members of the New-York Historical Society.
It was these well-off gentlemen who looked to the history of Dutch settlement in New York and found the figure of Sinterklaas (Saint Nicholas), who they said was a magical Christmas gift-bringer who brought treats for good little girls and boys and switches to paddle the bottoms of bad children.
The poets, who wrote “Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas,” better known as “’Twas the Night Before Christmas” (1822), popularized a fur-clad figure who arrived on Christmas Eve in a reindeer-pulled sleigh full of gifts.
Meanwhile in England, Charles Dickens was refashioning ideas about the sacred season. In his “A Christmas Carol” of 1843, Dickens linked old notions of the holiday as a time of mid-winter jollity and community to the idea of the festival as the feast of family togetherness and forgiveness.
The resurrection of Christmas also owes much to the example of Queen Victoria and the British royal family as celebrators of a family-centred Christmas.
The German background of her husband, Prince Albert, contributed greatly: his importation of the Christmas tree, emphasis on domestic togetherness proved an enormously attractive model for middle-class folk who now sought to emulate their monarch.
Now, In the 21st century we still observe Christmas in ways that Washington Irving, the New-York Historical Society, Charles Dickens, and Queen Victoria would find familiar and approve... of.
