Christmas Creep and Other Joyous Holiday Traditions

Eric B. Schultz

Not long ago, a friend sent me a video which featured a new holiday character, “Pumpkin-Headed Turkey Claus,” with a note saying how appalled he was with the way retailers had hijacked

the holidays.

I’m pretty jaded myself by holiday retailers. But even I’ve winced a few times this fall.  There was the Christmas wrapping-paper sale I stumbled upon in mid-October, for example, and the recent news that many large retailers would be opening their doors at 8 or 9 p.m. on Thanksgiving evening.  (Who’s going to eat cold turkey sandwiches with me?)  Now, I’d been introduced to the Pumpkin-Headed Turkey Claus offering proof positive that Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas had finally been smashed together into the twisted wreckage of one long retail extravaganza.

Remember the time when Christmas was simple and less commercial, when you could step out of your door into a Currier and Ives print.  No?  How about a $29 Thomas Kinkade “Memories of Christmas” print?  Precisely.  One of the greatest of all holiday traditions is recalling a holiday season—historian Stephen Nissenbaum reminds us in his superb book, The Battle For Christmas—that never existed at all.


Commercial Christmas presents were already common in America by the 1820s, Nissenbaum writes, and in 1834 a letter to a Boston Unitarian magazine complained about aggressive advertising and the fact that “everybody gives away something to somebody,” turning the holiday into a source of bewilderment.  In 1850 when Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote her Christmas story, readers could identify with the character who groaned, “Christmas is coming in a fortnight, and I have got to think up presents for everybody!  Dear me, it’s so tedious!”*  Just a few years before, Philadelphia’s confectioners had begun displaying huge cakes in their shop windows a few days before Christmas, actively competing for customers.

Professor Nissenbaum also reminds us that the figure of Santa Claus, all but invented in the early nineteenth century, was first employed to sell Christmas goods in the 1820s.  By the 1840s the jolly old chief of elves had become a common commercial icon.  Christmas had turned into “the thin end of the wedge by which many Americans became enmeshed in the more self-indulgent aspects of consumer spending.”

Few technologies would have a greater impact on Christmas and consumerism than the railroad.  In The Search for Order, Robert Wiebe tells us that it was two great explosions of railroad construction following 1879 and 1885 that, combined, produced hundreds of miles of feeder line designed to connect countless American towns—once isolated communities—into a single, massive, national distribution system.  This was aided by agreement on coordinated time zones in 1883, and a standard railroad gauge largely adopted by 1890. 

Retailers heard the whistle and jumped on board.  In 1872, Aaron Montgomery Ward produced his first mail-order catalogue, in 1874 Macy’s presented its first Christmas display, and in 1888 the first Sears catalog was published.  By 1890 many Americans were trading Christmas cards (thanks to affordable imports), and Santa had gone from icon to messenger, his arrival defining the holiday for many children.   Mass distribution had become a reality, though Santa might have felt more at home in a boxcar than a sleigh.

In November 1924, editor and journalist Samuel Strauss (1870-1953) penned “Things Are in the Saddle” for the Atlantic Monthly, an essay that addressed head-on the issue of American consumerism (or what he termed “consumptionism”, i.e.—the science of compelling men to use more and more things). “Something new has come to confront American democracy,” Strauss sounded the alarm.  “The Fathers of the Nation did not foresee it.”  And then he asked the reader, “What is the first condition of our civilization?  In the final reason, is it not concerned with the production of things?  It is not that we must turn out large quantities of things; it is that we must turn out ever larger quantities of things, more this year than last year?” Writing in the month leading up to Christmas, Strauss concluded, “The problem before us today is not how to produce the goods, but how to produce the customers.”

What had happened, he concluded with some pain, was that the American citizen had become the American consumer.  Civic duty now meant buying goods as fast as the great machines of industry could produce them, and the great trains of industry could deliver. 

Strauss implicitly understood that the relationship between our year-end holidays and merchant needs has always been incestuous.  While the Pumpkin-Headed Turkey Claus didn’t exist in 1939, for example, President Franklin Roosevelt most certainly did.  When merchants complained that a late Thanksgiving (on November 30) would reduce the number of shopping days before Christmas, he gladly changed the date.   The Thanksgiving Proclamation of 1939 declared the date of the holiday to be not the last, but the second-to-last Thursday of the month.

That same year, Robert L. May created Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer for Montgomery Ward.   And, of course, it’s just a lucky coincidence that 1947’s Miracle on 34th Street wove Santa Claus, Christmas, Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and the company’s flagship store into one happy story.  In 1966, another of our beloved holiday classics, It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, frankensteined Christmas and Halloween when Linus sat in the most sincere of pumpkin patches, waiting for the Great Pumpkin to arise and deliver toys to all the boys and girls.  In fact, you might remember that it was in yet another Peanuts special, It's the Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown, when the kids are disgusted to find Christmas store displays in the middle of April and a sign warning that there are only 246 days left until Christmas.

I don’t mean to sound like the Grinch, but hopefully your children have talked you into purchasing tickets (at $115 per seat) to his live holiday show by now.

In any event, Stephen Nissenbaum, Samuel Strauss, and Robert May all remind us that we come by the “Ho-gobble, gobble” of Pumpkin-Headed Turkey Claus honestly, one in a long line of characters that has contributed to what is now called “Christmas Creep.”  We’ve even developed an entire vocabulary around the launch of retail Christmas, including Grey Thursday, Black Friday and Cyber Monday.  It is the very reason you can hear David Bowie and Bing Crosby singing "The Little Drummer Boy" long before the jack-o-lantern on your front porch goes soft and mealy.

Columnist Yvonne Abraham wrote recently in the Boston Globe that she was shocked to find a house adorned in Christmas lights on the first week of November, and “the red snowman cups at Starbucks came out on Nov. 1. Ditto the elves on shelves at CVS. The wall-to-wall carols weren’t far behind.”  Indeed, global warming scientists warn us that our lawns are moving the equivalent of 6 feet south every year due to climate change.  It seems the Pumpkin-Headed Turkey Claus is here to warn us that Christmas is moving right before our eyes as well, a few hours earlier every year—a cultural movement that is nearly 200 years old and just as traditional as Old St. Nick himself. 

Civil War Soldiers and Conversation Hearts

Heather Cox Richardson

Valentine’s Day is synonymous with Sweethearts Conversation Hearts, those heart-shaped sugar candies with the messages on them: “Be Mine,” “I’m Yours,” and now, “E-mail Me.” The hearts are made in Revere, Massachusetts, at the New England Confectionery Company. Necco makes them from late February through mid-January of the following year for the Valentine’s Day market. They manufacture about 100,000 pounds a day, making more than 8 billion of the hearts every year.

Conversation hearts are the holiday version of the perennial Necco Wafers. Rumor—in the shape of an NPR story, a Boston Globe story, and hundreds of references on the internet—says that Union soldiers carried Necco wafers, which were called Hub Wafers in those days, in their haversacks. To write a lecture on the growth of industry during the Civil War, I set out to verify that little tidbit.

It was harder than you would think.

The histories on the Necco website and the Reference For Business website explain that Necco is the oldest candy company in America. In its earliest incarnation, it was founded in 1847 by an English immigrant to Boston, Oliver B. Chase, and his brother. Chase invented a device that would cut a simple candy, made of sugar, gelatin, and flavoring, into wafers. These early candies were called “Hub Wafers” (“Hub” was the nineteenth-century nickname for Boston). They were surprisingly popular, since they were cheap, durable, and lasted a very long time. This made them easy to ship and to carry, and thus, a likely thing for Civil War soldiers to take with them on their long marches.

But these histories don’t mention the Civil War. To solve my problem, I decided to try the company directly. Telephone calls to the Necco headquarters netted me only answering machines and an email to the company went unanswered.

So I turned to Civil War reenactors. Surely, in their quest for accuracy, they would know whether or not Union soldiers had carried Hub Wafers. Two hours of trolling through reenacting outfitters, newsletters, and educational websites about what Civil War soldiers carried netted me fascinating glimpses of army life (the US Army Center of Military History has a great website on haversacks and mess gear), but nothing on Hub Wafers. A telephone call to a reenactor yielded a fun chat, but no information on Hub Wafers. He had never heard of them.

Turning to primary sources on-line offered more information. In fact, Hub Wafers—or Necco Wafers, as they were sometimes known by the twentieth century, since both words were on the wrapper—seem to have become very visible and very popular in 1913-1915. Both advertising images and original wrappers are available from this era, some for purchase. The ads promise apothecary owners that the wafers will increase profits; they assure mothers that the candies are healthy and a good addition to afternoon tea. It turns out that this timing makes sense. According to the company history, Necco launched an aggressive advertising campaign in 1912; and in 1913, made much of the fact that Arctic explorer Donald MacMillan took Necco Wafers along on his journey, “using them for nutrition and as rewards to Eskimo children.”

By the 1930s, the candies had a huge following. During the Depression, they were cheap enough to be a treat, and well-loved enough that Admiral Richard Byrd took two tons of Necco Wafers on his own polar expedition. By the time of Pearl Harbor, they were the nation’s premier portable candy: the US government requisitioned the entire output of the Necco factory during WWII.

I never did find a historical source for the information that Civil War soldiers carried Hub Wafers. My guess is that some Boston boys did, as they would have carried other foods from home, but that it was hardly systematic. Instead, my search taught me that before modern techniques of refrigeration enabled people to keep chocolate from melting and spoiling, portability was such an important quality in a sweet that Necco was able to turn its wafers into the nation’s leading candy. While eclipsed now by newer products, Necco Wafers still exist, sold in a wrapper almost identical to that of 100 years ago.

Not bad for a candy that may—or may not—have been carried by Civil War soldiers.

End-of-Semester Hiatus: Holiday Edition

Randall Stephens

I'm flying over to Norway today to begin my Fulbright. I hope to post occasional dispatches from the land of the 9:30am sunrise. (I've stocked up on vitamin D.) So, we'll be back up and running as soon as things are settled across the water.

But in the meantime, check out these HS posts and others on Christmas, holidays, and general festivus.

"The Worst Christmas Music," The Onion, AV Staff, December 2, 2011

Historiann, “White Christmas” and A Christmas Story, December 11, 2011

"Yuletide Roundup," December 24, 2010, HS blog

Randall Stephens, "December 31st, 1759: Guinness Inceptum," December 31, 2010, HS blog

Paul Harvey, "Jewish Consumer Rites: Tracing Hanukkah's Roots to Cincinnati and Charleston," December 5, 2010, Religion in American History blog

Randall Stephens, "A Trippy, Merry Christmas" December 24, 2010, Religion in American History blog

"Hannah's Yorkshire Christmas Pie," December 22, 2009, Georgian London

A Seat at the Table of the Nation

Steven Cromack

Thanksgiving approaches. In schools across the country, students are learning about the Pilgrims with their black buckle hats, the Indians with their feathers, and a feast in which both groups came together in peace and harmony. At this first thanksgiving, both groups celebrated the bountiful blessings of company and friendship, while the Pilgrims gave thanks to their gracious God. Students learn of the first thanksgiving proclamation made by President Washington, and that, since then, Thanksgiving has become part of our national tradition.

The reality is that the Thanksgiving holiday, as we know it today, comes from Sara Josepha Hale, a nineteenth-century journalist, who petitioned President Lincoln for a national day of thanks, and singlehandedly linked giving thanks with eating turkey and pies.

Although many attribute the first thanksgiving to the Pilgrims, that celebration was nothing more than a harvest festival. In his book, We Gather Together: The Story of Thanksgiving, anthropologist Ralph Linton outlined the harvest festivals celebrated in the Old World. In the Hebrew, Greek, Roman, Scottish, Irish, Dutch, English, and Slavic traditions, there appears an annual harvest festival of feasting and giving thanks. In the same way, the Pilgrims, who carried with them their Old World traditions, were naturally going to have harvest festivals and give thanks for their blessings.

In 1895, Reverend William DeLoss Love wrote a comprehensive history of the New England harvest festivals. He noted that the 1621 event, “was not a thanksgiving at all, judged by their Puritan customs, which they kept in 1621; but as we look back upon it after nearly three centuries, it seems so wonderfully like the day we love that we claim it as the progenitor of our harvest feasts” (69). Reverend Love, instead, would have more realistically been familiar with the events of a few decades earlier and one prominent journalist.

Nineteenth-century journalist Sara Josepha Hale invented the thanksgiving that exists today. Hale was the editor of Godey’s Lady's Book, the nation’s premiere magazine for nineteenth-century women. In it, she published numerous editorials urging the nation to set aside the last Thursday in November as a day of thanks. In the September 1860 edition of Godey, Hale wrote, “THANKSGIVING—the new National Holiday.—We must advert once more to this grand object of nationalizing Thanksgiving Day, by adopting, as a permanent rule, the last Thursday in November in all the States.” In addition to this one, she had published similar petitions in Godey’s since 1855. One reader wrote Hale in November of 1859, “DEAR MADAM: Your admirable suggestions in relation to the simultaneous observance of Thanksgiving Day over the whole Union have, before this, made a deep, and, let us trust, an abiding impression in the most influential and desirable quarters.” Hale also published a cookbook titled Mrs. Hale’s New Cook Book, with recipes for turkey and sweet potatoes. In an effort to make permanent her desire for a national holiday, she wrote over forty years worth of letters to governors and presidents.

Finally, in 1863, President Lincoln recognized the political advantage to having a national day of thanks. In 1863, he declared, “I do, therefore, invite my fellow-citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a Day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens.” For Lincoln, appealing to the nation and God to give thanks was an attempt to start a healing process for a nation still embroiled in a bloody Civil War. In 1864, Lincoln made a similar proclamation. After Lincoln’s assassination, Hale wrote President Johnson and made the same request. As a result, every president following Lincoln, because of Hale’s letter writing, made thanksgiving proclamations in November. Thanksgiving, therefore, became a yearly tradition with Lincoln’s 1863 proclamation. Congress finally made Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1941.

It is because of Sara Josepha Hale, not the Pilgrims, that we eat turkey on the last Thursday of November. Thanksgiving only became a yearly tradition in the mid nineteenth-century. Her four-decade campaign changed the nation, and yet, not one American history textbook even mentions her enormous contribution to our tradition. Hale used Thanksgiving to bring the nation together. She wrote in 1857, “Last year, nearly all States and Territories united on that day. This year, we trust, there will be no blank in this number, nor a seat left vacant at the Table of the Nation.”

Further Reading:

Excerpts of Hale’s editorials, as well as letters written to her by readers, are online:
http://www.uvm.edu/~hag/godey/shtable/shtable-thanks.html

William DeLoss Love, The Fast and Thanksgiving Days of New England. New York:
Houghton-Mifflin, 1895.

Holiday Hiatus

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The HS blog is on a brief hiatus for the holiday. Enjoy these past posts on Thanksgiving.

Heather Cox Richardson, "The History of National Thanksgiving," November 25, 2010

Heather Cox Richardson, "Pre-Holiday Stress Relief," November 24, 2010

Randall Stephens, "Rebunking the Pilgrims?" November 24, 2009

A Thank You to Our Troops—All of Them—on this Memorial Day

Heather Cox Richardson

Memorial Day came out of the Decoration Days held after the Civil War. This seems like a logical thing for me, a scholar of nineteenth century America, to write about today.

Instead, though, I’d like to talk about a group of soldiers that often gets forgotten when we remember our troops. I mean the WACs, the more than 150,000 women who served in the U.S. Army during World War II.

The army had an existing Army Nurse Corps, but in 1941, Massachusetts Congresswoman Edith Nourse Rogers introduced a bill to establish an Army women’s corps, distinct from the Nurse Corps. During WWI, women had worked with the Army overseas, but because they were contract employees they got no housing, food, protection, or benefits. Rogers wanted to be sure that the same did not happen again.

Army leaders objected to permitting women to join the army directly, so officials hammered out a bill that created the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (the WAAC). This group was to work with the Army and receive some of the benefits of military service, but not all. The Army would provide up to 150,000 women with food, housing, uniforms, and pay—although at a lower scale than men. Women could serve overseas, but they would not get overseas pay, life insurance, or veterans medical and death benefits.

Even with these limits in place, the bill went nowhere until Pearl Harbor. Then Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall threw his weight behind it, recognizing that using women to type and run switchboards would free men to fight. “Who will then do the cooking, the washing, the mending, the humble homey tasks to which every woman has devoted herself; who will nurture the children?” wailed one congressman. The need to mobilize for war outweighed the strong cultural objections to the new plan. On May 15, 1942, President Roosevelt signed it into law.

The Army Air Force was especially eager for WAACs to work in weather operations, as cryptographers, radio operators, parachute riggers, and to keep track of personnel records (on the statistical control tabulating machines that led to modern-day computers). Some also flew planes for the AAF.

WAACs also worked for the ground Army, processing men, issuing weapons, tracking supplies, analyzing maps, dispatching boats, servicing equipment, calculating bullet velocity, and operating radios.

So successful were they that five days after the invasion of North Africa, Lt. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower requested five WAAC officers—including two that spoke French—be dispatched to Allied headquarters to become executive secretaries. The ship carrying the women was hit by a torpedo. Pulled out of the water by British destroyers, the women survived and served on Eisenhower’s staff for the rest of the war.

The WAACs had proved so useful that it was a crisis for the Army when recruiting fell off dramatically in 1943. As much as Army officers liked WAACs for freeing men to fight, the men fighting—and their female relatives—resented the women whose service took the men from typewriters and put them on the front lines. Popular images of the WAACs were that they were loose women who cast off traditional roles and joined the service to get men. Suddenly, “nice” girls did not join the WAAC.

Here the Army stepped in to convert the WAAC into part of the regular Army: the Women’s Army Corps (WAC). This would not only undercut the tarnishing of the women who wanted to serve their country, it would enable the Army to offer the same protections to women serving overseas as it did to men. In July, Congress created the WAC. The War Department quickly stepped up recruiting.

Immediately, WACs went to the overseas theaters. 300 WACs with the SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force) translated reports from the French underground and compiled files on the German officers. They kept the situation maps current. Other WACs followed the Army to Normandy and took over the switchboards abandoned by the Germans. In the Southwest Pacific Theater, WACs arrived with standard-issue clothing, including ski pants and heavy coveralls. They developed skin diseases from the heavy clothing—the dreaded “jungle rot”—and malaria because they shed their heavy clothes in desperation, leaving themselves vulnerable to mosquitoes. Women in this theater had to be locked in a barbed wire compound at all times to protect them from the male troops.

Like the men, women demobbed after the war ended. By the end of 1946, only 10,000 women were still in the Army, and they hoped to stay. Earlier that year, Army officials asked Congress to make the WAC permanent. Congress did so in 1948, and the WAC remained part of the Army until 1978, when women were integrated into the regular Army in all branches except combat.

The tens of thousands of women who had served in the Army during WWII braved social ostracism to serve their country. In the process, they proved that women could perform every bit as well as men, even in that bastion of males: the Army.

Those women went back to their homes across America. When they married and had children, they made sure their daughters knew that they could grow up to be anything they wanted.

Thanks, Mom.

Happy Memorial Day.

A New Old Look at Mother’s Day

Heather Cox Richardson

While I’m as happy as the next mom to get chocolate on Mother’s Day—or on any other day, frankly—I can’t help pointing out that “Mother’s Day,” did not originate as a way to encourage people to be nice to their mothers. It was part of women’s empowerment and social reform in the late nineteenth century. Rather than starting in 1908 when Anna Jarvis decided to honor her mother, it was an impassioned effort by women in the late nineteenth century to end war forever.

The Civil War years taught naïve Americans what carnage meant in a modern war. Soldiers who had marched jauntily off to war discovered that long-range weapons turned the inaccurate volleys of the past into murderous waves of death. Their romantic notions of brave battle and either a victorious return or a clean end died even before the men did. They saw their friends trampled into blood-soaked mud, piled like cordwood in ditches, turned into emaciated corpses after dysentery had drained their lives away.

The women who had sent their men off to war were also haunted by its results. They lost fathers, husbands, sons. If their menfolk did come home, they brought scars: wounds, missing limbs, and psychological trauma.

Modern war, it seemed, was not a game.

Out of the war came not only the horror of war, but also a new sense of empowerment for Union women. During the war, they had bought bonds, paid taxes, raised money for the war effort, managed farms, harvested fields, worked in war industries, reared children, nursed soldiers. When the war ended, they were eager to continue to participate in national affairs. Resenting that the Fourteenth Amendment did not establish that women, as well as African-American men, were citizens, women in 1869 organized the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association and the American Woman’s Suffrage Association to promote women’s right to have a say in the direction of the country.

Julia Ward Howe was a key figure in the American Woman’s Suffrage Association. She was a Boston lady drawn to women’s rights because current laws meant that if she broke free from her abusive husband, she would lose any right to see her children (a fact he threw at her whenever she threatened to leave him). She was not a radical in the mold of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Rather, she believed strongly that women, as mothers, had a special role to perform in the world.

For Howe, the Civil War had been traumatic, but that it led to emancipation might have justified its terrible bloodshed (a theme she developed in her “Battle Hymn of the Republic”). The outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 was another story. As she remembered:

I was visited by a sudden feeling of the cruel and unnecessary character of the contest. It seemed to me a return to barbarism, the issue having been one which might easily have been settled without bloodshed. The question forced itself upon me, “Why do not the mothers of mankind interfere in these matters, to prevent the waste of that human life of which they alone know and bear the cost?” (Julia Ward Howe, Reminiscences, pp. 327-328)

Howe had a new vision, she said, of “the august dignity of motherhood and its terrible responsibilities.” She sat down immediately and wrote an “Appeal to Womanhood Throughout the World.” Men always had and always would decide questions by resorting to “mutual murder.” But women did not have to accept this state of affairs, she wrote. Mothers could command their sons to stop the madness.

Arise, women! Howe commanded. Say firmly:

We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We, women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country, to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.” (Laura E. H. Richards, et al., Julia Ward Howe, vol. 1, pp. 302-303)

Howe had her document translated into French, Spanish, Italian, German, and Swedish, and distributed it as widely as her extensive contacts made possible. She believed that her Women’s Peace Movement would be the next great development in human history, ending war just as the anti-slavery movement had ended human bondage. She called for a “festival which should be observed as mothers’ day, and which should be devoted to the advocacy of peace doctrines” to be held around the world on June 2 of every year, a date that would permit open-air meetings.

Howe organized international peace conferences; American states developed their own Mothers’ Day festivals. But Howe quickly gave up on her project. She realized that there was much to be done before women could come together on such a momentous scale. She abandoned her grand vision of world peace and turned her attention to women’s clubs “to constitute a working and united womanhood.”

Perhaps Anna Jarvis remembered seeing her mother participate in an original American Mothers’ Day, and decided to honor her own mother’s idealism. In moving the apostrophe to turn Mothers’ Day into Mother’s Day, though, she changed the meaning of the holiday profoundly.

While we celebrate Mother’s Day, it’s worth also remembering Mothers’ Day, and Julia Ward Howe’s conviction that women must make their voices heard in politics.

December 31st, 1759: Guinness Inceptum

Randall Stephens

On December 31st, 1759, Arthur Guinness signed a 9,000-year lease for the St. James Gate Brewery in Dublin. (Since then Guinness has been a staple of new years merry makers.) The lease has survived and is held in a vault at the Guinness HQ. The four-acre site had a brewhouse, a dozen horses, a stable, and a grist mill.

Much changed in years to come. The Handbook to the City of Dublin (1908) described some of the brewery's history up to about 1900:

The brewery, which is now that of Arthur Guinness, Son, & Co., Ltd., was probably founded early in the eighteenth century, and belonged to a certain Mr. Rainsford. From him it was purchased by Mr. Arthur Guinness in 1759. Up to the year 1825 the trade was almost entirely local. From 1825, however, the trade commenced to increase in Ireland and England, and about the year 1860 commenced the foreign trade, which has gradually spread to all quarters of the world.

The stout manufactured consists of four kinds, viz.: porter, which is chiefly used in Ireland for draught; extra stout, which is the article best known to the English public, but which is also largely used in Ireland; export stout, generally exported in wood; and foreign stout, which is specially brewed and stored for the requirements of the bottlers, chiefly in Dublin, Liverpool, and London, by whom it is exported.

The amount brewed is equivalent to 101,132,001 standard gallons a year, or 2 gallons per head of population in the United Kingdom; and the supply of raw materials requires the produce of 130,900 acres of barley and 1,000 acres of hops. . . .

As regards the materials—consisting solely of malt, hops, and water—the firm use Irish barley as far as possible, but a sufficient supply of Irish barley cannot be obtained, and, consequently, a considerable quantity has to be bought in Great Britain, and a small amount is imported from foreign countries. Like most brewers, the company make a large part of the malt they use, and the remainder required is made by various firms throughout the country, on commission, or is bought in the Irish, Scotch, and English markets. The hops are obtained from Kent and America. . . .

There are three different levels in the Brewery premises, all connected by a narrow-gauge railway. . . .

The number of new casks capable of being turned out is as many as 1,500 a week, and the life of each cask about ten years. Unlike other breweries, Messrs. Guinness have not adopted cask-making machinery, except for the purpose of sawing timber. The casks are practically entirely made by hand.

The firm owns 210 drays and floats, 171 horses, and 10 steamers, all in full use; and the principal railways in Ireland have connecting lines to the brewery. The steambarges take casks from the quay which extends along the Liffey, and bring them down to the Channel steamers anchored at the North Wall, as well as to numerous vessels waiting at the mouth of the Liffey.

For more on drink, new year's revelries, frolics, merriment, teetotalism, temperance, prohibition, and more, see:

Maureen Ogle, Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer (Harvest Books, 2007)

John Kobler, Ardent Spirits: The Rise And Fall Of Prohibition (De Capo, 1993).

Michael A. Lerner, Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City (Harvard University Press, 2008)

Norman H. Clark, Deliver Us from Evil: An Interpretation of American Prohibition (W. W. Norton & Company, 1976)

Iain Gately, Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol (Gotham, 2009)

Richard W. Unger, Beer in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004)

Judith M. Bennett, Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England: Women's Work in a Changing World, 1300-1600 (Oxford University Press, 1999)

W.J. Rorabaugh, The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition (Oxford University Press, 1981)

Thomas R. Pegram, Battling Demon Rum: The Struggle for a Dry America, 1800-1933 (Ivan R. Dee, 1999)

Yuletide Roundup

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"Queen's Speech: history of the royal Christmas broadcast," Telegraph, December 24, 2010

The Queen's grandfather King George V delivered the first royal Christmas broadcast live on the radio from Sandringham more than 75 years ago.

He had reigned since 1910, but it was not until 1932 that he gave his first festive speech.

He was unsure about using the relatively untried medium of the wireless, but eventually agreed and read a message composed by author Rudyard Kipling.>>>

Adam Goodheart, "Ghosts of a Christmas Past," New York Times, December 23, 2010

The Yuletide season was an unquiet time throughout the nation on the brink of the Civil War – and not just among black Americans. Judging from period newspapers, Christmas 150 years ago was just as politicized as it is now, if not more so. With the nation splitting in half (South Carolina had seceded on Dec. 20), each side of the Mason-Dixon Line tried to claim the holiday as its own.>>>

"A look back at big Christmas snows in D.C.," Washington Post, December 24, 2010

The largest storm on Dec. 24 or 25 was one which ended, and dropped most of its snow on, Christmas Eve in 1966. This storm was among a select group in a case study done by Paul Kocin and Louis Uccellini for their book Northeast Snowstorms. The storm center tracked from central Texas and across the Southern United States along the southern edge of an Artic high pressure dipping into the northern tier.>>>

Suzy Khimm, "Deck the Halls With Partisan Warfare," Mother Jones, December 24, 2010

Though revived by the rise of Christian fundamentalists, the purported "war on Christmas" goes way back in American history. Industrialist Henry Ford, a notorious anti-Semite, blamed Jews for stifling Christmas carolers and school-based religious demonstrations, notes Time magazine. "The whole record of the Jewish opposition to Christmas...shows the venom and directness of [their] attack," Ford writes in 1921.>>>

"Durham University the history of Christmas carols," BBC, 23 December, 2010

Did you know that Christmas carols were not sung in churches until the 19th Century?

That is one of the many interesting facts about Christmas carols shared by expert Professor Jeremy Dibble from Durham University.

He recently appeared as an expert on the Songs of Praise 'Edwardian Christmas' programme on BBC One in December.

Jeremy believes that the carol-singing tradition is getting stronger.>>>

The History of National Thanksgiving

Heather Cox Richardson

Anyone who cares about the history of Thanksgiving generally knows that the Pilgrims and the Wampanoags shared a feast in fall 1621, and that early American leaders periodically declared days of thanksgiving when settlers were supposed to give their thanks for continued life and—with luck—prosperity.

The story of how Thanksgiving became a national holiday is fuzzier. I’ve always heard that Lincoln proclaimed a national holiday in 1863, but just how and why was never clear.

The answer is that Lincoln appears essentially to have been pushed into declaring a national holiday in 1863. With that pressure behind him, he recognized that he could use a holiday for an important political statement. Consummate politician that he was, he did so. But he did not stop there. Lincoln pivoted his political statement to express a larger vision of what America should stand for.

Here is how it happened:

An astonishing seventeen state governors declared state thanksgiving holidays in November and December of 1862. The war was going badly for the Union, but the armies still held. Leaders recognized the need to acknowledge the suffering, and yet to keep Americans loyal to the cause. New York governor Edwin Morgan’s widely reprinted proclamation about the holiday reflected that the previous year “is numbered among the dark periods of history, and its sorrowful records are graven on many hearthstones.” But this was nonetheless a time for giving thanks, because “the precious blood shed in the cause of our country will hallow and strengthen our love and our reverence for it and its institutions. . . . Our Government and institutions placed in jeopardy have brought us to a more just appreciation of their value.” (NYT, 11/27/1862, p. 8)

The following year, ahead of the many expected state proclamations, President Lincoln declared a national day of Thanksgiving. He issued his proclamation on July 15, and the relief in the document was almost palpable. After two years of disasters, the Union army was finally winning. Bloody, yes; battered, yes; but winning. At Gettysburg in early July, Union troops had sent Confederates reeling back southward. Then, on July 4, Vicksburg had finally fallen to U. S. Grant’s army. The military tide was turning.

President Lincoln wanted Union supporters to give thanks for the recent successes. He was also aware of faltering enthusiasm for the devastating war and the wavering loyalty of Democrats who were eager to make peace with the Confederates. A national day of thanksgiving for military success and for the protection of the Union would wed religion, thanksgiving, and the Union war effort. So the President declared a national day of thanksgiving.

But the nation’s first national Thanksgiving was not in November. The date President Lincoln set was Thursday, August sixth.

On that day, ministers across the country pointed out that the celebration was most apt, as they listed the signal victories of the U.S. Army and Navy in the past year. It was now clear that it was only a matter of time until the Union won the war, they told their congregations. Their predictions reinforced the war effort, of course, just as Lincoln had almost certainly intended.

While the roots of the national holiday we celebrate lie in the war years, though, the holiday we celebrate does not center on giving thanks for American military victories.

In October 1863, President Lincoln declared the second national day of Thanksgiving. It is this one that we celebrate, and its purpose was much broader than that of the first.

In the past year, Lincoln declared, the nation had been blessed:

In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to invite and provoke the aggressions of foreign States, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere, except in the theatre of military conflict, while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union. The needful diversion of wealth and strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defence have not arrested the plow, the shuttle or the ship. The ax has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect a continuance of years with large increase of freedom.*

The President invited Americans “in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea, and those who are sojourning in foreign lands” to observe the last Thursday of November as a day of Thanksgiving.

It is this one, the celebration of peace, order, and prosperity, that became the defining national holiday.

Pre-Holiday Stress Relief

Heather Cox Richardson

When I was in graduate school, the story circulated that one of our very few female professors had protested the scheduling of a committee meeting on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. “The next day is Thanksgiving,” she reportedly told the room full of male colleagues. She then asked: “Just who cooks in your house?”

We thought she was brilliant (and the meeting time got changed).

In honor of everyone stressing about the upcoming holiday, for whatever reason, I offer some classic moments in the popular culture of Thanksgiving:

There was the problem of commercial advertising, covered brilliantly by WKRP in Cincinnati, when the station manager decided to hold a turkey giveaway:

There’s the problem of politics, expertise, and celebrity. This was covered well by West Wing, when the President checks out the Butterball hotline:

And then there’s the problem of dissent in a democracy. This was covered, of course, in the all-time classic "Alice’s Restaurant." (Updated here. Would embed it here, but that's been disabled.)

Enjoy.

A Graveyard Smash

Randall Stephens

Forget the Pixie Sticks and Apples. (Like handing out grenades after the candy scares of yesteryear.) Make sure to have plenty of sealed candy bars, gum, blow pops, and the like. Tonight, hungry super-excited kids, with moms and dads in tow, will roam the streets outfitted as dogs, clowns, vampires, Richard Simmonses, zombies, and Abraham Lincoln zombies.

For a little on the history of the celebration. I quote here from a great read, Nicholas Rogers's, Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night (Oxford, 2002.):

"'Samhain and the Celtic Origins of Halloween': Halloween is commonly thought to have pagan origins, even though its etymology is Christian. Halloween is, quite literally, the popular derivative of All Hallow Even, or the eve of All Saints' Day (1 November). Taken together with All Souls' Day, which falls on 2 November, it is a time assigned in the Christian calendar for honoring the saints and the newly departed. . . .

In marking the onset of winter, Samhain was closely associated with darkness and the supernatural. In Celtic lore, winter was the dark time of the year when 'nature is asleep, summer has returned to the underworld, and the earth is desolate and inhospitable. In Cornwall and Brittany, November was known as the dark or black month, the first of winter; in Scotland, it was called 'an Dudlachd' or 'gloom.' Samhain was a time of divine couplings and dark omens, a time when malignant birds emerged from the caves of Crogham to prey upon mankind, led by one monstrous three-headed vulture whose foul breath withered the crops" (Rogers 11, 20).

How we got from that enchanted view of the world and all its seasonal rituals to kids dressed as Mighty Morphin Power Rangers or teens decked out as their favorite character on Jersey Shore, is a fascinating, odd, winding tale of cultural history.