Wednesday November 27, 2024

Christmas Traditions

Welcome, I’m Mary Louisa Locke, the author of the USA Today best-selling Victorian San Francisco Mystery series and the Caelestis Science Fiction series. In this daily newsletter, I reflect on my life as an indie author trying to age gracefully, including my struggles to maintain a balanced life, what I listen to, read, and watch for entertainment, and occasional bits of information I’ve gleaned from doing the research for my novels.

In addition, now and again I will provide some of my fiction to read, for free, on this newsletter. Everything is available to anyone who subscribes, but I am always pleased when someone shows their appreciation for the newsletter by upgrading to paid.

Daily Diary, Day 1547:

After having posted excerpts from Pilfered Promises, the fifth novel in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series, I hope you have been prompted to either go out and buy it (remember the ebook is only $5.99 and the audiobook is currently discounted to $2.99 on Chirp, Spotify, Apple, and Nook), or at the very least reread it if you already own it.

I thought I would wrap up this series by reposting the Historical Tidbits I wrote earlier on Christmas traditions in general, and remind you to look forward to December, when I will be posting for free, scene by scene, the short story, Tilly Tracks a Thief, which is set at Christmas 1881, a year after Pilfered Promises.

Christmas Traditions.

I spent a good deal of time researching how residents of that city were celebrating the holidays that year, including looking for articles in the San Francisco Chronicle. What I found was that many of the traditions that we are familiar with today started in the Nineteenth century…including the importance of advertising special holiday sales!

The Arcade: We are offering this week SPECIAL and EXTRAORDINARY INDUCEMENTS to buyers of HOLIDAY PRESENTS, especially in our SILK DEPARTMENT” ––San Francisco Chronicle, December 19, 1880

However, these traditions were actually relatively new. Before the mid-1880s, most native-born Americans, particularly Protestants from the Northeast, saw Thanksgiving and not Christmas as the key national holiday. In fact, throughout the 1800s, a number of Protestant denominations were very resistant to the celebration of the birth of Christ in any fashion beyond religious observances.

Not surprisingly, it was the Southern state of Louisiana, where there was a significant Catholic population, that first declared December 25th a holiday (in 1837), and Christmas wasn’t declared a national legal holiday until 1875. The huge influx of European immigrants to the United States, starting in the 1840s, many from Catholic countries, also played an important role in shaping the way Christmas began to be celebrated, especially in the larger cities.

This multi-cultural perspective certainly held true for San Francisco in 1880, which makes sense since at that date three-quarters of the city’s population of over 233,000 were immigrants or their native-born children.

The Stocking:

But the presents would lose half their charm did they not come through the medium of the huge stocking, religiously pinned to the chimney side…” ––San Francisco Chronicle, December 25, 1880

On Christmas day, the San Francisco Chronicle detailed some of the different ways that the holiday had been observed around the city, mentioning that one of the key traditions practiced by native-born San Franciscans was hanging stockings on Christmas eve.

An article on the history of Christmas traditions suggests that the descendants of New England Puritans, many who still were uncomfortable with anything that smacked of a secular celebration of Christ’s birth, were particularly enthusiastic about this stocking tradition because it shifted the main celebration to Christmas Eve.

Hence, the enormous popularity of the now famous poem, T’was the Night Before Christmas, which was first published in 1823. By 1880, for many Americans, the key elements of this poem…the stockings hung on the fireplace, the severe Saint Nicholas transformed into Santa Claus––a jolly old elf with his sleigh and reindeer––and the emphasis on presents for children, had become the personification of Christmas.

As an interesting side-note, one source suggests that it was the Irish (the largest immigrant group in San Francisco in 1880) who introduced the American tradition of leaving out milk and cookies for Santa Claus. Evidently this was based on their homeland tradition of the “laden table” where on Christmas Eve the door was left open for Mary and Joseph to enter and find milk and a loaf of sweet bread to eat on their journey.

The Tree:

Christmas eve, and the parted curtains of many a gayly-lighted San Francisco home revealed a fancifully decked Christmas tree and happy faces of children as they viewed the gifts it bore for them.”––San Francisco Chronicle, December 25, 1880

Germans are generally credited with the use of a decorated fir tree as an important part of Christmas celebrations, a tradition they introduced in England and the United States. For England, it was the marriage of Prince Albert to Queen Victoria (and the introduction of a tree at Windsor Castle by 1841) made this a popular Victorian custom in England.

However, in America, it was the successive waves of German immigrants (Germans were the second largest group of immigrants in San Francisco in 1880) that made the evergreen tree a central part of the American Christmas tradition. Germany was also the source of many of the ideas about what should be used to decorate the tree, and their tradition of filling the tree with candles (which makes me shudder over the fire hazard) and tying small gifts and bags of candied sweets on to the branches had become fairly universal in America by 1880. The hand-made silver wire and glass ornaments found in wealthier homes were often German imports, although by 1880, Woolworth sold inexpensive commercially produced ornaments as well.

I was delighted to discover that tinsel was another 19^th century German tradition that was imported to America. Made first of silver, by the 1800s tinsel was mixed with other metals like lead and mass produced, which was supposed to cut back on how easily it tarnished. I had my protagonist, Annie, decide not to use tinsel on her tree to honor my late father, who hated the stuff! But they did string popcorn, which, along with cranberries, was an American addition to the German tradition of stringing other edibles like nuts, dates, and gingerbread cookies on the tree.

Brief checkin: Continuing to baby my foot until I discover exactly what is wrong with it, didn’t do the stairs at all yesterday but did get in 60 minutes of chair yoga and Pilates, also making progress on editing friends manuscript and reading for pleasure.

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