Made In America - Bill Bryson [171]
But beyond this there was a practical side to their detestation of idleness. Building a community in a wilderness was a terribly earnest undertaking, and one that did not admit of much leisure. Yet many of the non-Puritan settlers showed a vexing inclination to down tools and engage in play on any convenient pretext. Thus, when on Christmas Day, 1621 (almost precisely a year after their landing), Governor William Bradford found a group of impious Strangers ‘in the streete at play, openly; some pitching the barr and some at stoole-ball’, and huffily took their implements from them, he was offended not merely by their celebration of a holiday not recognized by his sect, but at the wanton and dangerous frittering away of time and energy that might have been directed to securing their survival.
Such concerns were far from unique to New England. In Virginia, too, outsiders were often appalled at how little the inhabitants attended to their well-being and security. Thomas Dale, arriving with supplies in 1611, found the residents on the brink of extinction but playing at bowls. Soon after, the Virginia Assembly enacted restrictive laws very similar to those of New England, making it illegal to gamble, to be found incapacitated by drink, to fail to observe the Sabbath, even to dress ‘in excess’. None of this was motivated by a desire to help them tread the narrow path to heaven, but rather by the need to bring order and discipline to a vulnerable community.
When a celebration was deemed in order, the Puritans were delighted to let their hair down. The first Thanksgiving feast went on for three full days and involved, in addition to copious eating and drinking, such diversions as stoneball, a game similar to croquet, and competitions of running, jumping, arm-wrestling, shooting and throwing.
No one knows quite when this first Thanksgiving took place, other than that it was sometime between the beginning of October and the first week of November 1621. Nor was it regarded as the start of an annual tradition. No Thanksgiving appears to have been held the following year, and the Plymouth colony would not begin regular celebrations until almost the end of the century. For the rest of New England, Thanksgiving didn’t become an annual tradition until about the 1780s. For the nation as a whole, Thanksgiving wasn’t a fixed holiday until President Lincoln so decreed it in 1863. The date he chose was 6 August. The following year it was moved, arbitrarily, to the last Thursday in November, where it has remained ever since, apart from a brief period during the Depression years when it was brought forward seven days to give stores an extra week of potential Christmas shopping.6
Christmas likewise got off to an erratic start in America, not least because the Puritans disdained it, regarding it (not altogether inaccurately) as a pagan festival. In 1659 they went so far as to ban it altogether, and it remained widely suppressed in New England into the 1800s.7 Partly because of this interruption of tradition, Christmas as now celebrated is a mongrel accumulation of practices from many lands.
Gift-giving, which has no intrinsic connection with Christmas, was borrowed from Holland. From the Middle Ages, the Dutch had made a custom of giving presents to children on 6 December, St Nicholas’s Day. St Nicholas was a shadowy figure from Asia Minor whose many kindly deeds included bestowing bags of gold on three young women who otherwise faced a life of prostitution. Over time these three bags evolved into three golden balls and became, by some complicated leap of logic, the three balls associated with pawnbroking. In the late eighteenth century St Nicholas and the presents that went with him were borrowed from the Dutch but transferred to the nearest Anglican holiday, 25 December. At the same time, the now wholly secular figure of Santa Claus became bizarrely bound up with Christkindlein,