Made In America - Bill Bryson [172]
The Christmas tree and the practice of sending greeting cards arrived from Germany – they are often attributed to Queen Victoria’s German consort, Prince Albert – and gradually became part of the Christmas tradition in the nineteenth century. The first mention of a Christmas tree in America is in 1846. Carols (etymologically related to choral), mistletoe, holly and the yule log all come from Britain, mostly as survivors of a pre-Christian past. (Yule itself is pre-Saxon Germanic and evidently commemorates a forgotten pagan festival.)
The American artitude towards Christmas and how to celebrate it was long ambivalent. On the one hand Macy’s was staying open till midnight on Christmas Eve as far back as 1867 in order to deal with the clamour to buy presents. But on the other, the practice of decorating trees was so late in developing that even in 1880 a manufacturer of ornaments could persuade F. W. Woolworth to take no more than $25 of his stock. (Before the decade was out, however, Woolworth had upped the order to $800,000.)8
It may come as a surprise to learn that there are no official national holidays in America. One of the rights reserved to the states was the prerogative to declare holidays. The President can, with the assent of Congress, declare ‘legal public holidays’, but these apply only to the District of Columbia and federal employees. They have no formal sanction elsewhere.
If revelries were seldom given official blessing in America, they generally found private outlets. Though those who governed the early colonies tried almost everywhere to subdue the national impulse to engage in dissolute pursuits, they didn’t often succeed. Cock-fighting, dog-fighting, bear-baiting, drinking to excess and gambling were available to those who wished to find them, and not just on scattered feast days. Horse-racing, too, was widely popular, especially in Virginia, though suitable venues that offered a level surface and a measure of privacy were not always easy to find. Outside Jamestown there existed a particularly favourable stretch of road a quarter of a mile long. It became so popular as a location of illicit races that it led to the breeding of a new strain of horse, the quarter-horse, which lacked stamina but could sprint at enormous speed for short distances.9 Horse-racing would later endow the American vocabulary with a wealth of terms, among them frontrunner, inside track, to win by a nose, sure thing, also-ran and bookie, though some of these would have to wait some time before finding general acceptance. Bookie, for instance, isn’t found in print before 1885.10
In the Appalachian region, wrestling – or wrassling – of a particularly brutal nature became popular early on and evidently stayed both brutal and popular up to this century. Many of those who settled the region hailed from northern England, home of Cumberland and Westmorland wrestling, a contest that is thought to date from Viking times and remains popular to this day at country fêtes and other such gatherings throughout the English Lake District and slightly beyond. In it, two men embrace in a standing position, and with occasional bursts of grunting exertion, mixed with longer periods of strategic stillness (during which a spectator could be excused for thinking that they had temporarily nodded off), try to throw each other to the ground. It was, and in England remains, a gentlemanly pursuit. In the more rough-and-tumble environment of Kentucky and Virginia, however, Cumberland and Westmorland wrestling evolved into something rather more aggressive. Competitors grew their thumbnails long and filed their teeth to a point the better to inflict damage. Anything was permissible – pulling hair, gouging eyes, biting, stomping on a windpipe – so long as it was done with bare hands.
Fischer recounts the story of a fight between two men – and if you are squeamish you might just want to flit your eyes to the next paragraph – in which the winner secured an early advantage by gouging