The invention of modern Christmas got a boost 150 years ago from a book that begins with three unfestive words: "Marley was dead." In 1843 Charles Dickens erupted with "A Christmas Carol." Christmas was making a comeback.
When Oliver Cromwell was lord protector he protected England from Christmas which, Puritans said, was "an extraeme forgetfulnesse of Christ, by giving liberty to carnall and sensual delights." Of course to Puritans a fruitcake was a dangerous delight.Christmas in Merrie England had become a rollicking good time after the Normans imported French flair. By 1252 Henry III was slaying 600 oxen to go with the salmon pies and roasted peacocks. By the 1640s Cromwell was not amused.
Besides, the second syllable of "Christmas" suggested a popish plot. So the House of Commons sat on Christmas days and sheriffs were sent forth to require merchants to open for business. Pro- and anti-Christmas factions rioted.
The Puritans were bullies but were not wrong when they said Christmas observations in December had their origins in pagan festivals of the winter solstice, and no one knew in what season Christ was born. Some say if shepherds really were tending their flocks in the fields that night, it must not have been winter, when sheep in Palestine were penned at night. Some early Christians in Egypt fixed Christ's birth at May 20, and dates were suggested in every month before Dec. 25 became the consensus choice.
That choice coincided with some rival religions' celebrations of the rebirth of the sun, symbolized by candles and by what would come to be called yule logs. Pagans had traditionally decked their halls with boughs of holly, evergreens and mistletoe to symbolize winter's inability to prevent the renewal of life. In one of life's nice caroms, Christmas trees, a German tradition, may have been introduced to America during the Revolutionary War by Hessian mercenaries of the sort that George Washington routed from Trenton after crossing the Delaware on Christmas night, 1776.
The birth of Christmas in its modern form, as a festival of sentiment and material comforts, was made possible by the cooling of religious passions. In 1823 the Troy (N.Y.) Sentinel published anonymously Clement Clark Moore's decidedly secular poem beginning, " 'Twas the night before Christmas . . ." Forty years later, Thomas Nast, the illustrator and political cartoonist who gave us the Democratic donkey and Republican elephant, popularized the modern image of Santa Claus, a jolly one-man shopping mall.
Not until 1885 did all federal workers get Christmas Day off. President Chester Arthur, an otherwise sound fellow, signed that law. Franklin Roosevelt discerned Christmas' potential as a counter-cyclical program and moved Thanks- giving from the last Thursday to the fourth Thursday in November in order to get Christmas shopping humming sooner.
Dickens, who did so much to define the modern Christmas, did so with virtually no reference to religion. He was just 31 in 1843, still tormented by memories of youthful privation - his father in debtors' prison, himself toiling in a blacking factory - and intensely interested in child labor and the conditions of the poor. "A Christmas Carol," written in haste and rapturously received by the rapidly expanding reading public, epitomized the Dickens whom Orwell was to describe as "generously angry."