Brian Earl
speaker
57 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Brian Earl’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Now that rail travel was not only possible, but also pretty affordable to most people, Christmas was instantly rebranded. If you moved to the city for a job, you could come home for Christmas. If you lived in the city, you could have goods shipped in from the farms for Christmas. That changed everything.
Well, the short answer is that we used to say Merry Christmas, and then a lot of people wanted to move away from doing that. In England, when the Puritans were in power, they banned Christmas. And then after the Restoration, it came back in. It kind of came limping back into public consciousness. It was kind of getting wiped out, and it worked its way back into the culture slowly.
And up until around the Victorian period, Christmas was something that we celebrated kind of like the way we celebrate, say, Halloween or the Fourth of July or Mardi Gras, meaning an external and outside kind of celebration for communities to celebrate in the streets rather than ones that families celebrate in their homes. And
It had sort of taken on a reputation of being kind of a drunken, carousing kind of holiday. Anyway, the upper class, when they decided they wanted to domesticate Christmas, if you like, they wanted to move away from saying Merry Christmas because it was associated with that merrymaking, that kind of, you know,
celebration style of the common people and wanted to add the high class touch of happy christmas and indeed in george iii's radio address he started using happy christmas at the end of that as a way to socialize that idea but it's interesting that the word merry at least in the english language it seems to exist only to continue wishing one another a happy holiday season like when else do you use that word unless you're describing a merry-go-round or saying the more the merrier
It's one of these antiquated, fossilized words that we trot out for six weeks out of the year, and that's pretty much all it's good for.
Yeah, I mean, first of all, I like the way you frame the question, what we think of as Christmas, because Christmas isn't one thing. It's kind of it's gone through so many different versions. And this Christmas we celebrate is just the current version. It won't be the last. And it certainly wasn't the first. It all started to gel around the middle of the 19th century before the Civil War.
One in every three Americans was a farmer. Right. And then as we became more industrialized. Just the economy was changing. More goods were being made in factories and shipped to stores. Store-bought items became a big thing, as did the print media. The number of daily newspapers, something like tripled during the late 19th to early 20th centuries.
And that created new avenues for advertising and also an avenue to socialize an idea about Christmas. Because prior to, certain communities didn't celebrate Christmas at all. Or if they did, it was highly regionalized and very specific to that area. The idea of Christmas is just one thing that we all kind of understand what it is and how you celebrate it.
That could only be true if there was a mass media to propagate ideas like that. And as a matter of fact, in 1849, it was Queen Victoria and Prince Albert who were shown in Godey's Women's Magazine as celebrating Christmas around a Christmas tree. Now, Christmas trees have been around for a long, long time, but they were never popular until that point.
And then it was the next year that it became the must-have Christmas accessory on that side of the Atlantic. Over here, Franklin Pierce was our president during that time. He had the first national Christmas tree. And then it was several decades later when Christmas trees were grown as a commercial crop that they truly became as ubiquitous as they are now.
department store shopping where you take things off the shelves and bring them up to the register. That was new. Before that, things were behind the counter. You'd go into the shop and the shopkeeper would get things off the shelves behind the counter.
But now that we have these enormous department stores and the perfection of plate glass, which created an avenue for having these beautiful storefront windows and the Christmas displays that introduced the notion of window shopping. and walking down the city streets and just seeing Christmas as just part of your atmosphere, all of that came into being right around that same time.
So many factors converging at just the right time.
It was, yes, it was right around then. You know, again, Christmas had kind of gotten beaten up a little bit and was working its way back into the culture. Certain things couldn't have become popular until we had all of those conditions coming together.
Another one of them is right around the mid to late 19th century, lithography, a printing technique, was coming into its own, which allowed pretty cheap and efficient color printing. And that's right around the time there were certain postal reforms in the UK. The invention of the postage stamp, a uniform price to send things to and fro, coincided with the creation of the first Christmas card.
And you have to think before that, communicating across long distances wasn't really a big part of life for most people. The other thing that happened in the 19th century in America and in England is rail travel. Now that rail travel was not only possible, but also pretty affordable to most people, Christmas was instantly rebranded as a time where you can have a homecoming.
If you moved to the city for a job, you could come home for Christmas. If you lived in the city, you could have goods shipped in from the farms for Christmas. That changed everything and really made Christmas what it is today.
If you remember the poem, Twas the Night Before Christmas, that came out in 1880 in a newspaper. There were no illustrations, but the words are really interesting if you pay attention to them, where he rides in a miniature sleigh with eight tiny reindeer. He has a little round belly. He's an elf in that poem. He's described as an elf.
And Houghton Mifflin did an illustrated version of that that you can find online pretty easily. That was in 1912, I want to say. And the pictures of him show that he's, yeah, he's about three feet tall. So shortly after that, we start to have a bunch of different artists creating their image of Santa Claus.
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