Symbols of the season: We love our traditions
A week from now, the children will be nestled all snug in their beds, while visions of sugar-plums dance in their heads ...
Except that nobody knows anymore what sugarplums look like, even though most people recognize the famous line from Clement Clarke Moore’s “A Visit from St. Nick,” the 1823 story that might be the best-known American poem in the country.
Those sugarplums show up again in “The Nutcracker,” the traditional holiday ballet that scores audiences and cash every Christmas for American ballet companies and schools, as the Sugarplum Fairies dance across stage. The ballet was first performed in 1892.
Sugarplums, which are candies made of dried fruit, were in favor as holiday treats in the 19th century, but are hard to find now. (There’s plenty of recipes to be discovered online, including Alton Brown’s below).
But those sugarplums illustrate one of the magical aspects of Christmas: Things get associated with the holiday for all kinds of reasons, including Santa, candy canes, poinsettias, chestnuts, oranges and more.
“In some way, someone introduces a thought that appeals to a broad section of the population, and it just grabs the population and is repeated over and over again until it’s accepted as true,” says Debbie Harper, the curator of education at Winterthur Museum, Gardens and Library, in Wilmington, Delaware. She plans the annual Yuletide tour each year at the du Pont mansion.
The Christmas tree is often said to have been introduced to England, and thereby to the Americans, by Prince Albert and Queen Victoria, who married in 1840.
“That’s not true,” Harper says. “Queen Victoria knew Christmas trees when she was a child. Her mother had them. She had grown up with them. But it became popular in the 1840s when a popular magazine published an image of Queen Victoria with their Christmas tree. It just captured the public psyche because this was the first time most people had seen it, and therefore they thought it must have been the first time it happened.”
There are lots of stories about where the tradition of a decorated Christmas tree came from, Harper says.
“One of the very, very popular myths of the Christmas tree is that it was kind of invented by Martin Luther,” the German friar who led the Protestant movement that broke away from the Catholic Church in the 16th century, she says.
The story that’s often told is that Luther was walking in the woods and saw starlight shining through the trees and decided to take a tree into his house and put candles on it. Generations of Luther scholars have looked into that story, and no one can find any proof of it, she says.
But what they can find is an 1840s painting that supposedly showed Martin Luther and his family gathered around a Christmas tree. The painting was done more than a century after Luther died, but was published in Sunday School tracts and other religious literature and began to be taken as the truth.
That story illustrates how a tradition needs people to like it, accept and begin repeating it, Harper says.
“It was a way for the church to take what was a popular secular element of the holiday and give it a religious meaning,” she says. “But it appeals to reason. For some reason, people like this story or that story, so they repeat it over and over and over again, and it becomes enshrined as some manifestation of the truth, and certainly some aspect resonates with the people who believe it.”
It also means that people adopt the custom themselves, re-creating that activity or event over and over for themselves. That did happen with Christmas trees.
“Prior to the 19th century, the Christmas tree was not a widespread tradition,” Harper says.
“It was in general found only in very wealthy households. But the fact is that these are in images in publications so now people who may have heard of it are seeing it, and now there’s something they can do and re-create for themselves.”
The origin of the Christmas tree can’t be traced to a single moment or people or faith that Harper knows of.
“When you want to go back to origins, you’re going back really, really far,” she says. “Some people will tell you that they derive from trees that were carried in Medieval Paradise Parades.”
Others cite trees in Germanic countries in the 17th century. Some say they first appeared in passion plays, which follow the life and death of Jesus Christ.
“Various people cite things as the ultimate sources, and I can’t tell you any one of them is the ultimate source,” Harper says.
Each family has their own traditions — whether they are a decoration, food, activity or gift — that are essential to them, and when that aspect of the holiday is missing, the family keenly feels the absence, Harper says.
“You know the stories you hear that somebody replaced one of the foods and that caused consternation,” she says. “People have traditions, and they have rich meaning for their families. In any house you go to, you will find traditions, lots of Christmas trees, lots of stockings, lots of gifts. Things that are personal.”
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Oranges: Why were they treasured in stockings?
Some people will tell you oranges were valued because they were hard to find in the winter months, and if you could afford one to stick in a stocking, it was a sign of your wealth. Not so, says Debbie Harper.
“By the time stockings were coming into general use in the 19th century, oranges were commercially available in urban settings, so they wouldn’t have been as rare as they would have been back in the 19th century.”
But people living in the first half of the 20th century will tell you that they only got oranges at Christmas. She believes citrus fruits were only available in this country in the winter for a big part of our history.
“Certain folks perceive it as being rare. They only got it in this season, and it has a special association with Christmas.”
The orange shows up connected to Christmas in other ways, she says. There’s a European legend of St. Nicholas coming across three young women whose father didn’t have enough money for their dowries (which a father used to pay to the man or the family of a man who married his daughter). So St. Nick dropped gold into their stockings, where it fell into the toe.
“Some say it was a ball of gold, and gee, an orange is like a ball of gold,” Harper says.
Poinsettias: From Mexico to upscale florists to the masses
Poinsettias, the plants whose leaves turn red in the holidays and look like a giant flower, is a 20th century phenomenon, Debbie Harper says. Indigenous to Mexico, they were introduced to America by Joel Roberts Poinsett, a U.S. minister to Mexico, in 1825. By 1907, Winterthur owner H.F. du Pont was growing them in his greenhouses to use as holiday decor. They were expensive and considered a high-end floral item, but American country houses could propagate and grow them in their greenhouses. So many were used as holiday decor on television programs and in public places that they gradually migrated to the public. And greenhouses learned how to grow them cheaply in mass quantities, which helped their popularity as gifts and decor.
Candy canes: Religious symbol or easy to hold treat?
Candy canes are loaded with religious myths. One tale says that a minister wanted to keep his youngest parishioners quiet during services and asked a candymaker to create a cane they could suck on. The white is supposed to represent the purity of Christ, the red to represent the blood he shed for mankind and the cane represents a shepherd’s crook. Other people credict candymakers for coming up with the ideas.
“It’s a wonderful story,” Debbie Harper says. “I can’t find anything to document it beyond people repeating it over and over.” But again, she says, people would have seen the canes on trees or illustrations of the canes on trees, and they became popular.
Chestnuts: Why this nut and why this holiday?
Charles Dickens writes about chestnuts in his 1843 tale, “A Christmas Carol” and they are always roasting on an open fire in Nat King Cole’s “The Christmas Song.” That’s probably because chestnuts are ready for harvesting in the fall, “so they are ready for those cold winter months, kind of like citrus,” Debbie Harper says. They were associated with cold and with roasting -- a warm thought in frigid weather.