The Story of George Washington

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people, coming to you from the city where the West begins, Fort Worth, Texas. Trees strung with twinkling lights, grand tables set with all the trimmings, the sound of peaceful carols being sung, mantles decked with stockings and garland. These are just some of the many magical images that come to mind when we think of Christmas traditions. But it wasn’t always that way. In fact, in early America, Christmas was so out of control that it was actually banned. So how did we get from chaos to cozy? Well, one writer from the 1800s, Washington Irving, helped reinvent the ways we celebrate the Christmas holiday, and he didn’t even mean to do it. Here’s Brian J. Jones with the story.

So, when Irving is writing his collection of stories for what becomes The Sketch Book, at one point he bundles together five short stories that he titled ‘Old Christmas,’ and it’s about his narrator, who is alone at Christmastime, is invited by a friend of his to ride out to the countryside to Bracebridge Hall and observe the way Squire Bracebridge celebrates the old-fashioned English Christmas. And Irving starts telling the reader about all these traditions that Bracebridge is celebrating. He is celebrating Christmas old-school. It’s Yule logs burning, and it’s eggnog, and it’s tons and tons of food out 24/7 for anybody to eat it anytime. It’s children waking up early and waking up the adults, and it’s mistletoe, and it’s people singing songs, and it’s people writing in sleighs, and it’s hillsides glistening under snow, and sort of, everything we associate with Christmas. And Irving has his narrator sit through these wonderful settings of these wonderful dinners and watching Squire Bracebridge sitting at the head of the table and regaling people with stories of the old days and how this is ‘Old Christmas’ and this is the way they’ve always done Christmas. And at one point somebody literally turns to the reader and lays their fingers side their nose, and back in Irving’s day, that means we all know that this isn’t true, right? I mean, we’re all in on this joke, right? Irving’s nodding directly to the reader, saying, ‘This isn’t really the way it was, but I’m telling you it is.’ None of this is real. None of this really happened the way Irving says it happens. But it’s such, it’s a great story. It’s such a great vision of Christmas. You want to be in Bracebridge Hall. You want to wake up in this old English country manor and go downstairs in the morning, and the fires are crackling in the fireplace, and the tables are groaning under food and venison and beer and pie, and, you know, vegetables that they’ve picked and grown themselves. You want to be in Bracebridge Hall. You want to experience this kind of ‘Old Christmas,’ which is what Irving calls this section ‘Old Christmas.’ Whether that’s true or not. And I think even Irving letting the reader know, ‘You’re in on the joke here, right?’ American readers really didn’t care. In the American colonies at one point when the nation’s young, even before we’re a country, Christmas is banned by a lot of the colonial governors because it was an excuse for people to get drunk and get in these big fights and beat each other up. There’s a remnant of that, I think, in the Christmas carol, ‘We Wish You a Merry Christmas.’ One of the verses: You’re standing outside and they say, ‘Now bring us some figgy pudding, and we won’t go until we get some.’ I mean, that was, you would, you would have these drunken people stand outside of houses and they’d be singing with their arms around each other, say, ‘Now bring us some food, and if you don’t bring us some food, we’re gonna drag you. I’ll beat you up,’ which actually did happen. So, so the Colonel River said, ‘That’s it! Everyone out of the pool! We are canceling Christmas!’ So Christmas was not really the big, glamorous center of the chid year, for sure. But it wasn’t like our big holiday. It wasn’t a big holiday at the time it was. It didn’t really exist in a lot of places because it was an excuse for bad behavior. Irving is sort of rescuing Christmas and giving it back to us neatly tied up in this package called ‘Old Christmas,’ which didn’t really exist the way Irving said it did. But readers didn’t care. They just loved this interpretation of Christmas. Americans found that really, really attractive, as did Charles Dickens. Charles Dickens was a huge fan of Irving in his work. Irving and Dickens write each other fan letters much later in life, but Dickens later said that he was really influenced by Irving’s take on Christmas. So Dickens sort of takes Irving’s version of Christmas and runs with it when he creates something like A Christmas Carol, and, especially, is in A Christmas Carol when he’s going back to Christmas of days past and, you know, talking about Christmas traditions in that book that didn’t exist really that way either. So Irving’s view of Christmas really spawns Dickens’s version of Christmas, which by then really spawns the Christmas industry. As we kind of know what today. Victorian Christmas was influenced by Washington Irving, picked up and run with by Charles Dickens to make it sort of what it is today. So Irving can be fairly said to be the founder of the American version of Christmas because that portrayal, that interpretation of Christmas is so seductive and so fantastic that why wouldn’t we want that to be what Christmas is about? And it sort of informs the way Americans start viewing Christmas, and so between Irving and Dickens, we sort of have the modern, I will still say, American Christmas. We like to think of it as a Victorian Christmas that doesn’t really exist until Irving creates it and Dickens runs with it.

And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Madison Derricott. And a special thanks to Brian J. Jones, and his book is Washington Irving: The Definitive Biography of America’s First Bestselling Author. And my goodness! Who knew that Christmas was banned because it was an excuse for people to get drunk and act stupid, and, well, Washington Irving wanted to do something about it. So he writes this book and in the end reinvents and invents many of the traditions that we now consider, well, lifelong and forever traditions. Charles Dickens, by the way, was a huge fan and took a lot of Irving’s version of Christmas, and as we learned from Jones, just ran with it. The story of the founder of the American version of Christmas, Washington Irving, here on Our American Stories. Lee Habib here, and I’d like to encourage you to subscribe to Our American Stories on Apple Podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, Spotify, or wherever you get our podcasts. Any story you missed or want to hear again can be found there daily. Again, please subscribe to the Our American Stories podcast on Apple Podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, or anywhere you get your podcasts. It helps us keep these great American stories coming.