*Audio Cue*

Re-enactment Franklin D Roosevelt

I Franklin D Roosevelt, president of the United States of America, do hereby designate Thursday – the 23rd of November 1939- u as a day of general Thanksgiving. 

Re-enactment Shop Keeper #1

We desire to express our emphatic protest against the selfish attempt of a small group of stores to change the day of Thanksgiving.

Re-enactment Shop Keeper #2

This a small storekeeper with first thought leaving Thanksgiving Day where he belongs. If the large department stores are overcrowded during the shortest shopping period before Christmas, the overflow will come naturally…

Host

In 1939, Thanksgiving was going to fall on the very last day of November, creating the shortest Christmas shopping season possible. So at the urging of businesses and his own wish to spur economic growth, President Roosevelt moved the holiday back from the fourth Thursday of November to the third. It didn’t last. 

By 1942 the President stopped changing Thanksgiving. But the fact that the President of the United States could step in and change a holiday and believe that that alone would improve the US’s overall economy.

Well that shows the power of the Christmas shopping season and even as far back as the 1930s.

Can you imagine a Christmas without presents? And even if you can. Can you imagine any popular description of Christmas completely absent of gifts? 

Before the traditions, the stories, the myths – way before Santa. These are the first things we understand about the holiday.

Child Interview : Augustine

The first thing to come to mind is when you wake up and you get up and you see all the presents under the trees and you get and you open them.

Child Interview : Tiernan

Big packages. That’s basically what happened. They’re just big packages with a giant wrapping paper. 

Child Interview : Augustine

Mine, sometimes it’s from you guys. So like, it’s like wrapped in like unicorns or something. But from Chris – from Christmas, it’s like in bags or something.

Host

Do you guys think about the presence you get for your parents? It’s all about the presence that you’re going to get. 

Child Interview : Augustine

I like about the presents of me. Like when my parents give them to me.

Child Interview : Tiernan

It’s like, I want this. I want that. 

Child Interview : Augustine

It’s just so many presents… 

Host

Christmas and presents. They’re the same thought. But what a weird relationship we have is something we created.

We love, and we might actually even need to give gifts to each other. But as a society, we’re not totally comfortable with giving presents. And maybe we never have been. 

Almost every version of a gift giving holiday dating back to at least Saturnalia has evidence that some people were already worn out, exasperated, or just over giving presents altogether. And these feelings – exhaustion, confusion, stress – they only got worse for us with the reiteration of Christmas during the Industrial Revolution, when the world finally had the ability to make too much stuff. 

Then gift giving really became a game with endless possibilities, and new worries emerged, such as spoiling kids or worse, saying the wrong thing to the wrong person with the wrong present. 

Our modern gift hunt was so confounding, even at its very start, that it actually spurred an entire new type of advertising.

Gifting is complicated. Yet we as a people, invented, embraced and carried on the tradition because as much as we say something like-

Matthew Kelley

It’s a highly commercialized season, that’s been taken advantage of by, you know, marketing and sales toward the end of the year. So you make lots of profit 

Host

More often, we feel really good when we actually see the person we care about open that special thing we picked out for them. So basically we want to give presents. We just don’t want to screw it up.

We’re going to look at two types of giving. 

The first is how we got started getting presents in the first place and how we transformed that impulse into today’s Christmas presents. 

The second is giving as a form of charity. Sure. We’ve always celebrated generously during the winter celebrations of the past, but how did that become charity.

Today on creating Christmas : Presents, Gifts and Giving.

*Audio Cue*

Let me give you a Christmas… 

Host

I’m going to go ahead and get this out of the way because nobody really likes thinking about it.

Smoozy Voice Over

Christmas is about money, baby. It’s expensive, and we buy many, many things every year. Christmas is big business.

Host

Now, I don’t know about you, but to me that phrase is a freezing morning in a cold, dusty alleyway or being just, like, boxed in by old drywall. Hard and cold. The exact opposite of Christmas. 

But it’s true, especially if you think about a Christmas, starting with a visit from Saint Nick and Santa Claus to buying and giving a presents were part of our Christmas story from the very beginning.

Of course, I don’t want to look directly at it. And, you know, I might have said that I don’t know how you feel, but I actually kind of do. I mean, chances are you and most of the people, you know, don’t want to face this reality either. 

We want Christmas to be the “Season of Giving”.  Something outside of our day to day mundane financial reality.

So we separated it out. 

And that’s why somewhere between 70 to 86% of all people blow past their Christmas budgets. Every year. That’s like everybody, so many people.

Now, we all have our own justifications. Maybe it’s to continue the magic of the season or to make some seemingly impossible wish come true. But with presents, it really all comes down to one basic thing, trying to find all the right gifts for every person on our list.

We try so hard because we’ve decided that the gifts we give say everything about us. Our values are tastes, our socioeconomic level, the culture and morals we embrace – which is a lot of importance to put on one package. But that’s not all. 

We doubled down on the power of our presents by also letting them physically and concretely define our relationships to the people we give them to; how important they are, how we see them, who we are, and where we stand with each other.

Now, I’d love to say we decided on this within the past few hundred years, but gifting it’s been complicated since just about the dawn of civilization. 

Ace Collins

Hi, I’m Ace Collins and I’m the writer behind “the stories behind the best love songs of Christmas”, “the stories behind the great traditions of Christmas”, and a number of other Christmas books.

Christmas Gifts are the oldest of the traditions. And in in many ways at the root of it, people were giving what they thought that they needed, that people needed, not necessarily what they wanted.

Host

In the big, broad, general scheme of things. It probably won’t surprise you to hear that the act of giving presents to others can be found all the way back in pre-history caveman societies. In fact, it’s found throughout the animal kingdom. And so it makes sense that we also find presents in the early winter festivals. 

Then by the time the Romans are celebrating Saturnalia and Soul Invictus, people are already complaining about how many presents they’re being pressured to buy every season. 

If you were giving a gift in a post Roman society, chances are you’re giving it to someone socially above you.

My first thought is something like a present to a king or queen, but the average person was likely to give gifts to their landlords or to their church. In many instances, there were actually rules, or at least pretty strict expectations about what should be given to people in a higher station. 

There is one person is giving credit early on for starting to reverse the gift chain.

Have you ever wonder why King Wenceslas has a song? 

*Audio Cue – “Good King Wenceslass*

Good King Wenceslas looked out

On the Feast of Stephen

When the snow lay round about

Deep and crisp and even …

Host

Well, he wasn’t a king. He was actually a duke in life. And he began the practice of giving gifts to those in the lower station that himself in the 10th century.

Ace Collins

Good King Wenceslas, as he took food, clothing and firewood to the poorest of the poor on Christmas Eve every year, tramping through the snow with his men to make sure that the poor had presents…

Host

Still, for most of our history, these seasonal gifts didn’t resemble the size and shape you would now associate with Christmas presents. They were really little more than tokens. Well, except for the big gifts, to like kings, which also don’t resemble most Christmas presents, but on the opposite end of the spectrum.

Altogether, though, most gifting was actually focused on food and drink or combined into feast, you know, giving the president of a massive days feast.

But these weren’t Christmas presents. These were gifts given around the season of today’s Christmas, but on completely different holidays. Most of the time, these presents were given on a handful of holidays. There was: 

• December 6th being Saint Nicholas Day. Yes, that same Saint Nicholas, but back leaner as a saint, not an elf. 
• January 1st, which was New Year’s Day. It was a really really big day for presents. 
• And even, with the year to move to cancel Christmas in the 17th century, some of the holiday gifting actually moved all the way to Valentine’s Day. 

And these gift giving holidays form a direct line to our Christmas presents – like holiday forefathers or maybe even something closer like holiday twins. 

I mean, looking back at 1692, there’s an English writer who makes New Year’s gifting sound exactly the same way writers would describe Christmas presents at the turn of the 20th century.

Voice Over

They have judged it proper to solemnize the festival of gifts and to show how much they esteem, friendship in token of happiness. The value of the thing given or the excellence of the work and the place it is given makes it the more acceptable. But above all, the time of giving it, which makes some presents past the mark of civility in the beginning of the year that would appear unsuitable in another season.

Host

As we think of the creation of gift giving on December 25th – Christmas, we weren’t doing something new or innovative. Not at first. We were just moving, or at least centralizing the entire existing Gift-Giving season onto this new date. And as part of that, Christmas presents and Christmas gifts they adopted the traditions associated with the other holidays. 

So how did we make regular presents in the Christmas holiday?

Reading : “A Visit from St. Nicholas”

Up to the housetop they flew with the sleigh full of toys and Saint Nicholas to …

Host

Today’s gifting customs evolved from both of the preexisting forms of presents that I mentioned, spreading out through society and growing. So over the course of the 19th century, Western society, especially upper middle classes, formed their new view of sophistication and respectability, in part on the existing holiday gifting culture of the European aristocracy.

You know, gifts it had been given to kings, queens and lords being given socially or at least within families. And at the same time, the token gifts, things that have been given among family and communities, became more substantial as handmade gifts transition to Store-Bought. 

We start to see this transition in the very first versions of presents given around our modern Christmas, which appear at the very end of the 1700s. Now, wait, I know what you’re thinking: 

“The late 1700s, that’s really before the world got into the idea of Christmas.” 

And that’s right on the large scale, but it is just about the time that we begin to try and bring Christmas back in small and large efforts spread out in different cities and communities, all trying around this time to rejuvenate the holiday that was almost destroyed by the Protestants.

Now leading into the Industrial Revolution, the vast majority of gifts being given, no matter the holiday, were handmade. It was a practice that fit almost too well into the yearly cycle. 

The year’s work would come to an end in the late fall. And people had time on their hands to actually make the presents. But people can’t make everything in their home. Or at least the 18th century was a time when industry started to create things that individuals just couldn’t. And so the first items to emerge as presents to be bought for the holiday would be things that had to be manufactured. 

And the earliest examples of this were books, especially books for children. They were called annuals or gift books.

Period Voice Over

This man is an author. He had just finished writing a story. The story has been made into a book for readers everywhere. 

Host

Gift books were collections of stories and poems and sometimes pictures, and they weren’t just thrown together by freelancers on some 19th century Craigslist. Contributing writers included Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and even Washington Irving.

Now, gift books are unique as being probably the very first consumer products ever created specifically to be given away. So what they were, how they were sold, and even their gift provenance from about 1820 to roughly the 1860s, it’s all super important and kind of amazing in that these books give us a unique view into the creation of our gifting in general.

Because yes, society had gifts before this, but nothing like the abundance that was to come.

Really, gift books embody three key changes in our presence. 

• They marked the transition of gifting to Christmas.
• They showcase how presents moved away from homemade things in stages.
• And they also were the first type of gift that built a new style of marketing. 

So first gifting on December 25.

*Audio Cue*

Merry Christmas

Host

Gift books began to appear in the 1780s as New Year’s gifts. The transition of these books to being specifically Christmas gifts would be gradual over the next few decades and actually some of the earliest Christmas stories appeared in gift books in the 18-teens, while there are still New Year’s gifts. 

They really came into prominence in the mid-1820s as they became exclusively Christmas books. Now this is when most of the presents also began migrating to Christmas.

There’s not just one huge reason why gift giving made this transition to Christmas. It was probably many things happening all at once. Some factors might have been :

• That industry managers wanted to limit the days of worker celebration. 
• It might have been something to do with the holiday marketplace.
• It might have been the Protestant church helping to rein in the rowdy holiday that was New Year’s, 

But it was probably a little of all these things and loads of other small factors.

All of which occurred at the same time as the ascension of Santa Claus. You know, the Gift. Bringer. 

This definitely played its own part of the transition, as Santa was integral to cementing Christmas as a modern holiday and a key factor for locking in the family aspects of the new celebration. 

Secondly, homemade to store bought. 

Gift books out of the line between manufactured and homemade, which was a definitive split presence for nearly 100 years until about 1880 the vast majority of presents for homemade.

These early manufacture of gifts tried to carve out a niche in between the two sides by allowing customers to add personal touches to their gifts. In gift books, these took the form of a presentation plate – pages set aside for what were essentially fancy inscriptions. 

Grandma Voice Over

Merry Christmas little girl. 

Host

Towards the end of the 1800s, this form of personalizing a manufactured product took on much more complex forms, including leaving room for finishing touches all the way to products created to be assembled by the giver.

What’s most interesting and says a lot about how we dream of Christmas even today is that the closer society got to 1920, the less and less handmade gifts were given until they just about disappeared. But in polls people continued to say they preferred handmade gifts until the 1930s. 

Finally, marketing. 

As gift books grew in popularity throughout the 1820s, booksellers did something really new: they segmented the market – dividing and targeting different books for different purposes. 

Some set themselves apart as gifts for little girls or little boys, while others targeted adults with gifts between boyfriends, girlfriends or husbands and wives. Some sellers even divided these markets further, tying in specific meanings about the relationship between the giver and the receiver to separate books and even letting price points dictate a relationship’s importance.

Period Advertising Voice Over

Gift books come within the range of the means of most persons. Varying in price from $3 to $15. There are few that would wish to give a lady a present of a less value than $3.

Host

So you see what we’re really looking at here: 

Bigger than just Christmas. We’re on the scale of life on Earth. It’s our great, great, great grandparents navigating the transition from a need based society to a want based world.

No one needs a gift book, and the fact that they exist and we’re so popular throughout society shows that for the first time – humanity had enough and could want things that had nothing to do with survival. 

Now, by the mid-to-late 1800s, Christmas had become the most popular time to give presents. It beat out all the other previous holiday gifting days.

I mean, have you ever really thought about getting a New Year’s gift? 

Christmas just took over, and that’s when we could begin creating new traditions for presents, specifically for this one holiday; a set of gift giving customs that related almost exclusively to Christmas. 

What I mean is that early in the 19th century, Christmas gifts were just a new date for doing an old thing. We gave presents on Christmas the same way we had for other holidays. But by the turn of the 20th century, Christmas gift giving would become something unique in the history of presents. 

You know this because, well, a Christmas present is more than just something handed over in a grocery bag. Christmas presents come in boxes and bags and are decorated to wrap.

And this the gussied up a presents. It all started back at the turn of the century. 

Now the invention of the modern Christmas gift package is an entirely different episode, but I can’t resist mentioning some of it here because each part of what ended up defining our understanding of the Christmas present is fascinating. 

So let’s make a gift, a Christmas present.

For me and probably for you, Christmas presents mean wrapping paper, but that’s actually not the first type of packaging decoration. As we mentioned in our Christmas Tree episode, the first presents to be coupled with the Christmas tree were unbox unwrapped gifts hung on the tree branches. So instead of wrapped presents, the first popular packaging style for Christmas gifts was actually decorative boxes used in hanging things from the tree branches.

By the 1870s, how-to’s for decorative boxes covered in paper were annually featured in newspapers and magazines. 

Boxes became even more popular with the mass production of easy to assemble pasteboard boxes were to have could be stuck together to make high end shaped boxes. These decorative pasteboard boxes made ripples through more than just Christmas. Manufacturers began using boxes for individual products, so instead of shipping loose items products became individually packaged.

This is not just a Christmas thing. This is a general merchandizing change. 

It was the beginning of what’s now normal. You know, everything started coming in boxes.

Dramatic Voice Over

The dawn of cardboard boxes.

Host

To put it in perspective, think of how many more boxes you use during the pandemic versus the time before. The world saw an overall 9% increase in use, leading to a 1,000% price increase and a global shortage of cardboard boxes.

Now, nearly every year from 1849 to 1899, the world saw the same increase, with demand doubling every ten years. And Christmas boxes have their own place in history as manufacturers began creating special packaging just for the Christmas holiday season, usually decorated with red and green or holly branches. 

Now with the proliferation of boxes, the idea of wrapping presents became actually plausible No more round headed dolls to try and get paper around.

The earliest mention of a modern wrapped Christmas present is the 1860s. Probably little more than white paper and string. 

Even though this is the first mention, this wasn’t the norm. Most pictures from that period still show packages and presents unwrapped. 

Wrapping paper became a standard part of Christmas right at the end of the 19th century, with present wrapping stations popping up at department stores in the late 1870s and 1880s and Sears selling imported red and green paper by 1897. 

At the same time, we see women’s magazines start to urge readers to evolve their present presentation.

Period Magazine Reading

It would be pretty to arrange the gift about the base of the tree instead of hanging them upon the tree, as is customary among Americans. The Green Paper garland can be laid around in some fanciful design and altogether will make an effective finish to the Christmas tree. 

Host

I want to point out something in this quote from Good Housekeeping.

Moving the presents off the limbs and onto the floor is part of their design of Christmas. As we look back at the origin of Christmas presents, there’s this popular idea that much of the importance of Santa Claus and packages and wrapping paper had to do with shielding these holiday gifts from the standard economic market, because no one ever really liked to think about how much Christmas costs.

Now, while this might be partially true, there’s another aspect that it ignores, and that’s the visual esthetic of Christmas. 

These new packaging trends were heavily influenced by an aspirational desire to look just the right way, which would create a general split in the holiday aesthetic between men and women, where women went out and became the main bringers of Christmas throughout the turn of the century.

Christmas gifts became more and more commonplace as both society elevated Christmas higher and higher, and industrial growth massively expanded the availability of things. 

Now, having more stuff – that didn’t make gifting easier. In fact, giving a Christmas present had literally never been harder than it was at the turn of the 20th century. Remember, for most of our history, presents had been mainly food or drink and occasionally special tokens. Now, though, for really the first time ever, we as a people had so many things, so many options of things to want and for things to give. And on top of that, multiple types of each thing.

So, how were we to choose what to give? 

Well, stores stepped in to try and help by basically changing their ad campaigns to aid worried gift givers.

Voice Over : Period Ad

To husbands : If you find your wife is folded down the corner of this page, take it as a hint that a Caloric Fireless Cookstove would be generally acceptable at Christmas in your own home. 

Host

My favorite example of merchants trying to match gifts with receivers is actually from 1934.

Bamburgers in Newark, New Jersey mailed 10,000 letters to residents telling them  

‘we’ll help you figure out what your special person needs”. The recipient then returned a letter with the name and address of a person they were trying to find a present for. Then Bambergers sent another letter to that person asking what they wanted. And with their response, Bambergers would send the original person the wish list of their special person. 

That’s amazing to me. Think of all the time it took to put all that together. And this was only one of the ways that Bambergers tried connecting with Gift-Giving in the 1930s. 

Of course, department stores weren’t the only way to choose a gift. Popular magazines and newspapers would create reviewed guides and lists corresponding to certain personal traits. So here, by the 1920s and 30s, society had an understanding of what a Christmas present was, how to sell it, and how to give it to those we cared about.

But this wasn’t the only sort of giving that was part of the season at this point. Even as far back as the turn of the century, well before that, actually, charity was a big part of Christmas. 

And that story is after the break.

*Audio Cue*

I hear the jingle bells, people singing about love…

That’s why I want to sing about the Christmas on it’s way..

Host

On the other side of Christmas Gifting this Christmas Giving – the outpouring of donations and charity gifts that are tied to our understanding of the season. 

Holiday charity comes in so many forms nowadays. There’s dropping loose change in red buckets. There are toy drives from November to December. There’s giving opportunities like the USPS Operation Santa. And all those are separate from the monetary donations to nonprofits that we all kind of sort of clump towards the end of the year.

Now, looking back through the history of winter festivals, specifically at the wassailing

practices and similar traditions, it might lead you to believe that charity has long been a part of the holiday. But these early examples of the wealthy handing out food and drink to carolers and wassailers, this wasn’t charity as we understand it today. 

In general, historians considered this period of holiday history to be more about defusing the stresses of the year. You know, letting the lower class blow off steam. 

Charity and giving being a definitive part of the holiday can really be traced back to one man, Charles Dickens. 

Reading from “A Christmas Carol”

“…at this festive season of the year Mr. Scrooge,” said the gentleman taking up a pen, “It is more than usual it desirable that we should make some slight provision for the poor and destitute who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries. Hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir.”

“Are there no prisons?” asked Scrooge. 

“Plenty of prisons”, said the gentleman, laying down the pen again… 

Cindy Sughrue

My name is Cindy Sughrue and I’m the director at the Charles Dickens Museum in London. 

Dickens was, he was a phenomenon. He wasn’t just a writer of fiction, but he was a social reform campaigner. He did a phenomenal amount to raise awareness of contemporary issues and life in society to others and to try to effect change and make life better for people. And he didn’t just do it through his fiction. He did a lot of fundraising. He was a philanthropist in his own right. He encouraged others to do good things as well.

Host

What was his experience with the working class and children that made him want to to make this change? Or is the lower class something very foreign to him? 

Cindy Sughrue

Dickens himself, and this is something that often surprises visitors to the museum, he experienced firsthand during his own childhood the sort of desperation and humiliation and fear of descending into poverty – with the threat of workhouses and indeed prison looming over his life and his family’s lives.

So this personal, firsthand experience really fueled Dickens’ passion for campaigning for more humane and fairer support for the poor. 

Host

When he was putting together Christmas Carol, what were the conditions for the poor in London? 

Cindy Sughrue

So thinking more about Dickens as London, it was this huge metropolis that had rapidly expanded from the start of the 19th century, and poverty was rife throughout all of Britain’s industrial cities – and certainly in London. 

And families absolutely relied on children, including very young ones, to help make ends meet. And children were cheap and largely unregulated form of labor. So, children could be found working in really dangerous environments like coal mines and factories. 

So Dickens had long wanted to protest against the situation, and he’d been planning to write a journalistic piece, a political pamphlet.

But as Dickens started to conceive of “A Christmas Carol”, the evidence of poverty was really all around him, and not just in his own past. And then came along a really damning parliamentary report, which was the result of a three year investigation into child labor. And this report was deeply disturbing because it described truly appalling conditions that children, some as young as five years old, were working in.

And Dickens from that point was absolutely determined to respond with what he called a ‘sledgehammer force’ – a sledgehammer blow. 

I suppose the seeds of the idea of “A Christmas Carol” were cemented in his mind during the autumn of 1843 when he visited a ragged school in London and also made a trip to Manchester, an industrial town in the north of England.

After his visit to this ragged school, he wrote to a close friend of the terrible conditions and in that letter we actually see the beginnings of the child characters of Ignorance and Want.

Reading from “A Christmas Carol”

…from the failings of its rob. It brought two children wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. “Oh man look here. Look. Look. Down here”, exclaimed the ghost.

They were a boy and a girl. Yellow, meager, ragged, scowling, wolfish. 

Cindy Sughrue

So it was absolutely fascinating to see how his own childhood experience, what he was seeing on his own doorstep in London, and what he was seeing across industrial cities across Britain, and that he felt he had to find a way to do something to make a difference.

And I think what’s crucial about “Christmas Carol”, is when that spark of an idea came to him that he would write a story for Christmas, a time when people would gather together to celebrate and be thankful for what they had and and try to find some lightness and relief during the darkest month of the year. He, he knew that this would be a time that he could get his message across, perhaps to a larger group in society, a larger readership than he would do if he produced his original intention of a political pamphlet.

Host

If Charles Dickens wanted to help the poor you know, let more people know about the problems in society, why did he make the first editions so elaborate and so expensive? Many people, they couldn’t afford the book with the engravings and the illustrations and stuff that he wanted it included. 

Cindy Sughrue

You think about the very first edition of “A Christmas Carol”, it was beautifully presented. It was a high end, attractive Gift Book. And you might think, well, if he was trying to affect social change, you know, why make it this exclusive publication? But, he was doing it precisely for the reason of aiming it at the upper classes. Those people who could influence, those who were in a position to make meaningful change both politically and socially.

So, he designed it to be an attractive item that the people he wanted to get the message to the most would be attracted to. And in fact, you know, the first edition, which was 6000 copies sold out in just six days. It was published on the 19th of December, and it was sold out on Christmas Eve. And then six further editions sold out in the first six months. 

Host

I don’t need to tell you this, but “A Christmas Carol”, it was a huge hit. 

Like “A visit from Saint Nick” before it, it’s one of the most popular books of all time. It’s actually never been out of print, and there are literally too many adaptations and performances of the material to even try and count. And these adaptations started within just two months of the first publication of the book. 

Did it inspire social change or what were the lasting impressions of the book on society?

Cindy Sughrue

Well, it’s interesting because the impact was immediate and astonishing. I think the fact that, you know, it went into multiple reprints and stage adaptations, it sparked enormous interest both in the story and the transformation of Scrooge. But it also sparked an incredible revival of Christmas traditions and added momentum to charitable giving – that sense of of needing to help those who have less or have very little.

So the popular success of the book lent weight to Dickens’s efforts to bring about social change and the spotlight that he’s shown on the conditions of millions of people couldn’t be denied. And this most certainly influenced those with the power to make change. 

So I don’t think any of us could draw a direct line between a Christmas Carol and a change in legislation. But Dickens led this wave of writing about working class people. He was a first author to really write about them in very familiar terms. 

Host

It may be hard to directly link Dickens to any specific welfare legislation, but it’s also nearly impossible to overlook his immediate influence on the general swell of charity gifting, which suddenly became a part of Christmas because, well, Dickens was thought to have more or less completely invented Christmas, especially by people at the time.

As Cindy mentioned, a Christmas Carol did a lot more than just talk about the needy in London. It actually outlined a very specific type of Christmas celebration that was new. 

Dickens mixed the average person’s actual Christmas experience at the time with some fantastic details about what the holiday could be. People started creating Christmas in the Dickens way, and so it is a unique description of the holiday coupled with the book’s outstanding popularity that led many people to believe that Dickens actually created Christmas in 1843.

And in a way he kind of did.

As people began shaping their holiday to something similar to “A Christmas Carol”, traditions emerge that we still practice. Things like: 

Reading from “A Christmas Carol”

…”do you know whether they’ve sold the prized turkey that was hanging up there and not the little prize turkey? The big one.” 

“What, the one that’s big as me…” 

Host

Christmas turkey wasn’t really a thing until Scrooge said it was. 

So as the tide of Christmas rose over all society, the particulars of Dickens’ Christmas became more and more integral into how the world saw the holiday which is how Scrooge is banquet for the Cratchits became a massively influential narrative for how to provide charity to the poor. 

Cindy Sughrue

And that was on an individual basis because, you know, Scrooge is at the center of this transformation, and it’s about saying, ‘come on, if you have to have the means, if you can do something to make life a bit more bearable for those around you, you should do it.’

So that was a really call to action for every person to do what they can do individually. 

Host

At first, the most prevalent form of Christmas charity was to directly give to those who were needy. It was very popular to make this direct giving in the form of a food basket. But like all Christmas presents, these baskets weren’t a chance to give someone or a family a stock of dining staples, like loaves of bread or butter.

The items included were usually special Christmas time foods, you know, things appropriate for a Christmas banquet. A large part of the intention for giving the specific kind of food was to give those in need a feeling of being included in the overall celebration of Christmas, actually imparting a sense of belonging was at least equally as important as giving the food.

Now, even within the couple of decades following the publication of “A Christmas Carol”, there were doubts about the benefits of this sort of one-on-one giving. Dickens himself would eventually begin to do less direct donating in general and focus instead on large organized giving. 

Cindy Sughrue

He became very aware by the late 1830’s in through the 1840’s that that sort of individual giving would only alleviate someone’s circumstances for a moment in time. The next day they would be back to where they started from. 

So, he began to give more of his time to lead fundraising appeals. He gave benefit concerts wrote newspaper and magazine articles.

Host

Society began consolidating the individual, giving efforts as well, and ,much in the style of the reformed Mr. Scrooge. By the 1880s, large public Christmas dinners were one of the most visible forms of charity.

The Salvation Army, one of the most visible forms of holiday giving nowadays, even took part in these mass public Christmas dinners. Actually sponsoring the largest dinner ever recorded in 1901 – feeding 25,000 guests in Madison Square Garden, paid for solely by coins tossed in red kettles. 

There isn’t a record the exact amount of food eaten by these 25,000 people, but looking at another 6,000 person dinner given by New York Senator a few years later, the Salvation Army’s Madison Square Garden meal would have taken about 14.5 thousand pounds of turkey, 6,250 pies about 400 lbs of coffee and over 5000 liters of potato salad.

As a side note, there were tickets sold to go watch this meal. 

While this might have been the largest dinner. There are many other charities feeding dozens or hundreds or even thousands on their own. Often these events would also give diners, toys or supplies. 

Period Newspaper Reading

If there was a single family who lacked a Christmas dinner or a single child who failed to get at least one bag of candy. It was not the fault of a city institutions, the various private charitable organizations and the individual philanthropists – big and little of this town. 

Host

By the end of the first decade of the 20th century, the popularity of large scale dinners was beginning to weaken as more and more people began to wonder if there weren’t more effective forms of charity or even if the massive emphasis on Christmas charity didn’t hurt the urge to donate in other times of the year.

So charity would change, leading in the 1920s and thirties. But with Dickens publication of “A Christmas Carol” in 1843, donating to those in need became forever tied to our understanding of Christmas and the holiday season. 

Reading from “A Christmas Carol”

And so, as Tiny Tim observed, “God bless us, everyone”… 

Host

Before I go, I need to apologize to a few people. 

I want you all to know that this series is the work of the community. It’s you all sharing your stories and insights that make it so special. 

Recently, our audio service lost several of our interviews and we weren’t able to feature those stories. So, I want to thank you here now. 

First, I want to thank Joseph Janes. He’s the brains behind the podcast “Documents that Changed the World”. He and I talked all about the movement of Thanksgiving, which is so weird and unique, like the fact that one of the first pieces of legislation that was taken up after Pearl Harbor had to do with this Thanksgiving incident. Check out his podcast documents to change the world to hear the whole story. 

Next, I want to thank Dylan, who shared a Christmas story with us, which really became about his dad, his dad’s Jim. You might have heard him in the Santa Claus episode. Dylan shared how he has a drawer full of gifts just ready to give his dad for any occasion, which to me is just so special and unique about their relationship.

Finally, I want to pick Erin, who still feels bad that she might have caused her dad to crash through a glass door when hanging up lights. She apparently is one of the greatest gift wrappers of all time, a title she’s kept well hidden for years. And apparently the hardest item to wrap is an orange. 

Thank you all for your stories and hopefully we’ll get to hear you tell them in the future.

Okay. Creating Christmas was produced this week and this season by OversaturatedInc and me, Bobby Christian. Special thanks today to: 

Matthew Kelly. He was the voice at the very top of this show talking about how busy Christmas has gotten. He’s featured in several other episodes this season, including the first episode. So good. Check out his talk in its entirety.

Ace Collins and his book “Stories The Great Traditions of Christmas”

Cyndi Sughrue and the Charles Dickens Museum. There is so much more to this interview that didn’t fit in the episode. I hope you get a chance to visit the museum and discover what an amazing life Dicken’s lead. 

And the excerpts from A Christmas Carol were part of Librre Vox, which has a huge collection of books available to listen to for free. 

You can find links to all of this in the show notes, and if you want to read more, you find pictures, early artwork and a bunch of suggested books, along with all our previous episodes on CreatingChristmasPodcast.com 

If you’d like today’s episode, please take a minute to rate interviews on iTunes. From what I hear, each time a review is made, an angel gets its wings.

This is the last episode of the season, but the story goes on. We’ll see you next year for a whole new look at the biggest holiday we ever created.

And until then, I’m Bobby Christian. 

Stay jolly.

*Audio Cue*

…This Christmas is my 

This Christmas is my…