Christmas memories reflect the senses. We recall what and who we saw: parents and siblings, grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins and friends, many of whom are no longer with us and gives the season a tint of melancholy. We think of family gatherings, church services, the long drives home and back, a lovely meeting or awkward disagreement. We remember the sounds we heard: songs and chorales, jingling bells and wrapping paper, snow plows on asphalt, loud hellos and goodbyes and children’s shouts of joy. Smells bring flashes into the mind: a turkey or roast and pies of all description, the evergreen odors of the Christmas tree, smoke from the fireplace and stove, the spices of cinnamon, cloves, and allspice.
In our memories, Christmas is tightly linked to place. Those distant memories of sight, sound, and smell are not disconnected and aloft, but tethered to a spot of earth – a house, an apartment, a farm, a room, a locale – so that when we sense these things again, old places enter our consciousness. In the Christmas season, with our senses primed and our memories alive, those places return to us.
All of us are connected to a place. Although I grew up in Essex County, Massachusetts – a region of seacoast and forest, pine trees and swamp maples, seventeenth century homes and Salem witches – in recent decades my loyalties lay with New Hampshire’s Monadnock region, tucked into the southwest corner of the state. Its towns orbit around that rocky sentry against the sky Mt. Monadnock, the second most climbed mountain in the world behind only Mt. Fuji in Japan. Through the region’s middle runs the Contoocook River, giving mountain and river the rough appearance of an exclamation mark. In our thrice yearly visits, I think of Norman Maclean’s famous description of Montana, “Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of those rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.”
The history of Monadnock towns reflects the story of the United States, in paths taken and not. Franklin Pierce was born in the old mill settlement of Hillsborough and his home – used by his father, a Revolutionary War veteran and New Hampshire governor, as a tavern – stands on a hill above town. Joseph Grew, the American ambassador to Japan at the time of Pearl Harbor, lived in Hancock as did FDR’s ambassador to Canada J. Pierrepont Moffat (who married Grew’s daughter). Peterborough (“A Good Town to Live In,” as the welcome sign reads) was inspiration for Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, and visits to its small shops and restaurants show you why. The late political satirist P. J. O’Rourke of neighboring Sharon, New Hampshire was a true local character. I saw him once at the bookstore several years ago, dressed like he had been shoveling out horse stalls and purchasing a stack of artbooks for his daughter. Peterborough also houses the MacDowell Colony, founded by the composer and member of the famed “Boston Six” Edward MacDowell in 1907, and remains an artist colony today. Nearby Jaffrey is broken into new and old towns, the former along the Contoocook where water-powered mills once hummed and the latter bragging a lovely stretch of colonial homes on the road to Mt. Monadnock. The New Humanist Irving Babbitt summered here in the 1920s and the writer Willa Cather rests in the Old Burying Ground. On the road to Keene – the region’s capital – lies Dublin (home of “Yankee Magazine”) and beautiful Dublin Lake, where Mark Twain and Boston Brahmins holidayed to escape the city heat.
How we sense and experience Christmas in our many places has much in common with our ancestors but in other ways may surprise us. For many Americans in the years before the Great War – that sharp break in the West which gave us modernity – Christmas was a social event, celebrated together in towns and neighborhoods with equal if not more fervor than privately in homes. More was done together than alone or beyond closed doors.
In those sepia years before the Great War, people of the Monadnock celebrated Christmas differently but the outlines of the modern holiday can be seen. Christmas was primarily a community event and town-based festival celebrated at the church and town hall, or at the local Grange, all decorated with holly and evergreen boughs and Christmas trees. In 1894, Hancock’s large white-washed Unitarian Church and vestry sponsored a school concert and gift-giving. “Nearly every child in town was present at the Christmas tree and each made glad by a small present from the Sabbath school,” the town correspondent for the Peterborough Transcript reported. Neighboring Greenfield held their get-together with presents for every child in town, particularly those from poor families who could not afford gifts. “The children were all delighted with Old Santy and the tree was loaded down with presents for them. It was intended that every child in town should have a present. If any got left it was an oversight.” Small gifts, candy, fruit (particularly oranges), corn cakes, and chicken pie dinners were provided through donations from across the towns. One Jaffrey town hall festival distributed presents to one hundred and thirteen children. Most of the town attended Greenfield’s 1899 celebration:
A good number of the presents was then distributed with the intention that every one of the children should have one or more gifts. It is worth all that it costs in time and money to see the bright and happy faces of the little folks as their names were called and they received a token of love and respect from parents, teachers, and friends. May this beautiful custom never be put aside.
Santa Claus always appeared, of course, sometimes out of a handmade hearth or from behind a curtain. Other times, perhaps because of advancing age, more convenient entry points were used. “James T. Brown personated Santa Claus,” the Jaffrey reporter related in 1904. “He did not venture to come down the ventilator hole after the usual style, but walked modestly in at the door.” The children delighted in his entrance nonetheless.
Commentators wondered if these community events could coax lax churchgoers (the Christmas-Easter twice-a-year crowd) back to worship. New Hampshire governor Frank W. Rollins urged towns to hold “Old Home Weeks” in 1899, as a way to bring home former citizens who left for the big city or the West. Even if they stayed a few days, they spent money and might make these reunions an annual event. Perhaps these Christmas fêtes could serve the same purpose, bringing wayward Christians back home. Hancock’s correspondent wrote in 1900:
We would like to put the query to the many who attended the festival who are never or seldom seen at a regular church service and who were very welcome, if they are quite sure that the church has nothing for them – if they have no obligation as members of a Christian community and recipients of the benefits arising therefrom, to assist in supporting the church by their presence as well as in more substantial ways. The plea of Gov. Rollins for a revival of the good old custom of general church attendance and a uniting of all the moral forces of our towns for the best things ought not to fall on deaf ears in a town that has been so signally blessed with long and able pastorates as has Hancock.
Rather than dispersing town folk across several churches, one Monadnock resident wrote, it would be better if churches united to “invite the public to the musical feast, and inspiration would be trebled plus the enjoyment.”
Many townspeople could not afford a tree and the phenomenon of the “neighborhood tree” was born. These Christmas trees stood not on the town common, but in the home of one fortunate family and on Christmas Eve or Day the neighborhood was invited to enjoy a feast. The practice spread across area towns as a kind of Christmas block party. The truly indigent lived at the Hillsborough County Farm and with money raised by local churches the county hosted a festival for residents. Christmas was the best eating day of the year. The superintendent and his family gave out “oranges, bananas, and dates” and then hosted a large breakfast of “oatmeal, beef steak, mince pie, bread and butter, tea and coffee.” For presents, every man was given a white handkerchief and every woman a new apron, and the children “dolls, games, books, cards, candy, and toys of every description.” A large roast pork supper followed with a band and dancing. At the Peterborough “Old People’s Home,” staff presented gifts to infirm town elders. A 1909 observer reported, “One lady said, ‘I never had so many gifts in all my life.’ Another, ‘This is the happiest Christmas I ever had,’ and the third, with tears rolling down her cheeks, said, ‘I hope the good Lord will bless all those who have so generously remembered us.’”
Following an old New England custom, many couples married on Christmas Day, usually in a family home’s front parlor. Rooms were decorated in the Christmas fashion with hanging holly and pine boughs, and sometimes the family constructed a homemade canopy of holly, mistletoe, and hemlock, under which the pair took their vows. After a small party – the bride often baked her own wedding cake – couples departed who could afford a honeymoon. Trips were an expensive luxury, however, and many brides and grooms from rural families simply returned home to work.
When the weather cooperated, Monadnock’s families took sleigh rides between towns to attend dances or just enjoy the day (or if a bright moonlight shone off the snow, a midnight ride through the forest roads). The Francestown correspondent for 1898 reported his adventures the week before Christmas:
Last Wednesday a large company of old and young, the grave and gay, by one accord felt impelled to go off on a sleighride. Some sixteen teams were in line. By courtesy our representative was the leader. Everything went merry as a sleigh bell until they reached Antrim. The senior member of the group gave directions to turn to the first left road. On went the company and landed at the Methodist parsonage. The Rev. Mr. came forward mentally saying, ‘This is my Xmas snap,’ and was dismayed on learning they had lost ‘the straight and narrow way.’ However, he took down his fence and let the company take a turn through his garden.
The sleigh parade continued on their way to dancing and a turkey dinner at a local hotel. “Coasting” was also a popular Christmas pastime, an earlier term for sledding on a toboggan. In Dublin that Christmas of 1904,
Parties of young people have been coasting down the village hill some this week. We can remember when there was nothing in this world that pleased us better than to coast on a long double-ripper, with a dozen or more on it, down a long hill, whizzing through the frosty, moon-lit night at the rate of a hundred miles an hour, sitting up snug and holding our best girl on. Then we turned to and hauled that great sled, weighing half a ton, more or less, back up the hill. We believe we could enjoy it to-day if that girl, as she used to be, was only around, but as she isn’t we stay in beside the fire and smoke our pipe in melancholy peace.
These images bring to mind scenes from Edith Wharton’s novel Ethan Frome (1911), set in nearby western Massachusetts, where “on clear evenings the church corner rang till late with the shouts of the coasters.” The coasting experience of Dublin youth was decidedly more enjoyable to that of Ethan Frome and Mattie Silver. I encourage you to read that book to discover what I mean.
Caroling became popular (or noteworthy for Monadnock’s persistent reporters) later in the era. In 1914, for the first time, carolers walked Peterborough’s streets on Christmas Eve “and sang carols, the words of which had been printed on large sheets and distributed among the singers.” One hundred and thirty strong, accompanied by a cornetist, they marched around the town center (now illuminated by large light bulbs canopying the streets) and town residents hoped caroling would become a Christmas tradition. “There is little doubt but [that] this ceremony will be repeated another year, and on a large scale,” the Transcript noted.
Weather impacted these enjoyments some years, with bitter temperatures and heavy winter snows driving revelers to their hearthside. Descriptions read like a narrative version of John Greenleaf Whittier’s “Snowbound” (another New England literary totem I urge you to read on a wintry day). Two feet of snow fell for Christmas 1891 with the thermometer reading twelve below zero. A tremendous blizzard hit in 1909, the worst in decades, and festivities and church services were canceled across the region. A “party of campers” had to be rescued in Jaffrey – odd time to be tenting – and many Christmas visitors remained another day because of suspended train service and impassable streets. One unfortunate theological student from Boston, who came to Francestown to give the Christmas sermon at the Congregational Church, returned home after the storm with the sermon undelivered. Mailmen suffered the most in these Christmas storms, with their sleighs piled high with packages and fighting the high snowy windrows.
Romantic as these scenes sound, Christmas pre-1914 was no utopia in the Monadnock region. Police nabbed those enjoying the seasonal festivities a bit too much. “One man in the cooler for simple drunkenness,” a town correspondent reported for 1891. “He was used well. Two men sat up with him, kept a fire, and the chief of police took to his home the next morning.” A number of accidents occurred with men chopping up more than just firewood. The Hancock chronicler for Christmas 1896 relayed that one resident cut off two fingers and that the local doctor “put the members back in place and proposes to have them grow-on again.” How well that plan worked is lost to history. Illnesses most commonly interrupted events and attendance at town festivals rose and fell with ailments afflicting the towns. The grippe (or influenza) and scarlet fever closed schools, canceled concerts, and ended hopes of tree-raisings and gift-giving.
By the late 1890s, town correspondents noticed that participation waned at community events and families celebrated at home instead rather than with their neighbors. “Christmas was quite generally observed here as a home festival,” a Dublin writer declared in 1897. “There were few public gatherings, but business was very generally suspended and family reunions were nearly as plenty as at Thanksgiving time.” The Francestown correspondent observed the same trend in 1898: “More and more the day is coming to be observed around the family hearthstone.” Attendance at town events slackened and some communities stopped raising a Christmas tree. Santa Claus appeared, not at the Grange Hall, but in people’s parlors. The Transcript now reported less on events and more who arrived in town to celebrate with their families. Many came by train, others by automobile. By 1914, Christmas town festivals slowly receded into Monadnock homes, not unlike what we experience today.
My wife and I will be in the Monadnock in a few days and it will be a white snowy Christmas. We will see the ploughed roads, the knitted caps, the pellet stove’s fire, the people, the presents, and the trees. We will hear the chickadees, the wind through the white pines, and the corgis barking. We will smell the roast and the pecan pie, smoke from the neighbor’s wood stove, and sawdust from the barn. And over those frozen fields I will imagine sleigh parties and coasting with friends, and channel New Hampshire’s own Daniel Webster when I say, “It is, sir, as I have said, a small region of a small state, but there are those of us who love it.”
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The featured image is “Monadnock, Winter Sunrise” (1919) by Abbott Handerson Thayer, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
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