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People. Love. Hey History This Week listeners, it's Sally here.
We hope you're enjoying the holiday season.
I want to let you know that in addition to this week's episode featuring director Robert Eggers, today we're dropping a re -air of a classic History This Week episode.
All about the story behind why we give gifts on Christmas.
Enjoy! And we'll be back this Monday with another all -new episode.
I'm Sally Helm. The gifts are wrapped, the stockings are hung, at least they should be.
Because in this year, 1913, anyone who is still standing in line at a crowded department store really has no excuse.
For months now, newspapers have been broadcasting a simple message.
Do your Christmas shopping early.
Way back on May 30th, a notice ran in a paper in Salina, Kansas.
It said, yesterday the government thermometer registered 104.
And then right after that, seemingly out of nowhere, do your Christmas shopping early.
As summer turned to autumn, turned to winter, the slogan started to show up everywhere, on posters in Buffalo, New York, stuck to envelopes in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
By the first week of December, papers in Fremont, Nebraska, and Columbus, Georgia, and Morrisville, Vermont were printing this message in boldface type, do your Christmas shopping early.
All this got us wondering, how did this early Christmas things start?
We began our hunt for the answer in Midtown, Manhattan.
Julia Press. Hi Sally.
I found you. On a recent afternoon, I met up with producer Julia Press.
We wanted to see what signs of the early Christmas season we might find.
Yes, are you in the Christmas spirit on this fine Friday November 13th?
I mean, I can't help it, look at these wreaths and these bows.
I know. The hauls are decked.
The hauls are seriously decked already.
It was a week before Black Friday, so we hadn't even hit Thanksgiving yet.
But still... I'm seeing Santa's.
I see some bells. Yep, ribbon.
Oh my gosh! Empire State Building in Red and Green.
Oh my God, the employees dress like elves.
Do you have any sort of stories already from this Christmas shopping season?
I've had a lot of people try to break into our workshop.
Oh, another garland and a third garland.
So as we haven't seen, life -size nutcrackers.
There's some giant hanging baubles.
Oh look, just speak of the devil, a life -size nutcracker.
Near a pretty loud Christmas display, we talked to some shoppers.
Do you come down here most Christmases?
Yes, but it says zoom.
It says zoom! I know, already!
Natalie and Sharon are sisters.
They said they started shopping for the holidays over the summer.
By the time we talked to them in mid -November, they were almost finished.
So you guys are already done with this?
Yes! What? I'm so impressed!
These sisters did just what those 1913 papers advised.
They shopped early.
Which is great for them, they got gifts for people they love.
It is also great for store owners.
In the last two months of this year, American consumers are projected to spend up to $960 billion in retail stores alone.
It'll make up as much as 35 % of the store's annual sales.
So you might assume the shop early movement was the invention of greedy department stores or slick advertising executives.
It wasn't. At least, not at first.
It started with a labor reformer named Florence Kelly.
She wanted people to help not stores, but store workers crushed by the last second rush.
She told consumers, we can lessen the burden around Christmas by shopping early just by stretching the holiday shopping season out.
A hundred years later, that has definitely happened.
But not in the way that Florence Kelly intended.
The history of holiday shopping is in fact littered with good intentions gone awry, as we wrestle with the tension at its heart.
Family gatherings and heartfelt giving versus rank materialism and a stressed out labor force.
Tis the season. Today, a few surprising stops in the history of Christmas shopping.
How did Christmas gifts even become a thing?
And what were some of the spirited attempts to make the holiday shopping season merry for all?
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A family inside their living room.
Maybe there's a coffee table with candy canes on it.
Or a mantelpiece set with candles.
Almost certainly the family is gathered around a tree, decorated with tinsel or ornaments or twinkly lights.
In the middle of it all, there are probably some children ripping the wrapping paper off their gifts.
This scene is newer than you might think.
It had to be invented piece by piece.
Paul Ringel, a history professor at High Point University, told us, in the United States, Christmas hasn't always been that big of a deal.
For a really long time, Americans didn't really celebrate Christmas at all.
In New England, in particular, nobody really knows when Jesus was actually born.
And we all know that Christmas is built off kind of pagan rituals of midwinter and appearance, the Calvinists didn't think that was something that they should be celebrating.
In Massachusetts, for about two decades during the colonial years, celebrating Christmas was actually against the law.
If you were caught skipping work or feasting or parading around in public, you'd get fined five shillings.
But as Ringel was saying, some people were celebrating anyways.
There's a long history of midwinter revelry, and in the US, even during that colonial era, people would get time off at the end of the year so they could blow off a little steam.
There was this idea that this was a kind of a social safety valve.
That if you let the working classes get drunk and eat a lot and party and dance and have fun for a week, it would blow off some of that resentment and keep the social order safe.
Beginning in the 1820s or so, northern cities began to grow.
And workers would celebrate midwinter in the crowded streets.
One of the traditions was called wassailing.
Here we come a wassailing among the leaves so free.
Oh here we come a wandering so fair to be seen.
Wassailing involved knocking on the doors of the wealthy elites.
In New York, the elites were known as knickerbockers.
Wassailers would ask for money or liquor in exchange for a song.
A bowl of strong beer, I pray you draw near.
And a jolly wassail ist then you shall hear.
It could all get a little rowdy.
And the knickerbockers didn't love that.
The middle and wealthy classes start getting really nervous about all these drunk workers for raiding around the city.
And what's going to happen and are we going to have riots?
And so mid -19th century elites start pushing to change the way people celebrate Christmas.
Move it inside the home.
They pick up the Dutch tradition of making it this kind of domestic family celebration and say hey don't go out and get drunk in the streets that last week.
Go have a wonderful time with your family and have a tree and you know bring in some of the light that is gone.
That classic Christmas image is coming into focus.
The tree appears inside the living room.
People come in from the snowy streets to sit around it.
They light candles and soon enough under that tree the gifts appear.
Gifts are a big part of the new vision of Christmas.
The elites are like instead of banging on our doors asking for money what if we keep gift exchanges in the family?
Knickerbockers like Clement Clark Moore start pushing this message.
His famous poem known as Twas the Night Before Christmas is published in 1823.
Children with visions of sugar palms dancing in their heads right?
That's all part of that effort to construct this new vision of Christmas that revolves around gift giving.
The final key part of that vision is the children themselves.
Believe it or not at this moment in history giving kids gifts is a relatively new idea in the U .S.
In fact kids as we know them today are kind of a new idea.
Until the industrial revolution most kids had to work helping out with the family farm or the family business.
They didn't have a ton of time to play with toys and nourish their imaginations.
But as cities begin to grow all of this changes especially in the middle and upper classes.
Kids have a higher chance of surviving till adulthood.
Not as many of them have to work and with these changes.
They start becoming more like the children that we think of today.
So with this new sort of childhood focused on children's development and entertainment another important piece of that Christmas image is in place and the need for Christmas shopping for holiday gift giving has been born.
Ellen Litwicky is a retired history professor she taught at the state university of New York at Fredonia and she's an expert on the history of gifts.
She told us as Christmas presents proliferate you also get a new question.
What makes for a good Christmas gift?
In 1844 the famous essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson weighs in.
He publishes an essay called gifts.
One of the things he says is that he sees rings and jewels and any baubles that you can buy as poor excuses for a gift and that the only gift is the gift of thyself.
That gifts shouldn't be store -bought.
So he did not believe that anything commercial really was a good gift.
It is a cold lifeless business when you go to the shops to buy me something which does not represent your life and talent but a goldsmith's.
Emerson writes instead bring something that you made or as he puts it thou must lead for me.
So what he would do he would give like poems to people for gifts to his family members he would write poems for them.
He thinks that's a great gift.
He says it himself in his essay it's best that the poet brings his poem the shepherd his lamb the farmer corn the miner a gem the sailor coral and shelves but not everyone agrees.
Uh funny aside his daughter left a lot of letters and she has some funny stories about him being totally clueless about gift giving occasions.
Apparently once Emerson's kids bought a gift for him to present to his wife since he wouldn't buy one himself.
And he says oh this is great they're like uh dad this is what you're giving mother.
So he strikes me as sort of clueless that he sort of lived on that philosophical level sort of not solidly on the earth.
On the earth consumerism is taking off especially in the years after the Civil War the marketing of consumer products is in full swing and it crashes into these new ideas that have formed about childhood.
I spoke about this with Jennifer Lazott who teaches history at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.
She says around the middle of the 1800s people start to realize we can make money selling stuff for kids.
So for example the first patent for baby carriage is 1848.
High chairs are an innovation of the 19th century.
Before the mid 19th century you just plop the baby on someone's lap or put them on a stack of books on the chair.
Toys designated as for children were not really a thing until pretty late.
Wait whoa what were they designated as before there were toys for adults?
There were toys and games but they were considered to be family things.
But people start to make stuff that's specifically for children to play with.
Mass -produced alphabet blocks, toy trains, these lamp -looking contraptions called zoetropes that you'd stick a strip of paper inside and spin to make the pictures move.
There's some really crazy innovations like when Edison first patents the phonograph.
He doesn't know what to do with it.
He doesn't know what its commercial potential is, right?
So the first thing he does is he records some poems and shoves it inside a doll and they're terrifying and children hate them.
So it's this really loud clangy voice.
This was an experimental time in toy making.
A lot of children ended up scared by some scary dolls during the Exactly.
Yeah the dolls were really weird at this time.
And as all these products emerge, industries spring up to convince people to buy them.
The late 1800s see the birth of modern advertising.
Branding. And department stores.
Macy's opens its doors in 1858.
It sells feathers and fringes, neckties and corsets.
It has a special section just for gifts.
And Macy's pioneers the practice of putting up colorful light -filled window displays to try and lure customers inside.
For Christmas, by the 1890s, you might find an intricate replica of the Chicago World's Fair.
Or moving panoramas depicting famous novels.
Windows that, a New York newspaper said, will make the children's eyes stick out with wonder and delight.
Soon, every major city has a department store.
But the department store capital of the country is New York.
And near New York's famous Macy's, with its famous window displays, are the city's famous garment factories and the stock exchange.
So it is the center of finance, it is the center of production, and it is the center of labor.
And that labor is at the center of the burgeoning Christmas shopping industry.
Each Christmas season, families who could afford it gave their kids stockings full of sugar pumps.
But someone had to knit those stockings and make those sugar pumps.
Oftentimes, it was other kids.
One activist decides to look into what it's like for kids to be doing these jobs.
She goes to a caramel factory and finds over 100 immigrant children, as she describes it, sitting at tables covered with caramels, which the children wrapped in paper, being paid for their work at the rate of a penny a thousand.
One penny per every thousand caramels.
Hand -wrapped. That woman was an activist named Florence Kelly.
In 1899, Kelly starts running an organization in New York called the National Consumers League, or the NCL.
They're trying to organize political action among consumers, specifically women.
The NCL essentially tells them, you may not have the right to vote, but you still have power.
The power to choose what to buy.
If you're not going to buy products from a company that uses child labor, then maybe companies will stop using child labor.
That power is especially potent around Christmas, when managers push their workers to the max.
So in 1903, Florence Kelly sits down to write an essay called The Travesty of Christmas.
She's not against Christmas itself.
She's against the rampant labor violations that come with the holiday.
She takes particular aim at a labor law passed in New York City a few years before.
It sounds good. Women under 21 and boys under 16 can't be made to work more than 10 hours in a day.
But there is a major loophole.
The rules do not apply between December 15 and 31.
Kelly writes, just at the season most trying for these employees, all restriction of hours of labor was removed.
Here's Ellen Litwicky again.
ELLEN LITWICKY, The Travesty of Christmas One of the most egregious things was that workers in a department store had to work as much as six hours a day over time, about three weeks before Christmas.
And that was unpaid.
They didn't get paid for this overtime.
And it's not just department store workers.
Kelly tells the story of a New York delivery boy who took a nap in his wagon after working from 7 a .m.
to 2 a .m. delivering belated Christmas gifts, and he died of the cold.
Kelly had an idea about how consumers could help.
ELLEN LITWICKY, The Travesty of Christmas Shop early.
Shop early, you know, shop weeks before Christmas.
Shop early if you're going to be shopping for Christmas.
Shop early. That way, delivery boys aren't being worked around the clock.
Factories don't have to produce so many goods at the last minute.
And department stores aren't holding their workers hostage without pay.
The campaign takes off.
That year, a Kentucky paper reports that the local branch of the National Consumers League had heard from merchants that some customers started Christmas shopping in November, which meant the last week of the year wasn't as slammed as usual.
And the reform keeps spreading over time.
Notices appear in newspapers as early as May and June and July.
Do your Christmas shopping early.
The idea is to take what has become a mass event, the gift -giving season, and make it more humane.
So everything's good now, right?
Not quite. Coming up, my favorite twist.
And also, I sing a song from the progressive era about the right way to give gifts.
See you for details.
Hey friends, I'm Sharon McMahon, host of Here's Work Gets Interesting.
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By the end of the 19th century, Christmas is firmly established as a season of occasionally excessive gift -giving.
And now, a group of reform -minded women in New York notices, it's not just long hours that are burdening workers.
There's something else.
Ellen Litwicky told us their leader is Eleanor Robson Belmont.
She was an actress and she married this guy, August Belmont.
He was a financier, but I think he was also involved in starting the Belmont Stakes horse race.
The Belmonts summer in their coachman take them on horse -drawn sleigh rides in Central Park.
Belmont spends her time with people like Ann Morgan, the daughter of the banker J .P.
Morgan. They're in the habit of discussing what working women need to improve their plight.
Better working hours, better benefits, maybe vacation, sanitary restrooms and break rooms and, you know, a lunch break.
Belmont and Morgan are against more radical actions like strikes, but they support improving conditions on the job.
So they and their fellow reformers create this club where they meet with working -class women and try to help them save up to go on vacation.
They create their own sort of bank because other banks won't let working -class women open accounts.
And at one of the meetings of this vacation club, Belmont is talking with a group of department store workers.
The workers start complaining that at Christmas time they're pressured to give money for gifts for their supervisors.
Sometimes, you know, up to $25.
And this is, you know, they made like maybe $7 a week.
And so to Belmont, this goes against one of those central sentimental tenets of Christmas, right?
You're not supposed to give your boss a gift, you're supposed to give your children gifts or your family members gifts.
That was the whole idea behind the initial big change to Christmas back in the 1800s.
Keep it in the home and within the family.
Belmont and the other society ladies are outraged.
And they band together with these department store workers to start a group called the SPUGS.
What is a SPUG? Stands for the Society for the Prevention of Useless Giving.
As the New York Times writes, a spug is a woman who has vowed never again in all her life to give any Christmas gift that is not offered with a whole heart.
And it's more than just a vow.
It's a movement. The individual can't on her own say, I'm not going to give for this gift.
But if everybody in the whole department said that they weren't going to do it, you have more protection in numbers.
This is at a time when newspapers covered the activities of society women as big news.
So if Eleanor Belmont and Anne Morgan have now become spugs, stop the presses.
There's a flurry of articles about it.
Woodrow Wilson's wife and her daughter, they become sort of the leaders of spug in Washington.
The former president, Theodore Roosevelt, also claimed that he joined the spug.
So it gets a lot of publicity, right?
As the spug movement grows, it sets its sights beyond department store workers.
They decide that pretty much everyone is being asked to give useless gifts in some way or another.
Gift giving, Belmont says, has drifted to the level of a common swap, utterly devoid of the faintest trace of sentiment or meaning.
Their concerns go back to that 19th century sentimental, you know, Emersonian ideal that a gift should be a portion of thyself, a gift should not be coerced or should not be routine.
Anne Morgan laments that mandatory giving has led to the death of worthy Christmas feeling.
Another spug member writes lyrics to accompany a popular song.
It goes like this. Remember this December, that love weighs more than gold, help us spread the news to young and old.
Friendship bottoms whole, leaves the giver cool.
Catchy. And people find the ideas convincing.
You start seeing a few articles about it that say, uh, maybe this is a good idea.
But not everyone agrees.
The anti -spug backlash begins.
Then you start seeing people that start talking about them as scrooges, you know, destroying the idea of Christmas by being against gifts.
And so in response to some of this, Eleanor Belmont at one meeting said that if they were going to get complaints, we could change our name to the Society for the Promotion of Useful Giving.
Okay, I see some, I sense some spin.
It's not that we're against gifts, the spugs say.
We just want people to give gifts in a heartfelt way and make sure those gifts are useful, not just for the sake of it.
Gift givers like this new message.
But you know who really likes it?
Store owners. You start seeing these advertisements, be a spug.
Yeah, we have useful gifts.
You could buy furniture, you could buy, you know.
Well, advertisements from stores.
Yes, yes. I mean, the real story of spug is how, yeah, consumer capitalism can absorb any criticism.
One Oklahoma store urges, be a spug, alongside images of the practical gloves and socks you can buy.
And businesses with things to sell co -opt the Shop Early campaign, too.
An ad in a Kansas newspaper surrounds its Shop Early message with images of fur coats and vacuums and descriptions of tiny cashmere baby clothes.
A New Mexico store selling toys for little folks and sparkling jewels asks its customers menacingly, if Christmas came tomorrow, would you be ready?
There's no use fighting it anymore.
One of the purposes of Christmas is to boost American commerce.
The federal government knows it.
In 1939, President Franklin Roosevelt moves Thanksgiving a week earlier to create a longer Christmas shopping season.
The goal is to help businesses who have suffered in the Great Depression leave more time for spending.
This is the holiday season we know today.
Back on November 18th, Julie and I spoke to a woman named Andy at a New York holiday market.
When does it start to get crazy?
I would say right after Thanksgiving.
Andy sells cakes in a jar.
What is it like? What's the Christmas rush like?
It's very, very crazy.
You can barely walk through the market.
But yeah, it's exciting.
Everyone's very in their holiday spirits.
Is it fun? Like, does it feel festive?
It's so fun. Right now, I think people are just thinking about, you know, like, do I want this product for myself?
I think in a couple weeks people are looking to buy for other people.
Oh, can you like feel different when it turns into gifts?
Yeah, people are finally like thinking of other people.
So gift giving is a big thing.
So it's a lot to manage, but really fun and in the spirit of Christmas.
There's the old tension again, the standoff between consumerism and sentiment.
Useless gifts, practical gifts, gifts of thyself, bobbles and toys.
It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas.
Thanks for listening to History This Week.
For more moments throughout history that are also worth watching, check your local TV listings to find out what's on the History Channel today.
If you want to get in touch, please shoot us an email at our email address history this week at history .com or leave us a voicemail.
212 -351 -0410. Thanks to our guests, Jennifer Lazott, professor of history and material culture at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, Ellen Litwicky, professor emerita at the State University of New York at Fredonia, and Paul Ringel, professor of history at High Point University and author of Commercializing
Childhood. Thanks also to Stephen Nissenbaum, author of The Battle for Christmas.
This episode was produced by Julia Press.
It was story edited by Jim O 'Grady and sound designed by Brian Flood.
History This Week is also produced by Corinne Wallace and me, Sally Helm.
Help us spread the news.
Help, I don't know how they do that middle part.
That love weighs more than gold.
No, it's not their tune.
Sorry, Julia. It's going to be a funny section to cut.
Okay, I'm moving on.
Our associate producer is Emma Fredericks.
Our senior producer is Ben Dickstein.
Our supervising producer is McCamey Lin, and our executive producer is Jesse Katz.
Don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review History This Week, wherever you get your podcasts.
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