NOT-SO-TIMELESS CHRISTMAS : THE REAL STORY OF OUR CHANGING YULE `TRADITION'.

Byline: Michael Kenney Boston Globe

Growing up in an Orthodox Jewish family in Jersey City 60 years ago, Stephen Nissenbaum created his own Christmas traditions, giving away his toys to Christian playmates one year and then another year sitting his friends down for a reading of ``The Night Before Christmas.''

Nissenbaum, a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, has now written a cultural and social history of the transformation of American Christmas traditions, ``The Battle for Christmas.''

And as he acknowledged while in Boston for a lecture on the subject, his own self-invented traditions mirror the ``invented traditions'' that Americans take to be timeless rituals.

``Every family does something a little differently,'' he said. From when to put up the tree, to when to distribute presents, to what to have for dinner. ``We need to feel those traditions are timeless,'' he said, ``but they turn out to be traditions that are limited to our own family.''

And this is all a result, Nissenbaum argues in his book, of the deliberate transformation of Christmas from ``the unruly carnival season'' that it was during the early 19th century to the ``quintessential family holiday'' that it is today.

In Colonial New England, Christmas was banned by the Puritans, who saw its seasonal revelry as part of a corrupt world they wished to purify. The old customs only survived, Nissenbaum says, in notoriously irreligious maritime communities like Marblehead, which remained as ``repositories of enduring English folk practices, places that ignored or resisted orthodox New England culture.''

This began to change in the years between 1720 and 1760 as a spirit of moderation replaced stern-faced zeal. Nissenbaum says he established that time frame by studying the almanacs and hymnals printed during those years. ``In both cases,'' he says, ``Christmas was hardly to be found before 1720; after 1760 it could not be avoided.''

Meanwhile in New York, where Christmas had continued to be celebrated with traditional revelry, the holiday was getting quite out of hand. ``By 1820,'' Nissenbaum says, ``Christmas misrule had become such an acute social threat that respectable New Yorkers could no longer ignore it or take it lightly.''

What they did, Nissenbaum says, was invent Santa Claus as a way of ``forging a pseudo-Dutch identity for New York, a placid `folk' identity that could provide a cultural counterweight to the commercial bustle and democratic `misrule.' ''

The traditional view is that St. Nicholas - or Santa Claus - was a European tradition brought to the New World by Dutch settlers in the early 17th century. But citing recent scholarship, Nissenbaum notes that there is no evidence that there was a Santa Claus ``cult'' in New York City in New Amsterdam. Instead, he argues, ``the familiar Santa Claus story appears to have been devised in the early 18th century.''

But the ironic consequence of domesticating Christmas - the taking it off the streets and bringing it indoors to the family gatherings of Washington Irving's Bracebridge Hall stories and the ``stockings hung by the chimney with care'' of Clement Moore's ``The Night Before Christmas'' - was the commercialization that is reviled by today's traditionalists.

When 19th-century revelers were going house-to-house, they could be invited in for a glass of cheer - or sent on their way with a few coins. But, Nissenbaum argues, ``when the gift exchange was brought inside and limited to the family circle, such gifts no longer made sense.'' To make Christmas ``special'' for family members, the gift had to be something that was purchased.

Some 20 years ago when he was studying the Salem witch trials - a study that resulted in the book he co-wrote with historian Paul Boyer, ``Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft'' - Nissenbaum was struck by the contrast between the best-known American poem of the 1600s and 1700s, ``The Day of Doom,'' and ``The Night Before Christmas.'' The earlier poem, he says, ``was about God's wrath, the later one about the goodwill of Santa Claus,'' but somehow to Nissenbaum ``the two were engaging in a kind of dialogue with each other.''

At UMass, Nissenbaum taught both the Salem witchcraft trials and ``The Night Before Christmas'' in his cultural history class - ``as things which they already knew something about'' - and later developed a program based on the Christmas poem for Sturbridge Village.

When he started to turn this interest into a book, Nissenbaum said, it became very much a class project with important contributions coming from students Bill Hodkinson and Carrie Giard.

And Nissenbaum said that it was his wife, Dona Brown, a professor of history at the University of Vermont, who pointed out to him that a similar ``reformation'' of a holiday is now taking place with New Year's Eve.

Just as Christmas was ``reformed'' in the 1820s, Nissenbaum says, the revelry traditionally associated with New Year's Eve is now being replaced by the family-oriented First Night celebrations that were introduced in Boston in 1976. As Nissenbaum writes, ``Supported by downtown businesses, First Night events have been allowed to retain the public aura of the older holiday, but - and in this they are reminiscent of the 19th-century battle for Christmas - they're essentially efforts to suppress the use of alcohol.''

As for Nissenbaum himself, after the childhood ``rituals'' of giving away his toys and giving readings of ``The Night Before Christmas,'' Christmas became a time of rebellion.

``I did celebrate Christmas,'' he said, ``but with a guilty heart.''

His first wife was ``only partly Jewish,'' and when their children were young, he said, they customarily spent the holiday with a Harvard classmate from 1961 who lived on Boston's Beacon Hill. ``He was an old WASP, so there was no ambiguity about Christmas for him.''

They would also put up a tree at their own home, Nissenbaum said, and he would deliberately keep it up after Christmas, when his parents would come to visit. ``It was a big issue for my father,'' he said, ``and having the tree there was a continued provocation to him.''

But now, ``the battle for Christmas'' may be over for Nissenbaum. ``I think I've gotten Christmas out of my system,'' he said. ``This year I think Dona and I will go out to California.''

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