While the pastimes in vogue typify the national mind, and are to serious avocations what the efflorescence of the tree is to its fruit—a bountiful pledge and augury of prolific energy,—it is only when kept as holidays, set apart by law and usage, consecrated by time and sympathy, that such observances attain their legitimate meaning; and to this end, a certain affinity with character, a spontaneous and not conventional impulse is essential. The Tournament, for instance, was the natural and appropriate pastime of the age of chivalry; it fostered knightly prowess, and made patent the twinborn inspiration of love and valour. As described in Ivanhoe, it accords intimately with the spirit of the age and the history of the times; as exhibited to the utilitarian vision and mercantile habits of our own day, in Virginia, it comes no nearer our associations than any theatrical pageant chosen at hap-hazard. What other species of grown men could, in this age, enact every year, in the neighbourhood of Rome, the scenes which make the artists’ holiday? As a profession, they retain the instincts of childhood, with little warping from the world around. But imagine a set of mechanics or merchants attempting such a masquerade. The invention, the fancy, the independence, and the abandon congenial with artist-life, gives unity, picturesqueness, and grace to the pageant; and the speeches, costumes, feasting, and drollery, are pre-eminently those of an artist’s carnival. It is indispensable that the spirit of a holiday should be native to the scene and the people; and hence all endeavours to graft local pastimes upon foreign communities signally fail. This is illustrated in our immediate vicinity. The genial fellowship and exuberant hospitality with which the first day of the year is celebrated in New York were characteristic among the Dutch colonists, and have been transmitted to their posterity, while the tone of New England society, though more intellectual, is less urbane and companionable; accordingly, the few enthusiasts who have attempted it have been unable, either by precept or example, to make a Boston New Year’s day the complete and hearty festival which renders it par excellence the holiday of the Knickerbockers. Charitable enterprise, for several years past, in the Puritan city, has distinguished May-day as a children’s floral anniversary; but who that is familiar with the peasant-songs that hail this advent of summer in the south of Europe ever beheld the shivering infants and the wilted leaves, paraded in the teeth of an east wind, without a conscious recoil from the anomalous fête? The facts of habit, public sentiment, natural taste, local association, and of climate, cannot be ignored in holiday institutions, which, like eloquence, as defined by Webster, must spring directly from the men, the subject, and the occasion. Any other source is unstable and factitious. Of all affectations, those of diversion are the least endurable; and there is no phase of social life more open to satire, nor any that has provoked it to more legitimate purpose, than the affectation of a taste for art, sporting, the ball-room, the bivouac, the gymnasium, foreign travel, country life, nautical adventure, and literary amusements; an affectation yielding, as we know, food for the most spicy irony, from Goldoni’s Filosofo Inglese to Hood’s cockney ruralist and Punch’s amateur sportsman or verdant tourist. And what is true of personal incongruities is only the more conspicuous in social and national life.
When our literary pioneer sought to waken the fraternal sentiment of his countrymen towards their ancestral land, he described with sympathetic zest an English Christmas in an old family mansion; and the most popular of modern novelists can find no more potent spell whereby to excite a charitable glow in two hemispheres than a Christmas Carol. In New as well as in Old England the once absolute sway of this greatest of Christian festivals has been checked by Puritan zeal. We must look to the ancient ballads, obsolete plays, and musty church traditions, to ascertain what this hallowed season was in the British islands, when wassail and the yule-log, largess and the Lord of Misrule, the mistletoe bough, boars’ heads, holly wreaths, midnight chimes, the feast of kindred, the anthem, the prayer, the games of children, the good cheer of the poor, forgiveness, gratulation, worship—all that revelry hails and religion consecrates,—made holiday in palace, manor, and cottage, throughout the land; winter’s robe of ermine everywhere vividly contrasting with evergreen decorations, the frosty air with the warmth of household fires, the cold sky with the incense of hospitable hearths; when King Charles acted, Ben Jonson wrote a masque, Milton a hymn, lords and peasants flocked to the altar, parents and children gathered round the board, and church, home, wayside, town, and country bore witness to one mingled and hearty sentiment of festivity. Identical in season with the Roman Saturnalia, and the time when the Scalds let ‘wildly loose their red locks fly,’ Christmas is sanctioned by all that is venerable in association as well as tender and joyous in faith. It is deeply to be regretted that with us its observance is almost exclusively confined to the Romanists and Episcopalians. The sentiment of all Christian denominations is equally identified with its commemoration, the event it celebrates being essentially memorable alike to all who profess Christianity; and although the forlorn description by Pepys of a Puritan Christmas will not apply to the occasion here, its comparative neglect, which followed Bloody Mary’s reign, continues among too many of the sects that found refuge in America. There are abundant indications that if the clergy would initiate the movement, the laity are prepared to make Christmas among us the universal religious holiday which every consideration of piety, domestic affection, and traditional reverence unite to proclaim it.
The humanities of time, if we may so designate the periods consecrated to repose and festivity, were thoroughly appreciated by the most quaint and genial of English essayists. The boon of leisure, the amenities of social intercourse, the sacredness and the humours of old-fashioned holidays, have found their most loving interpreter, in our day, in Charles Lamb. Hear him:—
‘I must have leave, in the fulness of my soul, to regret the abolition and doing away with altogether of those consolatory interstices and sprinklings of freedom through the four seasons—the red-letter days, now become, to all intents and purposes, dead-letter days. There was Paul and Stephen and Barnabas, Andrew and John, men famous in old times,—we used to keep all their days holy, as long back as when I was at school at Christ’s. I remember their effigies by the same token, in the old Basket Prayer-book. I honoured them all, and could almost have wept the defalcation of Iscariot, so much did we love to keep holy memories sacred; only methought I a little grudged at the coalition of the better Jude with Simon—clubbing, as it were, their sanctities together to make up one poor gaudy day between them, as an economy unworthy of the dispensation. These were bright visitations in a scholar’s and a clerk’s life,—“far off their coming shone.” I was as good as an almanac in those days.’[18]
And who has written, like Lamb, of the forlorn pathos of the charity boy’s ‘objectless holiday;’ of the ‘most touching peal which rings out the old year;’ of ‘the safety which a palpable hallucination warrants’ on All Fools’; and the ‘Immortal Go-between,’ St. Valentine?
The devotion to the immediate, the thrift, the enterprise, and the material activity which pertain to a new country, and especially to our own, distinguish American holidays from those of the Old World. Not a few of them are consecrated to the future, many spring from the triumphs of the present, and nearly all hint progress rather than retrospection. We inaugurate civil and local improvements; glorify the achievements of mechanical skill and of social reform; pay honour by feasts, processions, and rhetoric to public men; give a municipal ovation to a foreign patriot, or a funeral pageant to a native statesman. Our festivals are chiefly on occasions of economic interest. Daily toil is suspended, and gala assemblies convene, to rejoice over the completion of an aqueduct or a railroad, or the launching of an ocean steamer. One of the earliest of these economical displays—in New York, memorable equally from the great principle it initiated and the felicitous auguries of the holiday itself—was the celebration of the opening of the Erie Canal, the first of a series of grand internal improvements which have since advanced our national prosperity beyond all historical precedent; and one of the last was the grand excursion which signalized the union by railroads of the Atlantic seacoast and the Mississippi river. The two celebrations were but festive landmarks in one magnificent system. The enterprise initiated in Western New York, in 1825, was consummated in Illinois, in 1854, when the last link was riveted to the chain which binds the vast line of eastern seacoast to the great river of the West, and the genius of communication, so essential to our unity and prosperity, brought permanently together the boundless harvest-fields of the interior and the mighty fleets of the seaboard. To European eyes the sight of the thousand invited guests conveyed from New York to the Falls of St. Anthony would yield a thrilling impression of the scale of festal arrangements in this Republic; and were they to scan the reports of popular anniversaries and conventions in our journals, embracing every class and vocation, representative of every art, trade, and interest, a conviction would inevitably arise that we are the most social and holiday nation in the world; on the constant qui vive for any plausible excuse for public dinners, speeches, processions, songs, toasts, and other republican divertisements. One month brings round the anniversary banquet of the printers, when Franklin’s memory is invoked and his story rehearsed; another is marked by the annual symposium and contributions of the Dramatic Fund; a temperance jubilee is announced to-day, a picnic of Spiritualists to-morrow; here we encounter a long train of Sunday scholars, and there are invited to a publishers’ feast in a ‘crystal palace;’ the triumph of the ‘Yacht America’ must be celebrated this week, and the anniversary of Clay’s birth or Webster’s death the next; a clerk delivers a poem before a Mercantile Library Association, a mechanic addresses his fellows; exhibitions of fruit, of fowls, of cattle, of machines, of horses, ploughing-matches, schools, and pictures, lead to social gatherings and volunteer discourses, and make a holiday now for the farmer and now for the artisan; so that the programme of festivals, such as they are, is coextensive with the land and the calendar. All this proves that there is no lack of holiday instinct among us, but it also demonstrates that the spirit of utility, the pride of occupation, and the ambition of success, interfuse the recreative as they do the serious life of America. The American enters into festivity as if it were a serious business; he cannot take pleasure naturally like the European, and is pursued with a half-conscious remorse if he dedicates time to amusement; so that even our holidays seem rather an ordeal to be gone through with, than an occasion to be enjoyed. At many of these fêtes, too, we are painfully conscious of interested motives, which are essentially opposed to genuine recreation. Capital is made of amusement, as of every other conceivable element of our national life. It is often to advertise the stock, to introduce the breed, to gain political influence, to win fashionable suffrages to a scheme or a product of art or industry, that these expensive arrangements are made, these hospitalities exercised, these guests convened. Too many of our so-called holidays are tricks of trade; too many are exclusively utilitarian; too many consecrate external success and material well-being; and too few are based on sentiment, taste, and good-fellowship. In a panorama of national holidays, therefore, instead of a crowd of gracefully-attired rustics waltzing under trees, an enthusiastic chorus breathing as one deep voice the popular chant, ladies veiled in tulle following an imperial infant to a cathedral altar, the garlands and maidens of Old England’s May-day, or the splendid evolutions of the continental soldiery,—we should be most aptly represented by a fleet of steamers with crowded decks and gay pennons, sweeping through the lofty and wooded bluffs of the Upper Mississippi, the procession of boats and regiment of marines disembarking in the bay of Jeddo, or the old Hall, in whose sleeping echoes lives the patriotic eloquence of the Revolution, alive with hundreds of children invited by the city authorities to the annual school festival; for these occasions typify the enterprise at home, the exploration abroad, and the system of public instruction, which constitute our specific and absolute distinction in the family of nations. A jovial eclectic could, notwithstanding, gather traces of the partial and isolated festivals of every race and country in America;—harvest-songs among the German settlers of Pennsylvania, here a ‘golden wedding,’ there a private grape-feast; in the South a tournament, at Hoboken a cricket-match, and an archery club at Sunnyside; a Vienna lager-beer dance in New York, or a vine-dressers’ merry-making in Ohio.
If from those holidays which arise from temporary causes we turn to those which, from annual recurrence, aspire to the dignity of institutions, the first thing which strikes us is their essentially local character. ‘Pilgrim-day,’ wherever kept, is a New England festival; ‘Evacuation-day’ belongs to the city of New York; the anniversary of the battle of Bunker Hill is celebrated only in Charlestown; and the victory on Lake Erie, at Newport, where its hero resided. The events thus commemorated deserve their eminence in our regard; and patriotic sentiment is excited and maintained by such observances. Yet in many instances they have dwindled to a lifeless parade, and in others have become a somewhat invidious exaggeration of local self-complacency. The latter is the case, for instance, with the New England Society’s annual feast in the commercial metropolis of the Union. It occasionally tries the patience and vexes the liberal sentiment of the considerate son of New England, to hear the reiterated laudation of her schools, her clergy, her women, her codfish, and her granite, at the hospitable board where sits, perhaps, a venerable Knickerbocker, conscious that the glib orators and their people have worked themselves into all places of honour and profit, where the honest burgomaster used to smoke the pipe of peace and comfort in his generous portico, his children now superseded by the restless emigrants from the Eastern States, thus boastfully tracing all that redeems and sustains the republic to the wisdom, foresight, and moral superiority of their own peculiar ancestry. The style of the festival is often in bad taste; there is too little recognition of the hospitality of their adopted home, too little respect for Manhattan blood; an exuberance of language too conspicuously triumphant over a race which the best of comic histories illustrates by the reign of Peter the Silent, so that, at length, a jocose reproof was administered by the toast of a humorist present, who gave, with irresistible nasal emphasis,—‘Plymouth Rock—the Blarney-stone of New England.’
It is, however, an appropriate illustration of the cosmopolitan population of New York, that every year her English, Scotch, Welsh, Irish, French, German, and Dutch children, after their own fashion, recall their respective national associations. In point of oratory the New England Society carries the day, inasmuch as it usually presses into its service some distinguished speaker from abroad; in geniality, antique customs, and long-drawn reminiscences, the St. Nicholas excels; at St. Andrew’s board the memory of Burns is revived in song; Monsieur extols his vanished Republique; Welsh harps tinkle at St. David’s; ‘God save the Queen’ echoes under the banner of St. George; green sprigs and uncouth garments mark the Irish procession of St. Patrick; and the Germans multiply their festivals by summer picnics, at which lager-beer, waltzing, and fine instrumental music recall the gardens of Vienna. ‘Thanksgiving-day’ is of Puritan origin, and was designed to combine family reunions with a grateful recognition of the autumnal harvest. The former beautiful feature is not as salient now as when the absence of locomotive facilities made it a rare privilege for the scattered members of a household to come together around the paternal hearth. The occasion has also diminished in value as one of clerical emancipation from Sabbath themes, when the preacher could expatiate unreproved on the questions of the day and the aspects of the times,—that privilege being now exercised, at will, on the regular day of weekly religious service. ‘Fast-day’ has also become anomalous; its abolition or identification with Good Friday has been repeatedly advocated; strictly speaking, its title is a misnomer, and the actual observance of it is too partial and ineffective to have any true significance.
An old town on the north-eastern extremity of an island, the nearest approach to which overland is from the southern shore of Cape Cod, was eagerly visited annually, until within a few years, by those who delight in primitive character and local festivals. The broad plain beyond the town was long held in common property by the inhabitants as a sheep-pasture. It may be that the maritime occupations of the natives, their insular position and frugal habits, imparted, by contrast, a singular relish to the rural episode thus secured in their lives of hazardous toil and dreary absence, as sailors and whalemen; but it is remarkable that amid the sands of that island flourished one of the heartiest and most characteristic of New England festivals. Simplicity of manners, hardihood, frankness, the genial spirit of the mariner, and the unsophisticated energy and kindliness of the sailor’s wife, gave to the Nantucket ‘Sheep-shearing’ a rare and permanent freshness and charm. Unfortunately discord, arising from the conflicting interests of these primitive islanders, at length made it desirable to restore peace by sacrificing the flocks—innocent provocations of this domestic feud;—the sheep were sold, and the unique festival to which they gave occasion vanished with them. We must turn to that most available resource, an old newspaper, for a description of this now obsolete holiday:—
‘Sheep-shearing.—This patriarchal festival was celebrated on Monday and Tuesday last, in this place, with more than ordinary interest. For some days previous, the sheep-drivers had been busily employed in collecting from all quarters of the island the dispersed members of the several flocks; and committing them to the great sheepfold, about two miles from town, preparatory to the ceremonies of ablution and devestment.