In its beginnings, a little New England village like ours would not have celebrated Christmas. While the Historical Society’s 1859-1866 ledger from one of our schoolhouses recorded Thanksgiving in an elaborate scroll, Christmas was not even mentioned; and in “All Our Yesterdays”, where former residents Janet and James Robertson chronicled the lives of the family who once lived in their Main Street home, Henry Taintor’s diary entry for December 25, 1855 records that he was presiding over a case in his role as Justice of the Peace. A farmer from neighboring Brooklyn “Went to mill. Carried log for sled Runners. Thrashed”. Henry’s niece Caroline, however, that same year would write of gifts and “eggnog and all kinds of delicacies” while she was living in Georgia, a place far removed from the Puritan principles of New England, where the Pilgrims decreed in 1659 “Whosoever shall be found observing any such day as Christmas and the like…shall pay for each offense five shilling as a fine to the country.”
Lois Kelley’s “Christmas Through the Ages”, published in 1998 and 1999, traced the history of the seasonal festivities, from the feast of the winter Solstice celebrating the return of the light, through the spread of the Christian holiday across Europe with missionaries such as St. Patrick, St. Augustine, and St. Francis of Assisi, who’s credited with creating the first Nativity Scene. The eventual emergence of the observance and celebration on our shores was the result of “the great melting pot of immigration” as families from other countries brought their traditions with them. Evidence of this is everywhere — the Irish custom of candles in windows which now fill our village, Christmas trees, a German tradition, in our homes and public places, the poinsettia of Mexican lore on our altars and in our doorways, the Scandinavian mistletoe. The absence in our celebrations of English traditions, the “Yule log, or wassailing, or roasting a suckling pig”, Lois explained, is the result of the reluctance of the first settlers from England to recognize Christmas.
In 1978, the Gazette’s first year, the December front page featured Pearl Scarpino’s interviews with residents who were raised here at the turn of the century — Helen Matthews, Vera Hoffman, Bertha Burnham, and Anna McDermott – who all recalled the humble Christmas celebrations of their childhoods, neighborhood gatherings of friends and families, riding in a sleigh to Church, where a Christmas tree, trimmed with strings of popcorn and cranberries and real candles was skirted with presents parents placed there for their children, dolls suspended from branches and toy trucks tucked under them. Five years later, the December 1983 issue relayed accounts from the “younger generation” – Phyllis Stone, Helen Pearl, and Eunice Fuller – which were much more “festive”; and in 2020, “Our Rural Heritage” shared residents’ fondest memories of Christmas in our town, which, curiously, returned to those simple pleasures – remembering neighbors, the ringing of the church bells, the candlelit windows in our village.
In many issues, the origins of our traditions were explored. Several authors contributed to the topic of the Christmas tree, the custom’s folklore as well as how to grow them and where to purchase them in town. Norine Barrett wrote several historical articles, explaining, for example, in “The Holly and the Ivy” the use of evergreens, pagan symbols of immortality and therefore forbidden by “the Church”, where greens and illuminations were initially viewed with disfavor and seen as distractions from the sermon. Wreaths were pagan symbols of protection and were also used in Solstice celebrations to illustrate the cyclical nature of life. Adorning most of our doors today, wreaths were adopted as Christian announcements of the season of Advent in Germany and Scandinavian countries. Norine also wrote of “Twelfth Night”, an English tradition which, like so many, was not celebrated in New England, and one English tradition which was – caroling. During the Depression and World War II, teenagers went evenings to every home in town to sing Christmas carols. Various groups have revived the tradition – students from the elementary school, Parish Hill High School’s chorus, girl scouts, boy scouts, and most recently, members of our Mennonite community.
Norine also shared her incredible collection of Santa Clauses, whose history Jean Wierzbinski traced in a 2014 article, from the original St. Nicholas, the Sinter Klass who settled on our shores with the Dutch in the 1600’s, to Clement Moore’s 1822 poem which bestowed him with “a miniature sleigh and eight tiny rein-deer”. When Santa Claus became a seasonal presence in city stores in 1941, he was also playing a role in our rural celebrations, distributing presents at the Congregational Church at the turn of the century, in the one-room schoolhouses, and to every child in town at the Little River Grange during the war years and beyond. For the last several years, Santa has made an appearance at the Burnham Hibbard House, and sometimes he’s ridden around town on a fire truck visiting children. In 2011, our front page, “Dear Santa”, featured the Christmas wishes of residents of every decade, from four-year-old Henry Fontaine who wanted “Smokey the Firetruck”, to ninety-seven-year-old Vinnie Scarpino, who asked Santa to “Surprise me!”
In the 1978 and 1980 issues, Alison Davis interviewed residents whose Christmas celebrations still included the customs of their cultures. Traditions such as Finnish pastries with prune filling and pastries with almond paste from Holland, Hungarian sweet bread with raisins and cinnamon, Scotch hash and short bread, Estonian blood sausage, German honey cakes and stollen. So many customs centered on food, with an Italian family’s Christmas dinner of octopus, pastry in honey, chestnuts and pumpkin pie, and a Polish family’s “Wigilia” twelve courses representing the twelve apostles and the twelve months, including familiar favorites such as borscht and pierogi, and beginning with the “oplatek”, a piece broken from the blessed wafer as it passed from person to person.
There were other traditions residents shared from their heritages. The Parson’s Estonian custom of a village and electric train on a platform under the Christmas tree, the German tradition of a wreath with real candles lit on the four Sundays of Advent at the Brown’s, the Arriolas’ Mexican farolitos lining the way to their home on Christmas Eve.
The Gazette also featured Chanukah many times with several residents sharing the history and customs of the “Feast of Lights” and inviting everyone in town to join the festivities, starting in 1981 when Lenore Case described the traditions, the dreidel, the latkes, the lighting of the Menorah. The following year, her six-year-old son was the first among many children to write of “Chanukah through the Eyes of a Child”. And in 2001, Mary Oliver interviewed Eva Loew for the story of “The Wooden Menorah”, crafted from a Cuban cigar box and wooden spools while the family awaited entry into the United States during World War II in a refugee community in Cuba, where Eva spent her “most memorable Hanukkah.”
Two years later, Mary would write of the origins and rites of a winter ritual with deeper roots, the Solstice, commemorated throughout history and throughout the world. Native Americans everywhere, including those who once lived here, celebrate the Solstice, the rebirth of the sun. Mary’s article relayed the Inuit legend of the beginning of the world and its absence of light, which an old man had hidden in a box within many boxes. Desiring light in order to see his surroundings, Raven turned himself into a pine needle which the old man’s daughter swallowed while drinking water from the river. Nine moons later, she gave birth to a strange boy with a beak-like face and feathers on his back, who begged his grandfather for the boxes. The old man eventually acquiesced, and when Raven found the one with the light, he turned into his true form and flew out of the smoke hole and into the sky, where the light drifted to the rim of the universe and where it “remains to this day – we call it the sun”.
As we enter a new year in a world torn with divisiveness, with prejudice, with an unfathomable amount of intolerance toward differences of every kind, it is good to remember the origins of our holiday traditions, the lands and cultures from which they came, to recognize the resemblances between our winter observances, to value the invitations from our neighbors to join with them in their festivities, to appreciate, throughout the year and our experiences, encounters with people of all walks of life, and to acknowledge the gift of diversity.
Happy Holidays, Hampton. Happy Chanukah, Christmas, Solstice, Dong Zhi, Kwanzaa. As Mary’s article reminded us, whatever you celebrate “remember to share your light – it makes us all warmer.”