Free The Battle for Christmas by Stephen Nissenbaum

love):
    ’Tis Love, pure Love cements the whole.
Love—of the BOTTLE and the BOWL .
    The interval of religious service (“Masons at church! … / Such folk as never did appear / So overfond of coming there”) is treated simply as an ironic interlude, showing “how they came
    To house of God from house of ale
And how the parson told his tale:
How they return’d, in manner odd,
To house of ale from house of God.
    Even the clergyman who preached on this occasion (“told his tale”) acknowledged that it was the feast, and not the sermon, that made up “the weightier business of the day.” His “sermon” is reported in aphoristic verse modeled on that of the English poet Alexander Pope:
    For eating
solid sense
affords,
Whilst nonsense lurks in many words.
Doubting does oft arise from thinking,
But truth is only found in drinking.
    This having said, the reverend vicar
Dismiss’d them to their food and liquor. 80
    These verses are funny today (and would have been shocking in 1749) for their deliberate juxtaposition of the sacred and the profane. And the event they described must have made for quite a scene in mid-eighteenth-century Boston. But in the context of older Christmas traditions one point stands out: The Freemasons’ banquet was limited to the lodge members themselves, all of whom were prosperous men. The “aprond throng” that collected on the streets to watch the procession was not invited to participate in the feast itself. Even so, it may have been part of the ritual. The British historian E. P. Thompson has argued that in England, too, the eighteenth-century elite no longer performed the requisite paternalist rituals of the season, but Thompson adds suggestively that the Englishelite still continued to “perform” in front of the poor, in a kind of disdainful “theater of the streets.” 81 That may have been what the Boston Freemasons were doing when they chose to march to their feast in a formal procession. The poet even suggests that the “apron’d throng” put on something of a performance of its own in response to the march—“shouldering close,” they managed to “close, press, stink, and shove” around the marchers.” In an aside, the poet reveals that the Grand Master of the lodge, a wealthy Boston merchant, decided not to attend the banquet—ostensibly because he had caught a cold, but in fact because he had foreseen “that the jobb/Would from all parts collect the mob.” 82 An interesting reason: Could it be that the Grand Master was not wholly comfortable with the implications of this performance?
Carriers’ Addresses: Wassailing in the Streets
    It is difficult to know how the poorest residents of eighteenth-century Boston observed the Christmas season. But the limited evidence that does exist suggests a reemergence of Christmas misrule, reminiscent of what was happening in European cities. In its more innocent form this involved a ritual that is still with us today: giving Christmas tips to the paper carrier. Newspapers were delivered door to door in eighteenth-century Boston. During the Christmas season these newspaper carriers expected a tip. Unlike their modern successors, the colonial carriers were not members of prosperous families who took on a paper route to earn a little extra spending money; they were the sons (very likely the teenage sons) of the poor.
    By the 1760s these Boston carriers were going on their begging rounds armed with little printed verses that they presented in turn to each of their patrons. Such “carriers’ addresses” were usually written and printed by the editor of the newspaper and distributed on or about New Year’s Day. (The custom originated in Philadelphia during the 1730s and had been picked up in Boston by 1760.) But there were at least four Boston carriers’ verses (printed between 1764 and 1784) that referred to Christmas as well as New Year’s. The 1764 verses in the
Boston Evening Post
, for example, was headed “The