Christmas in Colonial Charleston

 

Christmasⁱ

i Christmas Traditions in colonial Charleston

From scores of surviving letters and newspaper anecdotes, however, we can learn the basic outline of the season’s activities. Many people were busy visiting their family and neighbors, making music, dancing, hunting, and preparing fancy dinners. These were common practices, so few people felt the need to document them in written descriptions.

In both urban Charleston and on rural plantations, it was not unusual for white masters to allow their enslaved servants a bit of liberty to prepare a festive meal, and even to visit loved ones elsewhere within the Lowcountry. Written descriptions of Christmas traditions among early South Carolina’s enslaved majority are now exceedingly rare because of the segregated nature of those traditions. Unfortunately for us, the prejudiced white writers who rarely put pen to paper to document their own holiday practices were even less inclined to describe the festivities taking place in the slave quarters.

There was no St. Nick or England's Father Christmas – who was only concerned with adult merrymaking.

Christmas—the 25th day of December—was also one of the traditional “quarter days” of the English calendar. As I discussed in an earlier episode about the use of the Julian Calendar in early Charleston (see Episode No. 47), our community once marked the passing seasons of the year with four important dates: Lady Day (March 25th) marked the beginning of the year, followed by Midsummer Day (June 24th); then Michaelmas (September 29th), and finally Christmas. All financial accounts—be it the annual budget of our provincial government, a tenant’s rental contract, or a man’s bar tab at the local pub—were all calculated on a schedule formed around these quarter days. The local newspapers of colonial-era Charleston, for example, frequently reported the quantity of articles exported from South Carolina between, say, Christmas and Midsummer, or the number of enslaved Africans imported between, say, Lady Day and Michaelmas. Even after our community adopted the more accurate Gregorian Calendar in January 1752, Christmas and the other quarter days continued to play an important role in marking the passage of time in Charleston.

In my personal experience trolling through thousands of documents from the first century South Carolina, haven’t seen any references to gift-giving or the exchanging of gifts at Christmas. I have, however, seen a few references to the English tradition of the “Christmas box.” This was an ancient custom in which tradespeople and servants received small gratuities and even leftovers from their employers or customers on the day following Christmas, December 26th. Here in Charleston, this English custom was apparently extended to the enslaved population as well. Late in the year 1759, for example, local printer Peter Timothy advertised for subscriptions to publish a long poem by a local author. Part of the proceeds collected for this endeavor, said Mr. Timothy, would go to his enslaved assistant, Felix, “to augment his Christmas Box.