History

Even in the recent foaming at the mouth over whether your Wal-Mart greeter wishes you a merry Christmas or happy holidays, the holly-and-the-ivy season in Virginia is 400 years of converging customs, cultures, prohibitions, fashions and controversies. Truth be told, there’s no such thing as a traditional Virginia Christmas, and there never really was, the season having come over from England as an already rather murky mélange of pagan saturnalia and the Christian nativity, with some agrarian-society harvest festival thrown in.

Take, for example, the Christmas tree. O tannenbaum, O tannenbaum, more than a million of you are cut down and sold every year from Virginia farms these days, but you arrived in Virginia from Germany and didn’t achieve widespread adoption until late in the 19th century. Eric Bryan, Deputy Director of the Frontier Culture Museum of Virginia, in the Shenandoah Valley, notes that holiday season visitors have often been surprised, and sometimes incensed, that no Christmas tree stands in the museum’s American Farm exhibit, which is interpreted for the year 1820. A Staunton newspaper from the 1850s still considered the Christmas tree such a novelty that it reported on a resident who put one up and then opened his house for everyone to come and marvel at the wonder. In an oral history looking back on her childhood in early-20th-century Patrick County, Pearl Witt Kendrick recalled, “People just didn’t put up trees when I was a child.”

What did happen on Christmas day, Kendrick said, was her father and brother going outside and firing the shotgun in the air. Apparently nothing said “peace on earth” like a hail of gunfire; the tradition of “shooting in Christmas,” or its variant, “shooting in the New Year” (sometimes with fireworks rather than firearms), was remarked upon by a visitor to Virginia at least as far back as the 1700s. Back in Patrick County, Kendrick worried, “After hearing Mama tell the story of Christ’s birth, the Lord seemed so real and close to me that I was afraid Dad might accidentally shoot him.”