By Jessica Lynn Leeper, DPhil Candidate in History, University of Oxford

Whenever we think about Christmas in the 19th century, we think of the rich aesthetics of the Victorian age which began in the late 1830s. Scrooge’s ghosts made their debut appearance in 1843, President Franklin Pierce introduced the Christmas tree to the White House in the early 1850s, and so many of the carols we associate with the season were being written throughout the 19th century. In the 1820s, John Quincy Adams was at the height of his career, having been inaugurated as the Sixth President of the United States in 1825 after serving as President Monroe’s Secretary of State. St. Nicholas had just begun to appear in children’s literature in the 1820s, after his famous introduction in poems like Clement Clarke Moore’s ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas, yet John Quincy Adams – like most of his contemporaries – was entirely unaware that the holiday season was about to be revolutionized over the course of the 19th century. To him, it was a quiet point in his year. It was a time for reflection in his diary; for long hours of fireside reading; and unending (and often political) social visits. He rarely took the day off from his work at the office, but he almost always found time each Christmas for games of chess and whist, for lavish oyster dinners, and sleigh rides with his wife Louisa Catherine.

John Quincy’s diaries throughout the 1820s reveal a deep insight into how he and his family celebrated the Christmas season in the often-forgotten decade between the Early Republic and the Victorian age. Adams wrote daily in his diary throughout his life, and thanks to the digitization efforts of the MHS’s Adams editors, we can easily discover how this fascinating past president celebrated the Christmas season, and how his Christmas entries varied over the course of the 1820s. No Christmas at the Adams house was the same, and it is clear that John Quincy established no family traditions during that decade. There was no exchanging of gifts, but the season was remarkably social and cheerful nevertheless. Most of his Christmas entries read like political newspapers of information and congressional gossip, but there are glimpses into his family life throughout each page.

In the 1820s, John Quincy and Louisa Catherine’s three sons were, at different times, enrolled at Harvard, and the family’s celebratory season began once George, John, and Charles Francis arrived to Washington D.C. after their long and often treacherously icy journey from Massachusetts. For the boys it was an exciting escape from their studies, yet John Quincy interpreted their “winter vacation” as bonus study time. It was hardly a festive way to enjoy the holidays, but it was to some degree a way that John Quincy could connect with his children and measure their educational and personal progression with each passing year. For him, the holidays were a time to review on the year that was ending, much as we create montages of our achievements at New Years. It was important to him that his sons were exposed to an edifying and scholarly holiday, and scholarship was John Quincy’s greatest love. To him, the ideal leisurely day was one spent in his study, pouring over books of great moral poetry or statistics about weights and measures. His perfect holiday was a day of uninterrupted reading. Unfortunately, his family did not quite share his love of perpetual study! On Christmas day 1820, John Quincy subjected his sons to a tediously long reading of Pope’s Messiah, as he put it, “a poem suited to the day, and of which my own admiration was great at an earlier age than that of my Son Charles, the youngest person now in my family. Not one of them excepting George appeared to take the slightest interest in it, nor is there one of them who has any relish for literature.” Perhaps he realized that his sons needed their holiday to be a day of joy, and reading moral literature was not quite what they had in mind.

In the following few years, as his life became busier and busier, his Christmas entries reveal that he had become less interested in the festivities of the day, and far more interested in the social meaning behind the day, that is, the morals that one could learn from the Christmas season. In both 1822 and 1828 he wrote on Christmas day about the importance of religious toleration in American society. Though he was a Unitarian, he used the occasion of Christmas day to attend other denominational services, including in two different years mass at the Catholic church near the White House. For him, Christmas day was a day that first and foremost signified universal peace and friendship: “On Christmas day of all others, [those] of every denomination should forget all their animosities and dissensions, and adhere to the Law of Love.” For him, Christmas was not so much about the merriment of the season, the balls and feasts and garlands, but that it was a time to reflect on the morals of his beliefs and what it meant to be a friend to all in the 19th century. The sermons he attended soberly preached Revelations on the day of Christmas, rather than the more uplifting Nativity story, and he returned home from the services clearly eager to write introspective yet hopeful paragraphs in his diary.

Though John Quincy Adams did not celebrate the holiday season quite the way that we do today – there was of course no talk of Rudolph or commercial shopping in his diary each year – we can all perhaps take a cue from his diary entries from each Christmas. He spent each holiday thinking through how best to improve himself and the world around him; how to strengthen his friendships and his relationships with his family; and how to find peace and reflection at the end of each passing year. And, as John Quincy might wish for, we could all use an hour or two after opening presents and feasting to enjoy a good book!