Understanding why giving gifts to children (and by gradual extension, to adults) became part of this new Christmas tradition requires an expansion of Nissenbaums story. The Battle for Christmas focuses on the tensions between New Yorks elites and its working classes, but during this same period, a middle class began to emerge in New York and other northern cities, and the reinvention of Christmas served their purposes as well. Like their wealthier contemporaries, middle-class families worried about what rapid population growth and expanding market capitalism would do to their childrenparticularly because an expansion of goods and services on offer was reducing young peoples household responsibilities at a time when alternative pathways to adulthood, such as public education, had yet to emerge.
In response to the increasing uncertainty surrounding this stage of life, urban families that aspired to prepare their children for life in the middle and upper ranks of American society widely adopted new strategies for child rearing. As work and home became increasingly separated for these families, parents kept children within the home (or at church or in school) as long as possible in order to avoid what many of them perceived as the corrupting influences of commerce on kids inchoate moral character. Elites efforts to domesticate Christmas aligned neatly with these parents interests, for they encouraged young Americans to associate the joys of the holiday with the morally and physically protective space of home.
Meanwhile, even if parents were concerned about commercial influences outside the home, they were not bothered by the idea of letting childrens commodities into it, in limited doses. In the 1820s, an American toy industry began to emerge, and American publishers started producing books and magazines for children. (The first three self-sustaining childrens magazines in U.S. history debuted from 1823 to 1827.) Much of the initial demand for these items reflected parents recognition of the instructional power of consumer goods. As an 1824 review of the evangelical childrens magazine The Youths Friend noted,
If early-19th-century newspaper ads promoting Bibles as childrens Christmas gifts are any indication, parents during this era seem to have retained a similar focus on delivering spiritual value to their children. After the Civil War, the spread of consumer products in American cities made it increasingly difficult to control childrens access to toys, books, and magazines, so in order to keep young people at home, parents gradually acquiesced to purchasing products intended to amuse as well as instruct their offspring.
Postbellum Christmas traditions followed this broader trend by becoming more child-focused, particularly through the reconstructed image of Saint Nicholas. Clement Clarke Moores Saint Nick was an elf who was jolly but also a bit scary (as indicated by the narrators repeated reminder that he had nothing to dread).
During the 1860s, the cartoonist Thomas Nast created a new image of Santa Claus that replaced this ambiguous figure with a warm, grandfatherly character who often appeared with his arms full of dolls, games, and other secular toys. One of the earliest publications in which Nasts Santa figure appeared was the December 1868 issue of the magazine Hearth and Home.
Christmas gift-giving, then, is the product of overlapping interests between elites who wanted to move raucous celebrations out of the streets and into homes, and families who simultaneously wanted to keep their children safe at home and expose them, in limited amounts, to commercial entertainment. Retailers certainly supported and benefited from this implicit alliance, but not until the turn of the 20th century did they assume a proactive role of marketing directly to children in the hopes that they might entice (or annoy) their parents into spending more money on what was already a well-established practice of Christmas gift-giving.