The Lowcountry, despite its (usual) lack of snow or frosty temperatures, has a solid claim to the most cherished Christmas traditions and symbols. For starters, the joy and color of the Christmas season wouldn't be the same without the brilliant red and green of the Poinsettia (Euphorbia pulcherimma); and it was a native Charlestonian who first introduced the plant to the United States.
Joel Roberts Poinsett was the first United States minister to Mexico in the 1820's. Sent south by President James Monroe to report on troubling political unrest in Mexico and to negotiate a new border treaty, Poinsett first encountered the plant Mexicans called flor de nochebuena, or Christmas Eve flower, in a farming area south of Mexico City, where it had been cultivated for generations. Poinsett was an avid botanist and sent samples of the striking plant back home, where it was named in his honor.
Its association with Christmas is said to have begun in 16th-century Mexico, when a poor little girl unable to afford decorations for her church's celebration of the Nativity was told by an angel to gather weeds by the roadside, which soon sprouted bright red, star-shaped flowers and green leaves. The flowers' shape became associated with the Star of Bethlehem and their color with the blood of the crucifixion, and they soon appeared in churches throughout Mexico during the Christmas season.
Before the mid-nineteenth century, Christmas was primarily a welcome day of rest in the Lowcountry for both white landowners and their enslaved black workers. It was an especially welcome time for blacks, as it was one of the few times during the year (for some, the only time) when they were allowed by their masters to travel away from their home plantations to attend spiritual gatherings based on African harvest festivals, long celebrated at the same time of year in ancestral homelands. And many of them benefitted from the centuries-old British tradition of the "Christmas box" of food and clothing presented to workers on the day after Christmas, which we still call
Boxing Day.
It was the arrival of German and Scandinavian immigrants to the Lowcountry that brought many of the traditions we most strongly associate with Christmas, including the German Tannenbaum - the traditional fir tree that had been erected and decorated in western European households for centuries. The practice became firmly attached to the Lowcountry's holiday when the "Swedish Nightingale" Jenny Lind arrived in Charleston for an 1850 concert and on Christmas Eve placed just such a tree in the window of her hotel room. The Charleston Courier called it a "forest tree...decorated with variegated lamps that attracted much attention." Dutch immigrants, meanwhile, brought with them their beloved Sinterklaas, their version of Saint Nicholas, the bestower of gifts (and the occasional lump of coal).
By the time of Lind's concert, much of what we attach to the Christmas holiday was in place, including special sales presented by merchants and the giving of gaily-wrapped gifts piled under a festively decorated tree. And Sinterklaas had evolved into Clement Clark Moore's portly and jolly old elf, wishing "Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night."
Happy holidays from all of us at SINHG!
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