Oh, What Fun: Diving into an 18th Century Christmas
by Katherine Scott Crawford
Christmastime in the eighteenth century: This was something I had to research in order to write the Christmas scenes in my historical novel, Keowee Valley, which opens in the year 1768.
I say “had to,” but really—it was a blast! I’m a research hound and a history nut, and to top it off, Christmas happens to be my favorite time of year. Diving into the details of a Christmas nearly 250 years past was a job for which I’ll happily volunteer any day of the week.
But it wasn’t easy. For one, Keowee Valley is set in the American colonies during a time of great upheaval—the American Revolution is brewing—and not only that, the particular Christmas I was writing about takes place on the Southern frontier, in the then-wilderness of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The woman hosting the Christmas festivities—my protagonist, 25 year-old Quinn MacFadden—is a bit of a conundrum: she’s a quick-tempered bluestocking who rides a horse like a man, speaks a couple of long-dead languages, takes off into the back-country in search of her kidnapped cousin, barters for land from the Cherokee Indians and builds a settlement which functions as an egalitarian community, and is (at this point in the story) falling in rather complicated love with a mysterious half-Cherokee, half-Irish tracker with conundrums of his own.
While we know a bit of the Christmas traditions of the American colonists during this time, most of that comes from the diaries of people living in towns and cities like Savannah, Charleston, Wilmington, Philadelphia and New York. During a time of war, everything is thrown off kilter, even the holidays. And in the wild Carolina back-country, where Quinn lives with a handful of settlers, her faithful horse, and her Cherokee neighbors, we don’t really know what went on this time of year. We can assume folks of European descent celebrated much like they did wherever they were originally from. Perhaps they sang songs, made a special meal, lit precious candles, and spent time with family. After all, throughout history people have always attempted to hold on to tradition, no matter where they are when Christmastime rolls around.
For Quinn, this means the giving of simple, carefully-chosen gifts for the settlers with whom she shares her wild new home: people who were once strangers, and whom she has come to love.
There’s the leather gloves for a freed slave, a corncob pipe for a disgraced English lord, a tea kettle for a hard-working couple and a wood flute for their young sons. But it’s the two gifts Quinn receives in the middle of the deep, cold, holy night—one, the gift of a saved life, and two, a rather perfect surprise from a man who’s swiftly becoming much more than a stranger—that make it a very merry Christmas indeed.
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