Folklore: Santa Clause

First Christmas Card 1843

Re-post.

The History

As writers like Nissenbaum have pointed out, the current celebration part of Christmas is a nineteenth-century creation. The Puritans associated Christmas with high Anglicanism and paganism (or rather, they associated anything associated with high Anglicanism with paganism). 

The Victorians enjoyed Christmas, and Queen Victoria introduced German customs, but the huge decoration-explosion Nutcracker version of Christmas took awhile to catch on and didn't catch on in America (that home to "low" Protestantism) until the latter half of the nineteenth century. Santa Clause arrived around the same time.  

Washington Irving used the Santa Clause image in his fiction, and Clement C. Moore--a friend of Irving's--practically invented the standard description with "A Visit From Saint Nicholas." In Moore's poem, Santa has a "broad face and a little round belly/That shook when he laughed, like a bowlful of jelly/He was chubby and plump." He also smokes. Moore additionally named Santa's reindeer (although Rudolf wasn't added until 1920).

Other than Irving and Moore, the man who truly popularized the Santa Clause image in America was Thomas Nast, a German-born illustrator. (Both Irving and Moore also have German or, rather, Dutch connections.) Nast created his illustrations for Harper's Weekly (amongst other magazines) between 1860 to 1890. As well as Santa Clause, Nast is responsible for the donkey and the elephant as Democrat and Republican symbols; Nast is definitely an example of "high" or at least medium culture seeping into the lore of a nation. Rather impressive influence for one guy!

The Nast/Moore/American image of Santa is different from British versions: for a comparison, check out Lewis's description of Father Christmas in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Like Nast and unlike Moore, Lewis makes no overt attempt to associate Father Christmas with Saint Nicholas. Father Christmas has deep roots; it is likely that Saint Nicholas became a custodian for older stories, a common occurrence with Saints. C.S. Lewis would have been aware of the pagan element and he was more likely to incorporate paganism into his writing than excise or abolish it.

Kids and Santa

There are many folk stories and performances surrounding Santa, the most prevalent being that children should be allowed to believe in Santa as long as possible. Pretending Santa exists is a deliberate, uh, fib that kind parents allow their children to believe for the sake of the holiday.

And I sort of get it. Except when I don't. Believing in Santa, at least for me, wasn't exactly the same as believing in, say, aliens. (Aliens might be out there--I just don't think they would bother with Earth.) I asked my mom if Santa was real when I was about five. Some kids at the bus stop had told me he wasn't. I already knew the answer, so when she reluctantly said, "No," I didn't have a fit and start crying. I went, "Oh, okay."

On the other hand, it would have been nice if I could have believed some jolly, rich, old uncle was paying for the gifts under the Christmas tree. I was the kind of kid who felt guilty about everything (and I mean, everything) and naturally, the money my parents spent on my gifts got added to the list.

On the other other hand, I can't imagine pushing the idea of Santa Clause on anyone very hard. People in my childhood home talked about Santa, we selected gifts for our Santa lists from the Sears Roebuck catalog, and I put out milk and cookies (although that was more of a joke), but my parents never presented Santa as an actual possibility. "Santa" always seemed to be said in inverted commas. Even before my fifth year, I never believed in a North Pole hide-out or reindeer or a guy sliding down the chimney. I didn't not believe. I just didn't have any reason to believe (other than the guilt thing).

Do kids believe? Or do they really know, in their heart of hearts, that Santa is the head of the household? Do parents still spin elaborate tales about Santa's time traveling abilities? Or has Santa become an image and only an image: have your picture taken with the red-coated symbol?

Literary/Popular Appearances

Clement C. Moore's "A Visit From St. Nicholas" naturally. Grinch in How The Grinch Stole Christmas wears the traditional Santa Clause outfit. The awesome Bones episode "The Santa in the Slush" uses multiple red-coated singing Santas (with bells), and there's a very funny Due South episode where a number of Santas, reindeer, and Elvises ("I said elves, you fools! ELVES!") wander around the police station.

On a far more literary note, Tolkien wrote and illustrated Letters to Father Christmas.  Tolkien's Father Christmas (to the left) is more German than British/ Celtic (to the right). There's also the hilarious William Dean Howells' story "Christmas Every Day," although the main character there is a Christmas Fairy rather than Santa Clause. And I mustn't forget the famous editorial: "Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Clause" by Francis Pharcellus Church.

Whatever the image--symbolic or decorative--Santa adds a lot to the festivities!

Thanksgiving and Folklore

It's that time of year again! So here is my post from last year about Thanksgiving. At that time, I wasn't teaching my Folklore course and wanted to. This year, I am, and I'm thankful for that!

Thanksgiving, as it is known in America, is a relatively new holiday . . . despite the supposed link to Pilgrims and Indians.

Not that Puritans and Native Americans didn't lunch together--only, at the time, the involved parties weren't thinking, "Hey, this is Thanksgiving!" although they may have been thinking of "thanksgiving." People are generally glad not to be dead from starvation.

Not to overwhelm anyone with abstractions, but holidays usually become holidays once the thing they become a holiday for is long past. This is true of most commemorations: the Vietnam War Memorial was completed in 1982; the Korean War Veterans Memorial in 1995; and the World War II Memorial--for the war we won!--in 2004.

Commemoration always seems to occur when people fear that the thing being commemorated has already been forgotten (and it probably has).

Another point is that holidays will accummulate traditions which are explained/justified/linked to the holiday's history AFTER they have accummulated. Human beings are wonderful at seeing connections; they are also wonderful at having purely visceral reactions. So . . . let's have a parade! BECAUSE . . . the Pilgrims and Indians would want us to.

Here's the history. During the Civil War, Sarah Josepha Hale (of "Mary had a little lamb" fame) became obsessed (there's really no other word for it) with the idea of a National Thanksgiving Holiday. Hale wrote for/edited several women's magazines. She used her position to write numerous letters and editorials and articles, etc. etc. etc. about how awesome it would be to have a National Thanksgiving Holiday.

Hale was not particularly interested in Pilgrims and Native Americans. She was more interested in a holiday that would unite the United States (this was pre-Civil War), specifically, a holiday that had New England origins. Harvest festivals and days of thanksgiving were part of early colonial life, and thanksgiving dinners were already being practiced in New England in the 19th century. In many ways, Hale was the soul-sister of Martha Stewart since what she really wanted was for everyone to come to dinner. (And the creation of the holiday led to literally thousands of books on "how to cook the perfect turkey" and "holiday crafts that children will be forced to make and then scatter about your house!"--not that I minded the crafts as a child; I only became anti-crafts as an adult.)

In October 1863, Lincoln caved, issuing a Proclamation of Thanksgiving for the last Thursday of November for Federal employees and DC residents. However, Hale died long before Congress passed Thanksgiving as a legal holiday in 1941.

Here's the commemoration bit: although Hale started campaigning for a Thanksgiving holiday in the mid-1800s, that holiday was not linked to Indians feeding poor starving Pilgrims until the late 1800s; by then, the Mayflower had become a founding story, and Native Americans were no longer a perceived threat in the United States.

In other words, not only was the "traditional" story not linked to the holiday until well after it was first suggested, the reality of the "traditional" story at the time the link was made had been--true to the exigencies of communal memory--forgotten; the real threat felt by both Pilgrims and Native Americans for each other no longer existed. (As several people point out in the Buffy episode "Pangs," you can't just apologize for wiping out a civilization plus it is against human instinct to simply roll over and play dead just because you feel very, very, very bad; the politically-correct Willow still fights the ghost Native Americans to save her friends.)

All this sounds much more cynical than I mean it to. I'm all in favor of Thanksgiving personally and although I sympathize with those who commemorate it as a National Day of Mourning (if commemoration is going around, why not commemorate the way one wants to commemorate?), I think the symbolic gesture kind of misses the point. Thanksgiving Day started out as Martha Stewart personified and ended up as football, turkey, days off from school, and Christmas shopping, all of which is not too far afield from the original gesture (I guess Hale had a point); the later linkages occurred long after any actual events took place.

Not to mention that communal memories that have a shelf-life of OVER thirty years tend to create miserable places to live: hence, the Middle East.

On the other hand, I was raised on the Thanksgiving=Pilgrims & Indians story, so the link is there, however erroneous. I wasn't raised on it in a nasty way, and I never took it very seriously (it may help the cynics amongst my readers if I clarify that I have rarely in my life believed anything a teacher told me, but that doesn't mean I feel betrayed or anything [gasp! I was lied to in high school! gasp! gasp!]; I figure that in a democracy, obtaining and discerning correct information is my responsibility).

Misguided or not, I wasn't taught Thanksgiving folklore in a "We came, we saw, we conquered" sense but in multicultural sense. Of course, this approach has its own problems. As Dave Barry writes in his A Sort of History of the United States, "Also we should keep in mind that women and minority groups were continuing to make some gigantic contributions"--which is completely patronizing (Barry's point) but hasn't stopped many university programs from practicing this approach at the expense of more accurate/less "fair" history.

Thanksgiving Traditions in Literature/Popular Culture: "John Inglefield's Thanksgiving" by Hawthorne (holiday ghost story); "Two Thanksgiving Gentlemen" by O'Henry (combines motifs of charity with eating too much); "Over the River and Through the Wood" by Lydia Maria Francis Child; numerous sitcoms where characters bemoan the preparation work of Thanksgiving and mention football.

Folklore: A Re-examination

I am scheduled to teach Folklore & Literature this Spring. It is not clear whether the course will get enough students to run. I comfort my ego by reminding myself that my English Composition students do ask me, "Are you teaching Literature next semester?" (Literature is the other required English course; the answer is, "No, BUT . . ."). Electives, unfortunately, don't have a high cache at community colleges and have a particularly low cache in the current economy (get in/get the degree/get out).

Whether or not I get the opportunity, I have found posting about folklore this fall extremely helpful. I'm a big believer that you can't teach something until you teach it. I did tons of research on folklore, collected massive numbers of articles and short stories, created detailed lesson plans . . . all of which would have been useful but all of which, now that I've had a chance to actually present the material, I need to alter.

In fact, I'm actually grateful that I didn't teach the course this fall although yes, I really would like to teach it one of these days.

In any case, I decided that there aren't enough direct links between New England literature and folklore to justify making them. That is, although Melville may have been influenced by scary monster stories as a child which led him to create Moby Dick, the link is extremely tenuous (it's easier to make these kind of links with Shakespeare although those links may be just as shaky).

I also decided that although folklore fascinates me all by itself, finding itty-bitty folkloric symbols in stories just doesn't. It never has. I'm all about formal criticism, but I think the story matters more than the itty-bitty symbols (and that kind of analysis always strikes me as rather desperate).

This doesn't mean I have to throw out my material, folk or literary. I just need to morph it slightly. This isn't difficult because what I've been aiming for all along is the flexibility of ideas (I just didn't know that till I "taught" it).

Here's what I mean:

Human beings tend to categorize things. Categories make stuff easier to remember. So, historically-speaking, in Europe, you've got Ancient Civilizations, the Dark Ages, the Medieval Age, then the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, etc.

As C.S. Lewis tried to point out long before it was cool to point out, the real historical experience wasn't like that. Ideas that we think of as "Renaissance" appeared much earlier. Attitudes that we think of as "medieval" continued until much later. Art, music, literature, and ideas don't exist in tidy little boxes before and after which they cease to function. Same with people; there's a great scene in Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time where Grant, the police inspector, realizes in exasperation that Thomas More, chancellor for Henry VIII, was six when Richard III was king (and therefore, would have had no direct adult knowledge of Richard). And Ellis Peters consistently has her characters refer to the days before William the Conqueror. (The books take place during the civil war between King Stephen and Empress Maud.)

Two boxes for literature are "highbrow" and "lowbrow." "Highbrow" literature is academic, snooty, non-linear, and doesn't sell. "Lowbrow" is often raunchy, usually genre-based, narrative, and does sell. (Sorry, a bit of my bias is showing here.) "Highbrow" and "lowbrow" attitudes definitely exist in our culture whereby one group will pour scorn on the tastes of the other group.

However, in reality, nothing takes place in a box. I recently had a very interesting discussion with a student who wrote his research essay (for my composition class) on Thomas Wolfe's edited work. The student was refuting the idea that an edited work is no longer "pure" and therefore, the author is no longer a "genius." (I remember a very silly English teacher telling me that Mozart was a genius, because the notes just came out of him, but Shakespeare wasn't because Shakespeare worked on and edited his plays.)

The student and I discussed the difference between writing and editing and also how writers are influenced by other writers. Coleridge and Wordsworth, for example, wrote poems at the same table, trading ideas and sometimes even paper. (This is one reason, by the way, that I dislike placement writing tests. I'm all about students "paddling their own canoes," but 99.9% of business and creative writing involves some kind of feedback. Even if I work alone, I'm influenced by what I read and the rejection letters I receive. The idea that writing should take place in some kind of timed bubble is ridiculous.)

I believe that images, ideas, and words--whether "high," "low," or "middle"--have this kind of flexibility. Just as writers feed off and trade ideas with each other, mediums and genres feed off and trade ideas. Something that starts out as "literary" ends up as popular or low. Something that starts out as folk becomes literary, specialized, or sanctified. Ideas float about.

Take stories about magic. These stories show up in folklore. They show up in movies. They show up in the fantasy genre. They show up in literary works (where they become "magical realism," rather than fantasy). They creep into music and into art (the Pre-Raphaelites). Nothing stays still. Van Gogh's The Starry Night, for example, shows up in a song by Don McLean. Economists call this "liquidity"; as O'Rourke explains it, "Liquidity is the Wall Street word for having things you can do with your money and being able to do them." Creative liquidity would be having places (forms, genres, mediums) to play out ideas and being able to do so.

And these floating-about ideas color our perception of new works. "Puff, the Magic Dragon" was not about marijuana, but everybody believed it was. The cultural perception was more powerful, in many ways, than the reality, and the cultural perception became its own piece of folklore.

Consequently, the ideas that show up in folklore are flexible ideas that may have originated elsewhere and may show up anywhere else, altering the way new ideas are written about. With this in mind, I intend to keep more or less the same material I've already collected but broaden my scope to include material that is not technically folklore. (I will also continue to post; I've only posted about a month of material so far!)

To conclude, as an example of cultural intermingling, here are titles from various television shows. Where did they come from? What ties do they have? I've listed potential answers in a comment (there may be more than one answer for many of these).

From Lois & Clark:

The Ides of Metropolis
Fly Hard
Tempus Fugitive

From House:

TB or Not TB
Sleeping Dogs Lie

From Stargate:

The Devil You Know

From Due South:

They Eat Horses, Don't They
Hawk and Handsaw
You Must Remember This
The Man Who Knew Too Little

From CSI:

Cats in the Cradle . . .
Scuba Doobie-Doo
And Then There Were None
Anatomy of a Lye

From NCIS:

The Good Samaritan
The Truth is Out There

From X-Files:

Ghost in the Machine
How the Ghosts Stole Christmas

Folklore: Thanksgiving II, Founding Fathers

Several weeks ago, I promised that I would return to America's Founding myths around Thanksgiving time.

I chose four founding tales to tackle; two are based on real events, one is a song, and one is completely fabricated (and scholars know, more or less, who the fabricator is). I maintain that all four tales are folklore, however, because they have become "common knowledge," the stuff people more or less think they know about American history.

Before I continue, I should state that I am not APPALLED by the historical inaccuracies of these tales. I've never really understood why elementary and high school teachers should be blamed because (1) they don't teach the intricate minutiae of historical events to their students; (2) the students don't remember intricate minutiae about historical events. The fact is, most people remember history as a group of stories, and it makes a lot of sense to teach it that way. Second fact is, if you can get students to realize that the Civil War happened before WWI and that the Revolutionary War didn't involve Texas, you are doing a pretty good job.

Case in point: how many people know that the pyramids would have looked ancient to Moses? Not many. Egyptian history has been lumped into pyramids, King Tut, Cleopatra, Moses, Ramses, and Queen Hapshetsut even though most of those elements are completely unrelated in time and location. Still, anyone who is at least passingly familiar with all those elements is doing a pretty good job.

Story 1: The Boston Massacre

It depends on your definition of massacre. Out of a crowd harassing a group of British soldiers, five were shot and killed; six others were wounded. That doesn't seem like much but population-wise, it was probably a fairly high percentage. The part of the tale that is often skipped is that the British soldiers were defended by later American patriots, John Adams and Josiah Quincy. The leader of the Brits and six soldiers were acquitted; two soldiers were found guilty of manslaughter. (I believe it was at this trial that Adams or Quincy gave the famous "people are guided by self-interest and why shouldn't they be?" speech).

In any case, the perception that the Boston Massacre was YET ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF BRITISH ATROCITIES was evidently not shared by all the colonists. I've always found it interesting that the long-term relationship between America and Britain survived in a far more stable fashion that that between, say, America and France.

Story 2: Paul Revere's Ride

A few years back, it became popular to get all snotty about Paul Revere, specifically, Longfellow's poem about Paul Revere, and to point out that he didn't make the ride in 1775 alone; he didn't even make it to Concord!

The problem with this type of snotty cynicism is that it masks the fact that Paul Revere actually was involved in the ride that bears his name. Folklore should never be entirely ignored! Revere and William Dawes started out to warn Concord that the British were going to seize the military supplies there. They met up with Dr. Prescott. Revere was captured by the British (that makes him a bona fide hero in my book!), and Dr. Prescott made it to Concord. A map of the ride can be found here.

Story 3: Yankee Doodle Dandy

Reportedly, the British troops used the song to mock colonists. A "doodle" refers to a dumb person; a "Yankee"--at the time--referred to a bumpkin or redneck (no jokes about the New York Yankees, please) while "macaroni" referred to a "dandy." The idea is that Yankee Doodle is such a stupid oaf, he thinks a feather makes him fashionable.

The colonists reportedly took the song and made it their own. This is actually a classic strategic move in political game-planning. In one of his books, P.J. O'Rourke refers to one of Ted Kennedy's convention speeches: "Where was George?" (in reference, I think, to the Iran/Contra Affair; "George" was Bush Senior). The opposition's response was "At home in bed with his wife, Ted."

The folklore part of "Yankee Doodle Dandy" is that the song has survived despite uncertainty about its origins and despite multiple variations (older versions have many more verses than the classic tune that is hummed around school yards).

Story 4: George Washington and the Cherry Tree

For those of you who have forgotten this story, George Washington as a child reportedly chopped down a cherry tree (because boys will do these sorts of things). When questioned by his father, he admitted that he was the culprit.

It never happened. It was completely made up, probably by Mason Locke Weems in the 19th century. In 19th century terms, the story makes sense.

First, it is typical for people to create "prequels" about national and religious heroes after those heroes have entered the sacred zone of communal memory (after they've been dead/gone for 30 to 50 years). Some of the gnostic texts--the ones intelligently thrown out by early Christian scholars--tell stories of Jesus's childhood where he heals birds and invites strangers to breakfast, etc. In England, at least when I was there at age fourteen, the tour guide at Glastonbury Abbey claimed that Joseph of Arimathea brought Jesus to England during his teen years. (I guess Walt Disney World was closed.) My mother, who is something of a Bible scholar, sat there with her lips tightly pressed together. She later told me that it was unlikely. But it makes a great story!

Second, during the 19th century many, many, many books were written about good little children who learned their lessons and proved their moral superiority (the brats!). They often pined away and died (think Little Nell). Twain writes a very funny parody of this in Huckleberry Finn: Read the part about Emmeline and her poetry.

As I mentioned earlier, I consider founding tales to be fairly innocuous. It is customary for people who have too many degrees and very little sense to be SHOCKED! SHOCKED! that people would actually invent and/or perpetuate stories in order to create/support an image of a nation or home or cause; it is also customary for said SHOCKED individuals to want the said perpetuation stopped RIGHT NOW (except, of course, for those stories that ought to be perpetuated for the good of our nation).

Welcome to human nature.

Not that I'm not a fan of "real" history (and yes, I think there is such a thing; it's like pornography: I know it when I see it). But I think getting after people for perpetuating exciting stories--like the Halloween scares--or identity stories--like alien abductions--is kind of like getting after companies for trying to make their products look good so people will buy them (horrible capitalists!): a total waste of time.

Whatever my personal feelings, I would ask my students these questions: What is the function of founding tales? What do they tell us about being American? Is it wrong for kids to be taught these stories? Is there a place for folklore in history?

Yes, I know, I know, it's kind of like asking them, "Is there a place for Walmart in history?" Maybe not, but it's kind of there, so live with it. But they are young, and I can't do their thinking for them.

Literary/Popular Culture Occurrences: Longfellow's "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere" naturally (although this may be an occurrence of literature creating folklore rather than the other way around); a character makes a reference to the "real" story of the Boston Massacre in Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey. I actually watched Johnny Tremain to see if it got me anywhere; it didn't much except for the rather cute and orderly colonists-dressed-as-Indians. Booth does make a very funny reference to the Boston Tea Party in Season 3 of Bones: "I love this country. You know, I'll tell you something, if I was working law enforcement back in the day when they threw all that tea in the harbor - I'm good, I'm good. I would have rounded everybody up and we'd still be English."

Folklore: Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving, as it is known in America, is a relatively new holiday . . . despite the supposed link to Pilgrims and Indians!

Not that the Pilgrims and Indians didn't lunch together--only, at the time, the involved parties weren't thinking, "Hey, this is Thanksgiving!" although they may have been thinking of "thanksgiving." People are generally glad not to be dead from starvation.

Not to overwhelm anyone with semantics, but holidays usually become holidays once the thing they become a holiday for is long past. This is true of most commemorations: the Vietnam War Memorial was completed in 1982; the Korean War Veterans Memorial in 1995; and the World War II Memorial--for the war we won!--in 2004.

Commemoration always seems to occur when people fear that the thing being commemorated has already been forgotten (and it probably has).

Thanksgiving follows a similar pattern. During the Civil War, Sarah Josepha Hale, a kind of early Martha Stewart, became obsessed (sorry, there's no other word for it) with the idea of a National Thanksgiving Holiday. In many ways, she was the soul-sister of Martha Stewart since the creation of the holiday led to literally thousands of books on "how to cook the perfect turkey" and "holiday crafts that children will be forced to make and then scatter about your house!" (not that I minded the crafts as a child; I only became anti-crafts as an adult). Hale wrote for several women's magazines.

Hale was not particularly interested in Pilgrims and Native Americans. She was more interested in a holiday that would unite the United States (remember, this is pre-Civil War), specifically, a holiday that had New England origins. Harvest festivals and days of thanksgiving were part of early colonial life, and thanksgiving dinners were already being practiced in New England in the 19th century.

In October 1863, Lincoln caved, issuing a Proclamation of Thanksgiving for the last Thursday of November for Federal employees and DC residents. However, Hale died long before Congress passed Thanksgiving as a legal holiday in 1941.

Here's the commemoration bit: although Hale started campaigning for a Thanksgiving holiday in the mid-1800s, that holiday was not linked to Indians feeding poor starving Pilgrims until the late 1800s; by then, the Mayflower had become a founding story, and Native Americans were no longer a perceived threat in the United States.

In other words, the reality of the historical event had been--true to the exigencies of communal memory--forgotten; the real threat felt by both Pilgrims and Native Americans regarding each other no longer existed. (As several people point out in the Buffy episode "Pangs," you can't just apologize for wiping out a civilization plus it is against human instinct to simply roll over and play dead just because you feel very, very, very bad; the politically-correct Willow still fights the ghost Indians to save her friends.)

All this sounds much more cynical than I mean it to. I'm all in favor of Thanksgiving personally and although I sympathize with those who commemorate it as a National Day of Mourning (if commemoration is going around, why not commemorate the way one wants to commemorate?), I think the symbolic gesture kind of misses the point. Thanksgiving Day started out as Martha Stewart personified and ended up as football, turkey, days off from school, and Christmas shopping (all of which is not too far afield from the original gesture; I guess Hale had a point); the later linkages occurred long after any actual conquest took place.

Not to mention that communal memories that don't have a shelf-life of thirty years tend to create miserable places to live: hence, the Middle East.

On the other hand, I was raised on the Thanksgiving=Pilgrims & Indians story, so the link is there, however erroneous. I wasn't raised on it in a nasty way, and I never took it very seriously (it may help the cynics amongst my readers if I clarify that I have rarely in my life believed anything a teacher told me, but that doesn't mean I feel betrayed or anything [gasp! I was lied to in high school! gasp! gasp!]; I figure that in a democracy, obtaining and discerning correct information is my responsibility).

Misguided or not, I wasn't taught Thanksgiving folklore in a "We came, we saw, we conquered" sense but in multicultural sense. As Dave Barry writes in his A Sort of History of the United States, "Also we should keep in mind that women and minority groups were continuing to make some gigantic contributions"--which is completely patronizing (kind of Barry's point) but hasn't stopped many university programs from practicing this approach at the expense of more accurate/less "fair" history.

Literary/Popular Cultural Occurrences: I haven't been able to find any! I'm fairly certain that Harriet Beecher Stowe--the other Martha Stewart of the 19th century--referred to Thanksgiving Day in her writing. Otherwise, not including Buffy, I haven't been able to track down many literary/pop culture Thanksgivings that refer to the Pilgrim/Indian folktale. Either this is a folktale with relatively low flexibility or it is dying out. Football, turkey, and days off have taken its place: a triumph for secularism!

Folklore: Halloween

Happy Halloween!!
(In three days.)

In terms of folklore, American Halloween--despite claims that it is tied to ancient Celtic and medieval European festivals--is a very recent invention.

Around Victorian times, Halloween in the United States began to involve private parties which would include fortune telling and apple bobbing. Themed costumes entered the picture in the 1900s, but costumes--and for that matter, begging--were associated more with Thanksgiving than with Halloween.

The link of Halloween to costumes and, specifically, to trick-or-treating by children didn't take place until the WWII era. The idea was to reduce adult pranking and general out-of-handness by concentrating on the child aspects of the holiday.

I grew up at the tail-end of this children's-oriented paradise. I remember going trick or treating, carrying pillow cases (none of those cutsy jack o'lantern shaped "bags"--those things aren't even close to big enough!), and I have a vivid recollection of my brothers discussing whether or not to go home and get my little red wagon, so (1) I wouldn't get tired; (2) there would be more room for the candy. When we did get home, we would count, categorize, and trade our candy. (Then, as now, I preferred chocolate to hard candy and just about anything to Baby Ruths.)

And nobody checked it. In fact, not only did nobody check our candy, people gave away seriously uncheckable stuff: soda, homemade caramel popcorn balls. I grew up in pure suburbia, and there were tons of kids on the street and tons of houses ready and waiting to hand out treats.

And then the scares started. Interestingly enough, the big scare--the Candy Man--happened earlier than I had remembered. The Candy Man, the murderer who used doctored Halloween candy to hide killing his own kid, committed his crime in 1974. As a testimony to the power of folklore, by the time I hit my late prepubescence (the early 80's), this isolated incident had taken over people's perception of the holiday. By the time I was twelve, Halloween had become what it is now (more or less): a day for parties, aimed at both children and adults.

Sure, there're still some trick-or-treaters out there, but the holiday does seem to have lost its non-commercial joie de vivre (maybe, I'm just getting old). Many movie buffs credit the 1947 film Meet Me In St. Louis as crystallizing the ideal mid-America old-fashioned Halloween. In the movie, the costumed children meet around a bonfire (in the street!); one of them runs off and pulls a prank (throwing flour at a neighbor man).

My childhood Halloweens didn't involve bonfires or pranks, but I realized, watching the movie, that the costumed children are completely unchaperoned; that freedom was part of my childhood (my childhood was basically Sandlot). Whenever I get trick-or-treaters now, they are almost always accompanied by adults. To be honest, I probably would accompany my kid too if I were a parent. But when I was young, Halloween really was a kids' night--our parents simply expected us to be home before . . . midnight, I guess. My parents weren't careless; they were products of the Depression-era. Since my siblings and I are all still alive, I guess that sense of security (or was it a sense of "if it isn't poverty or a bomb, it won't kill you"?) was justified.

And the truth is, there have been relatively few incidents of children being harmed on Halloween. The Proquest Newspaper search I used to locate the "Candy Man" turned up almost no other incidents of poisoning. I think I read somewhere that more kids are hurt from carelessly crossing the street while trick-or-treating than from "stranger-danger," but that could be propaganda by those companies that sell glow-sticks. 

Factually incorrect or not, the surge of poison/razor blade scares had great impact. However, human beings are in general great adapters. Halloween didn't go away; it morphed. After the scares of of the 1970's and 80's, at-home types of entertainment became more and more popular: for example, decorating one's house or yard for Halloween. To be technical, these "haunted" or "spook" houses are folk performances rather than folk lore, but with holidays, the two tend to merge: folk performances inform the way the holidays are written and talked about.

Literary/Modern Examples: Children's literature contains some of the best writing about Halloween, namely The Witch Family by Eleanor Estes and Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth by E.L. Konigsburg (Konigsburg references the folk performance of the costume parade at school). There is also a reference to Halloween pranking in Ghosts Have I Been by Richard Peck.

For media examples, there are the Monk and Psych episodes that deal with poison candy (the Psych episode just makes a reference, but the Monk episode uses the idea of poison candy as its central mystery).

Also, Home Improvement has several Halloween episodes in which Tim creates a "spook" house. This is part of Tim's repairman-persona; there are also several Christmas episodes where he competes with a neighbor man--not Wilson--on how many lights and elves and electronic reindeer he can put up. Although this seems to be entirely commercial, these types of displays are in fact largely folk-promoted. I could digress here into a discussion of the things people put in their yards, but it would get way off-topic. I mean . . . gnomes?

Folklore: Monsters

There are, of course, lots and lots of folktales throughout history about monsters.

What are the three most common monsters that you have heard of?

I would suggest that for many people, the three big monsters are Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, and the Abominable Snowman. There are many others, though, from the Feejee Mermaid (a Barnum hoax) to Champ, the creature of Lake Champlain, to the Jersey Devil.

With the exception of the FeeJee Mermaid, what makes these folkloric creatures is the perpetuation of stories (by supposed witnesses) unconnected to proof. Occasionally, as with Bigfoot (or Sasquatch), the information becomes supposedly "authentic," but the stories seem to be based more on desire than scientific reality.

The truth is, it is unfortunately difficult to go on believing that there are creatures "out there," what with infrared thingies and satellite tracking. I think there is a tie here to the 20th/21st century rise in conspiracy theories. As the world "shrinks" and we learn that there are no Shangri-las, conspiracy theories--the insistence that something secretive is being kept from us--blossom. Perhaps, humans need Dover Demons and Memphres and Mothmans. Otherwise, the world is just too darn pragmatic!

Literary/Modern Examples: Monsters, Inc.. gives us the (very funny) Abominable Snowman, complete with John Ratzenberger's voice. And for a very modern monster, there is Stephen King's Cujo. Monster folklore seems to be partly about fear and partly about wonder. Cujo falls into the fear part of the equation. He is completely vicious and random, which may be part of the "monster's" attraction: come to think of it, the random, indifferent, but wholly destructive Moby Dick is another example.

And then there is "The Jersey Devil," an X-Files eponymous episode (Season 1) based on the folkloric monster. The background story for the Jersey Devil is that during the Revolutionary War, a colonist fell in love with a British solider; she eventually gave birth to a winged devil-baby; the story is fairly old but sightings didn't occur until 1909. I'm not sure why such a late date or why "sightings" in 1909 would choose the Jersey Devil for its monster; I suspect that the same people, forty years later, would have seen aliens. However, once the sightings were made, they continued, all the way up to 1993.

X-Files, naturally, gives the creature a completely different background but keeps the location and name (total digression, not class related: X-Files postulates that the creature is a new type of human, a step up the predatory scale: it is intelligent but preys on humans. The problem with this explanation is that humans are a step up the evolutionary scale from, say, tigers, not because they don't prey on humans. They are a step up because they have superior firepower. It doesn't matter how "advanced" a species is: if it lives in the woods wearing a loincloth and less-advanced humans can blow it up, it ain't going to survive long, not matter how super-duper intelligent it is. This just goes to prove that even X-Files had duds although the episode itself is okay entertainment).

Many folklorists, including Diane Purkiss of The Witch Throughout History, suggest that our belief in monsters, specifically our belief in aliens, is part of the same desire? inclination? that led humans to believe in fairies. As stated previously, when our inability to believe that "the people" are here faded, we sent them "out there."

I will post about aliens and alien abductions in a few days.

Folklore: Vampires

My folklore class, should it ever run, follows this schedule:

• What is Folklore
• Folklore & Literature
• Regionalism and Folklore
• Native American Myths and Legends
• Colonial Religious Folklore
• Magic-based Folklore in Colonial New England
• Bogies: Witches
• Bogies: Ghosts 1
  
• Founding Fathers & the American Revolution

In keeping with the season, I decided to skip ahead to more Bogies—Vampires, Monsters, and Alien Abductions, not to mention folklore surrounding Halloween itself!

I'll come back to the American Revolution at Thanksgiving. The connection is actually more appropriate than it seems since Thanksgiving is, to all intents and purposes, a deliberately created piece of Americana!

Folklore: Vampires

New England vampires are not the same as European vampires. Dracula, Buffy and Twilight, although very different in atmosphere and approach, are descendants of the post-Stoker, European idea: vampires as dangerous predators who walk about, sometimes dressed in tuxedos, enthralling their intended prey. They are the "undead." Buffy, naturally, has an American high school twist as in the pilot episode where Buffy spots a vampire because his clothing is "carbon-dated" (i.e., it's 80's rather than 90's cool). ("Yes," Giles replies, "but you have to hone your senses. You didn't hone.")

New England vampires didn't walk. Their corpses (still buried) fed off living relatives, such as siblings. This belief/image thrived around consumption deaths in the 19th century. The only way to cure a dying child/parent was to dig up the grave of the dead sibling/child/spouse ("vampire")—if blood was found in the corpse's heart (not unusual for consumption victims), the heart was burned. This would hopefully spare the person who was dying.

This belief/ritual possibly existed before the 19th century, but that time period marks the advent of scientific responses to consumption. New England vampires appeared in written records as examples of "rural superstitions" (science versus ignorance, etc).

I found most of my information about New England vampires from Food for the Dead: on the Trail of New England's Vampires by Michael Bell. Bell does a good job explaining how a 19th century "peasant" could have doubted the superstition but still practiced the ritual. His psychoanalysis reminded me of a James Herriot story in which Herriot is trying to save dying cattle on a friend's farm; a neighbor man insists on carrying out "superstitious" rituals at the same time--such as burying a goat under the barn. Sure, the dead goat was useless, preventively speaking, but frankly, at that time, veterinarians were dependent on sulfur drugs and couldn't do much of anything anyway. If your livelihood depended on cattle that were dropping dead at your feet, you'd do anything: the vet, the superstitious neighbor man, the witch down the street . . . (then WWII and antibiotics came along, and it was a whole new ballgame).

Bell also relates an interesting example of folklore to the second power: in his search for a particular "vampire's" grave, he came across a story about a teacher who told his or her students about the grave; the teacher's students went looking for the grave and found the wrong one. Residents blamed desecrations of the (wrong) grave on the teacher. Bell wanted to speak to the teacher. Eventually, he realized that the story of the teacher was folklore. Maybe it happened; maybe it didn't. In any case, although the story of the teacher was repeated to Bell by several people, there was no "source," and the teacher was untraceable.

Bell also makes it clear that New Englanders never used the term "vampire." So are they even "vampires"? Yes, actually. In fact, New England vampires are probably closer to the pre-Stoker image of vampires in Europe than our current, but still folkloric, post-Stoker image.

Literary Forms--And there are purely American versions of the New England vampire. You find them in Edgar Allen Poe's tales, specifically in "Ligeia" where a dead woman feeds off her living romantic rival. Poe was possibly influenced by European Gothic horror, but there's a definite consumption creepy feel to this and to "The Fall of the House of Usher."

Folklore: Ghosts

To review: I was supposed to teach a folklore course for a local community college this fall, but it got canceled. Hopefully, I will get a chance to teach it this coming spring! In the meantime, I have been posting occasionally about all the stuff I researched. These posts are basically my lecture notes (not the way I would present the material in the classroom).

Ghost folklore is actually split between two classes, but for the purposes of this post, I will combine the material.

First, the Puritans did believe in ghosts. I had a hard time tracking down this information. I got the impression that there was no official belief in ghosts but neither was there any official disapproval. Increase Mather (see below) collected a lot of ghost stories. Many of them used the following motifs:

The ghost with a message
The poltergeist (yup, the Puritans had poltergeists!)
The portent (somethings about to happen)
Headless ghost
Roadside ghost
Ghost protecting treasure

Ghosts have never really disappeared from American folklore but in the 19th century, they receive a huge burst of energy with the growth of spiritualism. Spiritualism, specifically mediums, was taken very seriously. Scientific American did investigations! It seems hard for us media savvy (and media-inundated) 20th century products to believe but people did honestly accept photographs such as the following:

The woman is spouting ectoplasm. Ectoplasm was supposedly a manifestation of spirits. It looks like a bunch of cloth to modern eyes, and it was, but keep in mind these were the same people who accepted Arthur Conan Doyle's fairies as more than just cardboard cutouts:

The same motifs listed above appear in 19th century ghost folklore. And they show up in contemporary ghost stories! With the help of the awesome Alvin Schwartz--who publishes scary folktales for kids and, even better, includes notes of where the tales came from--and Marcus LiBrizzi (Dark Woods, Chill Water: Ghost Tales from Down East Maine), I was able to locate modern tales about haunted houses and haunted dorm rooms. And I won't forget all the ghost tales that many of us grew up hearing around campfires and at slumber parties.

Literature examples: Possible the most famous "Americana" example of ghost literature is "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" which uses the motif of the headless/roadside ghost. Ghosts also show up (or do they? wink wink) in Henry James Turn of the Screw, Sarah Orne Jewett's work, and they practically drip out of Poe's work. A great example of a classic poltergeist appears in the child's classic: The Headless Cupid by Zilpha Keatley Snyder.

Popular culture: To prepare for this course, I watched Spielberg's Poltergeist for the first time this summer. I was pleasantly surprised to see Craig T. Nelson, one of my no-hands-down favorite actors.

The movie works as entertainment, not so much as an example of any particular ghost motif. My reaction was that Spielberg collected every single religious/popular culture/folklore motif regarding ghosts in our culture and threw it all at the screen. Being the master storyteller he is, he doesn't lose the viewer because he concentrates on the parents' trials. If I use the movie, I will show the clip of the mom in the kitchen when she realizes that the chairs keep shifting--classic poltergeist behavior! (However, the explanation for the behavior is so confusing, I've forgotten what it was.)

Folklore: Puritans, Magic, and Witches

Puritans brought over from the Old World a belief in magic. The difference between magic and religion is that magic is about controlling the supernatural (for gain), and religion is about supplicating the supernatural. Naturally, Puritan theologians preached against magic and so did some believers, but just as many believers switched between and combined the two ideologies--kind of like a fundamentalist Christian who also adopts New Age health practices.

Of course, New Age health practices don't get you hung for being a witch, but then, neither did a belief in magic all that much. Many more people practiced magic, including counter-magic (against witches) than were ever considered threats to their communities.

Basically, there were two types of magic: "like produces/cures like" (a leaf shaped like a kidney will fix that organ) and "part of the whole effects the whole" (think of the Buffy episode "The Witch" where Willow tests a piece of Amy's hair to find out if Amy is, in fact, a witch). Like in Buffy, counter-magic involved identifying the witch and then practicing one of the two types of magic against the witch.

However, the theological stance was that magic was the result of a contract with the devil and should be avoided. (In fact, some preachers opposed the practice of counter-magic, stating that all negative effects should be endured, even effects brought on, supposedly, by an evil agent; since the devil, not the witch, was the real culprit, it was God's will that the sufferer be afflicted, and the sufferer should just grin-and-bear-it.) The contract is what jeopardized the witch's soul, not necessarily what the witch did.

This motif (devil and human sign a contract which then must be honored or somehow voided, sometimes through a contest) has produced some real literary/music classics: "The Devil and Daniel Webster" by Stephen Vincent Benet, "Young Goodman Brown" by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and don't forget "The Devil Went Down to Georgia."

But what about those witches?

A lot of scorn has been poured on, well, everyone in Puritan times from the victimized witches (who are always portrayed as feminists) to the evil paranoid ministers. The scorn ignores some important points:

1. The Puritans, including many accused witches, truly believed in magic. Think about it: how would you feel if your neighbor could actually control the weather, crops, and livestock? Oh, wait, the environmentalists do believe that! (Sorry, I would never bring up environmentalists in the classroom: I would say something like, "Why would the belief that others could control nature be both frightening and comforting?")

2. Although most accused witches were female, witchcraft was also practiced by men, and some male witches were accused, and some were hung (but yes, women were the bulk of the accused and executed).

3. Witches (male and female) tended to be accused in batches (this was true in Europe as well). Arthur Miller was right: you really did have to have a zealous McCarthy type on hand to get witch trials started at all. Kramer, author of the big witch book that supposedly paints the entire Middle Ages as prejudiced and anti-fun-loving-witches--Malleus Maleficarum--was a real zealot, who just about everybody in power thought was nuts (I agree with scholars who claim Sprenger's name was added by Kramer to add gravitas to the work.) Of course, it doesn't say much for the Middle Ages that this crazyman ended up giving public lectures, but he was one guy, not everybody in Europe at the time.

Absent a zealot McCarthy-type, witch accusations tended to occur in small communities against a particular individual (gives you a whole new respect for civil lawsuits!).

4. Throughout the Middle Ages, it was more likely for a woman to die in childbirth than to be accused of being a witch. (Check out Magic, Mystery, and Science: The Occult in Western Civilization by Dan Burton and David Grandy.)

5. Witches were NOT, collectively, sweet, wise, herb-collecting midwifes. In her excellent book The Witch Throughout History, Diane Purkiss tackles the New Age image of the sweet, wise, herb-collecting midwife witch. Purkiss, by the way, represents the commendable side of Women's Studies: women scholars who refuse to accept comfortable, self-gratifying images at the expense of true history or at the expense of the real women who struggled and believed and endured those times.

Many witches in Europe and Puritan New England believed they were witches. Many midwifes were not only not witches but helped to identify witches. And whatever anyone likes to tell you, the environmental/Wiccan stuff is a late development.

6. The push to stop witchcraft trials came from Puritan ministers (who were bothered by the lack of tangible evidence), not from "enlightened" outsiders. Prolific blatherers like Increase Mather expended great energy trying to focus attention on the theological principle rather than on the accused: "It is then evidence that the devil himself did that mischief [not the self-accusing woman]. It must, moreover, be sadly confessed, that many innocent persons have been put to death under the notion of witchcraft, whereby much innocent blood hath been shed." Of course, Mather then goes on to paint Catholics as more likely to burn witches than Protestants. This is incorrect. Inquisition or not, Protestant countries hung/burned as many if not more witches than Catholic countries. So, he's a two steps forward, three steps back politically correct kind of guy.

Now, none of my points make up for what we moderns consider innocent people being tried and convicted on what we consider false testimony. Just: any trial/accusation should be judged by the times in which it occurred.

In terms of folklore, despite my list of "true" facts, the popular image of the witch--female, crone, pointy hat, broom (think Wicked Witch of the West)--appeared very early on. And, whether I like it or not, the image of the witch as a sweet, peaceloving, herbal collector has gained sway in popular culture. The Wiccans are right about one thing: beliefs in witches and magic lasted long after the Puritans morphed into gentler (but just as noisy) religions. Stories about magic and witches were collected from the Schoharie Hills (New York) as late as the 1930s:

Mrs. Elisha Case used to be witched. She would sit in a chair with one knee uplifted, the foot off the floor, hours at a time. When her folks asked her why she sat like that, because of course it was "an awful hard position to keep," she said she couldn't help it. Her family sent a lock of hair, her name, and her age to Dr. Jake Brink, and he cured her.

There are literary and film references to the older folkloric image of the witch--The Wizard of Oz being an excellent example. However, contemporary thought is more in sympathy with the witch than with her accusers. One common literary motif (not necessarily a folktale) that I've encountered is "teenage girl accused of being a witch and then saved by providential (scientific) intervention": The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare; Elizabeth in which Willo Davis Roberts basically stole Speare's entire book and rewrote it as a Sunfire romance; Gallow's Hill by Lois Duncan (nice twist at the end); Buffy episode "Gingerbread" (Season 3).

Folklore: Native Americans and Puritans

The folklore course that I hope to teach in the spring is split into two parts. In the first part, after I define folklore (which could be an entire course by itself!), I focus on types of folklore and their appearance in literature. The second part of the course looks at how folklore is interpreted and reinterpreted.

When it comes to organizing material, I'm a big fan of the historical approach. This is difficult with folklore since tales exist in one time, disappear, then crop up in another time. Nevertheless, when teaching American-anything, it is always a good idea to start with Native Americans and Puritans.

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Regarding Native American myth and legends, I stuck to New England tribes: the Penobscot, Algonquian, and Pequod, for example.

A great deal of Native American folklore was not taken down until the 1800s or later--consequently, using Native American folklore for "historical" purposes is fraught with problems. Nevertheless, I discovered several folktales that I plan to also use in my Working Women course.

"Corn Mother," for example, stresses the importance of corn to many Native American tribes and the connection between corn and women's work. In "Corn Mother," the human-goddess First Mother sacrifices herself, so corn can grow, thereby saving her family and their descendants.

Other tales, like "Big Eater's Wife" (which is also very funny), stress the importance of a woman's grinding tools: her mortar and pestle. This connection of women to food preparation tools is a general motif in older folktales and myths. In Good Wives, Laurel Ulrich points out the importance of basic kitchen tools to Puritan women: a family's wealth was determined by their kitchen pot. When survival becomes a community's main concern, access to food becomes a source of power (just watch Survivor or Big Brother).

Like most folklore, Native American folklore also includes trickster tales. In many such tales, Coyote appears as a dangerous trickster; in others, the trickster is "Glooscap" who seems to be less dangerous than Coyote but still respected. From my reading, "Glooscap"'s character seems to be a combination of Hermes, Loki, and Br'er Rabbit.

For a decent collection of Native American myths and legends (with source notes!), I recommend American Indian Myths and Legends, selected and edited by Richard Erdoes and Alfonso Ortiz.

Native American myth and lore in literature: Contemporary Native American poets include Suzanne Rancourt and Cheryl Savageau. Both writers use mythical imagery in their poems. Also, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote about The Old Man in the Mountain, a supposed Indian legend about an Abenaki chief waiting for his Mohawk wife to return, but there's no evidence that the tale originated amongst Indian tribes; more likely, Hawthorne made the whole thing up!

Speaking of Nathaniel Hawthorne . . .

The Puritans also had folklore. Oddly enough, they did not bring over beliefs in elves and fairies from England, but they did bring over beliefs in magic. Basically, Puritan folklore falls into three categories:

Religious
Magic (Witches)
Ghosts

I'm going to deal with religious folklore in this post.

What is "religious folklore"?

In (most) religions, there is a core theology. That theology is official--preached on Sunday, printed and discussed in manuals, textbooks, dissertations, etc. Religious folklore is what members tell each other about the theology/day-to-day practice of religion. The Puritans had tons of it.

We know about Puritan folklore mostly due to Increase Mather. The Mathers were the radio-talk-show hosts of their day, and Increase Mather really should be commended for collecting verbal accounts of folklore in true radio-talk-show host fashion. He may have had an agenda (what Mather didn't?) but in his collections (which he does not refer to as folklore), he bothered to distinguish between word-by-word accounts versus summarized accounts versus "I heard that someone said that" accounts. Pretty amazing!

The tales that come under "religious folklore" have to do with tales of providence and tales of judgment--basically, tales of good people who are rescued fortuitously from natural disasters, boat wrecks, and having their brains busted out of their skulls versus bad people who are struck by lightening, lose their sight, and have other hideous things happen to them.

These tales are staples in religious and pseudo-religious cultures (I had to throw "pseudo" in there for all the environmentalists who started saying that Katrina was a judgment for America's bad environmental practices--talk about starting a myth!) although while I was reading Increase Mather's tales, I kept thinking of those shows which focus on animals who providentially save their owners--there isn't a direct religious connection, but it's the same idea.

To be fair (to me), there isn't always an religious connection in Mather's tales either; he really gets excited about the kid with the brain problem: "[The surgeon] gently drove the soft matter of the bunch into the wound and pressed so much out as well he could; there come forth about a spoonful; the matter which come forth was brains and blood (some curdles of brain were white and not stained with blood): so did he apply a plaister . . . This child lived to be the mother of two children; and (which is marvellous) she was not by this wound made defective in her memory or understanding."

I can't close this section without referring also to religious folkways. Religious folkways, like religious folklore, grow up around the day-to-day (month-to-month) practice of a religion. A good example of a religious folkway occurred recently in my congregation (recently, as in June).

The young children usually sing a song for the entire congregation on Mother's Day and Father's Day. When I say "usually," I mean "usually for those of us who grew up in the church." However, the head of our children's organization did not grow up in the church--she's been a member approximately seven years. She was completely taken-aback by the whole singing thing. Witnessing her reaction was a real eye-opener to me; I suppose if anyone had asked me, I would have said, "Yeah, it's a folkway" (it certainly isn't proscribed), but I had never really thought about it. Talk about a custom being perpetuated simply on the basis of expectation! I supported her not going through with it (can't throw things, even customs, at people's heads at the last minute), but she ended up agreeing (to be honest, nobody really cares about the singing; they just want the kids to stand up and look cute).

Puritan folklore in literature: Anne Bradstreet's poetry ("Deliverance from a Fit of Fainting" and "Deliverance from Another Sore Fit") and, of course, Hawthorne. In The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne particularly relies on the lore of "omens" as indications of providence or judgment.

What Is Folklore?

Sadly, my folklore course canceled: not enough students signed up. The course hasn't been offered in a long time and is an elective; this is how I comfort myself over the lack of interest. (I spoke to a professor Monday morning who told me that often a course needs to be "on the books" for awhile before students take advantage of it.)

My wonderful boss has agreed to let me try again next semester. However, since I was looking forward so much to teaching the course this semester, I decided to post about folklore occasionally over the next four months using my lecture notes.

This is actually a good way for me to go through the material--the fact is, one learns how to teach by teaching, and one learns whether something will work in a particular course by trying it out. For example, concerning the material below, I was initially going to have the students read the Wilson article between class one and class two; now, I'm thinking that would be too confusing (though I might still include the article in the reading packet): all the "what-is-folklore-folklore-versus-history" stuff needs to be presented upfront. That way, I can focus on the relationship between folklore and literature as early as possible.

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What is Folklore?

The folklore course examines the connection between folklore and literature, specifically the mobility of ideas, images, and stories. For example, an urban legend can develop in the school yard; that legend can then be used in a commercial; that commercial can then be taken up by viewers, and eventually translated/transmuted back into a folktale.

Likewise, an image or idea that occurs in a novel--literary or popular--can worm its way into everyday culture, showing up as an example of "folk" to later anthropologists.

To summarize: Ideas do not stay put in one place.

But what is folklore?

Nobody really knows! Just about every book I found on folklore had a slightly different definition (see below for a chart I created to try to order the various definitions).

Here are my definitions:

Folklore refers to pervasive (common) songs and tales that are transmitted person to person rather than by an official institution or author. Strict folklorists believe folklore can only be transmitted orally; however, I believe that folklore--such as urban legends, jokes, songs, and stories--are also spread through the Internet. These legends, jokes, songs, and stories become "folk" when they are transmitted person to person (through email, for instance).

Folkways, like folklore, are transmitted person to person, often within a specific group (a family or an occupational group). Folkways refer to customs, traditions, and practices: schoolyard games, food and dress customs, crafts, holiday/birthday/funeral rituals.

Myth is a very broad term; I use it to refer specifically to stories about the relationship of supernatural beings (gods, angels) to humans. While folklore may contain supernatural beings (vampires, fairies), folklore is not centered on the supernatural-human relationship; rather, it is grounded in everyday life. Myth, on the other hand, does concentrate on the supernatural-human relationship. So, for example, Gawain may leave King Arthur's court to meet the Green Knight, but the meeting takes place in an earthly environment. Psyche, on the other hand, leaves the mortal world to deal with a god, Eros, in his environment. The first is a British legend or folktale; the second is a myth. Likewise, stories about ghosts visiting family members are folklore; stories about humans visiting the great beyond (near-death-experiences) I would classify as myth. (It's a fine line.)

Clarification

The most important aspect of folklore is that it is transmitted person to person within a community. It occurs at the "grassroots" level rather than in the official/institutional "face" of that community. So, for instance, a published collection of folklore on the Internet has stopped being folklore and become "official." But a story picked up from someone's blog and transmitted through email to friends and family (without credit to the original author) would be folklore. (Are "folklore" festivals--paid for through official state and university funds--really folk? Who knows! I would never be this legalistic with my students. I just don't want them relying on folklore websites rather than collecting stories from their friends. However, I do find it interesting that most general books about folklore were published in the 1970s; once folk studies become a government-funded issue--after the 1970s--general books about folklore practically disappeared. Well, and Richard Dorson died.)

Media Example: In the Psych episode, "Scary Sherry: Bianca's Toast," Shawn and Gus single-handedly create an urban legend or folktale when they tell all their elementary school friends that a woman committed suicide at the local mental hospital on Halloween night. The legend becomes anonymous; it enters the culture and is passed person to person until even Shawn and Gus have forgotten, fifteen plus years later, that they were the originators. In this case, the event never actually happened; Shawn and Gus just thought it did. The legend, however, has had an impact on the (television) town's culture.

Media Example: In the X-Files episode "How the Ghosts Stole Christmas," Mulder opens the episode by telling Scully a story that "everyone" knows about a haunted house. The story is prevalent and, in this case, supernatural.

On the other hand, the imaginative stories that Sara invents in The Little Princess are just that: imaginative invented stories. They are transmitted orally, but they are not pervasive or anonymous. Therefore, they are not folklore.

The relationship between history and folklore

Although both history and folklore deal with narratives (making connections between events to explain what happened), folklore is collected and transmitted differently than historical documents. History is about learning, or trying to learn, what actually happened. Folklore is what people say about what happened. The two disciplines often merge since learning what people say about an event can help historians grasp the overall aura or "feel" of an event. But historians and folklorists do not approach cultural/historical material in the same way.

The relationship between history and folklore is wonderfully elucidated by William A. Wilson in his article "Something There Is That Doesn't Love a Wall" (from his collection of essays, The Marrow of Human Experience). In this article, Wilson argues the following:

1. Folklore has existed throughout time.
2. All people (cultures) have folklore.
3. Folklore is both universal and culture-specific.

Wilson is arguing against the idea that folklore is only produced by uneducated, country peasants and also against the idea that cultures outgrow folklore. Folklore is created in specific circumstances to explain events or to justify actions; it is also used to connect people. Therefore, specific types of folktales will arise from specific cultures, but the habits of folklore appear to transcend human behavior, technology, and "progress." Consequently, particular tales will appear over and over again in many different cultures and times. Cinderella is one example.

If folklore indicates particular reactions to particular events as well as reflecting the general human condition, how (and why) is it different from history?

Wilson explains the difference this way: "[Historians] . . . attempt to come as close as possible to that [full] story, and . . . do so through the use of verifiable, documentary evidence" (57, my emphasis). Wilson continues: "Folklorists would also be interested in what really occurred . . . but their principal interest would be in oral narratives . . . because people govern their lives not on the basis of what actually happened in the past but rather on what they believe happened--that is, on folk history." Wilson attempts to distinguished between the roles of the folklorist and the historian, but he also shows how the two "hands" can reflect and help each other.

I highly recommend Wilson's article. Not only does Wilson have intelligent things to say about folklore, he says all those intelligent things in a calm, friendly, enlightening way.

Diagram of the relationship to folklore to history and what folklore is.