From the Vineyard Gazette edition of Dec. 24, 1976:

Every Christmas on Martha’s Vineyard is an old fashioned Christmas, even though the observance came relatively late to New England. The three youths who advanced to the front of a platform in an Island school and sang with voices hardly breaking at all, We Three Kings of Israel Are, were pioneers to begin with but are now the keepers of a warm tradition.

Exercises in the schools bore the true stamp of our own Island, and they were bound to spread. This they did most spontaneously after the turn of the century because, remember, there was no electricity until modern times. Candles on Christmas trees accented the shape of the tree and its color, but even more the strung chains of cranberries and popcorn in alternation which looped and wound among the needles.

Customs differed. In some Island households the tree was presumed to be a surprise. Young fry were expected to come upon it fully alive and gay, even to brightly wrapped presents nestling in the cotton that served as artificial snow on the floor. In other households, the youngsters were involved from the very start, the cutting of the tree, setting it up and stringing the cranberry and popcorn loops.

One of the fascinating and in a way poignant descriptions of a Vineyard Christmas is given in a few words in the journal of Lucy P. Smith which she kept aboard the whaleship Nautilus when she went voyaging with her husband, Capt. George A. Smith, and their small son Freddie, remembered on the Island today as a longtime county commissioner and public figure, the late Frederich W. Smith.

The Nautilus had recruited at St. Helena and was under orders to proceed to the Pacific where chances for oil were thought to be better. “I watched the boats with an anxious eye,” Lucy wrote in her journal. “I was so afraid of an accident. I was on deck all day for Freddie was so excited I could not keep him below nor trust him on deck unless I was with him, as everyone had enough to do without taking care of him.”

The next day was Christmas Eve and Freddie hung his stocking for the first time at sea. His mother wrote, “Freddie has just gone to sleep, expecting Sant Claus to fill his stocking. I have got almonds, several little books, a box of blocks, puzzles and a bag of things Mrs. Carroll (at St. Helena) gave me for him, and will now fill his stocking, then write a letter home as I cannot go to bed until the whale is in.”

Freddie was delighted with his presents and Lucy found something for herself in the bag given to her at St. Helena.

The essential Christmas was on hand and intact, even though the Nautilus was ploughing through heavy seas toward the rounding of Cape Horn. So it has pretty much always been, and when circumstances require, a certain minimum becomes a maximum as well.

All this was in 1875 — but back on the Vineyard in 1876, a hundred years ago, there was no mention whatever of a Christmas observance. What went on at the schools then was so widely known as to preclude novelty, and that may have been the reason.

An old time Vineyard reader owned and used by a young girl at Vineyard Haven in the 1850s, does not contain a single Christmas selection. This does not prove that schools failed to improvise their own, with trees, holly, ground pine, cranberries and popcorn, along with gay bits of this and that saved for the occasion, but it is indicative of a tardy general trend.

The reader contains a New Year’s Eve poem by Tennyson, but not the one sequel to his famous lines about the Christmas season. On the contrary the poem is one Tennyson might have wanted to forget, beginning:

If you’re waking, call me early,

Mother dear,

For I would see the sun rise

Upon the glad New Year.

The growth of community observances of Christmas on the Vineyard has been impressive since the early 1920s, including at first community trees and caroling, with carolers invited in for seasonal refreshments here and there, out of the darkness or the circle of mellow light, and then the practice in the larger towns of Christmas lights and accessories all up and down the principal streets.

Thus the secular observance of the season became interwoven with the holy calendar of the churches, and in all homes the legend of Santa Claus was nestled spontaneously with a memory of all the age-old festivals of lights and with the scriptural account of the birth of Christ.