A Holiday Hello: Stanton's Christmas Story for Kids and The Bah Humbug Puritans

Oh it's been a minute but you'll be glad you listened to this episode. Yes there are podcast updates, yes there's a cool new eZine/book you have to get: The Biting All The Apples Holiday (and any day) Book of 19th Century Inspired Home Amusements & Creative Endeavors  here's the direct link if it's not showing up: https://payhip.com/b/75vhY

The holiday joy doesn't stop there.  We've got a short hype message for all of your holiday emotional and physical labor AND you'll find out that puritans really hated Christmas and Stanton wrote a revisionist history Christmas fantasy story for kids. 

We share holiday chaos, gratitude for invisible labor, and a warm update on what’s next. Stanton’s risky Women’s Bible, the suffrage split, and her fanciful Mayflower Christmas story spark a look at why mythmaking comforts and what truth demands.

• peak lady labor and real appreciation
• launch of our 49‑page Victorian amusements zine
• why wordplay and in‑person games matter
• teaser for the Blackwell family special
• Kathy Kern’s insights on Stanton’s reputational cost
• family edits that tried to repair Stanton’s legacy
• debunking “Christmas on the Mayflower” with primary sources
• Puritan opposition to Christmas 
• nostalgia, comfort myths, and honest memory
• our 2026 motto

Here's more information about the reality of the early settlers: https://voyagingthroughhistory.exeter.ac.uk/2020/12/18/christmas-on-the-mayflower/

We used a batch of shared music for this episode and we're grateful to these artists:

JOY TO THE WORLD
Joy To The World by Audionautix is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Artist: http://audionautix.com/

Wish You A merry Christmas
We Wish You a Merry Christmas by Twin Musicom is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Artist: http://www.twinmusicom.org/

Away In A Manger by Audionautix is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Artist: http://audionautix.com/

Credits

Recorded at Troubadour Studios in Lansing, MI

Audio Engineer Corey DeRushia

Edited by Rie Daisies at Nighttime Girlfriend Studio

Music: ‘Shifting pt. 2 (instrumental)’ by Rie Daisies

Executive Producer Kathleen ML Rogers

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Website

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Chapters

• 0:00 Holiday Chaos And Quick Hello
• 1:03 Appreciation For Invisible Labor
• 2:09 Zine Launch And Holiday Sale
• 3:39 Why Victorian Games Still Matter
• 4:07 Blackwell Family Teaser
• 4:40 Rereading Stanton Through Kern
• 5:07 Suffrage Split And Backlash
• 6:21 Children Editing Stanton’s Legacy
• 7:29 Stanton’s Late Work And Motives
• 8:55 Christmas On The Mayflower
• 10:12 Puritan Reality Check
• 12:15 Why We Rewrite The Past
• 15:01 Year-End Reflection And CTA

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

I'm trying to record, but I think that someone took the white elephant gift exchange thing, like literally, and there's a white elephant running around in this building. Happy, happy holidays from the podcast you've probably been desperately missing. Welcome to Biting All the Apples. Special updates on Elizabeth Katie Stanton's Christmas story episode. I'm Sarah Kay, and I'm popping in to wish you all a saucy holiday season and to give you a podcast update. In our last episode, we may have mentioned that December would be busy, so we didn't make huge promises for like weekly episodes, but as usual, it was way crazier than we anticipated. Snowier too, colder, snowier, busier, grosser, politically, anyway, and much fluier. I hope that has uh avoided your area or that you're recovering. But I do know um the holidays really aren't a great time to back off feminist podcasting because it is peak lady labor season, and you do know what I'm talking about. However, it is never too late to deliver this important message to you. Let me tell you right now that all you do is appreciated. I mean, really appreciated. Making things special and festive is a gift to humanity. It is more important than ever. You are more important than ever. Whether you are ignoring the holidays or are finishing up your 20th hand woven wreath, you are a holiday hero. And I know holiday heroes. My fabulous co-host Joanna had a busy holiday month teaching and managing classrooms full of children that are still sent into a tizzy with the mention of six seven. But she did send me a photo of her dressed as a sparkly elf in her classroom last week, so I know that she's doing very well. In fact, she might be peeking. You know what I'm saying? Me? Well, I've been writing and researching and making crap. I created a 49-page easine book that I'm calling a Zook or a Zinc or a Zener. It's titled The Biting All the Apples, Holiday and Any Day. Book of 19th century inspired home amusements and creative endeavors. It is as sensational as it sounds. You would think this is be like a million dollars, but and it's usually only five bucks because I just want to spread the word. But from December 24th to December 31st, it's only$2. For just two bones, you can immediately download 49 pages of curated content that will reveal the cabinet of curiosities in your own home. And it's perfect timing for the holidays. It includes tons of 19th-century home entertainment games and projects, a good chunk of instructions for fortune-telling Victorian style, and you know how they did it. And includes information about the hidden meaning of flowers. You know how those Victorian ladies would communicate through bouquets called tussy mussies, and even some vintage beauty recipes and super complex braiding diagrams. I only included a couple of those, but you really have to see them. And I want to know if anybody can actually accomplish those. I'll put a link in the show notes. Um, andor you can just visit bitingalltheapples.com to get one. I'm gonna forward the URL to that. One of my favorite things about the vintage games I discovered is how they reflect a 19th-century appreciation for in-person interaction, intellect, and wordplay. That is also what Joanna and I marveled about reading through the women's Bible. I say bring it back. We can bring back wordplay and intellectualism. And a good way to start is to download this book. I'm not kidding. But while you're doing that, let me tell you a bit about what I've been researching. The women whose letters are featured in the appendix of the woman's Bible. We will be putting out a special episode on the Blackwell family. There are at least three letters in the appendix of the women's Bible written by members of the Blackwell family. They were a highly influential American family full of social reformers, including Elizabeth Blackwell, who was the first female U.S. doctor, and Emily Blackwell, also known for women's medicine. And there were abolitionists and suffragists like Henry Brown Blackwell and Antoinette Brown Blackwell. So there's lots to tell. And speaking of lots to tell, I got my hands on a copy of Kathy Kern's Miss Stanton's Bible, and it is so good, it sent me into a tailspin. Oscillating between regret that we didn't read her book before doing the podcast, and gratitude that we went through the women's Bible so thoroughly that Kern's book has that much more meaning. One of the things that Kern drives home in the very beginning is how risky it was for Stanton to do the Women's Bible Project. In several of our episodes of this podcast, we discussed the major split at the 1896 National American Women's Suffrage Association Convention. I had to say that slow, that's a mouthful, where a resolution was adopted to distance the association from the women's Bible. The suffrage movement went so far as to denounce Stanton, even though she'd spent most of her adult life working toward women's suffrage and paving the way for other women to write and speak their mind. And that's the thing she gets. It's okay, we know this. It's not easy to be a rebel, a thought leader. Kern writes The Women's Bible was seen as a frontal assault on the moral authority of women, and by extension, the moral authority of the nation. Isn't that how they always say, like, oh women like tame men because they're so wild, as if women aren't wild. That's another thing they take away from us, our wildness. Anyways, Kern goes on to say the public controversy standing ignited with the women's Bible had the ironic effect of diminishing her historical stature and nearly erasing this telling moment from the historical record. So it really is hard for us to get the full picture of how damaged Stanton's reputation was back then. But I take the fact that her children tried to repair her reputation posthumously as quite the indicator. Kern says Stanton's children attempted a heroic intervention. When they reissued her autobiography in 1922, her daughter, Harriet Stanton Blaff, and her son, Theodore Stanton, removed a controversial chapter titled Women in Theology, in which their mother chronicled the project of writing the women's Bible. Their decision, born of devotion and a desire to restore their mother to the prominence she deserved, would not have surprised Elizabeth Katie Stanton, but it would have exasperated her. Listen, Kathy, I agree. I think Stanton would have been like, cheese and crust. And she definitely would have said that because that's a Victorian substitute for Jesus Christ. Incorporate that. She would have been like, I know it is controversial. Everyone who's freaking out is literally proving my point. I'm obviously onto something. The answer isn't to bury it, it's to get the word out. Don't backtrack, Harriet and Theodore. But yeah, here's where we're supposed to say everyone was doing their best with the information they had at the time. But I say Elizabeth was trying to lay down some info in as many ways as she could. Journalism, essays, speeches, conventions, books, and people were just dense. So if they were doing their best at being dense, maybe that's true. But I also think the prohibition movement relied on that perceived moral authority of women to get going. So I wager that there were many forces at work that were against Stanton in her Bible project being recognized. I always wondered what she did after she was like shunned or if she knew it or if she was prepared for it. I don't know. But I do know that after the women's Bible, Stanton went on to write her autobiography. It was called Eighty Years and More Reminiscences 1815 to 1897. And yes, of course it makes sense to write memoirs and autobiographies in your late 80s. But I bet part of it was to let people know that, like, sh how much she did, and she's like, I did all this, I've learned all this, and you still aren't taking me seriously. Again, proving her point. Or maybe she's like telling the young chickadee, she's like, I did all this, what'd you do? Except for just like shoot down my work. I'm projecting here. Anyways, but what's intriguing and relevant to the timing of this podcast around the holidays is that in 1900, just two years before she passed away, Stanton wrote a children's Christmas story. What? Yes. It's titled Christmas on the Mayflower and was published in the kiddo periodical St. Nicholas. And not only did it have nothing to do with women's rights or human rights or anything of the sort, it was chock full of wild historical inaccuracies and fantastical descriptions of a 17th-century Christmas. Okay, just for an example, get a load of this excerpt. Then the mothers decorated their tables and spread out a grand Christmas dinner. Among other things, they brought a box of plum puddings. It is an English custom to make a large number of plum puddings at Christmas time and shut them up tight in small pails and hang them on hooks on the kitchen wall, where they keep for months. You see them in English kitchens to this day, with their plum puddings, gooseberry tarts, Brussels sprouts, salt fish, and bacon, the pilgrims had quite a sumptuous dinner. Then they sang God Save the King and went on deck to watch the sun go down and the moon rise in all her glory. Oh my goodness, that sounds like a Dickens novel. Isn't that lovely? Um, well, the thing is, is that the first winter in New Plymouth was more likely a barely surviving situation. So I found some of the excerpts of Elizabeth's story in a couple different sites, but there's one uh Voyaging Through History, a historical project about the Mayflower in Britain, has this excerpt from a 1622 New Plymouth colony publication called Mort's Relation. Side note, I totally have to check out. That's great. Mort's Relation. I wish I was a subscriber, anyways. Anyways, this is all that they had to say about December 25th, back in 1622. Monday, the 25th day, we went on shore. Some fell to timber, some to saw, some to riv, and some to carry. So no man rested all that day. But towards the night, some, as they were at work, heard a noise of some Indians, which caused us all to go to our muskets. But we heard no further. So we came aboard again and left some twenty to keep the court of guard. That night we had a sore storm of wind and rain. Monday, the 25th, being Christmas Day, we began to drink water aboard, but at night the master caused us to have some beer. And so on board, we had divers times now and then some beer. But on shore, none at all. Um, hello, where's the plum pudding buckets? So, yeah, the reality, that's just a uh teeny contrast from the salt fish and bacon feast in Stanton's story. The food in her description is almost as much of a fantasy as the part about generous relations between native people and the pilgrims. This is all included in her children's tale. Just listen to this excerpt about the holiday gift exchange between the Wampanoag and the pilgrims. The exchanging of presents was a very pretty ceremony, and when they were ready to depart, the good elder placed his hands on each little head, giving a short prayer and his blessing. While all this was transpiring, the squaws asked the four mothers to give them beads, which they readily did, and placed wreaths of ivy on their heads. As they paddled away in their little canoes, the horns and drums sounded. What a delightful picture. Some of these um stories about pilgrims and natives, I mean, this is sound a little familiar, but it's so strange to hear a very active feminist construct this children's tale. But not only is the scene far from the reality, like they just did not hang out. In fact, we just read an excerpt where they were like, there's night as we're getting muskets. Like, come on. Or the deviation from a very important core historical fact is that, well, Puritans were completely against Christmas celebrations. They believed them to be like a Catholic and pagan satanic thing. They would not have been into ritualized gift giving or celebrations of any kind. In fact, in 1659, the Massachusetts Bay Colony officially ruled that observing Christmas was an offense punishable by a five-shilling fine. A vintage notice published on that Voyaging Through History site says that the exchanging of gifts and greetings, dressing in fine clothing, grafting in similar satanic practices are hereby forbidden, with the offender liable to a fine of five shillings. Can you imagine having noticed it's like, if I catch you greeting somebody in the holiday style, you'll be burned or charged five shillings. So, but did you even know that celebrating Christmas was frowned upon, especially in New England, for well over a century? The website says, Wilst whilst I like how a historic website uses old-timey words like that. Whilst the Act was repealed in 1681, the effect on New England culture was long-lasting. Until the 19th century, there was little in the way of Christmas celebrations. Christmas only became an official state holiday in 1856. Okay. Maybe that gives us a little more insight into why they were like picking on Stanton for talking about the Bible. But it makes the whole like current put Christ back in Christmas thing kind of really funny today, if you think about it. I think we have a tendency to worship the past because we can make it whatever we want. I mean, Stanton's Christmas story reminds me of the stories of the first Thanksgiving we were told as children, at least this Gen X are. It's still common to revisit history through the lens of modern narrative preferences, but like I have a personal fascination with public figures who retreat into fantasies of long-ago simpler times. So, you know, um I live in Michigan where they send school children, usually around like fourth or fifth grade, to Henry Ford's Greenfield Village. It's a whole 19th-century town village built over 80 acres in Dearborn. And word has it that after normalizing humans doing repetitive work for eight hours a day to make more stuff, pretty much like the godfather of the industrialized world and company ownership over the lives of workers, Ward longed for the simpler time of his youth. So he created this whole village that he would just go hang out in. Yeah. That's what happens to people. And um, I'm not saying that Stanton felt the same way, but I do think something happens when you get older and have to, you know, and you have a look back at everything, at the world that welcomed you in um comparison to the one that you'll be leaving. The details in her Christmas story hint at a dream. Why did she want children to have that impression of the Puritans? The ones that laid the groundwork for the moralizing that later shunned her and her work, almost erased her from history. With all that emphasis on knowledge and free thought during the time, it's odd that she'd want to fill young minds with nonsense. It is weird. But, you know, I figure theories of child development change all the time, so who knows what they were thinking back then. But maybe the story was that was all about her or for her. Maybe she was setting the tone of the memories with which she wanted to leave this world. And you know, there could be an end-of-year message here for all of us. What fantastical story can you tell yourself about this past year that will ignite the passion and joy you're totally going to need to survive 2026? I know that Joanna and I are going to get together in the coming weeks to record our own real life with maybe a splash of fantasy review of 2025, as well as our predictions and podcast plans for 2026. Until then, go on and grab a copy of the 19th Century Home Amusements Easing Book Zook Zinc and have yourself a merry little whatever you are celebrating or rejecting. It's always good to have a little both, no? Let us know how your year went and what you want to hear on the podcast in 2026. Check the show notes for how to get in touch, and for lots of other good info and links and rabbit holy stuff. Thank you so much for listening. See you next year. Where the theme is Eat the Rich Twenty Six.