Meridian Magazine :: BYU Studies: “All Hail to Christmas:” Mormon Pioneer Holiday Celebrations

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Celebration Amid Scarcity

Even as they struggled for sufficient food and shelter, the Mormon pioneers took time their first year in the Valley to celebrate Christmas and staged Christmas dinners that ranged from boiled rabbit to splendid spreads. The settlers also set aside time for contemplation and celebration at the close of the year.

Some of the story of the first Mormon Christmas holiday celebration in Utah (in 1847) is well known and reflects the deprivation and discomfort of pioneer life. Elizabeth Huffaker, who participated in that first Christmas celebration as a child, recalled that temporal needs overshadowed the holiday festivities. “We all worked as usual that day,” she remembered. “The men gathered sage brush, and some even plowed, for though it had snowed, the ground was soft and the plows were used nearly the entire day.”

On the following day, Sunday, a large meeting was held around the flagpole at the center of the fort. Children played and the group sang “Come, Come, Ye Saints.” Huffaker’s Christmas dinner consisted of boiled rabbit and bread. Despite spending the holiday in unfamiliar and straitened circumstances, Huffaker concluded that “in the sense of perfect peace and good will I never had a happier Christmas in all my life.” [i]

Young Elizabeth Huffaker may have captured the way most Mormons in the Valley spent their First Christmas, but there were some who celebrated more festively. According to the diary of Eliza R. Snow, a flurry of holiday activities began before Christmas and extended through the New Year….Christmas Day found Eliza at a party hosted by Lorenzo Young. At least a dozen guests “freely & sociably partook of the good things of the earth,” including a “splendid dinner.”

Another pioneer Christmas party was a social for the little girls of the camp, hosted by Clara Decker Young. The week between Christmas and New Year’s found women gathering at the Willis home, where President John Smith taught and blessed them; other Saints assembled to hear Parley P. Pratt give a discourse titled “The Velocity of the Motion of Bodies When Surrounded by a Refined Element.” [ii]

Dancing and Whistling Brigade

As if it were sounding an official decree, the Deseret News on December 25, 1861, declared the preeminent place of dancing in Mormon holiday culture:

…Every nation and community do as they please when not interdicted by constitutional or statute laws to which they may be subject. Exercising that right the people of Utah have, by almost universal consent, adopted dancing as their principal amusement and selected the winter season as the most suitable for indulging in that favorite recreation, believing that inasmuch as there is a time for every purpose and for every work no more appropriate season than the winter months could be designated as the “time to dance.” [iii]

And dance they did. Mormon Christmas parties nearly always included dancing. The Saints stayed warm during the winter months by stepping lively to the music of bands, lone violins, hand clapping, or even whistling. On Christmas Eve in 1860, for example, Heber C. Kimball hosted a party for his family and neighbors, where he “mingle[d] freely in the dance[s].” The pioneers in Tooele marked their community’s first Christmas by gathering in John Rowberry’s home for a party and dance. Because no one in the settlement owned a musical instrument, dancers reeled to the sounds of Cyrus Call’s whistling and danced until midnight.

Brother Brigham’s Mammoth Sleigh

As in so many other things, Brother Brigham’s 1865 celebration set the pace, according to the Deseret News: “Among the ‘sleigh items’ of the times, we noticed President Young and a number of the male members of his family, with a few friends, out sleigh driving on Monday, in that mammoth sleigh, with some others of a smaller calibre in the wake.” [iv] Though sleighs were often a necessary mode of travel over frozen roads, sleigh riding on Christmas transcended mere transportation and reflected one’s status in the community. That same year, one reporter surveyed the Christmas scene and concluded, “Sleigh-riding seemed to be at a premium, and pedestrianism at a discount. The city appeared to be—not on wheels—but on curvated iron appliances, our local[s], a big crowd of boys, and a few other folks seeming to be the only people who were using their pedal extremities.” [v] The Christmas Day promenade that marked the holiday in cities like Philadelphia took on a different form when it arrived in Utah. In this case, form trumped function—the sleigh was the thing.

Pioneer Santa

Other poignant and humorous scenes filled Mormon homes on Christmas morning. On one Christmas Eve in pioneer Ephraim, two young girls excitedly tacked their woolen stockings to the front of their family fireplace. Scurrying off to bed, both girls had visions of the next morning, when, if Santa Claus had made it to Ephraim on his travels throughout the world, they would reach into their stockings and find a glorious mug.

When morning arrived, one sister anxiously poked into her stocking and pulled out the much anticipated mug. Hot on her sister’s heels, the other pioneer girl peered inside her own stocking and, much to her chagrin, found only an apple and a fried cake. Dejected, she blurted out disgustedly, “Such darn partiality.” Bowed, but unbroken, the second sister managed to find the bottom of her stocking, where she discovered her own mug “and was so happy she forgave Santa Claus.” [vi]

The character of Santa Claus often assumed a religious role in the minds of children. Sarah D. Jensen described the relationship of pioneer children to Santa in Ephraim: “The pioneer children all had divine faith in Santa Claus, but didn’t expect him to bring them many presents.” Just up the road in Fountain Green, Utah, C. H. White reminisced about Christmas using terms that place a patina of divinity on the jolly old Christmas elf. She remembered that children “hop[ed] and pray[ed] that Santa would put something” in their stockings. When the children looked into their stockings the next day and found sweet doughnuts twisted into the shapes of boys and girls, they “knew that Santa had heard our prayers.” [vii]

Richard Ian Kimball is an Assistant Professor of History at BYU. He earned a B.A. in American Studies from BYU and an M.A. and Ph.D in History from Purdue University.

[i] As quoted in “The Pioneer Christmas,” in Heart Throbs of the West, comp. Kate B. Carter, 12 vols. (Salt Lake City: Daughters of Utah Pioneers, 1939–51), 2:329. For more on how Mormons celebrated their first Christmas in the Rocky Mountains, see Sherry Lewis Brown, “The First Christmas in the Valley,” Pioneer 40 (November-December 1993): 13–15.

[ii] “The First Christmas in the Old Fort,” in Our Pioneer Heritage, comp. Kate B. Carter, 20 vols. (Salt Lake City: Daughters of Utah Pioneers, 1958–77), 17:71.

[iii] “The Festive Season,” Deseret News, December 25, 1861, 204. For more on this subject, see Larry V. Shumway, “Dancing the Buckles off Their Shoes in Pioneer Utah,” found in both BYU Studies 37, no. 3 (1997–98): 6–50; and in Nearly Everything Imaginable: The Everyday Life of Utah’s Mormon Pioneers, ed. Ronald W. Walker and Doris R. Dant (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1999), 195–221.

[iv] “General Items,” Deseret News, December 28, 1865, 98. Latter-day Saints were not the only Americans using Brigham Young’s Christmas celebrations as a measuring stick. Julia F. Snow, writing in Harper’s Monthly in 1866, declared that Santa’s fireplace was wide enough to accommodate all of the children’s stockings in Brigham Young’s family. Julia F. Snow, “Christmas Guests,” Harper’s Monthly 32 (February 1866): 354.

[vi] Lillie G. Barton, “How the Pioneers of Ephraim Celebrated Christmas,” in Carter, Treasures of Pioneer History, 1:121.

[vii] Barton, “Pioneers of Ephraim,” in Carter, Treasures of Pioneer History, 1:121. Expressing a religious faith in Santa Claus was not unique to Mormon children. Indeed, Leigh Eric Schmidt located a similar sensibility among American children generally. He writes that “St. Nicholas reemerged as a focus of real veneration; praying to him or through him became a recognized piety of Victorian childhood.” Schmidt, Consumer Rites, 139. For more on Santa’s connection with Jesus, see Restad, Christmas in America, 52–56.