Tidings of Great Joy
The American Story
Christopher Flannery
4.6 • 941 Ratings
🗓️ 20 December 2022
⏱️ 8 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
At the time of the American founding, celebrations of Christmas in America varied widely, from Puritans and Quakers who shunned or ignored it, to other Protestants and Catholics who honored it in their own Christian ways, to those who spent the day in “riot and dissipation,” like an ancient Roman Saturnalia. But E Pluribus Unum—out of many one—was the American motto on the Great Seal, and over the generations, out of many ways of celebrating or ignoring Christmas, came a recognizably American way.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the American Story. We have released a story every week since Constitution Day 2019, |
| 0:09.0 | and next week we will release our final episode. |
| 0:12.0 | I am immeasurably grateful to all of you for your personal |
| 0:15.6 | notes, words of encouragement, five-star reviews, generous donations, and for all you've done |
| 0:21.7 | to share these stories across the country and around the world. |
| 0:25.0 | Thanks to you at Year's End, we will have 129 evergreen episodes, |
| 0:30.0 | a collection of stories about the things that make America the country we know and love. |
| 0:35.0 | We will release our final episode on December 28th. |
| 0:38.0 | I hope each story contains some beautiful truth about our country that is worth hearing again and again. |
| 0:44.8 | This is Chris Flannery with the Claremont Institute, wishing you and yours a very Merry Christmas. |
| 0:50.7 | I call this one, Tidings of Great Joy. |
| 0:55.0 | On the mezzanine floor of the Parker House Hotel in Boston |
| 1:00.0 | hangs a mirror still today. |
| 1:02.0 | In the late fall of 1867, this mirror hung in the |
| 1:06.8 | apartment at the hotel occupied by English novelist Charles Dickens, and he spent |
| 1:12.4 | hours studying himself in it as he practiced for what would |
| 1:15.8 | become immensely popular readings of his classic story A Christmas Carol, which had been |
| 1:21.2 | circulating in America for 25 years. |
| 1:25.0 | Dickens gave his first public performance with great success on December 2nd, |
| 1:30.0 | 1867 at the Tremont Temple in Boston. |
| 1:34.4 | This was the same temple in which Frederick Douglas and thousands of others |
| 1:38.2 | had waited for word of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation |
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