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Godey’s Lady’s Book and Magazine, founded in Philadelphia, agreed with Barringer’s take on ambrosia in 1870, but offered pineapple as a worthy alternative.

Sarah Hale, the author most famous for her children's poem "Mary had a Little Lamb," used her position as editor of the best-selling magazine Godey's Ladies Book to advance a reformist agenda that included the abolition of slavery and the creation of holidays that promoted pious family values.

While trees sporadically adorned the homes of German immigrants in the U.S., it became a mainstream middle-class practice when, in 1850, Godey's published an engraving of Victoria and her Christmas tree.

“Custom, from time immemorial, has decided on white as a proper hue emblematic of the freshness and purity of girlhood,” claimed an 1849 article in Godey’s Lady’s Book, according to Marlise Schoeny, a curator from the Ohio State University Historic Costume & Textiles Collection.

American families adopted the Christmas tree more widely after 1850, when the Philadelphia-based magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book republished the royal family’s Christmas scene from Illustrated London News.