The Battle for Christmas (10 page)

T
HE
C
HRISTMAS SEASON
was always an important occasion in the life of John Pintard, a prominent New York City merchant and civic leader of the early nineteenth century. As Pintard went to bed on the evening of December 31, 1820, he was looking forward to the schedule he had carefully laid out for the celebration of New Year’s Day, the season’s end. First he would get up early for a private chat with his daughter, who was married but still lived in the household. Next there would be a devotional morning service at a nearby Episcopal church. The middle hours of the day would be devoted to an extended round of “ceremonial and friendly visits” with acquaintances and colleagues around the city. Finally, in midafternoon Pintard would return to his Wall Street home, where the entire household would, as he put it, “assemble round our festive boards” for a “little family party”—a meal of venison and other holiday dishes that had been prepared weeks in advance, and punctuated by a series of toasts “drunk with all affection and old fashioned formality.”

Pintard managed, the next day, to get through most of the activities he had planned, but only after his night’s sleep had been interrupted—not once but twice. First, in the middle of the night, with the household sound asleep, Pintard’s daughter was awakened when she heard “someone take [a] key and deliberately open the door.” The family knew that New
Year’s Eve marked the peak of rowdy Christmas revels in New York, so Pintard had reason to fear the presence of an intruder. He roused his wife (“mama,” as he referred to her in a letter written very early the next morning). “I threw on my clothes in haste, and down we sallied [to investigate,] found the back parlor door ajar, but nothing out of place.” As it turned out, the noise was only a false alarm—the family’s black servant had merely arisen early in order to light a fire in the study. So Pintard returned to bed. But no sooner had he fallen asleep than he was roused again, this time by bands of loud revelers marching down Wall Street and directly outside his house, banging on drums, blowing fifes and whistles, and all the while loudly proclaiming the New Year. The revelers did not leave, and in fact kept Pintard up for the rest of the night: They “interrupted all repose until daylight, when I arose, leaving mama … to take a little rest till nine, when I shall call [her].”
¹

What this little episode reveals is two incompatible styles of celebrating the holiday season. One of them, that of John Pintard, was a daytime affair, genially formal, and quiet. The other, that of the revelers in the street, was nocturnal, aggressively public, and just as noisy as they could make it. It was, in short, carnival. The two styles came into conflict in Pintard’s household only two years before Pintard’s friend Clement Clarke Moore wrote his poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas”—the account of a rather different kind of nighttime visitation during the Christmas season. The connection is not artificial, for John Pintard himself played a role in the development of Christmas as we know it today. One might even say that his role was that of John the Baptist to the figure of Santa Claus that Moore would soon perfect.

A
generation
earlier, in 1786, a newspaper in a nearby community pointed out the same contrast between the different fashions in which New Yorkers celebrated the season: “Some good people religiously observe it as a time set apart for a most sacred purpose,” some by “decently feasting with their friends and relatives.” But others observe the holiday by “revelling in profusion, and paying their sincere devotion to
merry Bacchus
.” The newspaper went on to rephrase the contrast in metaphoric terms: “in several churches divine service [was] performed,” while “the temples dedicated to the service of
merriment, dissipation
and
folly
, were much crouded [sic];
where the
sons of gluttony and drunkenness
satiate their respective appetites.”

Chapter 1
of this book argues that traditional Christmas misrule did not ordinarily pose a significant threat to the social order or to the authority of the gentry class. In fact, it actually served to reinforce the existing order of things by providing a sanctioned opportunity for the poor to let off steam; it was a safety valve that allowed them to express resentments in a fashion that was generally apolitical. Indeed, the form that misrule commonly took—that of
inverting
the ordinary social structure rather than simply ignoring it—may have served to confirm the legitimacy of the status quo. After all, what the patron received from his clients in return for his gifts was their goodwill—something that had a great deal of value, indeed, in the dynamics of a paternalist order.

But this would change as paternalism itself came to wither away as a dominant form of social relations. In England much of the change took place during the eighteenth century. E. P. Thompson has argued that in eighteenth-century England it was the upper classes themselves who severed the paternalist bonds that allowed the rituals of misrule to operate as a safety valve. Both the gentry and the established church abandoned their control over holiday rituals; these now became purely “plebeian” cultural expressions. (The Boston Anticks discussed in
Chapter 1
offer a good example of what Thompson had in mind.) In this new setting, rituals of misrule began to assume a more clearly
oppositional
form. Thompson describes these eighteenth-century protests as a kind of political “theater,” directed at the gentry “audience” before whom it was “performed”—something less than a full-fledged radical movement but more than sheer, unfocused rowdiness.
³
For example, in eighteenth-century England there appeared a kind of late-night serenade on New Year’s Eve known as the “callithumpian band”—possibly derived from the Greek word
calli-
(for “beautiful”). But the music these bands played was hardly beautiful. It was meant to be loud and offensive, characterized by “beating on tin pans, blowing horns, shouts, groans, catcalls,” and it was performed as a gesture of deliberate mockery; the general term in England for such things was “rough music.” (This was not wholly new; “rough music” is simply the
British term for what in France was called “charivari.” But the callithumpian bands seem to have directed their “rough music” against those who seemed to be claiming too much dignity or abusing their power.)
⁴

By the early nineteenth century, with the spread of wage labor and other modes of capitalist production in England and the United States, what I have chosen to call the “battle for Christmas” entered an acute phase. For some urban workers, the Christmas season no longer entailed a lull in the demand for labor; their employers insisted on business as usual.
⁵
(It was this impulse that Charles Dickens would caricature in his character Ebenezer Scrooge.) For other urban workers, the coming of winter brought the prospect of being laid off, as the icing-up of rivers brought water-powered factories to a seasonal halt. December’s leisure thus meant not relative plenty but forced unemployment and want. The Christmas season, with its carnival traditions of wassail, misrule, and callithumpian “street theater,” could easily become a vehicle of social protest, an instrument to express powerful ethnic or class resentments. Little wonder, then, that the upper classes displayed little interest in making the season a major holiday. Before the mid-1820s the holiday was mentioned only cursorily in British and American newspapers.
⁶
The turn of the nineteenth century may have marked a historic low point in the celebration of Christmas among the elite.

L
ET US
return, then, to New York City, where John Pintard’s neighborhood was subjected to the rough music of a callithumpian band in 1821, and where our modern American Christmas was invented, the following year, with the composition of Clement Clarke Moore’s poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas.” New York in the early nineteenth century was a fast-growing place. As late as 1800, the urbanized part of the city covered only a small area at the southern tip of Manhattan Island, well to the south of what are now the numbered streets. But the size of the city’s population had begun a rapid, almost geometrical increase—from 33,000 in 1790 to 200,000 in 1830 and 270,000 just five years later. In order to accommodate the rapid increase in population, the city in 1811 started implementation of a plan to construct a regular grid system of numbered streets (and avenues) that would crisscross the entire island. (As we shall see, this plan would have an effect on Clement Clarke Moore.)

The numerical growth of the city’s population was accompanied by a change in its composition: an influx of immigrants, especially Irish Catholics, and the appearance of an impoverished underclass that was living
for the first time in its own poor districts (generally divided up by ethnicity and race), along with a wealthy upper class that took up residence in its fashionable ones.
⁷
In the second decade of the nineteenth century, New York underwent an explosion of poverty, vagrancy, and homelessness. That was followed in the third decade by serious outbreaks of public violence. In the eyes of New York’s “respectable” citizens, to quote a recent historian on the subject, “the entire city appeared to have succumbed to disorder…. [It] seemed to be coming apart completely.”
⁸
Many well-to-do New Yorkers began to move out to new uptown estates, which they enclosed with fences or hedges. In turn, those fences were sometimes pulled down, and the hedges uprooted, by poor and homeless people who persisted in regarding the new estates as “common land” open to everyone. As a result, by the 1820s these estates were commonly being guarded by watchmen, drawn from the same underclass as the rioters themselves.

The city’s streets became the center of a different version of the same conflict. As Elizabeth Blackmar has written, the city’s poorest residents—“peddlers, ragpickers, prostitutes, scavengers, beggars, and … criminals”—depended for subsistence on the freedom of the streets, and the unregulated opportunity to accost strangers at will, whether for legal or illegal purposes. But by the 1820s, the propertied classes had begun to make systematic efforts to protect themselves from such “unwanted intrusions from the streets.”
⁹

John Pintard was one such propertied man. He was deeply troubled by the increasing visibility of poor people and by the danger their aggressive behavior posed to respectable New Yorkers.
¹⁰
Pintard was the moving force behind the establishment, in 1817, of the Society for the Prevention of Pauperism, an organization designed to put both a cap on the skyrocketing costs of poor relief and a stop to the public begging and drinking of the poor in order to make the city streets a safe place for people like himself.
¹¹
Needless to say, all these efforts failed. By 1828 Pintard was acknowledging that the problems of poverty, drinking, and street crime had, “I confess, baffled all our skill…. The evil is obvious, acknowledged by all, but a sovereign remedy appears to be impossible.”
¹²