The Battle for Christmas (12 page)

At this point Irving’s own narrative voice takes over from Squire Bracebridge’s. “Such,” Irving continues, “was the good Squire’s project for mitigating public discontent; and, indeed, he had once attempted to put his doctrine in[to] practice, and a few years before had
kept open house during the holidays in the old style”
[emphasis added]. But the open-house experiment failed:

So the squire was forced to back off his original project. Nowadays, Irving tells us, he “contented himself with inviting the
decent part
of the neighboring peasantry to call at the hall on Christmas day” [emphasis added]. It is that select group, rather than the entire neighborhood, that
cornes to Bracebridge Hall (at the stipulated time) to entertain and mingle with the squire’s
real
guests.

But so self-conscious is this scene—so close to the edge of silliness—that Irving himself suspected it might ring false to contemporary readers. For as the squire” mingled among the rustics, and was “received with awkward demonstrations of deference and regard,” Irving’s narrator observes (and reports to us) something that escapes the notice of his host: “I perceived two or three of the younger peasants, as they were raising their tankards to their mouths, when the Squire’s back was turned, making something of a grimace, and giving each other the wink, but the moment they caught my eye they pulled grave faces, and were exceedingly demure.” Irving surely wrote this little scene to protect his credibility with an 1820 audience, and his meaning would have been clear enough to the knowing reader: Despite all the precautions Squire Bracebridge had taken to do the job right, he had been unable to keep even the “decent part” of the local peasantry in “good humor” on Christmas Day.

The “Bracebridge Hall” stories were immensely popular, and they played an important part in restoring the interest of “respectable” Americans (and Britishers) in celebrating Christmas. Indeed, it was these sketches, together with the stories of Charles Dickens, that provided much of what a recent book terms the “enduring imagery of Christmas which is annually reiterated in Christmas cards and festive illustrations, where jovial squires entertain friends and retainers by roaring fires, and stout coachmen, swathed in greatcoats, urge horses down snow-covered lanes as they bring anticipatory guests and homesick relations to their welcoming destinations.”
²⁷

When the “Bracebridge Hall” stories were published in 1819, they set off something of a debate about whether reviving the old rural Christmas rituals would be enough to restore the fading authority of the English gentry. The issues were understood in just these terms. One essay, published in 1825, summarized them by asserting bluntly “that the merrymakings of the times of Elizabeth and the Stuarts originated solely in an instinctive [i.e., paternalist] understanding between master and man; that the rich encouraged them [i.e., the merrymakings] as a means of patronage and superiority, and that the poor accepted them as an oil to their chain, or a happy rivet of their dependence.” On those points, the essay argued, conservatives and reformers agreed. Where they differed was in their response: Conservatives believed “that the old times were the best because they were least free;” while reformers argued “that a merry season is dearly purchased by servility all the rest of the year.”

This particular writer (he remains anonymous) was a skeptic. He maintained that a revival of the old rituals was unlikely to have any effect, simply because the times themselves had changed. In former days, when “people believed any thing because a magistrate set his hand to it, the case was different;”

“Sports may be revived,” this man concluded; “wassail bowls may abound; the poor may cultivate their strength and spirits with gymnastic exercise, and the rich assuredly be no nearer an undue influence.”
²⁸

In any event, Washington Irving’s vision of Christmas did not exactly offer a practical model for anyone who was tempted—and many must have been—to celebrate Christmas in this fashion. How could John Pintard, say, reproduce a ritual that Washington Irving himself found it difficult even to
imagine
for his readers? It is easy to sympathize with Pintard, who almost certainly read
The Sketch Book
and felt the power of Irvings vision. But it was easier for Irving to imagine such a scene than for John Pintard to duplicate it, even though it may have been the “Bracebridge Hall” stories that inspired—and finally frustrated—Pintard’s elaborate efforts during the 1820s to re-create an old-time New Year’s Day. Pintard would not be satisfied until he discovered what had happened, in the hands of his friend Clement Clarke Moore, to a figure that he himself had originally introduced—that is, of course, the figure of St. Nicholas.

As
LATE AS
1826, Pintard did not associate Christmas itself with St. Nicholas (or with anything at all except attending church and what Pintard termed “solemni[ty]” and “devotional feelings”). Pintard went to church on Christmas in 1827, too; but there was something new that year: “We had St. Claas in high snuff,” Pintard noted, and he referred briefly to the “bon bons” his grandchildren had received. The following year, 1828, Pintard’s description was more elaborate:

Pintard’s letters from each of the years 1830 through 1832 contain descriptions that were at least as extensive as this one. By 1831 he characteristically referred to the ritual as an “ancient usage,” adding that “St. Claas is too firmly riveted in this city ever to be forgotten.” And in 1832 Pintard concluded a very lengthy account of the children’s reactions to Santa’s visit with these words: “Happy golden age. All was joy and gladness.”
³⁰
That was all there would be; Pintard lived for another dozen years (dying at age 85), but he was becoming blind and seems to have stopped writing letters.

D
URING THE TWO DECADES
from 1810 to 1830, while Pintard shifted his energies from December 6 to January 1, then from January 1 to December 25, this much remained constant: The season was to be celebrated with members of his own social class. But one thing had changed nevertheless, and it was more important than the simple date of the celebration. Pintard had gradually moved from a celebration that took place in public (first at City Hall, with the New-York Historical Society, then on the city streets and in the houses of kinsmen and old acquaintances) to one that took place in private, in his own home, with his immediate family. Just as important, the new celebration focused on a single group within the family: young children.

In a very important way, such a child-centered event was a new thing. Before the nineteenth century children were merely dependents—miniature adults who occupied the bottom of the hierarchy within the family, along with the servants. But perhaps that was exactly the point, because in another way this was a very old thing. Making children the center of joyous attention marked an inversion of the social hierarchy, which meant that a part of the structure of an older Christmas ritual
was being precisely preserved:
People in positions of social and economic authority were offering gifts to their dependents. The ritual of social inversion was still there, but now it was based on age and family status alone. Age had replaced social class as the axis along which gifts were given at Christmas.
The children of a single household had replaced a larger group of the poor and powerless as the symbolic objects of charity and benevolence. It was those children who became the temporary centers of attention and deference at Christmas, and the joy and gratitude on their faces and in their voices as they opened their presents was a vivid re-creation of the exchange of gifts for goodwill that had long constituted the emotional heart of the Christmas season.

It was just such an exchange that Washington Irving had evoked in “Bracebridge Hall” when he insisted that “there is something genuine and affectionate in the gayety of the lower orders, when it is excited by the bounty and familiarity of those above them; [how] the warm glow of gratitude enters into their mirth, and a kind word, and a small pleasantry frankly uttered by a patron, gladdens the heart of the dependent more than oil and wine.” During the 1820s such an exchange had particular appeal for the urban upper classes, precisely because they were still residually sensitive to the need to demonstrate noblesse, especially during the Christmas season. But Irving, who continued to place the patron-client exchange in the older context of social class, was able to imagine it only with difficulty. Clement Moore, by translating the patron-client exchange from one between the classes to one between the generations, helped to transform it into a practical, simple ritual that almost any household could perform. And eventually, as we know only too well, almost every household would.

N
OWADAYS
many Americans believe, as I did until recently, that there was nothing new about “the night before Christmas” described in Moores poem—that the story it told was simply an old Dutch tradition brought to the New World in the seventeenth century and then, in the natural course of things, gradually Americanized. That is just what John Pintard would wish us to believe (and he may even have believed it himself).

But the preeminent scholar of St. Nicholas in our own day has shown that this could not have been the case. In an article published in 1954, Charles W. Jones argued forcefully that “there is no evidence that [the cult of Santa Claus] existed in New Amsterdam, or for [more than] a century after British occupation.” Jones pointed out that
nobody
has ever found any contemporaneous evidence of such a St. Nicholas cult in New York during the colonial period.
³¹
Instead, the familiar Santa Claus story appears to have been devised in the early nineteenth century, during the two decades that ended in the early 1820s. It seems likely that a similar
ritual, along with others, was practiced in parts of Holland during the mid-seventeenth century, on St. Nicholas’ Day, December 6. But Charles Jones makes a compelling case that this ritual did not cross the Atlantic, and that the Santa Claus who was devised in early-nineteenth-century New York was therefore a conscious reconstruction of that Dutch ritual—an invented tradition.

This does not mean that “the night before Christmas” belongs to Clement Moore alone. In fact, it was the work of a small group of antiquarian-minded New York gentlemen—men who knew one another and were members of a distinct social set. Collectively, those men became known as the Knickerbockers; the name comes from an immensely popular book published in 1809 by the best-known member of the group, Washington Irving. Irvings book, commonly known as
Knickerbocker’s History of New York
, was a brilliantly satirical allegory about life in the contemporary city that the author lived in, but it was written in the guise of a history of New Amsterdam in old Dutch times. Irving himself mentioned St. Nicholas twenty-five times in
Knickerbockers History
, including references to the saint’s wagon, his pipe (more of that later), and a line that read: “laying his finger beside his nose.” Irving even chose to have
Knickerbockers History
published on St. Nicholas’ Day. If it was John Pintard who introduced the figure of St. Nicholas, it was Washington Irving who popularized it. In the words of Charles W. Jones, “Without Irving there would be no Santa Claus…. Santa Claus was
made
by Washington Irving.”
^32
*

The Knickerbocker set inhabited a special niche in the world of early-nineteenth-century New York. As a rule, its members were of British, not Dutch, descent. They belonged to the Episcopal Church, and, more particularly, to its ritually inclined High Church faction. They were part of the wealthy old aristocracy of the city (or at least they identified with it). And they were politically conservative, reactionary even—opposed to democracy (which they identified with mob rule) and fearful of both the working class and the new bourgeoisie. Indeed, they often failed to distinguish between these two groups, sometimes lumping them together with the general, yet quite telling, word
plebeian
.

For example, in his
Knickerbockers History
, Washington Irving disdainfully summarized in a single sentence an episode that clearly represented to his readers the Jeffersonian revolution of 1800: “[J]ust about this time the mob, since called the sovereign people … exhibited a strange desire of governing itself.”
³³
And in 1822 (the year “A Visit from St. Nicholas” appeared), John Pintard explained to his daughter just why he was opposed to the new state constitution adopted that year, a constitution that gave men without property the right to vote: “All power,” Pintard wrote, “is to be given, by the right of universal suffrage, to a mass of people, especially in
this
city, which has no stake in society. It is easier to raise a mob than to quell it, and we shall hereafter be governed by rank democracy…. Alas that the proud state of New York should be engulfed in the abyss of ruin.”
³⁴