The Battle for Christmas (15 page)

In every possible way, then, Moore’s St. Nicholas has lost his authority, his majesty, even his patrician dignity. He carries no bishop’s scepter. He is clothed not in a bishop’s red robes (despite the illustrations we may recall from modern editions of the poem) but in ordinary fur. This St. Nicholas is no bishop at all. He has effectively been defrocked.

But not only has Moore defrocked St. Nicholas, he has
declassed
him, too. It is not only his authority that has vanished; his gentility is gone as well. Consider how St. Nicholas is pictured in the first illustrated edition of Moore’s poem, dating from 1848 (and probably issued with Moore’s approval). He looks like a plebeian, and that’s also how he is described in the text. Remember that Moore says “he looked like a pedlar”—“a pedlar just opening his pack”—something, that is, between a beggar and a petty tradesman.

T
HE
S
TUMP OF A
P
IPE

And he smokes “the stump of a pipe.” Now, that little detail comes directly from Washington Irving—and from none of Moore’s other sources. Irving invariably associated St. Nicholas with a pipe. But there was a difference: That pipe was always referred to as a
long
pipe (indeed,
flamboyantly
long—in Irvings word, a “mighty” pipe).

It is necessary to say something here about the history and politics of pipes, if only because Irving himself does so. Indeed, there is a chapter in
Knickerbockers History
that bears the title “Of the Pipe Plot.” This chapter has nothing to do with St. Nicholas; what it deals with is the moment at which New Amsterdam (that is, New York) was transformed from a community characterized by “ease, tranquillity, and sobriety of deportment” into “a meddlesome and factious” city. Irving associated this transformation with the Jeffersonian revolution of 1800, the same political upheaval in which “the mob, since called the sovereign people … exhibited a strange desire of governing itself.” What happened, Irving reported, was that the citizens of New York organized themselves, for the first time, into two opposing parties. The terms Irving chose to identify these parties are intriguing: “[T]he more wealthy and important… formed a kind of aristocracy, which went by the appellation
Long Pipes
, while the lower orders … were branded with the plebeian name of
Short Pipes.”
⁴⁷

Plebeian St. Nicholas
. This illustration appeared in the first book-length edition of “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” published in 1848 under Moore’s name and almost certainly with his approval.
(Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society)

Long and Short Pipes
. This engraving, used as the frontispiece to Irving’s
Knickerbocker’s History
, was drawn by the well-known American artist Washington Allston. The four men in front are gentlemen; three of them are smoking long pipes. The plebeian tavern-keeper standing at the far back is smoking a short pipe.
(Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society)

Clearly, Irving was suggesting that short pipes were associated with working-class radicalism in the early nineteenth century. Not surprisingly, his suggestion seems to have been accurate. A recent paper delivered by a historical archaeologist who has been studying artifacts from the boarding
houses of the cotton mills in Lowell, Massachusetts, bears the improbable subtitle “Clay Pipes and Class Consciousness.” It seems that by the early nineteenth century, gentlemen smoked long pipes (some as much as two feet in length) known as “aldermen” or “church warderis;” workers smoked short pipes (or “cuddies”). It was not from economic necessity—that is, because short pipes happened to be cheaper—that working-class men (and women) smoked them; rather, they did so as a public gesture of class identity. In fact, the archaeological evidence (in the form of numerous broken-off pipe stems) suggests that workers often purchased longer pipes and then proceeded immediately, before smoking them, to break off the stems. The evidence seems compelling: Few of the broken-off stems recovered from the Lowell mills bear any telltale tooth marks.
⁴⁸
Workers
chose
to smoke “the stump of a pipe.”

Which finally brings this excursion into literary history back into connection with social history, and the analysis of genteel mythology into connection with the social changes that helped to generate it. Remember what was actually happening in the streets of early-nineteenth-century New York during the Christmas season: the presence there of marauding bands of revelers who threatened peace and property, whose revelry often turned into riot, who used this annual opportunity to reclaim for themselves (if only symbolically) the fashionable residential territory that had recently become the private preserve of the well-to-do. Remember the example of John Pintard’s unsettling experience on New Year’s Eve in 1821, when he was kept awake until dawn by the noise of a callithumpian band that stayed outside his door. Remember Clement Clarke Moore’s own anxiety, during the same period, over the slicing up of his pastoral estate into city streets for rapid development, the result of a plebeian conspiracy of artisans and laborers. Remember that Moore wrote “A Visit from St. Nicholas” in 1822, when the streets had just been dug and the development begun.

Viewed from this angle, there is something resonant about the choices Moore made in writing his little poem. And especially about his decision to both “defrock” St. Nicholas and “declass” him, to take away his clerical authority and his patrician manner, and to represent him instead as a “plebeian.” Moore’s decision meant that his St. Nick resembles, after all, the kind of man who
might
have come to visit a wealthy New York patrician on Christmas Eve—to startle him out of his slumber with a loud “clatter” outside his door, perhaps even to enter his house, uninvited and unannounced.

But there was one dramatic difference: The working-class visitor
feared by the patrician would come in a different way, for a different purpose. Such a visitor would have inhabited that murky ground between old-style village wassailing and the new urban political violence. He would have been youthful and full-sized, not a tiny “old elf.” He would very likely have been part of a roving gang (perhaps a callithumpian band), not a single individual. He would have come to make all the noise he could rather than to speak “not a word;” to
demand
satisfaction, not to
give
it; to harass or threaten his host, not to
reassure
him that he “had nothing to dread.” And, if he had finally departed in a genial spirit, wishing (in familiar wassail fashion) a “happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night,” it would have been because he had
received
satisfaction, not because he had
offered
it.

By contrast, the household visitor Moore portrays has come neither to threaten his genteel host nor to make any demands on his generosity. The narrator of “A Visit from St. Nicholas” is openly fearful when St. Nicholas first appears, but his fears have been assuaged by the time St. Nicholas departs.

There is another real-life variation on this theme. The houses and shops of well-to-do men in large urban centers were guarded, as we have seen, by night watchmen, a kind of private police force. As it happens, these watchmen, like other menial workers of the period, took the Christmas season as a time to ask their wealthy patrons for tips. We know this because the watchmen’s ritual sometimes took the form of a printed broadside (much like the carriers’ addresses discussed in Chapter i). A few of these broadsides—watchman’s addresses, as they were known—have survived. All of them remind their wealthy readers of the sense of security their nocturnal vigilance has managed to provide, and all go on to beg a reward for their efforts. A particularly resonant watchman’s address was circulated in 1829 by the watchmen of the Philadelphia suburb of Southwark. Headed “Southwark Watchman’s Address for Christmas Day,” it went in part like this:

Watchman
. The watchman is guarding a fenced-in New York estate at night. This illustration appeared in
Cries of New-York
, published in 1822, the same year that Clement Moore wrote “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” and was the work of Alexander Anderson, the illustrator who also executed John Pintard’s 1810 St. Nicholas broadside.
(Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society)

Here the watchman has reminded his patrons that he is protecting them in their “rich soft downy bed”—protecting them, indeed, from the “ruffian” who tries to enter in the middle of the night (and in the context of the Christmas season it is surely significant that the watchman has chosen to speak of a “ruffian” and not of a thief). He shields his prosperous patrons from danger and fear, to be sure. But he also makes demands of his own, demands that take the classic form of a wassail:

On such occasions the watchman in effect turned the tables on his ordinary role, symbolically becoming the very personage from whom he is supposed to offer protection. As with any wassail there was always a veiled edge of threat behind the good wishes—and in this instance a miserly patron would surely be risking far more than a wet newspaper!

But if “A Visit from St. Nicholas” spoke to the physical
fears
of its upper-class readers, it also addressed their moral
guilt
. What it suggested was that Santa Claus was one Christmas visitor to whom the patron owed no obligations, not even tips. This visitor asks for nothing, and by implication his host owes him nothing—an important point, if one is willing to believe that even as late as the 1820s many patrician New Yorkers still felt a strong, if inchoate, obligation to be generous to the poor during the emotionally resonant holiday season.

If Moore’s upper-class readers were to be comfortable at Christmastime, they needed to have at their disposal a class of dependents whose palpable expressions of goodwill would assure them that they had fulfilled their obligations after all. They did this in part by substituting their own children for the needy and homeless outside their household. In that way, as we have seen, they managed to preserve the
structure
of an older Christmas ritual, in which people occupying positions of social and economic authority offered gifts to their dependents. The children in their own households had replaced the poor outside it as the symbolic objects of charity and deference, and the gratitude those children displayed at present-opening time was a re-creation of the old Christmas exchange—gifts for goodwill. The ritual of social inversion was still there, but it now remained securely within the household.