The Battle for Christmas (16 page)

Still, that change could easily have been implemented without transforming St. Nicholas from a bishop and a patrician into a plebeian (indeed, it could have been achieved without introducing St. Nicholas into the picture at all). By representing him as a plebeian, Moore allowed something else to happen, and it’s a fascinating transformation. Without losing his role as the bringer of gifts, St. Nicholas has taken on an additional function: that of a grateful, nonthreatening old-style dependent. In the first of these roles (as gift-bringer), St. Nicholas is purely imaginary—a fiction devised for children, a private joke among adults (more about that in a moment). In the second role (as grateful dependent), he is imaginary
in a different way, and only in part—a fiction devised for adults, and hardly as a joke; and imaginary only to the degree that, say, the old Dutch yeomanry nostalgically described by Washington Irving in “Rip Van Winkle” or
Knickerbockers History
were imaginary, or the loyal peasants that Irving presented in his “Bracebridge Hall” stories. Like those fictional characters, Moore’s St. Nicholas may not have existed; but (in this second role) he, too, was based on a real-life prototype that meant a great deal to the upper-class New Yorkers who very much wished to believe that he did still exist.

In this way, Moore managed to evoke what had eluded his fellow Knickerbockers, Washington Irving and John Pintard, in their own efforts to recapture the spirit of Christmas past: that is, the integration of the social classes in a scene of shared festivity where the poor posed no threat and gratefully accepted their place. Moore did this by replacing the cheerful poor of cherished memory not just with the children of the household but also with the magical figure of St. Nicholas himself. With this tricky maneuver Moore managed to transform what had been merely archaic and sentimental (and also patronizing to the poor) into something that can be called mythic.

In order to negotiate that transformation, to create that myth, Moore had to make the two simple yet crucial changes I have described: He had to present St. Nicholas as a figure who would evoke in his hearers and readers a working-class image (and not a patrician one) and also as a figure who would act the patrician’s part (and not the worker’s). He had to present St. Nicholas in the
role
of a bishop, but without a bishop’s authority to stand in judgment. In short, Moore had to present St. Nicholas as both a bishop and a worker—but without either the power of the one or the animosity of the other.

He had to devote fully one-third of his poem to offering the reassurance that the people who received visits from this figure of the night would have “nothing to dread.” St. Nicholas first offers that reassurance by giving “a wink of his eye and a twist of his head.” And a little later, when he has filled all the stockings and is about to depart, he turns abruptly to face the narrator—the head of the household, or, in other words, us, the reader—and places his finger “aside of his nose.” This is a meaningless phrase today, but in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century the gesture seems to have represented the equivalent of a secret wink—a visual way of saying something like “Shh! I’m only kidding” or “Let’s keep it between the two of us.”
⁵⁰
In the illustration, the man seated
on the left is making this very gesture to the man on the right, who is laughing so hard at the other man’s joke that he has dropped his long pipe. In fact, the source of Santa’s gesture in “A Visit from St. Nicholas” was a passage in Irving’s
Knickerbocker’s History
, a passage in which St. Nicholas appears in a dream to a character named Van Kortland. The dream concludes with these words: “And when St. Nicholas had smoked his pipe, he twisted it in his hat-band, and
laying his finger beside his nose
, gave the astonished Van Kortland
a very significant look
, then, mounting his wagon, he returned over the tree-tops and disappeared” [italics added]. Since Moore was obviously alluding to this very passage, St. Nicholas’ gesture in his poem, too, can be understood as a signal to the narrator (and to all
adult
readers of the poem):
This is all a dream
. As if to say:
“We
know I don’t exist, but let’s keep
that
between you and me!”

1863 Santa
. In this, the first of many pictures of Santa Claus drawn by noted American cartoonist Thomas Nast, Santa still looks rather plebeian, and he is smoking a short pipe.
(Courtesy, Harvard College Library)

1881 Santa
. Thomas Nast drew this, his most famous Santa Claus picture, in 1881. Now Santa is holding a very long pipe, and he has grown fat and avuncular—imagine this Santa trying to fit into a chimney! This is pretty much the way Santa Claus has remained to the present day.
(Courtesy, Harvard College Library)

B
ACK TO THE
F
UTURE

All a dream
. For the upper-class New Yorkers who collectively “invented” Christmas, Moore’s quiet little achievement was especially resonant. It offered a Christmas scenario that took a familiar ritual (the exchange of generosity for goodwill) and transfigured it with a symbolic promise to release them from both the fear of harm and the pressure of guilt. A generation earlier, one might argue, the parents of these men were sufficiently in control of their social world not to require such a catharsis. A generation later their children were sufficiently purged of a sense of direct social obligation not to require it any longer.

By then, in any case, “A Visit from St. Nicholas” would be taking on new meanings. Santa Claus himself would lose his plebeian character as time passed, and as the poem (and the new kind of holiday it helped create) was taken over by the middle classes and even by the poor themselves. In the years to come, even the visual image of Santa Claus would change. Still “plebeian” in the 1840s, Santa and his “team” soon cease to be portrayed as a miniature (“eight tiny reindeer,” a “miniature sleigh,” and a “jolly old elf”). He becomes full-sized, even large. His beard turns into the
full gray beard of the late-Victorian bourgeoisie. He appears increasingly avuncular. And, in the hands of Thomas Nast, the famous cartoonist who was responsible for much of this change, over a period of eighteen years even his pipe grows long once again. Still, for all these changes, Santa Claus recovers none of the episcopal dignity that Clement Moore took from him in 1822. Between being a jolly plebeian elf and a jolly fat uncle, the real St. Nicholas would surely have found it difficult to choose.

The versatile saint would be put to other uses, too. The late nineteenth century was a period of vexing religious doubt for many middle-class Americans, and one characteristic solution was to think that God must exist simply because people so badly needed Him to; without God, human life would be simply unendurable. It should not be too surprising that this rather elegiac Victorian argument came to be applied to Santa Claus as well: In 1897, in reply to an inquiry posed by a young reader whose “little friends” had told her that Santa Claus did not exist, the
New York Sun
printed what was destined to become a classic editorial. “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus,” the editorial began. It was written by the newspaper’s religious-affairs reporter, and its language and tone selfconsciously mirror that of late-Victorian popular theology. “Virginia, your little friends are wrong,” the reporter insisted, explaining that “[t]hey have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age.” And he went on to stake out terrain that many of his adult readers would have found familiar from sermons they heard in church: “Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus,” the reporter argued. “There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence.” And he concluded: “No Santa Claus? Thank God, he lives and he lives forever.”
⁵¹

C
LEMENT
M
OORE WROTE
“A Visit from St. Nicholas” on what might be called the cusp of his life. The expansion of New York affected him in a direct way, breaking up his estate into city blocks. Before around 1820 he viewed this change as a threat, and protested it accordingly. But thereafter Moore adopted a different strategy. He stopped protesting the new conditions and began instead to protect his economic and social position by systematically controlling the development of the Chelsea district. As early as 1818, he donated an entire city block adjacent to his own house for the construction of an Episcopal theological seminary (the institution in which he later became a professor of Hebrew and ancient languages). And he gave another large parcel for a new and very elegant
Episcopal church, St. Peters.
⁵²
By doing this, Moore was able to protect the value of his remaining holdings in Chelsea. And during the following years he consciously controlled the development of those holdings, by leasing lots rather than selling them and by including restrictive covenants in the deeds he gave to builders.
⁵³
Under Moore’s careful direction, Chelsea became for a time a fashionable district, an oasis of respectability on New York’s West Side.

As a great Manhattan landowner, Clement Moore played a part in the emergence of a new urban landscape, a landscape that stratified and segregated the city by wealth and class, and in which housing itself became a commodity.
⁵⁴
What I have tried to suggest in this chapter is less easy to prove: that Moore helped to bring about a parallel change on the American cultural landscape, in the role for which he is best known to most Americans today—as the poet of Christmas Eve. If such a reading is correct, it was
that
which constituted his most important contribution to the history of American capitalism.

D
URING THE
1822 Christmas season, the very season during which Clement Moore was writing “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” a New York newspaper editor proposed that one aspect of the local holiday celebration be reformed. As we have seen from the experience of John Pintard, many respectable New York men during the 1820s spent part of their New Year’s Day in paying visits to the homes of their circle of acquaintances. There they were received by the women of the household, who were expected to serve them food and drink—alcoholic drink. For example, that same season another New York newspaper published without comment a notice from an anonymous group of “unmarried gentlemen,” noting their expectation that the ladies they visited would serve them “large quantities of cake and wine, rum jelly and hot punch.”
¹

The reforming editor, a Federalist named William Leete Stone, called for a stop to the serving of alcohol in the course of these New Year’s Day visits. “A cup of good coffee” would be an “excellent substitute,” he suggested, a token of hospitality that would serve to “tranquilize the excesses of the young.”
²