The Battle for Christmas (21 page)

In this instance a group of parents (including the writer of this letter) went to the schoolhouse to negotiate with the rebellious children. First they “prevailed” on the rebels “to raise one of the windows a little.” Then, when they inquired about the purpose of the rebellion, the answer was clear: “One of them, who seemed to be the commander in chief, replied they wished to have ten days of Christmas-play.”
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The practice even penetrated into rural New England. Horace Greeley later recalled that barring-out was common during his childhood in early-nineteenth-century New Hampshire:

Greeley went on to indicate that the practice was informally sanctioned by adults. If a persecuted schoolmaster “appealed to the neighboring fathers” for assistance, Greeley remembered, “they were apt to recollect that they had been boys themselves, and advise him to desist, and let matters take their course.”
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In whatever fashion it might be gained, the young people’s holiday generally took the form of what its critics, such as the 1818 Boston parent mentioned above, termed “idleness and dissipation.” Young boys went around the neighborhood firing guns and “squibs,” making noise, playing tricks.

Barring Out the Schoolmaster
. These boys have brought a supply of food and drink to last them through the anticipated siege (the words printed on the right in this primer include “carousing,” “drinking,” and “beer”). But the rebels’ plans are about to be foiled: The schoolmaster is pouring water through a secret trapdoor in the ceiling, so as to douse the schoolboys’ candle prior to his invading the schoolhouse. This illustration was included in a child’s primer published in 1850, but it had appeared earlier in the same publisher’s 1822 Boston edition of an English novella, Maria Edgeworth’s
The Barring Out. (Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society)

Children of both sexes drank and played kissing games.
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In its most innocent form, Christmas games meant having snowball fights, but even these could lead to disturbance and damage. Snowballing could become especially vicious in urban areas, where, during the Christmas season, respectable citizens associated it with the kind of menacing behavior they feared from working-class youth gangs at Christmastime. Remember, for example, the language in which the
New York Tribune
described the city streets during the Christmas season in 1854 (the emphasis is mine):” [A]t almost every corner
gangs
of
boys and drunken rowdies
were seen amusing themselves by
throwing snowballs?

That was how respectable adults saw it. But the issue was surely more complicated for many of the boys themselves, who must have been drawn in two directions at once—an old pull, toward carnival in the streets, and the new one, toward the quieter rewards that were promised at home. That double pull would have been especially salient in families that were positioned anywhere near the vulnerable lower borders of middle-class respectability. Youths who belonged to such families constituted a major battleground in the transformation of Christmas.

Young people do not often leave direct records of their inner experience. But a hint of what this inner battleground might have meant in human terms can be found in a careful reading of one rather sensitive Christmas story published in 1838 under the title “Snow-Balling.”The author of this story, Eliza Leslie, was a popular writer of the time. Set in Philadelphia on Christmas Day, the story tells of the adventures of a young boy whose father gives him a “Christmas dollar” and sends him downtown to buy himself a present. Left on his own, young Robert Hamlin encounters trouble. Unable to choose from the plethora of tempting items for sale in the shops, Robert becomes confused and begins to wander about the streets.
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In his wanderings, Robert comes upon an alleyway where he sees “some rude boys engaged in snow-balling.” (“Rude boys” is a phrase that may require some explanation for modern readers: The word
rude
was a reference to these boys’ social class as well as to their manners. A “rude boy” was a working-class youth, the sort of person who might be expected to engage in forms of rowdy activity even more threatening than throwing snowballs.)

Robert is tempted to join these youths, especially after one of them throws a snowball at him and proceeds to laugh. But he is saved by luck from succumbing to this temptation. One of the boys throws a snowball at a woman who is observing the scene from the entrance to her house;
the snowball hits her in the nose and hurts her badly, causing her husband to run out of the house and chase the youths away by brandishing a pair of fireplace tongs. Witnessing this scene, Robert feels “glad that he did not belong to them.”

At this point the author of the story is engaging in a significant gesture of evasion. For, as we shall see in a moment, young Robert gets into a snowball fight after all. In real life, as opposed to a work of fiction, someone like Robert would probably have joined the “rude boys.” But Eliza Leslie does not wish to have the fictional Robert become involved with such a crew. She has taken pains to let us know his social class. He is the son of an artisan, a “respectable mechanic,” which means that he is not so far in origin from the “rude boys.” While not a proletarian, he is not securely middle-class, either. If a real Robert Hamlin had joined those boys he might have ended up in serious trouble, causing damage or injury, and his snowball fight might have been the first step in his descent out of respectability and into permanent proletarian status. Such a descent was far from uncommon among urban artisans in the middle of the nineteenth century, a period when independent artisanship itself was being subverted by industrial capitalism. Joining a gang of “rude boys” in a Christmas game of snowballs was thus a small but potent symbol of the larger dangers faced by the son of a “respectable mechanic.”

If the fictional Robert is to get into trouble, then, it cannot be with the “rude boys.” But get into trouble he must, or there is no point to the story. Eliza Leslie manages to devise a clever solution: the fictional Robert ends up getting into trouble with youngsters
above
his class.

Turning a corner away from the “alley” of the “rude boys,” young Robert comes upon “a row of very handsome new houses.” And in front of these houses he sees “a party of rather genteel looking boys, engaged also in snow-balling.” The earlier scene now repeats itself: One of these “genteel looking” boys hurls a snowball at Robert. But this time Robert joins in. He makes a “very hard snow-ball,” and throws it at the boy who has just done the same to him. But Robert’s aim is poor, and his snowball smashes through a windowpane of one of the handsome new houses. Fortunately, no one is injured, though the snowball nearly hits “the head of a pretty little girl” who has been sitting quietly “engaged in reading one of the new annuals [i.e., a Gift Book she has presumably received as a present that very day].” The girl screams loudly, and Robert hides. But the family’s black servant rushes outside and confronts the other boys, threatening them with the wrath of the owner: “Ah! you young nimps—only wait till the gentleman comes home—I’ll be bound Mr. Cleveland
will give you enough of snow-balling, for smashing his rights and property in this way, without leave or license.’”

Robert overhears the threat, and he quickly runs off and returns to his own house, where his parents are just sitting down to the family’s Christmas dinner, having planned a domestic Christmas for their children: a festive dinner followed by a “juvenile party” at his aunt’s house. But Robert, beset by guilt, is hardly capable of eating his turkey and mince pie, or looking forward to the party. After a while he gets up from the table, leaves the house, and goes back to the scene of his recent crime. There he confesses to having been the culprit who broke the window and offers the owner the dollar he had been given for Christmas (the same dollar he could not make up his mind how best to spend). Now he feels better, and returns home again, this time to enjoy the turkey and mince pie—and the praise of his parents when he finally tells them what he has just done.

As I have said, the dangers presented in this story were very real in households like Robert Hamlin’s. We can assume that respectable boys
did
sometimes join “rude boys” in Christmas sport, and that snowballing was not the worst of their games. With snowballing as a partly symbolic act, Eliza Leslie’s little story can be read as offering the same kind of warning to younger boys that older boys heard in the 1830s about the dangers of alcohol—or that girls heard about the dangers of sexual seduction. In all these cases, the ultimate risk was that of a serious decline in social status, the loss of respectability and independence itself.

Snow-Balling
. This engraving appeared as an illustration for Eliza Leslies 1838 short story of the same title. It vividly conveys the menace that could be associated with that sport.
(Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society)

But if the dangers were real, so, too, were the alternative lures that were now being offered to the Robert Hamlins of America: Christmas dinner at home, tempting presents to play with, and even children’s parties—such as the “juvenile party” that young Robert could look forward to at his aunt’s house. Such activities posed no social risk; and some of them (for example, reading the Gift Books that were frequently given as Christmas presents, and in one of which Eliza Leslie’s story “Snow-?ailing” was itself published) even promised harmless amusement along with cultural enhancement. In the words of an 1840 newspaper editorial, “Good books are good gifts for good children.”
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The story “Snow-Balling” ends before the “juvenile party” gets under way. But other stories published in the same period give us an idea of what such parties may have been like. For one thing, it is clear that they would have taken place indoors, usually in the family parlor and under the immediate or general supervision of an adult. In addition, the participants would have been young cousins and/or trustworthy friends—children who had been picked and invited by the parents, and not by the children themselves. We can be sure that there would be no “rude boys” in attendance—not even the children of household servants. Lower-class people were to be kept away on these occasions, and the children of the household were kept inside.

The literature of the decades after 1820 is filled with Christmas scenes in which parents arrange parties for their children. These are invariably indoor parties, and the games are indoor games. In the fictional literature, Christmas has become a controlled children’s “frolic,” sometimes wild enough to recall the rowdiness of an interclass carnival Christmas, but always under complete control. One story, published in 1850, begins with a Christmas Eve party for twenty preteen children. There are
“cakes and candies … lemonade ice-cream,” music (a piano), and games. “The windows rattled and the very walls were shaken, by the bounding and leaping—the racing and tumbling—of the half-dancing and half-romping youngsters.” The twin parlors had been set up “to give room for the frolic of Christmas Eve, and most fully did the children avail themselves of the license of the season.” Before the party was over, “scarce a chair or a table was to be found in its proper place and posture half an hour after the revel [had] begun.”
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