The Battle for Christmas (60 page)

6.
New-York Advertiser
, Jan. 4, 1828. This was the same callithumpian parade described in
Chapter 2
(pp. 54–55).

7.
New-York American
, Dec. 28, 1827.

8.
Ibid., Dec. 30, 1828. A year later the same newspaper came out in favor of excluding alcohol from the New Year’s visitation ritual (ibid., see letter appearing Jan. 1, 1830).

9.
Eliza C. Folien, “Life of Charles Folien,”
The Works of Charles Folien
(5 vols., Boston, 1842), I, 562.

10.
New York Morning Herald
, Dec. 25, 1839. The theater at which “Santiclaus” appeared was the Broadway Circus, perhaps the only New York theater that was still attracting a “mixed”-class audience at this time. See also
New York Tattler
, Dec. 27, 1839. These items were brought to my attention by Dale Cockrell.

11.
New York Daily Herald
, Dec. 23, 1839.

12.
Dec. 26, 1848, in Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas, eds.,
Diary of George Templeton Strong
(4 vols., New York: Macmillan, 1952), 1, 338–339.

13.
New-York Tribune
, Dec. 23, 1850. The paper went on to suggest that these gangs had the tacit support of politicians (presumably from Tammany Hall).

14.
New-York Tribune
, Jan. 3, 1852. For a survey of riots in nineteenth-century New York, see Luc Sante,
Low Life: Lures and Snares of New York
(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991), 339–356, a chapter bearing the apt title “Carnival.”

15.
New-York Tribune
, Jan. 3, 1852.

16.
See also the
New-York American
for Dec. 26 and 30, 1840, juxtaposing riot reports (in one column) with an upbeat editorial (in another) about Christmas shopping and “the merry days [of] childhood and youth.”

17.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Christmas at Ratzeburg,” in
The Friend
(Burlington, Vermont, 1831), 322. Coleridge continues: “About seven or eight years old the children are let into the secret, and it is curious how faithfully they keep it!” Readers who studied the piano as children may recall “Knecht Ruprecht” as the title of a mock-scary piece from Robert Schumann’s “Album for the Young.” In Alsace, a similar figure was named Hanstrap.

18.
Pennsylvania Gazette
, Dec. 29, 1827; quoted in Alfred Shoemaker,
Christmas in Pennsylvania: A Folk-Cultural Study
(Kutztown: Penn. Folklore Society, 1959), 74.

19.
Ibid., 74–75.

20.
See, for example, P. E. Gibbons, “The Pennsylvania Dutch,”
Atlantic Monthly
, Oct. 1869, 484; quoted ibid., 76.

21.
Diary of James L. Morris (from Montgomery, Penn.); quoted ibid., 74.

22.
Pottstown Lafayette Aurora
, Dec. 21, 1826; quoted ibid., 73–74.

23.
Morris diary entry, Dec. 24, 1844, quoted ibid., 74;
Norristown Herald and Free Press
, Dec. 31, 1851;
Lancaster Daily Evening Express
, Dec. 26, 1873;
Carlisle Herald
, Jan. 2, 1873; all quoted Shoemaker,
Christmas in Pennsylvania
, 77.

24.
Reading Berks and Schuylkill Journal
, Dec. 27, 1851;
Norristown Olive Branch
, Dec. 31, 1853;
Easton Daily Express
, Dec. 27, 1858 (all quoted Shoemaker,
Christmas in Pennsylvania
, 76).

25.
Pottstown Ledger
, Dec. 26, 1873; quoted ibid., 77.

26.
Susan G. Davis, “‘Making Night Hideous’: Christmas Revelry and Public Order in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia,”
American Quarterly
34 (1982), 185–199 (quotation from 190–191).

27.
Philadelphia Daily Chronicle
, Dec. 26, 1833; quoted Shoemaker,
Christmas in Pennsylvania
, 86; partly quoted in Susan G. Davis,
Parades and Power: Street Theater in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 81.

28.
Philadelphia Public Ledger
, Dec. 27, 1839.

29.
Davis, “‘Making Night Hideous,’” 191.

30.
Philadelphia Public Ledger
, Dec. 25, 1839.

31.
Ibid., Dec. 27, 1848. On Dec. 30, 1856, Philadelphia patrician Sidney Fisher noted in his diary that he had “[h]ad trouble with our servants—cook and waiter got drunk this afternoon & I was obliged to have the police to take them away.” Nicholas B. Wainwright,
A Philadelphia Perspective: The Diary of Sidney George Fisher Covering the Years 1834–1871
(Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1967), 264.

32.
Philadelphia Public Ledger
, Dec. 25, 1844. Or take Sidney Fisher: On Christmas Day, 1840, that patrician “ate pretty well & drank claret, champagne &, Madeira [at dinner], again at supper drank Burgundy, Madeira & whiskey punch, besides 4 cigars at home.” Diary entry, Dec. 26, 1840, in Wainwright,
A Philadelphia Perspective
, 108.

33.
For the open shops, see, for example, the 1841 column of Christmas Day amusements: “[W]e briefly note below where are kept and may be obtained the good things prepared for the times, the large use of which is part of the performances of the day.” Although “businesses” were reported closed, that term apparently referred to large-scale financial and manufacturing enterprises.

34.
Nile’s National Register
, Jan. 1, 1842, 288 (this item was brought to my attention by Carol Sherif). See also
Philadelphia Public Ledger
, Dec. 27, 1843, and Dec. 25 and 27, 1844. These promenades may have been a source of Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Man of the Crowd,” a dark tale about a man who gets swept up in a vast crowd while promenading through the streets of a large city. The story (set in London, which Poe had never seen) was published in 1840, after the first Christmas Poe spent in Philadelphia.

35.
Philadelphia Public Ledger
, Dec. 27, 1841 (“struggling and jostling”); Dec. 26, 1842 (“the whole city”).

36.
Ibid., Dec. 27, 1843 (“more drunken men and boys”); Dec. 25 and 27, 1844. Philadelphia was not the only city in which regular public rituals were burlesqued. In New York, the military companies that marched out of the city each Christmas Day on the way to target-shooting were burlesqued by similar bands of “fantasticals.”

37.
Philadelphia Public Ledger
, Dec. 27, 1845; Dec. 25, 1846.

38.
In 1801
Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser
carried a watchman’s address asking for money (Dec. 25, 1801). But in 1802 the same newspaper published a warning, under the heading “Christmas Reflections,” urging religious piety instead of revelry and excess—at least on Christmas Day itself: “Pause—
ye
giddy and ye gay…. Forego, for
one
day at least, the resplendent and fascinating charms of dissipation.” (Ibid., Dec. 25, 1802.)

39.
The four almanacs: “Citizens & Farmers’ Almanack for … 1825” (Philadelphia, [1824]); “Grigg’s Almanack, for … 1825” (Philadelphia, [1824]); “New Brunswick Almanack, for 1825” (Philadelphia, [1824]); and “The United States National Almanac” (Philadelphia, 1825). The newspapers:
Saturday Evening Post
, Dec. 23, 1826;
National Gazette
, Dec. 24, 1827 (Moore poem);
Poulson’s
, Dec. 26, 1827 (Bracebridge Hall). The “Bracebridge Hall” extract was a passage defining Christmas as “the season for gathering together of family connections….”

40.
Poulson’s
, Dec. 24, 1828;
National Gazette
, Dec. 26, 1828;
Poulson’s
, Dec. 26, 1829 (Santa Claus ritual));
National Gazette
, Dec. 24, 1830.

41.
Nathaniel Whittemore (Boston, 1719), lines opposite Dec. 18–21; Henry Dwight Sedgwick to Theodore Sedgwick, manuscript letter, Dec. 24, 1805, in Sedgwick Family Papers V (Massachusetts Historical Society), Box 2.13;
Boston Daily Advertiser
, Dec. 22, 1818; John Pintard to his daughter, Dec. 16, 1827, in
Letters from John Pintard
, vol. 2, 382;
New-York Tribune
, Jan. 2, 1854. For comparison, here is the text of a wassail sung by young people in England: “We are not daily beggars / That beg from door to door, / But we are neighbors’ children, / Whom you have seen before…. / We have got a little purse / Made of stretching leather skin, / We want a little of your money / To line it well within.” (Quoted Ashton,
Right Merrie Christmasse
, 111–112.)

42.
See, for instance, John R. Gillis,
Youth and History: Tradition and Change in European Age Relations, 1770-Present
(New York: Academic Press, 1974); for an American version, see John Demos,
A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1970). Phillipe Aries,
Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of
Family Life
(New York: Knopf, 1962), shows brilliantly how this began to change in the seventeenth century among the European aristocracy and nobility.

43.
The ritual had reached America by the middle of the eighteenth century. A little broadside printed in 1765 or 1766 (probably in Boston) contains the following short verse, written by a blacksmiths apprentice: “This is unto all
GENTLEMEN
who shoes [sic]] here, / I wish you a merry Christmas, a happy New Year: / For shoeing your Horses, and trimming their Locks, / Please to remember my New-Years Box.” (This is catalogued as Bristol ’B2818; S-M41768; Ford #137. Ford says it was “probably” printed in New England because it was found together with other New England material.) For the history of Christmas boxes, see Ashton,
A Right Merrie Christmasse
, 202–204 (Samuel Pepys and Jonathan Swift); see also J. A. R. Pimlott,
The Englishman’s Christmas: A Social History
(Sussex, England: Harvester Press, 1978), 72–73.

44.
Nurse Trueloves Christmas Box
(Worcester, Mass., 1786 [and several times thereafter]); Emily E. F. Skeel,
Mason Locke Weems, His Work and Ways
(3 vols., New York, 1929), III, 29. An advertisement headed “Christmas Box” appeared in the
New-York Evening Post
, Dec. 24, 1802.

45.
Both volumes were originally printed in Boston in 1747. The former was reprinted six more times by 1804; a last edition appeared in 1824.

46.
A Present to Children
(New London, 1783);
Present for Misses
(Worcester: I. Thomas, 1794);
A Present for a Little Boy
(Philadelphia, 1802);
A Present for a Little Girl
(Philadelphia, 1804).

47.
“How am I pleas’d with painted toys? / I feed the foolish fire: / Trifles and fashions cover my eyes / And cheat my warm desire. / On jointed babes [i.e., dolls] I fix my hope. / In my fond arms carest; / I dress the mimic-puppets up, / And hug them to my breast.”
(A Present to Children
[New London, Conn., 1783], 9.)

48.
Boston Daily Advertiser
, Dec. 22, 1818. This letter is also discussed in
Chapter 1
.

49.
Rex Cathcart, “Festive Capers? Barring-Out the Schoolmaster,”
History Today
38 (Dec. 1988), 49–53. Cathcart suggests that barring-out may have begun as a substitute for the earlier inversion ritual known as the “Boy-Bishop,” which was suppressed at about the same time. See also Keith Thomas,
Rule and Misrule in the Schools of Early Modern England
(Reading, England: University of Reading Press, 1976). For barring-out in England, see Maria Edgeworth, “The Barring Out” (Philadelphia, 1804); Brand,
Popular English Antiquities
, I, 441–434; and Ona and Peter Opie,
The Lore and Language of Children
(Oxford, England, 1959).

50.
“The Further Affidavit of James Blair …,” in William S. Perry, ed.,
Historical Collections Relating to the American Colonial Church
(2 vols., Hartford, 1870), 1, 137–138. Virginia was also the site of an apparently more peaceful barring-out much later in the same century. A Northern visitor noted in his diary on Dec. 18, 1773, that “Mr Goodlet was barr’d out of his School last Monday by his Scholars, for the Christmas Holidays, which are to continue til twelfth-day….” (Hunter Dickinson Farish, ed.,
The Journal and Letters of Philip Vickers Fithian
[Williamsburg, Va., 1943], entry for Dec. 18, 1773, 34.)

51.
Philadelphia Democratic Press
, Dec. 18, 1810; quoted Shoemaker,
Christmas in Pennsylvania
, 24. Another Pennsylvanian, writing later in the century, recalled the custom from his childhood in the 1850s: “The windows were nailed fast, one and all; the benches were dragged from all parts of the room and piled against the door,—a long row extending to the stove, as a prop…. For one brief hour the scholars were master,—the tables turned, as it were, and riot ran high and wild.” (Charles H. Miller,
Lykens Twenty Years Ago
(Lykens, Pa., 1876), 13; quoted ibid., 27.)

52.
Horace Greeley,
Recollections of a Busy Life
(New York, 1868), 43–44. For an Indiana example from the 1830s, reported in vivid detail, see
A Home in the Woods: Oliver Johnson’s Reminiscences of Early Marion County, as Related by Howard Johnson
(Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, [1951]), 56–64. (This item was brought to my attention by Burton Bledstein.)

53.
For background on school culture in New England, see Robert A. Gross,
An Age of Revolution
(forthcoming, Hill & Wang), ch. 3. Barring-out presumably died off later in the century, as Christmas vacations became an official part of the school calendar rather than something negotiated ad hoc by the schoolboys themselves (and as the teaching profession itself became professionalized—and feminized). Even in colleges, a similar custom may have been practiced, although by the nineteenth century it more generally took the form of students simply leaving the campus at Christmastime, sometimes with the encouragement of the faculty. (See
Diary of George Templeton Strong
, Dec. 22–23, 1835, 1, 8–9.) But students at Yale were engaging in an annual Christmas Eve “Callithumpian anniversary” during the 1830s and 1840s: Late at night, “painted and masked, wearing all sorts of hideous and fantastic dresses; some having drums, some tin kettles, some horns,” they would march through New Haven, “carrying devastation and ruin wherever they go, levelling fences, breaking windows, destroying the unfortunate barrels of whiskey, which may happen to be exposed….” (An extended account of this ritual appeared in the
New York Herald
, Dec. 30, 1837.) After the 1847 callithumpian parade, one Yale student was actually indicted for attempted murder
(Hampshire Gazette
[Northampton, Mass.], Dec. 28, 1847, and Feb. 8, 1848).