The Battle for Christmas

by Stephen Nissenbaum

  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:

  … [W]hile you’re reposing in sleep’s fond embrace,

  Upon your rich soft downy bed,

  The Watchman, who’s one of your own fellow race,

  Sees clouds gathering thick o’er his head.

  This doth not affright him, his pathway is clear,

  To serve you, he’s ne’er seen to stray;

  To shield you from danger, and guard you from fear,

  Propels him alone on his way….

  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)

  The ruffian at midnight is drove from your door,

  By the watch that is faithful and true;

  And this keeps in safety your house and your store;

  To him, then, is gratitude due.

  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:

  Now to close, he wishes you health, to fare well;

  And your mite from him hope you won’t spare.49

  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.

  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)

  BACK TO THE FUTURE

  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

  CLEMENT MOORE 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.