The Battle for Christmas

by Stephen Nissenbaum

  * A fascinating equivalent to the Knickerbockers’ invention of Santa Claus (and all in the guise of continuing a venerated old tradition) is to be found in an unlikely arena: the early history of the game of baseball. The American national pastime, like the American Christmas, was invented in New York—and less than a generation later. Astonishingly, the earliest extant description of a baseball match, in a press account dating from 1845, referred to this newly devised sport as a “time-honored game”! But a clue that may help explain that phrase is to be found in the name of the best-known baseball club from this early period of the sport: formed in 1846, this New York team was known as the “Knickerbockers.” (The account of the 1845 match, printed in the New York Morning News, was unearthed only in 1990; it antedates by one year the earliest previously known report of a baseball game. The discovery was a front-page story in the New York Times, October 4, 1990.)

  CHAPTER 3

  The Parlor and the Street

  THE BATTLE FOR SANTA CLAUS

  Santa Claus and Alcohol in New York

  DURING 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

  Stone’s suggestion met with a barrage of public ridicule. (This was several years before the emergence of a temperance movement in the United States.) One man—he did not provide his name but identified himself as a former sheriff of the county—wrote an especially pointed rejoinder. This sheriff embroidered a lengthy account of his usual sequence of visits, visits to homes where he had always counted on being greeted with “gaiety and hospitality”—but at every stop he was now greeted only with a cup of coffee. When he declined one such offer by telling his hostess that he had “‘breakfasted already,’” he was told that “‘this is not intended as breakfast—Mr. Stone, of the Commercial, recommends coffee as a substitute for wine or cordial.’” And so it went throughout the morning. “Oh, sir,’” said one of his hostesses, “‘’tis all the rage now—wine and cordial heat the blood, while coffee warms and stimulates without producing deleterious effects.’ ‘So it does, ma’am, at breakfast, but at this hour I would prefer a glass of raspberry [cordial] and a cooky, vulgar as it may appear.’” Even at the house of a good friend, a house “where gaiety and hospitality were ever united,” the sheriff encountered only “a neat gilt china cup, filled with coffee, presented to me by a beautiful young lady.” “‘Surely you will not refuse any thing I offer you,’ said the lady, with a bewitching smile, and with some tenderness in it….” When he continued to protest, she added: “‘But, sir, ’tis recommended in the newspapers by Mr. Stone.’…”

  At last the sheriff gave up and decided instead “to visit some of the Hotels—the landlords having thrown open their doors with their usual hospitality.” At one of these—“our old friend Niblo’s”—there was, “as usual, good fare and a hearty welcome.” Another hotelier provided “such a display of wines and delicacies [as] has never been surpassed in this city.” At length the sheriff entered a third hotel, and there he encountered an unexpected guest: “[W]ho should I see seated at the table, and up to his elbows in good things, but my coffee-drinking friend Stone.” The sheriff looked around the table, “and thank heaven not a cup of coffee was to be seen. Stone was so intent on eating cold round [of beef] and turkey, and washing it down with large draughts of old Madeira, that he saw nobody, and if it had not been cruel to have check’d this terminal gratification of his appetite, I certainly should have been tempted to have gone up to him, and said, ‘Stone, how are you off for coffee?’”

  The sheriff took pains to show that he knew all about holiday rowdiness, too, and that it did not bother him very much. Indeed, he wrote with more affection than anger about the antics of working-class men on New Year’s Eve. Such behavior was nothing more than part of the standard “ceremonies and jolifications [sic]” of the occasion. It was hardly surprising that those New Yorkers sometimes chose to go on “what they called a spree.” Some of them “went forth with bands of music to serenade their friends, but the most mischievous amused themselves by knocking on doors, displacing signs, knocking down the watchmen, firing crackers and pistols, and snow balling the frail fair ones of the city….” About twenty of the revelers were jailed for the night, but even incarceration failed to dampen their spirits: In the jailhouse itself “[t]hey snapped their fingers, danced waltzes, whistled loud and shrill, and sang glees and catches.” Nor did the magistrate who tried their case early the next morning seem troubled by their offenses, for, as the sheriff concluded, “in consideration of the day, [he] discharged them all, with suitable admonitions, and without requiring any fees [i.e., fines].”

  It was an interesting account. The sheriff presented himself as a man who reached easily across class lines and was equally at ease in the drawing room of a “splendid mansion,” a boisterous public house, and even a jail. Actually, the only people who seemed to bother him were reformers (like Colonel Stone) and fashionable women. In that sense, his little story is about gender and class. Women are the purveyors of fashion who portend the decline of real hospitality in the form of good food and drink; the sheriff must go to a “public house” (run and attended by men) in order to eat and drink properly. He takes pains to let his readers know that he is not bothered by working-class drinking and rowdiness. The real social threat (however humorously it is posed) comes from emerging middle-class reforms, represented by Stone’s editorial appeal for coffee instead of alcohol—and it is women who read and act on this advice, turning even the homes of old friends into cold comfort. (As the decades passed and the temperance movement emerged and spread, other newspaper editors tried to rally women to the antidrinking cause. Almost every New Year’s during the 1840s, for example, Horace Greeley used his paper, the New York Tribune, to persuade women to remove alcohol from their tables.)

  Resistance to the reform of the Christmas season thus came from above as well as below. Men of a similar stripe to the sheriff actually tried to claim Santa Claus himself as an ally in the cause of old-fashioned hospitality. Two years earlier, in 1820, a New York newspaper printed a poem about Santa in which the “good St. Nicholas” had “just come from Amsterdam / To give the New-years maids their cakes, / And Pinester lads their drams.” The poem then proceeded to address the “lads” directly:

  Much to this Saint you owe

  For eggs, and nuts, and pies, and crulls,

  And whyskey’s jovial flow.3

  Nor was this all. On January 4, 1828 (five years after Clement Clarke Moore had written “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” and during the very Christmas season in which his poem began to be widely printed in newspapers around the nation), at least two New York newspapers printed another poem, this one bearing the title “Ode to Saint Claas, Written on New Year’s Eve.”4 The author of this 1828 poem signed himself “Rip Van Dam” (a sure indication that he was not of Dutch ancestry) and insisted, in an introductory note, that he had written his poem only because, “[s]o far as I know, nothing in the way of honourable commendation hath been sung in this city
of honest Dutch Burghers, to the thrice-blessed Saint Nicholaas—the saint of all saints, and king of good fellows.” That claim may have been a dig at Moore’s poem, because the figure of “Saint Claas” he presented—“king of good fellows”—was a far cry from Moore’s. To be sure, “Rip Van Dam’s” figure is chubby and jolly, and he, too, “fills every stocking” with little treats: “Apples, and nuts, and sugar-plums, / Grateful to little urchin’s gums … new suits for girls and boys, / Pretty books and prettier toys.”

  But that was not all this St. Nicholas brought. The very next verse promised other treats of a very different order: “Mull’d cider, cherry bounce, [and] spic’d rum, / Jolly Saint, O hither come!” And the poet went on to fantasize about joining Santa in a drunken orgy:

  Come then with thy merry eye,

  And let us bouse it [i.e., booze it] till we die!

  Come and o’er my thirsty soul

  Floods of smoking glasses roll!

  This Santa Claus was an “imp” who would “frisk about” and encourage his charges (no doubt emboldened by drink) to dance and perform “merry pranks.” (Only one such “prank” is named, but it suggests what this writer had in mind: “[M]aidens” would approach their male companions to “seek” a “kiss.”) This Santa Claus was no other than the Lord of Misrule, master of the Christmas carnival:

  A little short, thick, lusty, “whoreson,”* rover,

  Rolling about the room full half seas over.5

  “Rip Van Dam” himself acknowledged that this lusty and drunken “whoreson” of a Santa was on the way out, a figure of the past, merely a nostalgic symbol. “Fashions” were changing, he lamented:

  And all the good of olden times

  Is lost, save in old fashioned rhymes;

  While cold hard-hearted revelry

  Usurps the place of heartfelt glee….

  Only a faithful few had kept to the old traditions:

  Though good old customs long have flown,

  And few thy honest sway will own,

  Still will I bow the reverent knee,

  And shout Saint Claas, all hail to thee!

  Of course, it was Clement Moore and not “Rip Van Dam” whose representation of Santa Claus carried the day. Nor, given the new patterns of holiday violence, should that be surprising. Indeed, the very day that the “Ode to St. Claas” appeared, the same newspaper carried a shocked report about an especially violent callithumpian New Year’s Eve parade in which more than a thousand “persons of all ages” marched down “many of the principal streets of the city” committing “outrageous” acts. The mob

  moved from one end of the city to the other, making the most hideous noises, committing many excesses, and for several hours in succession, disturbing neighborhoods where they thought proper to become in some measure stationary, to such a degree that sleep and rest, for the sick or for the well, were entirely destroyed. No nocturnal tumult or disturbance that we have ever witnessed, was in any measure equal to this. We understand that wherever the watch offered to interfere for the purpose of preventing mischief, they were either overpowered, or intimidated by numbers, and the mob had undisputed possession of the streets until a very late hour in the night.

  The newspaper demanded that the authorities take aggressive action to prevent any recurrence of such “outrages.” And it asserted that alcohol was the proximate cause: “Such a multitude of persons, assembled together for an unlawful purpose, when maddened with liquor, and conscious of their force, will, after a very few more experiments, be guilty of the greatest atrocities.” Most important of all, the account concluded, the public should not dismiss these events by viewing them through the lens of seasonal ritual, as high jinks that had to be tolerated. “It is in vain to wink at such excesses, merely because they occur at a season of festivity. A license of this description will soon turn festivals of joy, into regular periods of fear to the inhabitants, and will end in scenes of riot, intemperance, and bloodshed.” What had taken place was not a matter of letting off steam at Christmas; it was a criminal mob, and—here the editor hinted at the presence of underlying economic issues—a mob not only “stimulated by drink” but also “enkindled by resentment.” Left to itself, it would soon commit “the most outrageous offenses without reflection, and without remorse.”6

  Remember that this report appeared in the same newspaper that simultaneously printed “Rip Van Dam’s” ode to the drinking Santa Claus. But by now an alternative was beginning to emerge. The other newspaper that printed Van Dam’s poem that year also began to deal with Christmas in a new way, as a family holiday. (In previous years that paper had casually printed verses about Christmas revelry.) The paper published two holiday items in its December 28, 1827, issue: an editorial that termed Christmas “a festival sacred to domestic enjoyments” and a reprint of a passage from Washington Irvings “Bracebridge Hall” sketches that described how Christmas evoked “the pure element of domestic felicity.”7 And the following year, in 1828, the same paper carried an account of the Christmas celebration in New York, an account that stressed sobriety, and associated it with Santa Claus himself: “‘Merry Christmas’ was celebrated yesterday joyously and soberly in our goodly Dutch city,” this account began. But it continued by acknowledging that New York was “Dutch no longer” and had become a multiethnic city with “new houses and new names.” Even so, the report insisted, the ancient Dutch Christmas traditions had managed to remain in place among the new immigrant groups: “[T]he olden festivities retain their hold, and the good St. Nicholas is adopted into the calendar of all the nations that congregate in this, his faithful city; and makes glad the hearts of merry urchins of the various tongues and kindreds that now call New-York—home.”8

  It is no coincidence that the previous year’s callithumpian riot had been perpetrated largely by immigrants. It is no coincidence that the editor now chose to associate the Santa Claus ritual with a “sober” Christmas, and made that ritual serve as an instrument of cultural assimilation for “the various tongues and kindreds that now call New-York—home.” It is no coincidence that the same newspaper had previously recognized that heavy drinking was an integral part of the holiday season, and that in 1829 it would demand that alcohol be eliminated. It is no coincidence, in short, that Clement Clarke Moore’s Santa Claus beat out Rip Van Dam’s.

  This is not to say that the rowdy Christmas season simply disappeared or even diminished. A domestic Santa Claus did not obliterate other modes of celebrating the holiday (indeed, it still has not). On New Year’s Eve, 1839–40, one ailing visitor to the city was kept awake by “revelers, making frightful noises.” This visitor, Eliza Folien, reported that the lights in her sickroom “attracted the attention of some rioters in the street; they stopped under the window and screamed ‘Happy New Year!’ with what seemed to me the voices of fiends, the sound was so frightful.”9 For that matter, a domestic Santa Claus did not wholly extinguish other versions of St. Nicholas himself. Just a week before Follen’s unpleasant experience, a New York theater advertised a Christmas-night performance of a “new pantomime got up for the occasion, called ‘Santiclaus, or the orgies of St. Nicholas.’”10

  To read the city’s newspapers at mid-century is to encounter upbeat editorials about Christmas shopping and the joyous expectations of children juxtaposed with unsettling reports of holiday drunkenness and rioting. A couple of examples will tell the story. On December 26, 1840, a party of German-Americans (they were “engaged in fiddling, dancing, and making night hideous with their discordant din”) engaged in a serious street battle with the police in which twenty-five people were arrested. But on the same day, the paper announced that “the holidays are at hand—the merry days to which childhood and youth look forward throughout the year with such anticipation and delight….” The “holidays,” as this report defined them, were domestic and child-centered: “Santiclaus is about making his annual visit to our world-renowned Dutch city.” And the holidays were commercial: “[T]he display of all sorts o
f presents is striking,” the paper boasted. “The various shops and establishments, whose special province it is to minister to the supply of Christmas wants, exhibit no lack of accustomed temptations.”

  In 1839 the New York Herald made it clear that this was the only decent choice: “Let all avoid taverns and grog shops for a few days at least, and spend their money at home.” In that way men would be sure “to make glad upon one day, the domestic hearth, the virtuous wife, the innocent, smiling, merry-hearted children, and the blessed mother.” “Christmas,” the editorial concluded, “is the most hallowed season of the whole year.”11

  Not for everyone. In 1848 George Templeton Strong was able to note casually that Christmas was “essentially an indoor and domestic festival,” but when he took an omnibus to go shopping that same day, he noted that “[t]he driver was drunk and the progress of the vehicle was like that of a hippopotamus.”12 Two years later, with accounts of Santa Claus and Christmas shopping plastered lavishly throughout the pages of the Tribune, gangs of youths were still roaming the streets at Christmas, making trouble wherever they went. By this time the gangs even had names, such as “[t]he Short Boys, Swill Boys, Rock Boys, Old Maid Boys, Holy Ch—s, and other bands of midnight prowlers [who] should have been in state prison long ago.”13 New Year’s Eve, 1851–52, was ushered into the city by what the Tribune termed “a Saturnalia of discord, by Callithumpian and Cowbellian bands, by musketry and fire-crackers, by bacchanal songs and noisy revels, which for two hours after midnight made sleep not a thing to be dreamed of.” One man was arrested “for entering, uninvited, the house of Philip Herring, during his absence, and insulting his wife.” And a group of about 150 men (most of them apparently Irish, and all of them drunk) invaded a fashionable Broadway restaurant and systematically destroyed the furniture, threw food and dishes around the place, and finally (before the police arrived) assaulted the owner, his wife, and their staff. All in all, upwards of one hundred men were arrested that night “for entering residences in which they never were before, and where they knew not a soul, and after eating and drinking without molestation to their hearts’ content, maliciously breaking decanters, dishes, scattering the provisions about the premises, and not content with that, in many instances breaking windows, doors, and behaving more like fiends than like men.”14