The Battle for Christmas

by Stephen Nissenbaum

  Barring-out came to America early, and rather violently. The year was 1702, and the place was a grammar school in Williamsburg, Virginia. On that occasion students not only barricaded the schoolhouse but actually fired pistols at the schoolmaster when he responded by trying to break down one of the doors. He reported what took place:

  About a fortnight before Christmas 1702 …, I heard the School boys about 12 o’clock at night, a driving of great nails, to fasten & barricade the doors of the Grammar School…. I made haste to get up & with the assistance of 2 servant men … I had almost forced open one of the doors before they sufficiently secured it, but while I was breaking in, they presently fired off 3 or 4 Pistols & hurt one of my servants in the eye with the wadd … of one of the Pistols[.]

  [W]hile I pressed forward, some of the boys, having a great kindness for me, call’d out, “for God’s sake sir don’t offer to come in, for we have shot, and shall certainly fire at any one that first enters.” … [I then] resolved to let them alone till morning, and then getting all the other masters together & calling for workmen to break open the doors.50

  The practice of barring-out continued through the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth, and extended into other regions of the United States. A letter to a Philadelphia newspaper written in 1810 objected to the practice but acknowledged that it was commonplace there:

  A very absurd and wicked practice has long prevailed in this country, namely, that of Scholars barring out the Schoolmasters a little before the 25th of December, commonly called Christmas day, in order to extort permission from him to spend a number of days called the Christmas holidays in idleness or play. A scene of this kind took place last year in our school in this place: a few of the scholars took possession of the school-house, and so completely fortified it, that it was impossible to reduce it except by a regular siege, and the caitiffs [sic] had provided against this also by laying in a large quantity of provisions. Thus was not only the Teacher shut out, but also all those who wished to occupy their time in learning, and not in idleness and riot.

  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.”51

  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:

  There was an unruly, frolicsome custom of “barring-out” in our New Hampshire common schools, which I trust never obtained a wider acceptance. On the first of January, and perhaps on some other day that the big boys chose to consider or make a holiday, the forenoon passed off as quietly as that of any other day; but, the moment the master left the house in quest of his dinner, the little ones were started homeward, the door and windows suddenly and securely barricaded, and the older pupils, thus fortified against intrusion, proceeded to spend the afternoon in play and hilarity. I have known a master to make a desperate struggle for admission; but I do not recollect that one ever succeeded,—the odds being too great….52

  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.”53

  “Snowballing” and the Battle for Children

  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.54 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.55

  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 descen
t 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.”56

  DOMESTICATING GAMES

  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.”57

  But this was “frolic,” “license,” and “revel” only in quotation marks. It was limited to blood relatives, and to préadolescents at that. The writer of the above-mentioned story could not be clearer on this point: “All the little Thompsons, and all their relatives by blood or marriage, even to the third degree of cousinship, who had not reached their ‘teens,’ were there …” The room had been carefully childproofed in advance; and the party ended early—it was at its height as early as 8 p.m. And an adult was always present.

  And that was one of the wilder scenes in this literature. More often the parties were described as sedate affairs. It was common for them to culminate in “a great call for games.” But the games seem to have been talking games, role-playing games, sometimes even board games. In one 1827 book a mother organizes a quiet Christmas Eve party for her children, a group of cousins, and other children who are known to the parents. For entertainment she has devised moral games: “puzzles, which had enfolded in them [i.e., the solutions to which involved], some moral or religious precept.” The mother never leaves the children alone during the party, lest they “romp and disturb the neighbors with their noise.” Instead, she stays with them “to moderate the buoyancy of their spirits.” She even plays teacher with them. Here, too, the party ends early: “Nine o’clock was the hour she fixed, for the young people to separate, and they seldom infringed on these limits … [for her word] was a law to them.”58

  Perhaps so. But the lesson taught in this book was not necessarily taken to heart by the children who read it—a fact that comes across clearly in some lines handwritten on the flyleaf to one copy of that very book that is now owned by the American Antiquarian Society. These lines serve to remind us that books were not always used by readers in quite the way their authors intended. The lines read as follows: “Touch not this book / For if you do / The owner / Will be after you. Punch. Punch you.—Touch not this book / For fear of shame. / For you will find the owner’s name. Punch.—Touch not this book / For fear of life. / For the owner has / A big Jack knife.”

  • • •

  PARENTS DID NOT have to invent their own games for children to play on such occasions. By the 1830s a spate of Christmas books were available that consisted mostly of suggestions for children’s games and puzzles. These books
were generally published during the Christmas season, and they were intended to be purchased as Christmas presents. Lydia Maria Child published such a book, The Girl’s Own Book, in 1831. The preface makes the purpose of the book clear. It concludes: “To all my readers, little ones especially, a merry Christmas and a happy New-Year.”59 Like other such books, this one, too, contained several activities intended specifically for Christmas. The American Girl’s Book, also a popular collection of harmless but entertaining games, appeared in the same year. (This book was authored by Eliza Leslie, the woman who would a few years later write the cautionary tale “Snow-Balling.”) And while there is no printed evidence that this book was intended as a Christmas present, a copy of a later (1859) edition, also owned by the American Antiquarian Society, is inscribed by a father to his daughter with the date “Christmas 1860.”60

  But children (and grown-ups, too) did not have to rely on the Christmas-party games featured in books; ready-made games were widely available for purchase at bookshops and other stores. As early as 1817, one Broadway merchant advertised (under the heading “Amusement for the Holydays”) a “complete assortment” of children’s games: “Different games with tetotums, such as Panorama of Europe, Heathen Mythology, Who Wears the Crown…. The celebrated Chinese Puzzle, and Philosophical & Mathematical Trangrams … is one of the most curious and entertaining amusements ever contrived … Price $2.” Seven years later, in 1824, another Broadway store advertised

  a large assortment of Juvenile Pastimes, all of which are calculated to improve as well as amuse the youthful mind, viz: Geographical Games. The Traveller’s tour through the United States, performed with a tetotum and travellers [also The Traveller’s tour through Europe and The Traveller’s tour round the world]. They are put up in three different modes—on pasteboard and double folded on cloth, with a case, and dissected [i.e., jigsawed]. Dissected Maps. Vernacular Cards, Geographical Cards, The Cabinet Of Knowledge Opened, PHILOSOPHICAL Cards, Astronomical Cards, Scriptural Cards, Botanical Cards, Dissected Pictures…. In addition, [the store has] a good assortment of Juvenile Books, in plain and elegant bindings. Also, Pocket Books, Chess Men, Backgammon Boards, Pen-Knives, and Ladies’ Work Boxes.61