The Battle for Christmas
Page 16
By the 1840s these games had reached flood proportions. The largest selection I have encountered comes from a Cincinnati, Ohio, shop that in 1845 advertised “A Great Variety of Games.” Heading the list was a game that actually seems to have been about the process of Christmas shopping itself: “The laughable game of ‘What d’ye Buy.’” This amounts to an ironic comment on the list that followed:
The Oracles of Fortune, The Game of Heroes, The Game of Characteristics, Shakespeare in a New Dress, The Christmas Cards, Robinson Crusoe and His Man Friday, The Strife of Genius, The Game of Cup and Ball, Jack Straws, The Pickwick Game, The Game of Kings, The Mansion of Happiness, The Game of Pope and Pagan, Dr. Busby’s Cards, The Game of Graces, Master Rodbury and his Pupils, The Game of the American Eagle, The Devil on Sticks, &c. &c.62
But these indoor games had not replaced more traditional forms of Christmas revelry. In 1844, a Cincinnati confectionery concluded an advertisement that featured “Sugar Plums” and other sweets with the added note that the store “also” offered a “splendid assortment of Fire-works, for both little and big Pyrotechnists.” That same day the Cincinnati press carried an admonitory reminder from the local mayor: “The city ordinances impose a fine for discharging fire-arms, or firing squibs, crackers, &c., ‘in the streets, alleys, market spaces, and public commons’ in the city proper. The Holidays are not made an exception.”63
THE PARLOR OR THE STREET: BOOKS VERSUS THEATERGOING
The battle for children extended to another form of popular Christmas amusement: attending the theater. Before the 1820s American theaters did not offer performances on Christmas Day, either in a gesture of respect for the holiday or, more likely, because the actors refused to work on that day. But on the two adjacent days they did offer performances, and these were specially designed for the season. Thus in 1821 a Cincinnati theater offered performances on both December 24 and 26 of “a comic Pantomime Ballet, called CHRISTMAS FUN; or, The Village in an Uproar.” When Boston’s Haymarket Theater was first established back in 1796, it deliberately settled on December 26 for its opening night. A Boston newspaper remarked disdainfully in 1823 that the theatrical productions of the Christmas season were “of a mixed nature and not of a high intellectual order.” The reason was that those productions had to compete with the local Circus (which was “thronged every evening”). In response, the theater managers “have thought it expedient to introduce rope-dancers and tumblers, as adjuncts to the drama.”64
By the 1820s pressure was building to hold performances on December 25 itself. In 1825 the New England Galaxy praised the managers of the local theater for remaining closed that day, and thereby “sacrificing the profits of [their] ordinary business.” The article noted that if the house had been open on Christmas evening, its receipts would have approached the record $800 chalked up on the previous Thanksgiving Day. (The Circus had an audience of 1,600 on Christmas evening, and another 500 had been turned away.)
The Boston theater soon succumbed to this pressure; beginning in 1826 it held yearly Christmas-night performances. Once again, Boston was typical. Christmas performances began during the mid-1820S in New York, Philadelphia, and Cincinnati as well. By the 1830s they were being advertised as special Christmas productions; and by 1840 the Christmas special had become part of every theaters stock-in-trade. In the 1840s, for example, the Boston Museum offered “Christmas pantomimes” that were “built around the characters of Harlequin, Columbine, old Pantalon, and Clown … [performed] without conversation.” And in 1843, Christmas week at the Boston Museum opened with “The Christmas Gift, or The Golden Axe.” The following year’s Christmas pantomime was “The Busy Bee, or Harlequin in the Hive of Industry.”65
These were wild affairs on both sides of the curtain. Going to the theater in early-nineteenth-century America did not mean sitting passively through the performance; audience behavior resembled that seen at modern rock concerts. As at rock concerts, the audience at these events thought of themselves as an active part of the performance, shouting back responses to the lines delivered onstage—sometimes they even threw objects at the actors. (This was especially true in the cheapest seats, known as the Gallery.) All in all, attending the theater was not very removed from participating in “street theater,” and it was the same group of people who were most likely to engage in both.66
That was particularly true at Christmas. Christmas productions tended to be especially exaggerated, burlesque affairs. And audiences behaved correspondingly. In 1837 the New York Herald reported that the theaters attracted “a considerable portion of the Christmas revelers.” One house especially, the Bowery Theater, was “more peculiarly a holiday theater than [any other].” “The audience here, [even] upon most occasions, performs as much before the curtain as the actors do behind it; but on Christmas eve … the acting on the stage is altogether secondary to the acting in the body of the house.” By 1844 things had become even wilder: “In the noisy theaters, nothing was heard of the performances; and the actors and actresses might as well have gone through their parts in dumb show.” In one place, the play itself “was neither seen nor heard, the fun all being this side the foot-lights….”67
Worst of all that year was the Chatham Theater, where several hundred newsboys had assembled to witness—of all things—a musical play based on Charles Dickens’s novels Christmas Carol, which had been published in book form only a year earlier. Here’s how the New York Herald described the scene:
Some three hundred news boys, sharp set for relaxation in the shape of theatrical criticism, were engaged throughout the earlier part of the evening in an animated contest with the police officers, and several “stirring scenes,” and peculiarly animated exits and entrances were enacted, to the uproarious delight of the gods and goddesses of the gallery, who cheered on the combatants with the various slogans and war-cries of the tribe, known only to the initiated, and altogether untranslatable. Several of the noisiest and most unmanageable of these amateurs, were, at length, snaked out by the police, and the scene of their exploits changed to the Tombs [the city jail]….
Even after “comparative quiet” had been restored, the “clamor” of a noisy youngster “quite drowned the bass drum, in the melo-dramatic music which ushered the ghost of old Jacob Marley through the trap.”68
Newsboys, the source of all this disorder, were themselves a new phenomenon on the urban scene. The development of cheap newspapers in the 1830s (the “penny press,” so called because that was now the price of a daily paper) had helped create the need for street vendors who would hawk the afternoon papers on street corners. (In contrast, their predecessors in the trade—the “carriers” we encountered in Chapter 1—delivered newspapers only to the houses of those who had subscriptions.) Newsboys were drawn from the poorest classes of large cities; often they were homeless—in fact, the word newsboy was sometimes used interchangeably with homeless boy or street arab. Their love of theatergoing was notorious; everyone agreed that they attended “night after night.” They used the theater as a gathering place and even as a place where they could sleep. But above all, newsboys loved theatrical performances and responded interactively to events onstage just as if they were witnessing real life. The presence of police officers in the theaters was a standard precaution against newsboy excesses.69
Newsboys at Christmas. This picture appeared in the 1844 Christmas edition of a New York newspaper, Brother Jonathan. These were the same newsboys who would end up disrupting several of the city’s theatrical performances later that evening. (Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society)
Newsboys may have been a new phenomenon in the late 1830s, but they fit a social and demographic profile that had long been associated with rituals of Christmas misrule: They were poor and youthful males. So it is no wonder that they took to acting up with particular intensity during the holiday season. This was as true in Philadelphia as it was in New York. An 1844 advertisement for one Philadelphia theatrical production ended with a notice assuring othe
r prospective theatergoers that “[efficient Police have been engaged to preserve order; boys will be prevented from congregating in front….”70 Just a year earlier, in 1843, the Christmas-evening theatrical scene suggests the reason:
The Arch Street [theater] was also crowded, where as well as at the National [theater], the boys amused themselves by tossing each other, as well as they could in the crowd, over each other’s heads and jostling the weak under foot, to the great discomfiture of their apparel.71
To put all this in context, consider the program presented at two theaters on that occasion. The matinee performance at the National Theater opened with a drama, “George Barnwell,” continued with a blackface show, the “Original Virginia Minstrels,” and ended with another drama, “King of the Mist.” The Arch Street Theater matinee opened with “Hunter of the Alps,” continued with “a Comic Song,” and concluded with “the Colored Music Festival, by the Virginia Minstrels.”The evening show at that same theater opened with a drama, followed once again by the Virginia Minstrels, and concluded with “a new Pantomime, entitled ‘Sante Claus’—Old Krisskingle [played by] Mr. Winans.”
Old Krisskingle. By 1843 this figure had become the lead character of a Christmas pantomime performed in concert with a minstrel show. (This would not be the only occasion on which Santa Claus converged with blackface minstrelsy. In about 1840 a collection of minstrel songs was printed in New York under the authorship “by Santaclaus.” And remember, too, the Belsnickles who went wassailing in blackface in areas of Pennsylvania.) Two years later Kriss Kringle would once again appear at the theater, this time in front of the lights, in the form of a costumed actor distributing gifts to the children who attended the show: “KRISS KRINGLE will deliver Presents of Toys, &c. to all his Juvenile Visiters [sic]…. KRISS KRINGLE will positively appear, in propriae personae, and present Toys, Sweetmeats and Fruits to the juvenile visitors….”72
By this time Kriss Kringle was a ubiquitous presence in Philadelphia, and several places were announcing themselves as his “headquarters.” One of these places advertised that “‘KRISS KRINGLE’ has determined to make the Assembly Building his Head Quarters over the Holidays….” He would be appearing there with a ventriloquist for six performances on Christmas Day (every two hours from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.) But on that same day a bookstore, too, advertised itself as “KRISS KRINGLE’S HEAD QUARTERS FOR CHRISTMAS BOOKS”:
Come and choose—come one, come all—he has laid a great variety on the counter for you to choose from. Parents bring your children. Children don’t forget to ask your parents, and remember that it is at JOHN B. PERRY’S, No 198 Market street.”73
Bookstores and theaters represented two different cultural worlds. If theatergoing was part of the rowdy world of Christmas carnival, reading books was part of the world of quiet domestic pleasures. By the mid-1840S Kriss Kringle had entered the world of books, and he was urging his youthful readers to do the same. In 1842 a Philadelphia publisher brought out Kriss Kringle’s Book, a gift book for children that explained the ritual of St. Nicholas (it even included Clement Clarke Moore’s poem, “A Visit from St. Nicholas”) and urged its youthful readers to “prepare” for his visit by acting “obedient to their parents, studious, respectful to their teachers, gentle to their play-fellows, and attentive to their religious duties.” If they did so, such children would be certain to receive “numerous tokens” of Santa Claus’s goodwill. And among these tokens there were sure to be books: “Saint Nicholas … loves to give the children nice little story books, such as will teach them to be good, and at the same time afford them a good deal of innocent amusement….”74
Santa in Blackface. The cover page of a collection of minstrel songs published in New York in about 1840. The songs were written and performed by one of the best-known American minstrels, Thomas Rice, who performed onstage as “Jim Crow.” The exact reason for attributing the authorship of this pamphlet to “Santa Claus” is obscure. (Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society)
In 1845 two other Philadelphia publishers entered the Kriss Kringle market. One came out with Kriss Kringles Christmas Tree, which contained a poem in which a boy chooses a book as his present, passing over the rowdier options of a “sword or drum.” The other publisher produced a book called Kriss Kringles Raree Show, for Good Boys and Girls. This, too, was a gift book. Its text consisted of a series of history lessons—thirty-eight very brief stories (two pages each), most of which were accounts of famous battles in American or European history.75
Santa Claus as Theater Manager. This illustration, from the title page of Kriss Kringle’s Raree Show (1845), shows Kriss Kringle in the role of a theater manager, collecting tickets from the eager boys shoving to get into the show on Christmas Day. Kriss Kringle is depicted as a plebeian here, and he even smokes a short pipe! (Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society)
Theater Interior with Curtain Down. Kriss Kringle is now seated atop the chandelier at the top left, his pipe tucked into his cap. From this position he will draw the curtain for each change of scene. The audience itself suggests elements of misrule: One boy is sitting on the stage; the little girl in front of him is crying; and another little girl (at the right) is blowing a tin horn. (Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society)
Theater Interior with Curtain Raised. Only the scene onstage has changed here—the rest of the setting remains the same (as it does in every single illustration in this book). The dramatic scenes, this one showing Indians battling Conquistadores, are all represented as merely drawings on an inner curtain. This is a low-budget operation even in fantasy! (Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society)
But the text of Kringle’s Raree Show is the least interesting thing about this book. What is more intriguing is the way the book was organized around the conceit implied by its title. A raree show meant either of two things.76 Its first meaning was “a show carried about in a box,” such as an exhibition of pictures, viewed through a magnifying lens inserted in a small opening at one end of the box (this would later become known as a “peep show”). Indeed, each of the thirty-eight historical accounts contained a full-page picture—and instead of being divided into chapters, each account was labeled a “sight” (thus “Sight the Twenty-First” was “the Capture of Stony Point” during the American Revolution; and “Sight the Thirty-Eighth” was “the Battle of Lake Erie” during the War of 1812).
The second meaning of the term raree show, by extension, was large-scale and theatrical: “a spectacle of any kind,” or a “spectacular display,” especially a theatrical spectacle (often, apparently, one related to pantomime). Kriss Kringle’s Raree Show fit this definition because it pretended to offer the experience of going to the theater—specifically, the experience of a group of children attending a theatrical “exhibition” at Christmas. On the title page is pictured the arrival of the children at the theater. Kriss Kringle plays the role of theater manager in this picture. Standing at the entrance, he takes the children’s tickets as they attempt to press into the hall. He is pictured much as Moore described Santa Claus—a plebeian, short and plump, bearded, holding “the stump of a pipe” in his teeth. (But that is also, I suspect, very much the way an actual theater manager of the time might have looked.)
The book’s brief introduction sets the scene and also describes the interior of the theater. This description is accompanied by a full-page illustration of the interior of the theater, with the lowered curtain at its center (the inscription on the curtain is the title of the book). Kriss Kringle, the manager, now magically sits poised atop a candelabrum at the left side of the proscenium, where he will presumably manipulate the curtain for each of the “sights” in the show (or book). In the foreground we see the children who will be the audience (or readers). These children may not exactly resemble the real Philadelphia children who had disrupted theatrical performances two years earlier by “tossing each other … over each other’s heads and jostling the weak under foot.” But they aren’t exactly quiet or passive, either. One boy
has already climbed onto the stage; several are laughing and talking, and waving (apparently to Kriss Kringle). The little girl on the extreme left is crying, and the little girl at the right is blowing a tin horn (presumably she has received it as a Christmas present; tin horns were such notorious noisemakers that they were later banned in the city of Philadelphia). Finally, several youthful couples appear to be taking the opportunity to do some flirting. I suspect that the artist drew the scene this way because he wanted to convey at least a semblance of how such a theatrical audience would have looked and behaved on an occasion like this—to provide, perhaps, just enough verisimilitude to evoke in the young readers of the book something of the vivid sensation of actually being there.
On with the show. At the signal of a ringing bell, the curtain rises abruptly, and the performance begins. Kriss Kringle is still present, again in the role of theater manager: “He is enjoying the astonishment and delight of the children at the scene which presents itself on the rising of the curtain.”77 In each of the scenes that follow—the thirty-eight “sights”—the same full-page background illustration I have just described appears; the only thing that changes is the “sight” itself (i.e., the historical scene behind the curtain). The purpose of this repetition was presumably to save money and time on the books artwork; but it also inadvertently suggests what we already know from other sources: that a real audience would not have quieted down when the curtain went up.