The Battle for Christmas

by Stephen Nissenbaum

  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).

  54. See Seba Smith, “Yankee Christmas,” in ‘Way Down East; or, Portraitures of Yankee Life (New York, 1854), 29–52; previously printed in the New York [Weekly] Herald, Dec. 24, 1842. See also “Doesticks’ Description of the Christmas Party at His Friend Medary’s,” in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, Jan. 2, 1858, 75.

  55. Eliza Leslie, “Snow-Balling; or, The Christmas Dollar,” in The Violet (Philadelphia, 1839 [c. 1838]), 36–52.

  56. New York American, Dec. 26, 1840. An exemplary study of Philadelphia’s “mechanics” during these years is Bruce Laurie, Working People of Philadelphia, 1800–1850 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980).

  57. “Christmas Eve,” in Christmas Blossoms, and New Year’s Wreath for 1850 (Philadelphia, 1850), 38–39.

  58. Christmas Holidays; or, A Visit at Home (Philadelphia [American Sunday School Union], [1827]), 19–20.

  59. Lydia Maria Child, The Girl’s Own Book (Boston, 1833), iv.

  60. This is not the only such example. The American Antiquarian Society’s copy of Robin Carver, The Book of Sports (Boston, 1834) is inscribed on its flyleaf with the date “Jan. 1st, 1835.”

  61. New-York Daily Advertiser, Dec. 26. 1817; New-York Daily Advertiser, Dec. 24, 1824). See also an ad in the New England Palladium, 1822–23, for “instructive games on cloth, with te-totems.” A te-totum was a top.

  62. Cincinnati Daily Gazette, Dec. 23, 1844.

  63. Ibid., Dec. 23, 1845.

  64. Liberty Hall and Cincinnati Gazette, Dec. 24, 1821; New England Galaxy, Dec. 26, 1823.

  65. Quotations from Claire McGlinchee, The First Decade of the Boston Museum (Boston: Bruce Humphries, Inc., 1940), 132. See also A. E. Wilson, Christmas Pantomime, the Story of an English Institution (London, 1934; reprinted as King Panto; the Story of Pantomime [New York: E. P. Dutton, 1935]); R.J. Broadbent, A History of Pantomime (London, 1901). McGlinchee writes that “[t]his type of entertainment was superseded by the Christmas show, a queer medley of burlesque, musical comedy, fairy play, and revue. The term ‘pantomime’ was kept, even though dialogue had been introduced.”

  66. For a good description of theater as a “male club” (and the mid-nineteenth-century effort to transform it into “respectable” family fare), see Richard Butsch, “Bowery B’hoys and Matinee Ladies: The Re-Gendering of Nineteenth-Century American Theater Audiences,” American Quarterly 46 (1994), 374–405.

  67. New York Weekly Herald, Dec. 30, 1837; New York [Daily] Herald, Dec. 26, 1844.

  68. Ibid. The tickets had probably been purchased for the newsboys by their employers, as a Christmas present. See Brother Jonathan, Holiday Extras dated Jan. 1, 1843, and Dec. 25-Jan. 1, 1844 (which reported that they had gone to the Chatham Theater).

  69. The best account of the newsboys’ love of theater is in an 1852 novel by Elizabeth Oakes Smith, The Newsboy (New York, 1854), 25–33, from which I have taken some of my description. See also Tom Brice, the News-boy (New York, 1862), 4–5; and Charles Loring Brace, The Dangerous Classes of New York, and Twenty Years’ Work Among Them (New York, 1872), 345–346.

  70. Philadelphia Public Ledger, Dec. 25, 1844.

  71. For this quotation and those in the following paragraph, see ibid., Dec. 27, 1843.

  72. Ibid., Dec. 25, 1845.

  73. Ibid., Dec. 24, 1845.

  74. Kriss Kringle’s Book (Philadelphia, 1845), 6. The title of the book is—deliberately—malleable. The cloth cover reads “Kriss Kringle’s Book,” and that title is repeated at the very end of the preface. But the title page itself reads “St. Nicholas’s Book,” and that is the way the book is referred to at another point in the preface. When the book was reprinted in 1846 the title page read “The Christmas Book,” while a third printing, in 1852, read “Kriss Kringle’s Book.”

  75. Kriss Kringle’s Christmas Tree: A Holliday [sic] Present for Boys and Girls (Philadelphia, 1845), 77 (“sword or drum”); Kriss Kringle’s Rare
e Show, for Good Boys and Girls (Philadelphia, 1845).

  76. Oxford English Dictionary (definition of raree show).

  77. Kriss Kringle’s Raree Show, 5.

  78. The socially disruptive, subversive potential of books (especially fiction and romance) was well recognized in the early nineteenth century (critics employed virtually all the same arguments that are used today against children’s watching television). Novels were even written to warn their readers about the dangers of reading other novels! In one novella, published in 1824 and set during the Christmas vacation from school, the parents keep their collection of books in a locked bookcase, and a series of mishaps is set off when the mother is obliged to entrust the key to her oldest daughter. ([Lucy Lyttleton Cameron,] The Sister’s Friend; or, Christmas Holidays Spent at Home [Boston, 1824]).

  Chapter 4

  1. John Birge manuscript Daybook (Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association Library), p. 89. This reference was discovered by Carrie Giard, an undergraduate student at the University of Massachusetts. Carrie also discovered that two years later, in 1771, another Deerfield shopkeeper paid one of his clients 10½ shillings “cash at Christmas” in return for “four days [i.e., of labor] at Christmas.” (We can only speculate as to why this man desired to have cash at Christmas.) John Russell manuscript Account Book (Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association Library), pp. 153–154.

  2. Harriet Beecher Stowe, “Christmas; or, The Good Fairy,” in National Era 4 (Dec. 26, 1850). This was the same magazine in which Stowe was shortly to begin serial publication of her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The story was later reprinted in The Mayflower, and Miscellaneous Writings (Boston, 1855); it did not appear in the original (1842) edition of that volume. For scholarly works that date the commercialization of Christmas to the turn of the twentieth century, see William B. Waits, The Modern Christmas in America: A Cultural History of Gift Giving (New York: New York University Press, 1993); and, implicitly, William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Pantheon, 1993); as well as James H. Barnett, The American Christmas: A Study in National Culture (New York: Macmillan, 1954), 79–101. This interpretation is part of a larger analysis that places the emergence of modern American consumer culture in the decades 1880–1920. See, for example, Simon J. Bronner, ed., Consuming Visions: Accumulation and Display of Goods in America, 1880–1920 (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1989); Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears, eds., The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980 (New York: Pantheon, 1983). For a recent reevaluation (and one that deals with the “carnivalesque” as well), see Jackson Lears, Fahles of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994), chs. 1–5. But another historiographical strain dates the origins of the consumer revolution far earlier, even to the middle of the eighteenth century; see page 340, note 16.