The Battle for Christmas (17 page)

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:

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:

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:

“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:

Only a faithful few had kept to the old traditions:

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

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 of 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.”