The Battle for Christmas (18 page)

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

Santa Claus’ Quadrilles
. The cover to a piece of sheet music published in New York in 1846. This Santa Claus is beardless and youthful, apparently a merry bachelor. He is playing the fiddle as he dances on a New York chimneytop. (The picture was drawn by an artist who went by the name “Spoodlyks.”)
(Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society)

At the heart of all this disorder, the
Tribune
reiterated, was the prevalence of alcohol during the Christmas season: “In the Eleventh Ward an unusual number of men were arrested for drunkenness, creating a mob, exciting a riot, insulting females, and other offenses to which men of low breeding, when intoxicated, are addicted.” Such behavior was abetted by certain business establishments; local bars actually served drinks gratis on Christmas Day, in a holdover from the old English custom demanded of innkeepers (which was itself a variant of the tradition by which the gentry held “open house” for their dependents). The results, Horace Greeley reported, were obnoxious:

What had changed, then, was not that the rowdier ways of celebrating Christmas had disappeared, or even that they had diminished, but that a new kind of holiday celebration, domestic and child-centered, had been fashioned and was now being claimed as the “real” Christmas.
¹⁶
The rest of it—public drunkenness and threats or acts of violence, “rough music”—had been redefined as
crime
, “making night hideous.” In part, this was accomplished through institutional means (in 1828 New York introduced a professional police force to replace the private “watch” that had failed to control the previous year’s callithumpian riot). And in part it was accomplished through the manipulation of language itself. Henceforth, newspaper stories about Santa Claus would appear under the heading “Christmas,” while stories about callithumpian activities would be relegated to the police column. In the terminology of a later age, those activities would be
marginalized
.

Santa Claus came to Pennsylvania, too, in the 1820s. But there he encountered a rival figure, a somewhat scarier personage associated with the Germanic culture that pervaded much of the state. That figure, whose features are already familiar to us, was commonly known as the Belsnickle. (The term is a variant of the German phrase
Pelz-nickle
—that is, “St. Nicholas in Fur.”) I do not know when or how the term was first used (it may not have come into usage until the 1820s, when Santa Claus himself was emerging). But it was almost certainly based on an older German figure, commonly known as Knecht Ruprecht (that is, “Rupert the Servant”). The British writer Samuel Taylor Coleridge encountered Knecht Ruprecht during a 1798 visit to Ratzeburg, a village in the northern part of Germany. Knecht Ruprecht was a man outfitted in “high buskins, a white robe, a mask, and an enormous flax wig”—in other words, he was burlesquing the dress of a gentleman. On Christmas night this figure

In contrast to Santa Claus, who was never actually seen, the roles of both Knecht Ruprecht and the Belsnickle were performed by real people—generally men of the lower orders, who went around town in disguise. (The disguises varied, but they were always ornate and often involved wearing a wig.)

What Coleridge encountered resembles only the most carefully regulated form this practice took in Pennsylvania. Here the Belsnickle would offer small gifts (usually of food) to good children and intimidate ill-behaved children by threatening to hit them (or actually doing so) with a rod or a whip as they reached for the gifts he had brought. A Philadelphia newspaper reported one such appearance in 1827—by which time the Belsnickle was already being compared to Santa Claus. It is interesting to note that this Belsnickle was made up in blackface:

In this form the Belsnickle, although an intruder, would serve to reinforce the authority of the householders he visited. (Indeed, at least one father assumed the role himself.
¹⁹
) But it is clear that Belsnickling, like most rituals, was profoundly malleable. The Belsnickle might snap his whip at a child who had behaved well, or a whole group of Belsnickles might visit a house together. Often the Belsnickle frightened the parents as well as the children.
²⁰

In fact, Belsnickles frequently struck those they visited as unsavory (perhaps because they were frequently played by men of the lower orders). James L. Morris, a shopkeeper from Morgantown, Pennsylvania, described them in his diary in 1831 as “horrid frightful looking objects.” In 1842 Morris recorded his impressions at greater length:

Belsnickles could wreak mischief, as they did in Potts town, Pennsylvania, in 1826, where for several nights running one or more of them left a “wreck of lumber that is strewed through our streets and blockading the doors generally every morning”:

Despite the damage this Belsnickle did, the phrasing of this report suggests that he was seen as a mere prankster:

Like wassailers and mummers, Belsnickles often took on the role of beggars, visiting houses (and shops) to
demand
rather than offer gifts. This may very well have been the reason that four or five of them visited James L. Morris’s store in 1842 and once again in 1844, when Morris noted that “[s]ome 4 or five hideous and frightful looking mortals came into the store dressed out in fantastic rags and horrid faces.” These Belsnickles were probably coming for gifts. In 1851 several “processions” of them in Norristown, “arrayed in all their fantastic costumes, … paid their annual visit to the shopkeepers and citizens, soliciting the ‘good things’ and rendering an equivalent in caricaturing the sable sons of our soil” (in other words, they too were performing in blackface). They were still begging in the 1870s. This was the case in Lancaster, for instance, where “[t]he old custom of playing ‘Bellsnickle’ was renewed in our midst, and we heard perhaps half a dozen parties, dressed in hideous disguise, going about on Christmas eve from house to house, and entering without so much as ‘by your leave’;” or in Carlisle, where in the same year “[t]here were numbers of bell-snickles
going from house to house in quest of cakes, wine, apples, or whatever else the good housewife might place at their disposal, large boys and small boys….” (In the latter instance they were dressed in women’s clothes, “burlesquing the ruling fashions among the ladies.”)
²³

The examples above make it clear that youths and boys were playing the Belsnickle role themselves, thus reverting to the “original” structure of the ritual. In Reading, in 1851, “juvenile harlequins were running from house to house, scattering nuts, confections, consternation, and amusement in their way.” Or in Norristown, where in 1853 “[s]illy children parade[d] the streets dressed in hideous masks.” Or in Easton, in 1858, where “[t]he ‘bell-snickels’ were … a most attractive feature on the streets … as there seemed to be a general feeling among the juveniles … to participate….”
²⁴
But these youthful Belsnickles were frequently a source of annoyance rather than amusement, as in Pottstown, where the local newspaper was not amused in 1873:

A malleable ritual, as I have said. But there is a pattern behind it all. Whether the part was played by a grown man or a child, and whether he acted as the donor of gifts or as a beggar, the Belsnickle always used his costume and his manner as a means of intimidating those he visited, a way of taking on an air of mock authority over the rest of the community. Young people had traditionally been just another part of the lower orders, so that it was socially natural for them to step outside the constraints of their normal roles by imitating what other plebeians were doing. And it was a thin line—and probably more of a terminological distinction than a historical one—that divided a Belsnickle from a mummer, a callithumpian, or simply a hoodlum. (On the other side of the cultural ledger, Belsnickles were frequently referred to as “Christkindle,” “Kriss Kringle,” or even “Santa Claus.”) The particular term may have been a matter of local or even personal preference. But whatever he was called then, or termed now, the Belsnickle remained a Lord of Misrule.