The Battle for Christmas (61 page)

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 McGlinchee writes that “[t]his type of entertainment was superseded by the Christmas show, a queer medley of burlesque, musical comedy, fairy play, and revue.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 Raree 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]).

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.

3.
Salem Gazette
, Dec. 18, 1806;
New-York Evening Post
, Dec. 26, 1808. Philadelphia’s first ad for Christmas presents came in 1812. If we include ads for “New Year’s Presents”—or “Holiday Presents”—this dating needs to be moved back a decade or two earlier. Salem came in in 1804, two years before the ad that named Christmas. (It was placed on Dec. 21, 1804—four days before Christmas—by the same bookseller. Headed simply “Elegant Presents for Children,” it was followed on January 1 by a similar ad headed “Elegant New Year’s Presents for Children.” It is as if this bookseller was testing the cultural waters before actually daring to name Christmas.) But Salem was not the first American community to advertise New Year’s gifts. The first community to do so was another New England town, Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1783 (more about Worcester a little later). New York followed in 1789; Philadelphia, in 1796; Boston, in 1801.
Salem Gazette
, Dec. 21, 1804, and Jan. 1, 1805. Other New England examples: Amherst, New Hampshire, in 1811; Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1816.

4.
“Christmas and New Year’s Presents,” in
New England Galaxy and Masonic Magazine
, Dec. 26, 1823. By 1825 the same periodical was able to claim that Christmas was a season “which custom from time immemorial has pointed out as a proper one for giving and receiving remembrances, and tokens of affection” (ibid., Dec. 23, 1825).

5.
E.N.T., “Christmas and New Year’s Presents,”
Christian Register
, Dec. 20, 1834. In Worcester, Massachusetts, one man noted in his diary on Christmas Eve: “[G]eneral preparation for Christmas: the children must have presents and the parents, uncles, and aunts are all getting them.” (Levi Lincoln Newton Diaries, 1837–1843, in manuscript collection, American Antiquarian Society.)

6.
Farmer’s Cabinet
(Amherst, N.H.), Jan. 2, 1835. The story urged children to buy books rather than candy for the holidays.

7.
The same pattern is true of ads labeled “New Year’s” or “holiday” gifts. Worcester, Massachusetts (1783): “New Year’s Gifts [all of them books] for Children;” New York (1789): books “for young gentlemen and ladies;” Boston (1801): “Books for Young Persons;” Portsmouth, New Hampshire (1816) “Juvenile books, suitable for To-morrow [New Year’s Day].”

8.
In contrast, I have found only a single advertisement that advertised presents for servants. During the 1822 Christmas season, one Boston bookstore, after advertising a great variety of books and games for children of various ages, added that it also had “a large collection of Narratives, Popular Stories, &c., very cheap and neat editions, suitable for presents to Domestics and others.”
(New England Palladium
, Jan. 3, 1823.) The 1820s may have been the last decade in which such an ad could reasonably appear; after that, servants would not have been considered real members of the household. (Conversely, the early 1820s were also virtually the
first
time such an ad could have appeared; only a decade or two earlier,
nobody
would have received a commercial Christmas present.) In January 1820, a prosperous New York woman recorded spending “2.6” [2s. 6d.?] for “N[ew] Year presents
to servants.” The following December the same woman made a similar entry: “New Year presents to servants[:] 1.56.” [Jane Minot Sedgwick?], Accounts and Commonplace Book, 1817–59, in Miscellaneous Sedgwick Papers (Massachusetts Historical Society), vol. 16.

9.
New-York Herald
, Dec. 23, 1839;
New-York American
, Dec. 27, 1841; see also
New York Tribune
, Jan. 3, 1844.

10.
In 1844, the first Christmas ads in the
New-York Tribune
appeared as early as December 12.

11.
[Philadelphia]
National Gazette
, Dec. 24, 1841.

12.
Philadelphia Public Ledger
, Dec. 25, 1841.

13.
The idea probably originated in New York, where one paper reported in 1838 that “[f]our or five mammoth cakes have been made in this city to be cut up on New Year’s Eve. That at Ameli’s, 395 Broadway, is the largest ever made in this city. It weighs about 3300 pounds, and is worth $1500”
(New York Weekly Herald
, Dec. 22, 1838). But even as early as 1819, a New York baker advertised a “mammoth cake … weighing 300 pounds”
(New York Evening Post
, Dec. 28, 1819).

14.
The quotation is from Eliza Leslie, “Snow-Balling; or, The Christmas Dollar,” in
The Violet
(Philadelphia, 1839 [c. 1838]), 36–52.

15.
New York Daily Herald
, Dec. 23, 1839.

16.
Cary Carson, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert, eds.,
Of Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century
(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994).

17.
Emily E. F. Skeel,
Mason Locke Weems, His Work and Ways
(3 vols., New York, 1929), III, 29. This advertisement originally appeared in the
Georgia Journal
(Milledgeville), Nov. 18, 1810.

18.
Worcester Spy
, Dec. 25, 1783; Dec. 23, 1784.

19.
In some years, at least, Isaiah Thomas published more books during the holiday season than at other times of the year. In 1794, for example, between March and late November he placed a total of anywhere from one to four book ads in any given issue (the paper was published weekly). But on November 26 he placed five such ads, a number that went up to six on December 10, and then to nine on both December 17 and 24, before falling back to seven on December 31, then to four on January 7 and 14, and to a single one on January 21. It would appear that in some years Thomas printed his books on a seasonal cycle, a cycle that peaked during the Christmas season. There were other children’s books that we can assume were published for the Christmas trade, since the word
Christmas
was part of their title (and they had no other Christmas-related content). See, for example, “Peter Pinchpenny,”
The Hobby Horse; or, Christmas Companion
(Boston, 1804).

20.
Copies of these two Munro and Francis catalogs are held by the American Antiquarian Society.