The Battle for Christmas (22 page)

But this was “frolic,” “license,” and “revel” only in quotation marks. It was limited to blood relatives, and to préadolescents at that. The writer of the above-mentioned story could not be clearer on this point: “All the little Thompsons, and all their relatives by blood or marriage, even to the third degree of cousinship, who had not reached their
‘teens,’
were there …” The room had been carefully childproofed in advance; and the party ended early—it was at its height as early as 8 p.m. And an adult was always present.

And that was one of the wilder scenes in this literature. More often the parties were described as sedate affairs. It was common for them to culminate in “a great call for games.” But the games seem to have been talking games, role-playing games, sometimes even board games. In one 1827 book a mother organizes a quiet Christmas Eve party for her children, a group of cousins, and other children who are known to the parents. For entertainment she has devised moral games: “puzzles, which had enfolded in them [i.e., the solutions to which involved], some moral or religious precept.” The mother never leaves the children alone during the party, lest they “romp and disturb the neighbors with their noise.” Instead, she stays with them “to moderate the buoyancy of their spirits.” She even plays teacher with them. Here, too, the party ends early: “Nine o’clock was the hour she fixed, for the young people to separate, and they seldom infringed on these limits … [for her word] was a law to them.”
⁵⁸

Perhaps so. But the lesson taught in this book was not necessarily taken to heart by the children who read it—a fact that comes across clearly in some lines handwritten on the flyleaf to one copy of that very book that is now owned by the American Antiquarian Society. These lines serve to remind us that books were not always used by readers in quite the way their authors intended. The lines read as follows: “Touch not this book / For if you do / The owner / Will be after you. Punch. Punch you.—Touch not this book / For fear of shame. / For you will find the owner’s name. Punch.—Touch not this book / For fear of life. / For the owner has / A big Jack knife.”

•     •     •

P
ARENTS DID NOT
have to invent their own games for children to play on such occasions. By the 1830s a spate of Christmas books were available that consisted mostly of suggestions for children’s games and puzzles. These books were generally published during the Christmas season, and they were intended to be purchased as Christmas presents. Lydia Maria Child published such a book,
The Girl’s Own Book
, in 1831. The preface makes the purpose of the book clear. It concludes: “To all my readers, little ones especially, a merry Christmas and a happy New-Year.”
⁵⁹
Like other such books, this one, too, contained several activities intended specifically for Christmas.
The American Girl’s Book
, also a popular collection of harmless but entertaining games, appeared in the same year. (This book was authored by Eliza Leslie, the woman who would a few years later write the cautionary tale “Snow-Balling.”) And while there is no printed evidence that this book was intended as a Christmas present, a copy of a later (1859) edition, also owned by the American Antiquarian Society, is inscribed by a father to his daughter with the date “Christmas 1860.”
⁶⁰

But children (and grown-ups, too) did not have to rely on the Christmas-party games featured in books; ready-made games were widely available for purchase at bookshops and other stores. As early as 1817, one Broadway merchant advertised (under the heading “Amusement for the Holydays”) a “complete assortment” of children’s games: “Different games with tetotums, such as Panorama of Europe, Heathen Mythology, Who Wears the Crown…. The celebrated Chinese Puzzle, and Philosophical
&
Mathematical Trangrams … is one of the most curious and entertaining amusements ever contrived … Price $2.” Seven years later, in 1824, another Broadway store advertised

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:

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 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:

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)