The Battle for Christmas (59 page)

11.
Oct. 28, 1818, in Pintard,
Letters
, I, 151. For the Society for the Prevention of Pauperism, see Stansell,
City of Women
, 30–36 (also 18, 71, 164), and Mohl,
Poverty in New York
, ch. 5. The S.P.P.’s purposes included the discouragement and “prevention of mendicity and street begging;” the group argued that existing relief policies only served to encourage laziness and dependence on charity (Mohl,
Poverty in New York
, 245). Pintard himself wrote that the S.P.P. was intended to stem the growth of “the present system of relieving the poor,” by providing “not … alms but labor, so that there shall be no pretext for idleness,” and “to expel the drones from society.” (Pintard,
Letters
, 1, 151.)

12.
Dec. 16, 1828, ibid., III, 51–52.

13.
This item was actually printed as a broadside: “The following piece, which was desired to be inserted in the New-York Journal of this Day, Dec. 24, 1772, but omitted for want of room, will be inserted next Week.”

14.
Gilje,
The Road to Mobocracy
, 130–133, 253–260. See also Susan G. Davis, “‘Making Night Hideous’: Christmas Revelry and Public Order in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia,”
American Quarterly
, 34, No. 2 (Summer 1982), 185–199; esp. 186–192. This is the best study of the battle for Christmas in a nineteenth-century city. See also Susan G. Davis,
Parades and Power: Street Theatre in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 38–39, 76–78, 103–109, 158–159.

15.
Ibid., 255. The mayor was Philip Hone. In 1837 Hone recorded in his diary a New Year’s Day scene at the house of a subsequent mayor: “[T]he rabble … use his house as a Five Points tavern…. [T]he scene … defies description … the tables were taken by storm, the bottles [of wine and punch] emptied in a moment. Confusion, noise, and quarreling ensued, until the Mayor, with the assistance of his police, cleared the house and locked the doors…. Every scamp … considers himself authorized to use him and his house and his furniture at his pleasure; to wear his hat in his presence, to smoke and spit upon his carpet, to devour his beef and turkey, and wipe his greasy fingers upon the curtains, to get drunk with his liquor….” Hone suggests that similar scenes had happened before. Allan Nevins, ed.,
The Diary of Philip Hone, 1828–1851
(2 vols., New York, 1927), I, 235–236).

16.
Quoted in Gilje,
The Road to Mobocracy
, 254.

17.
New York Advertiser
, Jan. 4, 1828; Gilje,
The Road to Mobocracy
, 257–259; Luc Sante,
Low Life: Lures and Snares of New York
(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991), 341–342.

18.
Davis,
Parades and Power
, 108; Gilje,
The Road to Mobocracy
, 260.

19.
May 27, 1823, in Pintard,
Letters
, II, 137–138.

20. Charles Jones, “Knickerbocker Santa Claus,”
New-York Historical Society Quarterly
38 (1954), 356–383 (see 367–371).

21.
Ibid., 370–371.

22.
For example, see Dec. 18, 1827, in Pintard,
Letters
, II, 382.

23.
Dec. 16, 1827, in Pintard,
Letters
, II, 382.

24.
Dec. 16, 1827, ibid., II, 382; Jan. 2, 1828, ibid., III, I.

25.
For the St. Nicholas Day banquets, see Pintard,
Letters
, 1, 38 (1816); 1, 156 (1818). For New Year’s Day, see ibid., I, 44 (1817); 1, 161 (1819); I, 358–359 (1821); II, 117 (1822); II, 320, 324 (1827); III 1 (1828); III, 117 (1830). In 1832 Pintard anonymously published in the
New York Mirror
(Dec. 29, 1832, 207) an essay lamenting the decline of New Year’s open houses among the New York elite and attributing it to the nouveaux riches. (This anonymous essay was brought to my attention by Elizabeth Blackmar.) Pintard’s authorship is indicated ibid., IV, 114–115, 117.

26.
Eric J. Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds.,
The Invention of Tradition
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Anthropologists have dubbed this phenomenon, rather meanly and a little unfairly,
fakelore
(as distinct from more authentic
folklore)
.

27.
J. M. Golby and A. W. Purdue,
The Making of the Modern Christmas
(Athens, Ga: University of Georgia Press, 1986), 43.

28.
“Keeping Christmas,”
Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction
10 (1825), 514–518. (This magazine, published in Boston, reprinted British material.) Another essay on the same topic simply argued that the old rural Christmas was a complete bore! “A Country Christmas,” ibid. 5 (1823), 168–172.

29.
For Christmas as a day of prayer, see Pintard,
Letters
, 1, 356 (1820); II, 114 (1821); II, 210 (1825). For “St. Claas”: ibid., II, 384 (1827); III, 53–540 (1828); III, 115 (1829); III, 206 (1830); III, 305 (1831); IV, 116 (1832).

30.
While Pintard’s basic Santa Claus ritual remained essentially the same after he first devised it, Pintard did continue to tinker with the details. In 1827–29, the family’s presents were placed in stockings hung by the chimney, but in 1830 they were placed on a table. The presents themselves changed, too: candies and fruit at first; toys were added in 1828 (a drum), and in 1832 the toys were replaced with books (because toys “cost much and are soon broken”).

31.
There were allusions to St. Nicholas’ Day in 1773 and 1774, but Jones explains these in reference to the American Revolution (i.e., as a patriotic alternative to St. George’s Day), and not as precursors of the St. Nicholas cult that would develop a generation later. Jones, “Knickerbocker Santa Claus,” 362–364.

32.
Ibid., 376. In another study Jones even suggests that the Dutch themselves took up the St. Nicholas cult from America—in the twentieth century, and largely for the sake of the tourist trade: Charles W. Jones,
St. Nicholas of Myra, Bari, and Manhattan: Biography of a Legend
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 307–308.

33.
Washington Irving,
A History of New York
(2d ed., 2 vols., New York, 1812), vol. 1, 247 (Book 4, ch. 5).

34.
Jan. 15, 1822, in Pintard,
Letters
, II, 121–122.

35.
Irving,
History of New York
(1812 ed.), vol. 1, 116 (Book 4, chs. 5–6); “with characteristic slowness….” appears only in the first edition (N.Y., 1809), vol. 1, 116 (Book 2, ch. 5); Irving deleted the passage in the 1812 edition. For a somewhat later (and highly self-conscious) expression of this same Knickerbocker enterprise, see James K. Paulding,
The Book of Saint Nicholas, translated from the Original Dutch
(New York, 1836), a “biography” of the saint, dedicated to the St. Nicholas Society of New York, and with a preface dated “Nieuw Amsterdam, 1827.” See also Peter H. Myers,
The Young Patroon; or, Christmas in 1690. A Tale of New-York
(New York, 1849).

36.
Sean Wilentz terms Moore a “level-headed Episcopalian conservative.” (See
Chants Democratic
, 79.) The only book-length study of Moore, short and hagiographic, is Samuel W. Patterson,
The Poet of Christmas Eve: A Life of Clement Clarke Moore, 1779–1863
(New York: Morehouse-Gorham Co., 1956). For Moore’s ancestral background (and the Tory sympathies of his family), see 22–29, 31–36, 48–51. His wife—they married in 1813—was a member of the Cordand family (64–66). For information on Moore’s slaves, see 5, 48. The political tracts Moore published include
Observations upon Certain Passages in Mr. Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia
(New York, 1804), a critique of Jefferson’s irreligion; and A
Sketch of Our Political Condition
(New York, 1813), condemning the Jefferson and Madison administrations (and the War of 1812) for their destruction of rural life! A shorter biographical sketch is Arthur N. Hosking, “The Life of Clement Clarke Moore,” appended to the 1934 reprint of a facsimile edition of Moore’s “A Visit from St. Nicholas” (New York, 1934).

37.
Moore’s professorship initially paid a token $750, a figure that eventually increased to $2,000. See Patterson,
The Poet of Christmas Eve, 77–79
.

38.
Hosking, “Life of Moore,” 23.

39.
April 8, 1830, in Pintard,
Letters
, III, 137. For Moore’s wealth, see Charles Lock-wood,
Manhattan Moves Uptown: An Illustrated History
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), 205; Patterson,
Poet of Christmas Eve
, 106–110.

40.
Isaac N. Phelps Stokes,
The Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498–1909
(6 vols., New York, 1915–28), vol. 5, 1602. Moore writes of eminent domain in
A Plain Statement, Addressed to the Proprietors of Real Estate in the City and County of New-York
(New York, 1818), 13–18. A few years later, the city made plans to fill in an area under the Hudson River, in the process moving the river away from Moore’s estate. (Phelps Stokes,
Iconography
, vol. 5, 1603). By the 1830s some of that land was occupied by the Manhattan Gas-light Works, a company that was installing street lights in that area of the city, and digging a network of underground pipes in order to do so. (See
New York As It Is
[New York, 1837], 14.)

41.
Longworth’s City Directory
(New York, 1821), 315.

42.
Nov. 3, 1832, in Pintard,
Letters
, IV, 106. By the end of the 1820s, the area that had come to be known as Chelsea Square was home to a substantial population, much of it poor and/or immigrant. By the 1830s Moore was watching Irishmen on St. Patrick’s Day marching along the periphery of his property—down Twenty-third Street, then turning south on Eighth Avenue. See Patterson,
Poet of Christmas Eve
, 92–93. Like most of the men who owned great uptown estates, Clement Clarke Moore erected fences around his property.

43.
Hosking, “Life of Moore,” 28–31.

44.
Moore,
Plain Statement
, 6, 12, 39, 62. Elizabeth Blackmar shrewdly suggests that Moore’s complaint was based on his understanding that New York’s urban development actually functioned as a public-works program to provide jobs for the poor and the unemployed—a program Moore opposed (Blackmar,
Manhattan for Rent
, 162–163). Cartmen, whom Moore singled out for criticism, had developed a reputation for especially rude and surly behavior by 1820, breaking speed limits and running down pedestrians—much like the modern taxi drivers who partly replaced them. See Graham Hodges,
New York City Cartmen, 1667–1850
(New York: New York University Press, 1986), 116–117, 127. Hodges indicates that many wealthy New Yorkers chose to move out of downtown New York after being awakened regularly by the sound of “hundreds of cartmen racing their vehicles at dawn” (p. 121). In the late 1820s Moore was actually planning to move out of Chelsea to a still-rural area of Manhattan several miles to the north; he changed his mind only when his wife died in 1830. In 1839 Moore purchased an estate up the Hudson River at Sing Sing, and in 1850 he rented a house in Newport, Rhode Island, where he spent his remaining summers. Patterson,
The Poet of Christmas Eve
, 93–94, 149–150.

45.
Irving,
A History of New York
, vol. 1, 120 (Book 2, ch. 7); see also 454, 639, 655.

46.
The Children’s Friend
(New York, 1821).

47. Irving,
A History of New York
(1812 ed.), vol. 1, 253 (Book 4, ch. 6: “ease, tranquillity;” vol. 1, 246 (Book 4, ch. 5: “meddlesome and fractious”); vol. 1, 254 (Book 4, ch. 6: “long pipes … short pipes”). Irving introduced the story of the “pipe plot” only in the 1812 edition.

48.
Lauren J. Cook, “Snow White Little Instruments of Comfort: Clay Pipes and Class Consciousness at the Boott Mills Boarding Houses,” a paper delivered at a meeting of the New England Historical Association, Lowell, Massachusetts, April 21, 1989. There was a practical reason for workers’ use of short pipes: they made it possible to smoke while working. But what may have begun as a practical necessity became, by the nineteenth century, a political gesture. By the same token, smoking a long pipe became an
assertion
as well as a sign of genteel leisure (as, for example, the long pipes in Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle”).

49.
“Southwark Watchman’s Address for Christmas Day, Dec. 25, 1829” (Philadelphia, 1829), Broadside collection, American Antiquarian Society. Coincidentally, even the meter (of the odd lines, at least) is identical to that of “A Visit from St. Nicholas.”

50.
Among some British Jews today, I have been told, the gesture still thrives, signifying
stumm!
, or “hush.”

51.
New York Sun
, Sept. 21, 1897.

52.
Patterson,
Poet of Christmas Eve
, 99–101.

53.
Blackmar,
Manhattan for Rent
, 195–196. See also Lockwood,
Manhattan Moves Uptown
, 205. John Pintard made the same point in 1832; see letter of Nov. 3, 1832, in Pintard,
Letters
, IV, 106.

54.
Blackmar,
Manhattan for Rent
, passim.

1.
New-York American
[for the country], Jan. 4, 1822.

2.
New-York Weekly Commercial Advertiser
, Jan. 3, 1823. Stone added that such a change would also provide the “young ladies” who hosted the visits with “an opportunity for a contest of skill in making coffee.”

3.
“Sainte Claus,” in
New-York Evening Post
, Dec. 26, 1820 (this poem was reprinted from the
Northern Whig)
.

4.
“Ode to Saint Claas, Written on a New Year’s Eve,”
New York Advertiser
, Jan. 4, 1828 and
New-York American
, Jan. 4, 1828.

5.
For another example of Santa as Lord of Misrule, see Francis H. Davidge, “Christmas Is Coming,” in T. S. Arthur, ed.,
The Brilliant
(New York, 1850), 22–26. This sketch was apparently written by a Southerner, and it was in the South that Santa Claus continued for decades to be described as a “trickster.” See, for example, Joel Chandler Harris, “Something About ‘Sandy Claus’”: ch. 7,
On the Plantation: A Story of a Georgia Boy’s Adventures During the War
(New York, 1892), 104–121, in which a pair of slaves describe Santa Claus as a kind of Brer Rabbit figure.