Christmas Read online

  One of the founders of the Sons of St Tammany was a merchant named Lewis Pintard (although he was of Huguenot, rather than Irish, descent), the guardian of his orphaned nephew, John Pintard. Pintard Jr also became a merchant, but he was more interested in charitable endeavours and in history than in trade, and in 1804 helped found the New-York Historical Society, which took St Nicholas as its emblem, possibly as a nod to Pintard’s Huguenot heritage: many American Huguenots originated in the Low Countries, especially Wallonia, where the cult of Nicholas was particularly prominent. Pintard himself had previously marked the saint’s day, 6 December, as a private day of thanksgiving for the world’s first three republics: those of France, the United Provinces and the United States.

  In this same period, a young writer named Washington Irving was drawing on New York’s Dutch history for political satire, contrasting what he thought of as a kinder and gentler Old World in New Amsterdam with the hustle and bustle of modern New York. In his 1809 burlesque, A History of New-York, published under the mock-Dutch pseudonym of Diedrich Knickerbocker (and thus often later known as the Knickerbocker History), to be a New Amsterdammer rather than a New Englander was to be a real New Yorker. The New-York Historical Society members also used New Amsterdam as a contrast to what they viewed as the ills of the present in their rapidly changing city. In 1809, the toast at the society’s annual dinner ran: ‘To the memory of St Nicholas. May the virtuous habits and simple manners of our Dutch ancestors be not lost in the luxuries and refinements of the present time.’

  Irving’s History of New-York was hugely successful, making his name, but also clouding its comic origins. Instead, the book began to be read as though it described real events. The History claimed that the first church in New Amsterdam was dedicated to St Nicholas, in honour of the colonists’ patron saint, and, sure enough, half a century later, this was repeated as fact in a history of New York. (In actuality, there was no New York church named for St Nicholas until the twentieth century.) Had anyone paused to check, the History could not have passed as history for a moment: Irving described ‘Dutch’ New York cookies being impressed with, on one side, an image of Rip van Dam, the lieutenant-governor of New Amsterdam, on the other ‘the noted St. Nicholas, vulgarly called Sancteclaus … venerated by true Hollanders.’ The historical Rip van Dam was indeed a New York politician, but one who had governed years after Dutch New Amsterdam had turned into British New York.

  Yet the Nicholas legend-building continued. In 1810, for the next St Nicholas dinner, Pintard produced a broadside bearing an engraving of ‘the good holy man’ St Nicholas in his bishop’s robes, holding his bags of gold, and, next to it, pictures of good and bad children by a fireplace hung with stockings.* Underneath was a verse, in Dutch and in English:

  St Nicholas, my dear good friend!

  To serve you ever was my end,

  If you will, now, me something give,

  I’ll serve you ever while I live.

  Pintard claimed this verse had been recited to him by ‘an ancient lady 87 years of age’. It is possible, of course, that Pintard did hear it from an elderly Dutch lady, although if she had been eighty-seven in 1810, not only had she been born in an English colony, but so had her parents. It seems likely, therefore, that Pintard invented the verses, and possibly even the old lady, for the verses included one detail that had not previously been known in the Netherlands: that the saint lived in Spain the rest of the year. By later in the nineteenth century, this tradition was a regular feature of Dutch descriptions of ‘their’ St Nicholas, but there is no evidence of it appearing in the Low Countries before Pintard’s broadside.

  Legend, however, easily trumped fact. Two weeks after that dinner, the New York Spectator published a poem about the ‘good holy man’ – the Dutch phrase repeated by Pintard – adding: ‘whom we Sancte Claus name’. The poem, too, concentrated on the Dutch roots of the city, its saint bringing not apples, as he did in German lands, but a ‘bright Orange’, tipping its hat to the Dutch princes of Orange-Nassau. (It is noticeable too that these English-speaking authors all used versions the German word Sankt, not the Dutch Sint.) Two years later, knowledge of Sancte Claus had spread widely enough for a censorious volume for children, False Stories Corrected, to dismiss ‘Old Santa-claw, of whom so often little children hear such foolish stories; and once in the year are encouraged to hang their stockings in the Chimney at night’. By 1830 he was firmly enough established that a New York bookseller advertised that in his ‘Temple’ of ‘Santaclaus’ customers could return to ‘the good ways of their fathers’: less than twenty-one years after his American birth, he was already a piece of nostalgia.

  So it appears Washington Irving, John Pintard and their friends should be credited with the creation of Santa Claus. Or should they? Almost everything suggests that they were the creators – were it not for two references in a New York newspaper to ‘Santa Claus’ in 1773 and 1774, the first appearing when John Pintard was fourteen, and Irving not yet born. Once more we need to stop and rewind.

  On 23 December 1773 Rivington’s New-York Gazetteer reported: ‘Last Monday the anniversary of St. Nicholas, otherwise called Santa Claus, was celebrated at Protestant Hall … where a great number of sons of that ancient saint celebrated the day with great joy and festivity.’ There was a similar mention in 1774, followed by decades of silence.

  ‘Last’ Monday might have been the 20th, or possibly the 13th, of December. What it wasn’t was 6 December, just as, later, the New-York Historical Society took an elastic approach to the saint’s day, their annual dinner by no means always falling on 6 December. The meeting at the Protestant Hall, ‘at Mr. Samuel Waldron’s, on Long Island’, makes it sound as if Mr Waldron might have been running a pub with a meeting-room attached. (He also hosted St Patrick’s Day events, so the ‘Protestant’ part seems nominal.) It is unlikely that this was an anti-British group, as Rivington’s Gazetteer was published by John Rivington, a loyalist so famously stalwart he was hanged in effigy by the Sons of Liberty in 1775. Where, then, did this St Nicholas group, who used the name ‘Santa Claus’, come from? No explanation, nor even any guess, has ever been put forward. It might be, however, that it was another immigrant group, neither Dutch, nor pseudo-Dutch, which supplies the missing link between St Nicholas and Santa.

  By the eighteenth century the European settlers of what would soon be New York State included immigrants from what are today Germany and Austria, from the Czech lands, from Scandinavia and Finland, as well as from Britain. Switzerland, too, had seen a mass migration to the New World, with possibly as many as 25,000 Swiss heading for North Carolina, Pennsylvania and New York in that century alone. Many came from their country’s German-speaking regions, a fact which becomes of potential interest to Santa Claus historians when we remember that two of the Swiss-German, or Schweizerdeutsch, dialect names for St Nicholas were Samichlaus and Santi-Chlaus, both of which sound far closer to Santa Claus than Sint Nicolaas does.

  Samichlaus travelled through the Swiss mountains on St Nicholas’s Day as early as the seventeenth century. We cannot, of course, be certain, but there were Swiss immigrants in New York, they came from the part of the world that celebrated the visit of Samichlaus, and it is therefore entirely possible that this Swiss dialect name is the ancestor of Santa Claus, transmitted via Rivington’s Gazetteer, a copy of which we know John Pintard himself owned.

  Other parts of the new holiday traditions, after all, came from similarly transplanted customs. From the very earliest days of the Pintard/Irving version, stockings were the receptacles for presents, taken for granted by later use so that there has rarely been any discussion about the origin of this custom. Some have located it in the Dutch practice whereby children treated their shoes or clogs as gift-receptacles, the shape of the shoe a reminder of the saint’s travel by ship to the Netherlands. Yet if Pintard was indeed the creator of the Spanish home of St Nicholas, then this must also be a later addition to the canon. Irving, in his Knickerbocker Histor
y in 1809, simply wrote that the ‘pious’ stocking-hanging ceremony was ‘still religiously observed in all our ancient families’.

  It is possible that either Pintard or Irving invented the idea. In Britain, an anthology printed in 1812–13 attributed the custom to either Italy or Spain, which it seemed to consider were potentially the same place: ‘Italian nobles had a practice called “ZAPATA”, (the Spanish for a Shoe)’, wherein they placed ‘in the slippers or stockings of persons they wished to honour, some present of dress or trinkets’. A decade later, an almanac recorded that on Epiphany, Venetian children hung stockings in the kitchen for La Befana to fill with ‘dirt, rubbish and a few sweetmeats’. The same year The Children’s Friend illustrated stockings hanging ready for ‘Santeclaus’, as well as showing Santeclaus’ sled, complete with reindeer, the first time these appeared in connection with Christmas or the bringer of gifts.* The Children’s Friend may also have influenced Pintard’s friend Clement Clarke Moore, whose ‘A Visit from St Nicholas’ was written in 1822, because Moore’s poem had both stockings and reindeer, which were now given names (although not Rudolph, who had to wait a century to join his reindeer friends). And, like the New-York Historical Society, Moore was not overly committed to marking the actual saint’s day, following The Children’s Friend by relocating it from the eve of 6 December to the eve of the 25th, and the success of this work made the 5 December date almost immediately obsolete.

  Now Santa put toys, fruit and nuts in the stockings of good children, while bad children got coal, or birch switches, which was better than back in Zurich, where bad children received horse manure and rotten vines (although not yet in stockings).

  In Zurich, Samichlaus also brought trees for all children, while in Germany the Christmas tree remained, for the moment, something for the prosperous and the urban. The less prosperous became familiar with the custom in institutions – in schools, hospitals, orphanages and the like – where they had become a feature of charitable giving: patrons and donors attended candle-lighting ceremonies, at which carols were sung and gifts were handed to the poor.

  Traditions in private houses were not dissimilar. In 1798 the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge visited a family in Ratzeburg, in north Germany. On Christmas Eve, the children took over the parlour, where ‘a great yew bough … [was] fastened on the Table’ and decorated with ‘a multitude of little Tapers … and coloured paper, &c.’ The children laid out their presents underneath, before inviting their parents in. The following day, the situation was reversed, and the parents laid out the children’s gifts by the bough. The trees, the decorations and presents varied from family to family, from place to place.

  However the evening was staged, in the nineteenth century the custom appeared more frequently, at first in the very highest echelons of society. Henrietta of Nassau-Weilburg, born in Prussia, erected a tree in Vienna in 1816 after her marriage to Archduke Charles of Austria; twenty years later, Helen of Mecklenburg did the same when she moved to Paris on her marriage to the duc d’Orléans. Soon the less fashionable followed, and trees were also found in the homes of the elite in Denmark and Norway, in Finland and Sweden, and in the Netherlands.

  In England, Princess Lieven, born into a Baltic German family in Riga, where one of the very earliest trees was recorded, spent the Christmas of 1829 at Earl Cowper’s house near Hertford, and ‘got up a little fête such as is customary all over Germany’, wrote the memoirist Charles Greville.* ‘Three large trees in great pots were put upon a long table covered with pink linen; each tree was illuminated with three circular tiers of coloured wax candles – blue, green, red, and white.’ Below each tree were toys, gloves, handkerchiefs, workboxes and books for the individuals tree’s ‘owner’. Queen Adelaide, the wife of William IV, from Saxe-Meiningen in south-western Germany, had a tree on Christmas Eve at Brighton Pavilion, and the young Princess Victoria and her mother, the Duchess of Kent, also German-born, had ‘large round tables on which were placed the trees hung with lights and sugar ornaments’ at Kensington Palace.

  Coleridge’s published an essay on his German Christmas experience in 1809 in his own journal, The Friend, which had a limited audience. By 1810, however, it had been reprinted in three London papers; in 1825, in a popular annual; in 1828, in the Gentleman’s Magazine; and in 1834 it was reprinted in The Times. A number of extracts also appeared in local British newspapers, as well as in several American ones. By 1844 the English translation of a German children’s Christmas book, with its frontispiece of a decorated fir tree, and its notes on ‘The German form of celebrating Christmas Eve’, appeared with Coleridge’s essay at the end. Thanks to its popularity, a single family’s local tradition was known across the English-speaking world as though it were the standard way Christmas was celebrated throughout Germany.

  All of this was overtaken in 1848, when the Illustrated London News published an engraving of Victoria and Albert beside a tabletop tree at Windsor. The accompanying text explained that this was the children’s tree, while the queen, the prince consort, the Duchess of Kent, and ‘the royal household’ all had their own, as well as additional trees in the dining-room.* This single image cemented the Christmas tree in the popular consciousness, so much so that by 1861, the year of Albert’s death, it was firmly believed that this German prince had transplanted the custom to England with him when he married. In the USA, the engraving was rendered more democratic when Godey’s Lady’s Book, the bestselling monthly magazine in the country, reprinted it in 1850, merely removing Victoria’s jewellery and Albert’s sash and medals (as well as his moustache), and reducing the number of presents under the tree. The illustration was retitled ‘The Christmas Tree’, with no reference to royalty, the ‘the’ suggesting only one tree per household, not the small forest set up every year at Windsor.

  The image was reprinted in 1860, and again in the following decade. By then, Christmas trees had taken root in American culture in a way they would not do in Britain for a century (one estimate in 1930 thought 4 million trees were erected that year, in a population of approximately 45 million). For a start, they were not a fashion set by the aristocracy, but one generated by the people. In legend, just as Prince Albert took the Christmas tree to England, so in the USA it was said that Hessian soldiers fighting with the British in the Revolutionary Wars had been decorating their traditional Christmas trees when Washington crossed the Delaware on 26 December 1776, making it possible for him to take them by surprise and win the crucial Battle of Trenton. Given our knowledge of Christmas in Germany, which centred around 24 December, not the 26th, this is unlikely. But Christmas trees may have arrived in North America as early as 1786. In North Carolina that year, a member of the Moravian Brethren accused an apprentice of cutting down a small pine tree on Christmas Eve, the day on which trees were customarily erected in Germany. It was one, he added, ‘which he had been taking special care of’. In 1805, this time in Georgia, the students at a Moravian Indian Mission school were taken on an outing ‘to fetch a small green tree for Christmas’. The following year, they again ‘fetch[ed] shrubs and little trees for the Christmas decorations’, some of which might have been used in constructing Putzes. And in 1812, they went to a friend’s house where there was ‘a treat for our young ones … a little decorated tree’.

  ‘Little decorated trees’ were found in the North, too. One is shown in a watercolour by Lewis Miller, a Pennsylvania folk artist, which included the date 1809. Since Miller would have been only thirteen in that year, it is likely the date indicates a later recollection of a Philadelphia family Christmas at that time. The tree itself, decorated with fruit and paper cutouts or possibly verses, is unmistakably labelled ‘Christmas tree’. (The naked child under the table is, more mysteriously, ‘A Christmas Gift’: a nativity reference, or just a child born in December?)

  In 1821 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, one resident recorded in his diary that his children were going to the sawmill ‘for Christmas trees’ – he felt no need to expand, as though
by then everyone knew what a Christmas tree was, and that was likely to be the case, at least locally, since in 1823, the bachelors of York, Pennsylvania announced plans for a charity ‘Krischkintle Bauhm’, which they promised would be ‘superb, superfine, superfrostical, schnockagastical, double refined, mill-twill’d made of Dog’s Wool, Swingling Tow, and Posnum [Possum?] fur’.*

  Lewis Miller, ‘An 1809 Christmas in York, Pennsylvania’ (Collection of the York County Heritage Trust, York, Pennsylvania). In a mixture of German and English, Miller wrote: ‘Seifert, the Blue dier, colouring, dying, and Family, in north George Street, 1809. She mentioned – This morning I haven’t yet swept the floor.’ Then, presumably listing out the holiday meal, ‘Beef, broth, salad, eggs and good wine is good for the children.’

  From now on, Christmas trees were recorded with increasing frequency: first in areas of German emigration; by 1843, the New York Tribune was carrying advertisements for trees; and in 1851, the city’s Washington market set aside space for their sale. Trees had reached the Midwest by the 1840s: Calvin Fletcher, an Indianapolis lawyer, land speculator and banker, described his family’s ‘Christmass Gifts … hung on a tree in the parlor’. (Despite the casual familiarity with which he describes the setting, this is the first year he writes of having a tree.) Trees were erected by German immigrants in Texas in the 1840s, and by the 1850s they had become naturalized and were decorated with local produce: moss, cotton, pecans, red pepper swags and, an American innovation, the popcorn string, as well as Old World red berries, biscuits and sweets.