Postscripts

Labels: American Indians, Christmas History

HISTORY


Santa Claus
St. Nicholas was a real person about whom we know very little. He has become the most beloved nonbiblical saint in the history of the Christian religion. Noted for his generosity, he was the bishop of Myra (in present-day Turkey) in the fourth century. There is no real connection between St. Nicholas and Christmas. He died on December 6, and that date became his feast day in the Church.

Greeting Cards
The first true commercial Christmas card did not make its appearance until 1843. Designed by John Calcott Horsley for Henry Cole, it was printed in London and hand colored by an artist named Mason. The Horsley-Cole card is considered a forerunner of modern Christmas cards in that it leaves little room for personalization by the sender. It anticipates a new commercial awareness of the commercialization of Christmas and the need to recognize a wider circle of friends and family members.
            R.H. Pease, engraver, lithographer and variety store proprietor in Albany, N.Y., distributed the first American-made Christmas card in the early 1850s, but the practice of exchanging cards did not immediately catch on in the U.S. The few cards sent usually were imported from England.

Dickens’s A Christmas Carol
Although Charles Dickens included Christmas incidents in his Pickwick Papers and Sketches by Boz, nothing he wrote compared to the success of his 1843 A Christmas Carol. Dickens made two trips to the United States. On his second trip, a three-month tour in 1867, he presented dramatic readings of his classic Christmas story. In Boston, 10,000 tickets were sold weeks before his appearance, people stood in the cold all night long and in New York to buy tickets.

Christmas Music
Music heard at Christmas time can be divided into three categories: The first includes traditional hymns, many composed in medieval times. A second group includes Christmas carols. Among the popular carol favorites are such standbys as "Joy to the World," "O Little Town of Bethlehem," "It Came upon a Midnight Clear” and "Silent Night."

Christmas Movies
Everyone seems to have their own favorites, ranging from musicals to comedies. Christmas movies have been made during the entire history of cinema; three movies stand out: It's a Wonderful Life (1946), Miracle on

34th Street (1947), and A Christmas Story (1983).

Labels: Christmas Cards, Christmas History, Christmas Movies, Christmas Music

Labels: Christmas, Christmas History

HISTORY

      Every war produces its share of heroes. The American Revolution, the most desperate of our conflicts, was unusual because many brave women participated alongside their men and even took an active part in battle.
      Controversy still rages today about the role of women in combat. It is perhaps fitting to examine the lives of three women and their spontaneous heroism more than two centuries ago. Without such sacrifices, this nation might not have been created. Two were army wives who became impromptu cannoneers. The third masqueraded as a man and fought as a soldier. All were dubbed "Molly," then a popular diminutive of Mary.

Margaret Corbin
The first American woman to shed her blood in defense of this country, Margaret Corbin was born in 1751, the only daughter of Robert Cochran, a Scots-Irish settler in western Pennsylvania. When she was five years old, her father was killed by Indians, and her mother was carried off into captivity. Fortunately, Margaret was with relatives at the time.
      In 1772, she married John Corbin, a Virginian, who joined the Continental Army as a gunner’s assistant in the First Pennsylvania Regiment of Artillery. His wife accompanied the unit as nurse and camp assistant. After watching her husband at his work, Molly Corbin soon became as familiar with the sequence of loading, firing and sponging a cannon as any artilleryman
      John Corbin was killed in 1776 while manning a small cannon in a northern outpost of Fort Washington in upper Manhattan. Margaret took his place, loading and swabbing the gun "with skill and vigor" until she herself was severely wounded in the shoulder and chest by Hessian grapeshot.
      Following the capture of Fort Washington, in return for her promise that she would fight no more in the war, her captors delivered her to the American forces. Evacuated to Philadelphia in 1779, Margaret Corbin was voted a pension of "half-pay for life and one complete set of cloaths."
      After the war, she settled in Swimtown (later called Buttermilk Falls and now Highland Falls) outside of West Point. Famous for her flaming red hair, sharp eyes, shrill voice, shrewish temper and useless left arm, she was saluted as "Captain Molly." She died in 1800, a hard-drinking, impoverished veteran.
      In 1926, her obscure grave was located. Her remains were disinterred and moved to the cemetery at West Point. Sheltered by a small grove of arbor vitae near the Old Chapel, an imposing monument erected by the Daughters of the American Revolution memorializes this first artillery woman of the American Army.

Molly Pitcher
Evidence exists that Molly Pitcher actually was a generic name given to women who brought pitchers of water or grog (rum diluted with water) to thirsty soldiers on the battlefield. The name is most often associated with Mary Hays, born Mary Ludwig, a Pennsylvania Dutch girl whose parents had emigrated from Germany. Married to John Caspar Hays, a young barber, she accompanied her husband's regiment, the First Pennsylvania Artillery, when it joined Washington's Monmouth campaign in New Jersey. In a strange coincidence, this was the same unit in which Margaret Corbin's husband had served.
      Mary Hays's moment of glory came at the Battle of Monmouth on Sunday, June 28, 1778, remembered as one of the hottest days of that summer. Soldiers were dropping all around, not only from bullets but from thirst and overexertion in the hundred-degree heat. Mary carried water from a nearby spring, thus earning her the well-known nickname. When her husband suffered from heatstroke while firing his artillery piece, she grabbed a rammer and kept the gun in action.
      Let Joseph Plumb Martin describe her decisive action. His graphic contemporary picture of the life of an enlisted man in the Continental Army was published anonymously in 1830:
      "While in the act of reaching a cartridge and having one of her feet as far from the other as she could step, a cannon shot from the enemy passed directly between her legs without doing any damage other than carrying away the lower part of her petticoat. Looking at it with apparent unconcern, she observed that it was lucky it did not pass higher, for it might have carried away something else, and continued her occupation."
      Her husband died shortly after the war, and Mary Hays married George McCauley, an ex-soldier from her husband's regiment. He turned out to be shiftless and a heavy drinker. She left him, supporting herself as a laundress and nursemaid.
      Although she "smoked, chewed tobacco and swore like a trooper" and in later life comported herself like an old soldier, "Sergeant Molly" regrettably never was awarded a veteran's pension by Congress. Contemporary writers described her as a stocky, ruddy-complexioned Pennsylvania Dutch girl. Apparently misled by the McCauley name, some writers claimed that Molly Pitcher was Irish. Responding to this, her granddaughter, Polly McLeister, described Molly as being "as Dutch as sauerkraut."
      A monument on the site of the Battle of Monmouth, near Freehold, N.J., celebrates the heroism of Molly Pitcher. She died in 1832 and is buried (as Mollie McCauley) in the Old Graveyard on South Street in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

Deborah Sampson
Of all the stories to come out of the Revolution, none is stranger than that of the only woman to formally enlist in the Continental Army. Deborah Sampson was born in Plympton, Massachusetts, in 1760. After their sailor father died at sea, the Sampson children were all parceled out among friends and relatives.
      Deborah spent her teenage years as an indentured servant in Middleboro, Massachusetts, and a remarkable servant she was. Not only did she learn to read, but she educated herself enough to qualify as a part-time teacher. At the age of 22, dressed in borrowed male attire, she tried to enlist in the Continental Army as "Timothy Thayer." She was unmasked when she became tipsy in a local tavern celebrating her enlistment.
      Undaunted, Deborah Sampson walked some 75 miles to Worcester, where she succeeded in passing herself off as "Robert Shurtliff" and inscribing this name on the rolls of Capt. George Webb's light infantry company of the Fourth Massachusetts militia regiment.
      The success of her deception is understandable. A contemporary description portrayed her as "a heavy-boned woman of about 5 feet 8 inches in height, with an elongated horse-face and a long prominent nose." Teasingly nicknamed "Smock Face" and "Molly" because of his lack of facial hair, the new private marched off to West Point with his unit. In a skirmish with Loyalist troops near Tarrytown in Westchester, Deborah was wounded in the head by a saber blow that left a permanent scar.
      She was wounded again near Eastchester, receiving two musket balls in the thigh. Medical treatment of these wounds would have revealed her gender, so she removed one musket ball with a penknife and sewing needle. The other was too deep to remove; it caused her to limp for the rest of her life. After service at Fort Ticonderoga, she was transferred to Philadelphia as an orderly to General John Paterson of the Delaware militia.
      Having come down with a fever, she again tried to avoid treatment. Near death, she was treated by Dr. Barnabas Binney, who discovered her secret when he examined her. Discreetly, he said nothing and had her taken to his home to recover. The good doctor’s participation in her deception eventually backfired; his niece became infatuated with the young soldier.
      Dr. Binney decided the time had come to reveal that Robert Shurtliff was a female. When told that his orderly was a woman, Gen. Paterson exclaimed, "Why, this is truly theatrical!" It was also unlike anything in his experience, so he took the news to the Commander-in-Chief. George Washington decided that an honorable discharge should be granted to Private Robert Shurtliff. This was done, showing an enlistment of a year and a half.
      In 1784, Deborah Sampson married Benjamin Gannett, a prosperous Sharon, Massachusetts, farmer. Later, the Massachusetts legislature and Congress each awarded her small pensions. . She capitalized on her fame by appearing on the lecture platform, the first woman to do so. Her talk was a set speech about her wartime experiences that concluded with a performance of the complete manual of arms in full military uniform.
      She died in 1827. Her grave is in Sharon's Rock Ridge Cemetery, and a street in Sharon is named for her. The house in Plympton in which she was born, and the Gannett House in Sharon in which she lived and raised four children are both still standing. In 1943, the Bethlehem Steel Company's Sparrow's Point shipyard near Baltimore launched a Liberty ship that proudly carried the name of this unusual woman.
      It has been said that one of the reasons for many of our problems today is that we lack genuine heroes. For starters, we could reflect on the selfless courage of three American women called Molly, now only dimly remembered.
　

Labels: American Revolution, Christmas History, Heroines

LOWER HUDSON VALLEY

On October 14, 1842, 167 years ago, New York City marked the completion of the Croton Aqueduct and the stream of cold, clear water it brought from the valley of the Croton River. The water's arrival touched off celebrations whose like had never been seen before. At a time when the purity of Croton's own water supply is in jeopardy from runoff contamination, it is appropriate that we remind ourselves of the benefits Croton's pure, sweet water brought to the way of life in Gotham.

Throughout the summer of 1842, Manhattan's citizens were brimming with anticipation as they eagerly awaited the long-heralded coming of Croton water. Over the years many proposals had been explored in the city's search for "a sufficient quantity of pure and wholesome water," including tapping the Bronx River, the Passaic River in New Jersey, or the Housatonic in Connecticut.

To replace an earthen dam that had been breached and destroyed in a storm, a dam had been erected in Westchester County to impound the Croton River. Some 270 feet across and 50 feet high, the Croton Dam, the first large masonry dam in this country, created a lake five miles long. To carry this water to the city, a now still-usable masonry aqueduct eight and a half feet high and seven and a half feet in width, snaked its way through a dozen towns and villages and across hundreds of acres of private land, tunneling through hills and spanning broad valleys with earthen embankments or classical arches.

Bridges carried it across deep ravines, streams or highways. Some, like the aqueduct bridge at Sing Sing with its span of 88 feet and height of 76 feet, were structures of striking architectural boldness. The entire system was one of the nineteenth century's engineering marvels. Proposed in 1833 and estimated at $5 million, its final cost was almost twice that amount.

Farther to the south, a 24-million-gallon reservoir was erected at the highest point of this part of Manhattan, now the site of the New York Public Library. Like a gigantic above-ground swimming pool, the magnificent Egyptian-style masonry structure stretched across two city blocks from 40th to 42nd Street. Its sloping walls rose 38 feet above street level. It would soon become a major attraction for residents and visitors. A railed flagstone promenade atop its massive walls made it possible for strollers to gaze into the serene depths of sparkling clear Croton water or to survey the vast panorama of the city lying to the south.

On June 8th, Chief Engineer John B. Jervis, several of his assistants and the five water commissioners began a final inspection by trudging for three days through thirty-three miles of the Croton Aqueduct from the Croton Dam to the Harlem River. Jervis, a brilliant self-taught engineer, had cut his teeth on canals: first on the Erie Canal--where he rose in eight years from axeman to surveyor to Resident Engineer--and then the Delaware and Hudson Canal. Next he built New York's first railroad, the Mohawk and Hudson, between Albany and Schenectady. The driving force in the construction of the Croton Dam and Croton, Jervis's only remaining monument today is the 41-mile-long aqueduct itself.

The Voyage of the Croton Maid
On June 20, a modest flow of water was started down the aqueduct. Only 18 inches deep, the stream was enough to launch a 16-foot flat-bottomed wooden skiff designed for this use and named the Croton Maid. Carrying four workers, the tiny vessel competed its journey and reached the Harlem River 22 hours later.

As artillery battery fired a 38-gun salute , the first Croton water began to flow into the receiving reservoir in the wild area that would become Central Park. New York Governor William H. Seward (who would later become Lincoln's Secretary of State), Mayor Robert H. Morris and other officials were on hand for the historic event.

After portaging the Croton Maid around the three-foot-diameter cast iron pipes that carried the aqueduct temporaryily under the Harlem River and across Manhattan Valley, on June 21st the four men in the little craft finally sailed out into the giant York Hill receiving reservoir located betewen 79th and 86th streets and Sixth and Seventh avenues to the cheers of some 20,000 enthusiastic spectators, cannon salutes and toasts of the "sweet, soft, clear water." A Water Commission report later added that this voyage "afforded indubitable evidence that a navigable river was flowing into the city for the use of its inhabitants."

George Templeton Strong, a young graduate of Columbia University who was to have a brilliant career as literary critic, music lover and lawyer, noted in his diary, "Croton Water is slowly flowing towards the city, which at last will stand a chance of being cleaned--if water can clean it."

Filling the Reservoirs
Few were present at sunrise on the Fourth of July when valves were opened and water flowed through three-foor iron pipes down Fifth Avenue and began to flow into the Murray Hill distributing reservoir at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenu, as 45 cannon boomed. (The New York Public Library now occupies this site.) . Croton's water had arrived not a moment too soon. The huge cast-iron tank erected in 1829 at 13th Street and the Bowery, with a capacity of more than 305,000 gallons, the city's only reservoir and the source of the water on which it depended for fire protection, was bone dry. At Mayor Morris's request, Croton water was immediately piped to the downtown location.

George Templeton Strong told his diary: "There's nothing new in town, except the Croton Water, which is all full of tadpoles and animalculae, and which moreover flows through an aqueduct which I hear was used as a necessary by all the Hibernian vagabonds who worked upon it. I shall drink no Croton Water for some time to come. Jehiel Post has drunk some of it and is in dreadful apprehensions of breeding bullfrogs."

The festivities of June and July marking the arrival of Croton water were mere preludes to the huge celebration planned for Friday, October 14th. "Nothing is talked of or thought of in New York but Croton water; fountains, aqueducts, hydrants and hose attract our attention," another tireless diarist, ex-Mayor Philip Hone, wrote, "and impede our progress through the streets. Water! Water! is the universal note which is sounded in every part of the city, and infuses joy and exultation into the masses, even though they are out of spirits."

Charles King, president of Columbia College, hailed the Croton Dam and Aqueduct as "the crowning glory and surpassing achievement of the latter part of the half century," and indeed it was. The city had participated in the statewide celebration of the federal union and the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, but it had outdone itself this time. The Croton Dam and Aqueduct were exclusively a municipal venture.

Invitations went out to President John Tyler, in Washington, and to the two living ex-Presidents, John Quincy Adams, then serving as a Congressman from Massachusetts, and Martin Van Buren, then living up the Hudson in Kinderhook, N.Y. All declined because of previous commitments. Writing from the Upper Manor House, 80-year-pld Pierre Van Cortlandt, former member of Congress and President of the Westchester County Bank in Peekskill, gratefully accepted the invitation "to celebrate the introduction of Croton Water."

A Celebration Unlike Any Other
The day began with the firing of one hundred cannon in a national salute at sunrise. Church bells were rung for an hour. At ten, the five-mile-long parade began. The Commercial Advertiser called it "the largest procession ever known in the city." Spectators jammed windows, balconies and sidewalks to watch and applaud. The seven-mile-long parade route took marchers north from the Battery up Broadway to Union Square and then turned south down the Bowery and East Broadway to City Hall Park. Spectacular fountains shooting geysers of Croton water 50 feet into the air had been erected at Union Square and at City Hall Park.

First came a military escort, followed by a dozen open carriages carrying top-hatted dignitaries and elected officials, followed by additional regiments of soldiers. Next came 97 companies of volunteer firemen in full regalia of fire helmets, red shirts and dark trousers. Some pulled highly polished hand pumpers; the smoke-bellowing, steam-driven pump engines were drawn by teams of powerful horses. Four thousand firefighters were in the line of march: three thousand from the city and the balance from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, upstate New York, Connecticut and Long Island.

Butchers on horseback made up another contingent, all in white aprons with their forearms covered with traditional checkered sleeve protectors. These were followed by 30 temperance societies, artisans and mechanics organizations, trade unions, civic societies, college faculties, ladies' auxiliaries, and bands of every description. No segment of society was overlooked.

The Cold Spring Temperance Benevolent Society marched under a banner showing "a gentleman tendering the pledge of total abstinence to a poor ragged inebriate." Its motto was, "Turn; drink of the pure fountain of life, come with us and be free." The presence of so many temperance organizations reflected the hope of reform-minded New Yorkers that public drunkenness would decline with the availability of water that did not have to be made palatable by the addition of alcohol.

About four-thirty the last marchers reached the park at City Hall, where the Mayor introduced the orator of the day, Samuel Stevens, President of the Board of Water Commissioners. "Only the Romans could compete with such a magnificent public work," Commissioner Stevens told the assembled throng. "But the works of Rome were built by slaves," he reminded them, while the Croton Aqueduct "was voted for and constructed by free men." Abolitionists in the audience cheered.

"The Croton Ode"
With the City Hall Park fountain as a backdrop, a choir of two hundred members of the New York Sacred Choral Society sang "The Croton Ode," with lyrics composed by George Pope Morris specifically for the occasion. Morris was a poet, journalist and writer of popular song lyrics. His most famous work was the 1837 sentimental ballad, "Woodman, Spare that Tree." The music for "The Croton Ode" was adapted by Sidney Pearson from Rossini's opera Armida and contained fourteen four-line stanzas; one stanza anticipated the conquest of the twin threats of epidemics and fires:

Water leaps as if delighted,
While her conquered foes retire!
Pale Contagion flies affrighted
With the baffled demon, Fire!

Another stanza pointed the way to temperance:

From her haunts of deep seclusion,
Let Intemp'rance greet her too,
And the heat of his delusion
Sprinkle with this mountain dew.

The ceremonies closed with a cold buffet for invited guests in City Hall , with more speechmaking by the mayor and governor. Wines and spirits were conspicuously absent; the only beverages available for the frequent toasts were Croton water and lemonade.

Despite the hoopla and the celebrations that accompanied the arrival of Croton water in New York City in 1842, by 1844 the Croton water system had acquired only 6,000 paying customers and revenues of $100,000, while total cost had risen to $13 million. Croton water was everywhere--in fountains spouting geysers of water and in fire hydrants, but many property owners had not spent the money to intall the expensive pipe connections to the system. Most city residents still preferred to get their water from free street hydrants and the few wells that remained flowing with subsurface water in ancient springs below Manhattan.

With the completion of the High Bridge in 1848 and the resultant increase in water pressure, usage of Croton water began to rise. Begun in the 1850s, construction of an underground sewer system soon made interior bathrooms and water closets a fixture in city dwellings, and launched a new trade--that of the Croton water plumber. In 1857, an enterprising manufacturer named Joseph C. Gayetty produced and marketed the first packaged toilet papers in the United States. For ten cents, a customer got a package of ten sheets of manila hemp paper pre-moistened with an aloe solution. Gayetty's name was imprinted on each sheet.

Arrival of Croton water in Manhattan reputedly added another feature to life in the booming city. The omnipresent German cockroach (Blatella germanica) acquired a new name. City dwellers called it the "Croton bug," convinced that this pest could be introduced into dwellings through the pipes bringing Croton water.

Little did the 1842 celebrants know that by the turn of the century the city would have to build a new and larger Croton Aqueduct to relieve the threat of water shortages, and a new and higher Croton Dam backed by additional upstate reservoirs to increase water capacity. In its unending quest for water, the city would range even farther afield to the Catskills and beyond. For the moment, however, New York was content--and awash in water. It had found in the Croton watershed the "pure and wholesome water" that would make it the envy of other cities.

Editor’s Note: This is the fourth and final article in a four-part series about the building of the Old Croton Aqueduct. The complete series of published articles can be found at the following links:

http://notorc.blogspot.com/2009/04/how-disease-and-fire-led-to-building-of.html

http://notorc.blogspot.com/2009/04/no-irish-need-apply-culture-clashes.html

http://notorc.blogspot.com/2009/06/the-old-croton-aqueduct-an-engineering.html

http://notorc.blogspot.com/2009/06/days-of-hope-and-glory-when-croton.html

Labels: Celebrations, Christmas History, Croton Aqueduct, Croton Dam

HISTORY

Christmas is almost upon us and with it the traditional complaints by editorialists bemoaning the commercialization of the Christmas season. Unhappiness with the way the holiday is observed is nothing new. In 1621, a year after the Pilgrims arrived in Plymouth, Governor William Bradford found some male members of the colony taking the day off from work and playing games in the street. He promptly ended such foolishness. Their more numerous and historically more significant Puritan neighbors in the Massachusetts Bay Colony were even stricter. In 1659, the Massachusetts General Court declared that anyone celebrating Christmas committed a criminal offense and would be fined five shillings. This law remained on the books until 1681, but the sentiment lingered for years after. The Puritans saw Christmas as nothing more than a pagan festival adapted to Christian purposes and would have none of it.

In America today, the Christmas season begins commercially on the day after Thanksgiving and continues well past New Year's Day. In England, the season can begin in mid-December and continues until the first Monday after January 1 (called "Plow Monday," which marks the return to the routines of farm work).

Fixing the Date
According to religious scholars, there is no biblical or historical basis for placing the birth of Jesus on December 25. Although the Gospel according to St. Luke describes how shepherds were living with their flocks, the cold weather in Judea in late December was hardly conducive to outdoor living. Not until the fourth century did the Church officially decree that Christmas should be observed on December 25. The date was not chosen for religious reasons, but because it was close to the winter solstice--an event celebrated in many cultures outside the tropics long before the coming of Christianity. When the Church set the date of Christmas Day, it took a calculated gamble, knowing that boisterous pagan holdover festivities in that time period were rooted in popular culture.

Many different cultures marked the period when daylight becomes the shortest with ceremonies involving light and greenery. An example is Chanukah, "the feast of lights." Other examples are the Yule log, candles, holly, mistletoe--even the Christmas tree. All have their roots in pagan traditions that have no connection to the birth of Jesus. In Europe during the three centuries between 1500 and 1800, Christmas was a time to let off steam and gorge oneself. In northern agricultural societies, December marked a critical point in the yearly cycle of farm work. The tasks of gathering in the harvest and preparing for the bitter cold of winter were over. Plenty of newly made beer and wine was available, with abundant supplies meat from freshly slaughtered animals that had to be eaten or be salted and preserved.

Misrule
In ancient Rome, celebrations of the winter solstice became riotous festivals of gambling, the exchange of gifts, feasting and drinking. Called Saturnalia, these pagan solar and agricultural observances honored the planet Saturn. Social roles were reversed, and masters served slaves. The words Christes maesse, or "festival of Christ," entered the English language about A.D. 1050. Nevertheless, the celebrations retained the air of carnival. Churchgoers attended in masks and sang bawdy songs, even rolling dice at the altar. A "Lord of Misrule" was selected and authority was mocked in such "dangerous practices" as mumming and caroling. Mumming usually involved cross-dressing. Caroling was a "disgrace" because it as "generally done in the midst of Rioting, Chambering and Wantonness." It is interesting to note that the concept survives in Philadelphia, where participants in the annual mummer's parade select a Lord of Misrule.

According to Stephen Nissenbaum, a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, 16th-century bishop Hugh Latimer summarized the season, saying: "Men dishonor Christ more in the twelve days of Christmas than in all the twelve months besides." Nineteenth-century British historian John Ashton reported an episode in 1637 in which the man selected by the revelers as the "Lord of Misrule" was publicly given a "wife" in a ceremony led by a man dressed as a cleric. After the ceremony, Ashton noted in circumspect Victorian language, "the affair was carried to its utmost extent." During the Christmas season, the social hierarchy was turned upside down. The young would imitate and mock their elders--a boy might be designated a "bishop" and briefly take on the authority of a genuine bishop. Men could dress like women and women like men.

At Christmastime, the rich were expected to offer charity to their poorer neighbors. For most of the year, the poor owed money, goods or labor, not to mention deference, to the rich. But when the tables were turned at Christmastime, the poor--mostly gangs of young men and boys--claimed the right to enter the houses of the well-to-do and receive gifts of food, drink and money. In Britain in a custom called "wassailing," roving bands of young men circulated through neighborhoods performing songs in exchange for gifts. In America, a nation of immigrants largely from the British Isles, these practices continued in the 18th and 19th centuries, causing much unhappiness among the middle and upper classes. What they desperately hoped for was a change in the celebration of Christmas to a home-centered holiday.

The Christmas Tree
Nineteenth-century America and Britain finally adopted new ways of celebrating Christmas from other traditions to create the modern domestically centered holiday. The tree that graces American homes today has a long history. At the Kalends of January, Romans trimmed their houses with evergreens to symbolize fertility and regeneration. Eventually, Christians appropriated evergreens for their Christmas celebrations, inventing stories explaining the origins of the custom and removing any taint of paganism.

By the first decade of the 19th century, German Protestants took the tree as an emblem of their faith, and the practice spread throughout Europe. It reached Denmark and Norway by 1830; by 1840, France. Swedes added trimmed evergreens to their Christmas celebration is the 1860s. It was German immigrants who brought the custom of Christmas trees to the United States early in the 19th century, according to Penne Restad, a historian of Christmas at the University of Texas. The trees quickly became objects of fascination for Americans. During the 1830s, evergreens began to appear in homes. Christmas trees next appeared in churches and the marketplace. To women fell the task of transforming this ancient pagan fertility symbol into an icon of domesticity. In the home, a place was found for it, usually in the front parlor. The first home Christmas trees had been squat evergreens, no more than two or three feet tall, set on a table top. Inevitably, the use of taller trees invited more ambitious trimming with strings of beads, gilt paper stars or shields and lace bags of candies.

Early Christians had shunned candles because of their use in pagan ceremonies, but by the mid-19th century, concerns about paganism and the ever-present danger of fire did not prevent Americans from dressing their Christmas trees with candles. In 1880, F.W. Woolworth bought from a Philadelphia importer his entire stock of German Christmas tree ornaments made of colored glass. Placed on a counter in his store in Lancaster, Pa., an area with a large Germanic population, in two days they were gone. "I woke up," he said later about his discovery of their sales potential.

Woolworth began making trips to Germany to buy directly from the ornament makers. In the small Thuringian town of Lauscha, the manufacture of Christmas tree ornaments was a genuine cottage industry. Woolworth initially placed an order for more than 200,000 ornaments. The craze for fragile glass ornaments had begun, and Woolworth was on his way to making his fortune. But the introduction of the Christmas tree into the holiday was only one aspect of the conversion of Christmas into a home festival.

Gift-giving
Much of the charm of the Christmas tree was to be found in the small gifts that could be tied to its branches with colored string or spread beneath it. Early Christians refrained from gift-giving because the practice was associated with the Roman Saturnalia, which began in December 17. During the 16th century the English revived the custom. Women often received expensive pins or gloves--sometimes accompanied by gifts of money. This custom gave rise to the terms "pin money" and "glove money." By the middle of the 17th century, even members of the clergy were accepting gifts at New Year's. Unsurprisingly, Puritans strongly opposed such gift-giving, seeing the custom as another pagan rite.

By the 19th century, gift-giving in America had become prevalent. Workers began to remind employers or patrons that some token was expected. For example, newspaper carriers presented subscribers with a short poem (these were called "carriers' addresses") to signal that they expected a gift.

Gift Books
Books are among the earliest items given as gifts at Christmastime. Evidences of the practice abound in newspaper advertisements. In 1810, prolific author and bookseller Mason Locke ("Parson") Weems distributed his own books as Christmas gifts. Weems is best remembered as the inventor of the improbable legend about George Washington and the cherry tree. In that year, he advertised a discount to buyers of copies of his biography of George Washington and a companion work on Francis Marion, "the Swamp Fox" of the Revolution.

A new literary genre soon made its appearance, the gift book. Such books wee invariably published toward the end of each year specifically for use as Christmas presents. Gift books soon proliferated widely. There were gift books for boys, girls, young men, mothers, temperance advocates, abolitionists, and even for members of men's organizations, such as the Masonic order and the Odd Fellows. Although ordinary book publishing was carried on everywhere, including the smallest and most unlikely hamlets, three cities were centers of gift book publishing: Boston, New York and Philadelphia. Many gift books were lavish, with gilt page edges, ornate and embossed bindings, expensive engravings and colored presentation plates bound in. They were bought solely to be given to another. As such they were the first products manufactured exclusively to be given to another person at the Christmas season.

In 1840, when the nation had not yet recovered from the financial panic of 1837, gift books were offered at prices raging from three dollars to fifteen dollars--"within the range of most persons," noted The New York Herald, which added, "There are few that would wish to give a lady a present of less value than $3.00." Gift books were aggressively promoted using techniques new to the world of traditional book publishing. Often they contained advertisements for themselves in the text itself, especially in gift books intended for children. Some publishers were not above including blatant advertising for others of their books in the current lists.

Despite their opulent appearance, gift books were not bought and presented to others as a display of conspicuous consumption. Nevertheless, the prices of such books were so widely advertised that it would be unfair to conclude that recipients were not aware of the pecuniary value of the gift. These were luxury items, but one of their chief uses was as part of the courtship process,

Ironically, although intended to be seen as personalized gifts, gift books usually included a mass-produced formalized page (called a "presentation plate") designed to be filled in by the giver. One such presentation plate not only included places for the purchaser to enter his name, the name of the recipient and a line on which to show the sentiment the gift book was meant to convey. Gift books proliferated between 1825 and 1860, when the fad died out. One book that continued to sell steadily was the Bible. If they owned no other book, most American families owned a family Bible. These were large and sturdy volumes, meant to be passed down from one generation to the next.

Early in the 19th century Bibles evolved in more convenient formats, personal books that could be carried to church services, as well as hymn books, prayer books, and editions of the New Testament. Rivaling the finest gift book, was the Illuminated Bible, published by Harper and Brothers in 1846 with an elaborate presentation plate. So successful was the Illuminated Bible that it earned the publisher a half million dollars in a dozen years.

Greeting Cards
It had long been a custom in England for neighbors to send greetings to one another as the old year ended and a new year began. Engraved or lithographed notepaper specifically for this purpose appeared at the end of the 1600s. The earliest use of the phrase "Merry Christmas and happy New Year" was employed in a 1699 holiday letter.

The first true commercial Christmas card did not make its appearance until 1843. Designed by John Calcott Horsley for Henry Cole, it was printed in London and hand colored by an artist named Mason. The Horsley-Cole card was a postcard-sized piece of cardboard with a central panel depicting a happy family gathered around a large plum pudding. This panel also greets the recipient with the sentiment, "A merry Christmas and a happy New Year to you." In the left-hand panel, a man offers food to the hungry; in the right-hand panel a woman clothes a ragged child. Unlike earlier Christmas letters, there is no room for a personal greeting on this card. At the top a dotted line following the word "To" provides space for the recipient's name to be written, and at the bottom a shorter dotted line following the word "From" allows limited space for the sender's name.

The Horsley-Cole card may be considered a forerunner of modern Christmas cards in that it leaves little room for personalization by the sender. It presages a new commercial awareness of the commercialization of Christmas and the need to recognize a wider circle of friends and family members. According to Karal Ann Marling, a professor of art history at the University of Minnesota, R.H. Pease, engraver, lithographer and variety store proprietor in Albany, N.Y., distributed the first American-made Christmas card in the early 1850s, but the practice of exchanging cards did not immediately catch on in the United States. What cards were sent were usually imported from England, manufactured by firms like Marcus Ward and Raphael Tuck.

American indifference to cards was eventually overcome by Louis Prang, a German immigrant. Born in Breslau in 1824, Prang left Germany after the 1848 revolution and established himself in Boston, setting up a lithographic business with Julius Mayer in 1856. By 1868, Prang owned perhaps half of the steam presses in America and two-thirds of the total by 1870). By then, he had significantly improved the quality of his prints by using a multicolor process he had invented, eventually switching from stone to zinc plates. Prang seldom use fewer than eight colors and often as many as twenty to produce his "chromos." These colorful but inexpensive prints soon decorated the parlor walls of most of the homes in America.

An exhibition of Prang's prints at the Vienna International Exhibition caused a sensation in 1873. The following year he added a Christmas greeting to his cards. Introducing these to the United States in 1875, Prang cards were such a hit he could not keep up with the demand. He increased his work force to 300 and was soon selling more than five million cards annually. Prang commissioned well-know American painters and illustrators to produce original works of art for his cards. Women, whose role in the fine arts had been limited, were represented in Prang prints.
Prang's cards soon sparked intense competition from British and German manufacturers. By the 1890s, German greeting cards dominated the trade. "Lower wages and cheaper materials," Prang admitted, "made it impossible to battle successfully against foreign competition." In 1890, Louis Prang withdrew from the greeting card business and turned his attention to art education and the manufacture of artists' supplies. Between 1900 and 1910, most of the major American greeting card companies were established. From the studios of Rust Craft, Hallmark, Gibson and Norcross the modern American greeting card was born. Designed as a simple folder, the card now had an illustration and short text on the front and a longer verse or message inside.

Advances in technology may be responsible for changes in holiday card usage in recent years. The estimated number of cards received by American households dropped from 29 in 1987 to 20 in 2004. Despite the increased use of e-mail, fax and telephone for communication, a staggering 1.9 billion cards were still exchanged by mail in the U.S. in 2005, according to Hallmark research.

Editor's Note: This article was originally published on December 12, 2006.

Labels: Christmas, Christmas Cards, Christmas History, Christmas Tree, F.W. Woolworth