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By Root 7347 0

bare-knuckled free-for-all that raged downtown, for according to the conventional wisdom, proclaimed over and over again in the pulpit and in the press, nature designed the female of the species to be pacific, nurturing, and cooperative. Her proper sphere was the Home, and her duty— essentially a refinement of the ideal of republican motherhood—was to make the Home a haven for her weary husband and a nest where she imbued her children with Christian love and humility. A genteel household was thus the very antithesis of the marketplace yet indispensable to it, a place where men returned at the end of the day to be refreshed for battle the next and where the young acquired the moral armor they would need as adults.

THE DOMESTICATION OF CHRISTMAS

Wealthy New Yorkers didn’t invent this new cult of domesticity, which was a characteristic of emerging bourgeois culture throughout the Atlantic world. They did, however, give it Christmas—a holiday that became synonymous with genteel family life and a quintessential expression of its central values.

For 150-odd years, probably since the English conquest, the favorite winter holiday of the city’s propertied classes was New Year’s Day (as distinct from the night before, which was an occasion for revelry and mischief among common folk). Families exchanged small gifts, and gentlemen went around the town to call on friends and relations, nibbling cookies and drinking raspberry brandy served by the women of the house. Sadly, according to John Pintard, the city’s physical expansion after 1800 rendered this “joyous older fashion” so impractical that it was rapidly dying out.

As an alternative Pintard proposed St. Nicholas Day, December 6, as a family-oriented winter holiday for polite society. In Knickerbocker’s History, Pintard’s good friend Washington Irving had identified Nicholas as the patron saint of New Amsterdam, describing him as a jolly old Dutchman, nicknamed Sancte Claus, who parked his wagon on rooftops and slid down chimneys with gifts for sleeping children on his feast day. It was Salmagundi-style fun, of course: although seventeenth-century Netherlanders had celebrated St. Nicholas Day, the earliest evidence of anyone doing so on Manhattan dates from 1773, when a group of “descendents of the ancient Dutch families” celebrated the sixth of December “with great joy and festivity.” Certainly nothing remotely like the Sancte Claus portrayed by Irving had ever been known on either side of the Atlantic.

Mere details were no obstacle to Pintard. On December 6, 1810—one year to the day after the publication of Irving’s History— he launched his revival of St. Nicholas Day with a grand banquet at City Hall for members of the New-York Historical Society. Their first toast was to “Sancte Claus, goed heylig man!” and Pintard distributed a specially engraved picture that showed Nicholas with two children (one good, one bad) and two stockings hung by a hearth (one full, one empty)—the point being that December 6 was a kind of Judgment Day for the young, with the saint distributing rewards and punishments as required. St. Nicholas Day never quite won the support Pintard wanted, and he eventually ran out of enthusiasm for the project. Sancte Claus, on the other hand, took off like a rocket. Only a few years later, in a book for juveniles entitled False Stories Corrected, he was already under attack as “Old Santaclaw, of whom so often little children hear such foolish stories.”

Other New Yorkers of Pintard’s ilk were meanwhile taking a second look at Christmas as a substitute for New Year’s Day. Since the Reformation, Protestants had dismissed Christmas as another artifact of Catholic ignorance and deception: not only was the New Testament silent on the date of Christ’s birth, they noted, but the Church had picked December 25 to coincide with the beginning of the winter solstice, an event traditionally associated with wild plebeian bacchanals and challenges to authority. Wellbred New Yorkers in the early nineteenth century weren’t so vehemently opposed to Christmas as Petrus Stuyvesant