Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [370]
It remained only to get Sancte Claus into the picture, and that was the achievement of another of Pintard’s friends, Clement Clarke Moore (still fuming over the intrusion of Ninth Avenue into his beloved country estate, Chelsea). During the winter of 1822, Moore wrote a poem for his children entitled “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” arguably the best-known verses ever written by an American. Moore’s saint was an obvious derivative of Irving’s—“a right jolly old elf” who sneaks down the chimney of a gentleman’s house in the dead of night, not to rob him but to put toys in the stockings hung up by his children. Moore had him arrive on December 24, however, a small revision that deftly shifted the focus away from Christmas Day with its still-problematic religious associations.
A friend sent “Visit” to an upstate newspaper for publication, other papers picked it up, and within a decade it was known throughout the country (though Moore didn’t acknowledge writing it until some years later). In the meantime, genteel New Yorkers embraced Moore’s homey, child-centered version of Christmas as if it they had been doing it all their lives. “A festival sacred to domestic enjoyments,” the papers called it; a time when men “make glad upon one day, the domestic hearth, the virtuous wife, the innocent, smiling merry-hearted children, and the blessed mother.” In 1831, his earlier promotion of December 6 long since forgotten, Pintard asserted that the new rituals of Christmas were of “ancient usage” and that “St. Claas is too firmly riveted in this city ever to be forgotten.” (Christmas trees reached New York in the mid-thirties, courtesy of German Brooklynites; they were popularized by Catharine Maria Sedgwick, the novelist, who wrote the first American fiction including a Christmas tree in 1835.)
PARLOR BUSINESS
Despite its prominence in the consciousness of upper-class New Yorkers, the ideal of a genteel household—quarantined from the rough-and-tumble of commerce by distance, nurturing mothers, and yuletide cheer—often collided with the day-to-day realities of household affairs. Only the very wealthiest women, for example, had enough servants to relieve them entirely of cooking, cleaning, laundering, and other menial chores. John Pintard employed an all-purpose maid, but his wife and younger daughter were responsible for sewing, tailoring, preserving food, baking, liming the basement, whitewashing fences, clearing the yard, and basic carpentry. Increasingly, moreover, even rich families were replacing lifetime African-American retainers with part-time or seasonal help, typically Irish, and the mistress of the house needed to be as adept as her husband in recruiting and managing a wage-labor force. Everyone had stories of servants who stalked out in a dispute over their duties or pay or were lured away by promises of better accommodations. When John Pintard’s “unfaithful, ungrateful” maid left without notice, he found it “vexatious in the extreme” and (as was his wont) formed an organization in 1825 to deal with the entire “problem”—the Society for the Encouragement of Faithful Domestic Servants.
Business and public affairs were no more absent from the genteel home than labor. If the back parlor remained a family sanctum, the dining room and front parlor, where children were allowed only on Sunday mornings, hosted a good deal of work-related socializing. New York gentlemen often entertained one another at home and although Mrs. Trollope deplored the exclusion of women from these male affairs as “a great defect in the society” that “certainly