Season's Greetings

Normally, this would be the blog post where I recount all the great things that have happened in CASL over the past year (and there have been many). But instead, I was inspired by something that I heard over the weekend to put my historian hat on and to talk briefly about something altogether different. While out running some errands recently I happened to overhear a mother talking to her daughter. The mother and daughter were dressed for the holiday season and as they shopped, they were taking turns reciting the lines from Clement Clark Moore’s famous poem, “The Night Before Christmas.” I am certain that most everyone is familiar with this most famous of American poems; “’Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house…” What most are not familiar with, however, is the historical context in which the poem originated or how it was a first, and very powerful, step in the taming of the Christmas season. The poem (originally called “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” was first seen in 1823 and is believed by many to have been written by Clement Clark Moore. Moore, a New York City patrician, was the scion of a wealthy and well-connected family. He made his money in real estate (he sold a portion of the estate that he inherited and developed it into what is today the Chelsea district of New York City) but also held a post as Professor of Ancient Languages at the General Theological Seminary (which his money helped to found). Moore and his elite friends found themselves jostling uneasily with a burgeoning and disorderly (and not infrequently drunken) urban democracy in America at large but profoundly noticeable in New York City especially (the city’s population doubled between 1810 and 1830, jumping to nearly 250,000). That an increasingly large portion of these city dwellers were poor and that many were also of foreign birth who brought with them strange religious beliefs and cultural practices, made matters all the worse in the minds of people like Moore. The potential for unruly behavior (and thus threats to the social order) were increasingly a part of daily life in New York. At no time was this more pronounced than during the Christmas season as it was customary in many of the European countries where these new arrivals originated for the holiday to be marked by misrule, the upheaval of class norms, and aggressive begging (the traditions of wassailers and the wren boys offering two such examples). This begging often took a threatening tone that sometimes went as far as breaking and entering and the trashing of the homes of the well-to-do. Uneasy with the chaotic and less than deferential tumult of the Christmas season, Moore determined to “tame” the holiday through prose. Moore’s St. Nicholas, like his working-class compatriots in New York City, also breaks into houses. But whereas the members of the mob demanded tribute and destroyed property, St. Nick is, “a right jolly old elf” and instead leaves gifts. As Moore writes, “A wink of his eye and a twist of his head soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread.” The middle-class imagery in Moore’s poem is both obvious and abundant: the nuclear family; the tidy and warm dwelling; the lawn; the single-family house. The contrast to the world that was increasing encroaching on his Chelsea estate (a world of crowded, drafty, run-down boarding houses with rooms occupied by multiple, often sick and always very poor families) could not have been sharper. Moore’s work was but an opening salvo in the effort to domesticate Christmas, but its impact was both immediate and long lasting, to the point where its familiar refrain is now deeply embedded in our culture and in the hearts and minds of many as they celebrate what we now know as perhaps the most family-oriented (and most domestic) holiday of all. So, like Moore’s St. Nicholas, as I approach the end of this brief history lesson, and ere I drive out of sight let me say “Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night.”