Gothamtide: Christmas words and images in nineteenth-century New York

Magazine Antiques, Dec, 2002 by Sibyl McCormac Groff

One of the earliest known Christmas books for children in the United States was The Children's Friend: A New-Year's Present, to the Little Ones from Five to Twelve, published in New York City in 1821. This charming book consists of eight verses, each accompanied by hand-colored lithographs, one of which introduced the notion of reindeer pulling the sleigh on a snowy eve (PL III).

Christmas charity has been a long-standing tradition in New York City, as documented in the New York Tribune on December 26, 1882: "Nowhere in Christendom are the poor remembered at Christmastide so generously as they are in American cities, especially our own." (26) One of the most respected social reformers who promoted Christmas charity was Jacob A. Riis, a Danish immigrant who sought to draw attention to and ameliorate the deplorable living conditions in the slums of New York City through his documentary photographs and writings. (27) In his book Nibsy's Christmas of 1893 (Pl. IV), Riis graphically depicted the spirit of Christmas amongst the struggles in the Lower East Side tenements, where Nibsy and other young news carriers used their hard-earned money to buy presents for their families and friends. Other Christmas stories by Riis include "Is There a Santa Claus?," first published in the Ladies' Home Journal in December 1903, (28) which documents Riis's Christmas visit to the White House to see his fel low social reformer President Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919), who had shut down the newsboys' dreadful lodgings in New York City after Riis had showed them to him in 1895 and 1897. The story is the source of the familiar phrase, "Santa Claus is the spirit of Christmas." (29) Another of Riis's articles, which appeared in Outlook on July 6, 1907, described the Christmas seal program in his native Denmark, which supported tuberculosis research and brought about the introduction in 1907 of the similar long-standing program here. (30) Riis also helped put up one of the earliest civic Christmas trees in New York City's Madison Square Park (between Madison and Fifth Avenues and Twenty-third and Twenty-sixth Streets) in 1912. (31)

Some of the best records of the evolution of Christmas rituals and customs are contemporary magazines and newspapers. Their subjects included family customs and events, recipes, gifts, holiday stories, decorations and greenery, department store displays, the nativity, and charity. Publications such as Harper's Weekly illustrated Christmas day as "the home festival" and New Year's day as "the away from-home holiday" (32) They were filled with advertisements for such events as ladies' holiday fairs, or "home charity bazaars for the friendless," as they were called in the New York Daily Tribune beginning in the 1850s. Numerous holiday shows--at Barnum's American Museum, Griffin and Christy's Minstrels Opera House, and Niblo Gardens, for example--were also advertised, (33) along with Christmas night balls, operas, and choral concerts. Because presents were given at New Year's until the latter part of the century, advertisements for "holiday" gifts ran in both the late December and early January issues. Frequently advertised gifts included toys, pens, and jewelry, but most common were books, sometimes with lavish illustrations (also called "tokens" or "annuals"), for both adults and children. In a December 23, 1859, advertisement in the New York Daily Tribune, books were identified as the "most appropriate and highly cherished" holiday presents, followed by "dry goods, pictorial, stereoptics, stationery and confectionary." (34) However, handmade gifts were also desirable (especially earlier in the century when store-bought gifts were less available). In 1889 Good Housekeeping gave instructions for making "doilies, fancy bags, and drawer bags," all of which were "ornamental, practical and serviceable." (35)