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

Magazine Antiques, Dec, 2002 by Sibyl McCormac Groff

(6.) Ibid., pp. 226-227.

(7.) Lydia Maria Francis Child, Letters from New York (London, 1843), p. 84.

(8.) Quoted in Bayard Still, Mirror for Gotham (New York University Press, New York, 1956), p. 92.

(9.) While the book, written by Barent Vanderlyn and published by Staats and Fonda in Albany, New York, cannot be located, it was reviewed in volume one of the Knickerbacker; or, New-York Monthly Magazine (later called Knickerbocker) (1833). The calling tradition was primarily celebrated in Albany and New York City, which were the two most populous Dutch settlements.

(10.) The letter was intended to be inserted as a broadside into the New York Joumal of December24, 1772, but never was. A copy of the letter is on microfilm at the New-York Historical Society in New York City.

(11.) Child, Letters from New York, p. 83.

(12.) John Flavel Mines, A Tour Around New York and My Summer Acre: Being the Recreatious of Mr. Felix Oldboy (New York, 1893), p. 111.

(13.) "Christmas Past," Harper's New Monthly Magazine, vol. 70 (December 1884); cited in Penne L. Restad, Christmas in America: A History (Oxford University Press, New York; 1995), p. 105.

(14.) Saint Nicholas, a fourth-century bishop of Myra in Asia Minor, was known for his good deeds and generosity to children, mariners, and the less fortunate. Many churches are named after him, and he is the patron saint of Russia and Greece, among other places.

(15.) The New-York Historical Society carries on the tradition by hosting festivities on Saint Nicholas day.

(16.) An annual dinner of the Saint Nicholas Society of New York depicted by Edwin Austin Abbey (1852-1911) was illustrated in Harper's Weekly, vol. 21 (December 29, 1877), p. 1032.

(17.) The more familiar title of the poem, "The Night Before Christmas," was first used in 1851 as a subtitle, according to Nancy H. Marshall, The Night Before Christmas: A Descriptive Bibliography of Clement Clarke Moore's Immortal Poem (Oak Knoll Press, New Castle, Delaware, 2002).

(18.) See The New-York Book of Poetry, comp. Charles Fenno Hoffman (New York, 1837), p. 219; and Clement C. Moore, Poems, by Clement C. Moore (New York, 1844), p. 126.

(19.) The Livingston family and scholars of the Hudson River valley have long debated the authorship of the poem. Clara Brandt, in An American Aristocracy: The Livingstons (Doubleday, Garden City, New York, 1986), p. 169, writes that "Livingston had acquired a reputation for literary light-mindedness...Mr. Moore's turgid and stilted style clearly was not as close as Major Livingston's to the style of the contested opus." Moreover, the noted Vassar College scholar Don Foster, who analyzed its construction by comparing the poem to other writings, also concluded that Livingston is the author. See Donald W. Foster, Author Unknown: On the Trod of Anonymous (Henry Holt, New York, 2000), pp. 226-281.

(20.) Stephen Nissenbaum, The Bottle for Christmas (Vintage Books, New York, 1997), pp. 78-79.

(21.) Alston's Tonsorial Saloon, Our Christmas Box (Brooklyn, New York, 1873). A copy is in the broadside collection of the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts.