Entries tagged with “holidays” from Patell and Waterman's History of New York

We're pleased to join with a group of other NYC blogs in a collaboratively produced 2009 holiday guide. See the bottom of this entry for links to participating sites.

How about putting a little history in your holiday basket? Stephen Nissenbaum's The Battle for Christmas is a perennial favorite around these parts.

Nissenbaum, in a highly entertaining narrative, shows not only that the American version of the holiday has been commercial from the start (the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade was a late arrival on that front), but also that it's what you'd call an "invented tradition." All the bits about Dutch origins were part of an effort among nineteenth-century New York gentry -- the self-anointed Knickerbocker set -- to create a colonial cultural heritage for themselves by establishing the social preeminence of their Dutch lineage, real or imagined. A byproduct: Santa Claus was able to sidestep an earlier Puritan bias against celebrating Christmas in the American colonies. Cyrus has summarized Nissenbaum's argument here before, but Santa Claus was smuggled into New York by the group of patricians also responsible for the New-York Historical Society (especially John PIntard) and writer-friends such as Washington Irving and Clement Clarke Moore.

Irving doesn't need so much introduction, but many readers may not have heard of Moore, or if they have they know him only for his poem "A Visit from St. Nicolas," more familiarly known by its first line: "Twas the night before Christmas." But Moore left his imprint all over the city, especially in Chelsea, the neighborhood named after his family estate. (His father was both the president of Columbia College and New York's Protestant Episcopal Bishop; his grandfather, a British officer, had purchased farmland in Chelsea in the 1750s, but the Moores had owned land in Queens since the 1650s.) After graduating Columbia as valedictorian in 1798, Moore dabbled in belles lettres and anti-Jeffersonian pamphleteering, compiled a two-volume English-Hebrew lexicon, and donated the land for the General Theological Seminary, where he was a professor of classical languages for three decades. (The seminary still stands, filling the entire block from Ninth to Tenth Avenues between West 20th and 21st Streets.)

Nissenbaum's The Battle for Christmas is especially good on making Moore's famous "A Visit from St. Nicolas," written in 1822, come alive in new ways. Ever wonder why the poem's narrator was so quick to spring from his bed to see what was the matter (rhymes with "clatter")? He probably thought a house-break was in progress. Christmas in early nineteenth-century New York, Nissenbaum suggests, had started to take on some of the elements of English seasonal misrule. But what had traditionally served as an escape valve -- allowing laborers to let off some steam but ultimately keeping social order in check -- was turning increasingly violent as a new industrial order demanded more of workers without giving much back. The mobs of working-class carolers who had traditionally demanded that rich folk bring them some figgy pudding -- insisting that they wouldn't leave until they get some -- were evolving into "Callithumpian bands" parading in the street making noise and committing acts of petty larceny. (One contemporary described these roving bands as made up of "Negroes, servants, boys, and other disorderly persons.")

I won't give much more away, but Nissenbaum argues that the significance of Moore's poem was to silence a little of that seasonal clatter, tame it to protect polite audiences. Santa Claus is a housebreaker, sure, but he's bringing gifts for the kiddies. The "patron-client exchange" that had defined seasonal misrule ("We won't go until we get some!") shifted to a parent-child exchange that made Christmas a domestic holiday rivaled only by the invented tradition of American Thanksgiving, taking shape around the same time. Moore's poem helped make Christmas "a practical simple ritual that almost any household could perform." The upshot: we have nineteenth-century New Yorkers, not seventeenth-century New Amsterdammers or their Old World parents, to thank for the cult of St. Nick and for Christmas trees. (Speaking of Christmas trees ...)

How to thank Mr. Moore? You might, like Cyrus's family, make his poem part of your own holiday ritual. (He recommends the pop-up edition by Robert Sabuda.) Or try one of these annual Moore Advent events:

Chelsea Community Church (346 W. 20th St.) holds an annual candlelight service and reading of Moore's poem. This year's event happens on December 13 at 6 pm. According to the NYC Parks & Rec website, at the nearby Clement Clarke Moore Park (W 22nd St. at 10th Ave.), neighborhood folk gather on the Sunday before Christmas for a reading of his poem. A similar event takes place uptown, in Washington Heights, at the Church of the Intercession (155th St. and Broadway), where people gather for carols, a reading of Moore's poem, and a candlelight march to Moore's grave site, in the Trinity Cemetery on 155th Street. This celebration has apparently been going on since 1911; this year it takes place December 20 at 4 pm.

A few other historically oriented seasonal suggestions:

If you'd like to seek out a patrician New York Christmas that predates Moore's poem (and hence is decidedly not Santa-centered), check the seasonal calendar for the eighteenth-century Van Cortlandt House Museum in the Bronx.

Jewish historians of Christmas, Episcopalian compilers of Hebrew lexicons, and Tin Pan Alley's Jewish Christmas Broadway musicals notwithstanding, maybe Christmas just isn't your thing? Then you probably already know the traditional alternative for December 25 is dim sum. We're not exactly sure when this practice started, but the big decision, these days, is whether to go with Jing Fong or Golden Unicorn. When you're finished eating, work off some calories on Big Onion's 19th Annual Dec. 25 walking tour of the old Jewish Lower East Side.

George Balanchine's Nutcracker has been a tradition in New York City since 1954. The very thought may make you yawn. If so, did you know that Uptown Dance Academy has been performing Black Nutcracker since 1995? Catch it at the Apollo Theater on December 22nd; proceeds go toward a new studio for the kids.

If you'd like to revive a non-commercial historic NYC holiday tradition, try "calling on" (visiting) as many friends as possible on New Year's Day. You'll need to bring the equivalent of a photographic calling card to leave behind. I suppose you could do something like this on Facebook, but we're fans of the slow media version that requires actual travel from house to house. We wrote about it last holiday season, as did our friend Esther at Ephemeral New York.
   
A final suggestion for those who'd prefer to bring a little misrule back to your yule: you might consider joining in the annual Parade of Santas in Santacon NYC 2009, on December 12. Be warned: though some participants will be decked out in period costumes, you may also encounter pub crawlers with puke in their beards. (Putting the ho back in ho! ho! ho! since 1994. A little Santacon history here.) We suggest it in the spirit of the nineteenth-century Callithumpian bands, mentioned above. 

Discover lots more in the 2009 "NYC Bloggers Do the Holidays" Guide:

Brooklyn Based: Home for the Holidays
Give and Get: Tis The Season to Volunteer
the improvised life: unwrapping the holidays
Manhattan User's Guide: The Gift Guide
Mommy Poppins: Offbeat and Multicultural Family Holiday Events
NY Barfly: It's the Holidays, Time to Drink
NewYorkology: Big-ticket holiday shows: Nutcracker, Rockettes, Wintuk
offManhattan: Ten Holiday Getaways Near NYC
the skint: 30 days of skintmas - a cheap (or free!) holidays-in-nyc-treat for every day of the season
The Strong Buzz: Holiday Eats Old and New
WFMU's Beware of the Blog: Happy Freakin' Holidays Playlist
Walking Off the Big Apple: The Thin Man Walk: A New York Holiday Adventure with Nick and Nora Charles

If you write a NYC-oriented blog and would like to contribute to a future group post, please let us know!

I've long used this clip of party-goers in the Hamptons, 1987, to make me feel better about being in town on Labor Day. What a clip! Pick your favorite character:

 

Same party, two decades (and one year) later. A hundred years from now, which one will be more obnoxious?

Ephemeral New York posted a few days ago about the lost tradition of New Year's Day "calling," which involved the city's gentlemen making the rounds and the ladies receiving them. The tradition was particularly popular in the late nineteenth century. Included in ENY's post, which mourns the passing of the tradition (which subsided over a century ago), is an earlier lamentation from the Times in January 1888. Seems the young gentlemen just weren't what they used to be:

Some of the 'old boys,' however, could be seen yesterday in their spotless kid gloves and shiny ties making the rounds as solemnly as they did 30, 40, or 50 years ago . . . . In none of the brownstone districts yesterday were the familiar sights of other New Year's Days to be encountered . . . . Not even the acknowledgment of a basket for cards was shown either on Fifth or Madison avenue of the cross streets.

The "cards" mentioned here would be cartes-de-visite, small calling card-sized photos you wouldn't necessarily have used for everyday business but certainly would have pulled out to make the rounds of a New Year's Day. Even ordinary people had them made; they are quite common in archival collections related to the late nineteenth century and are quite fun to handle. Many people created elaborate frames or scrapbooks for them, like schooldays photo albums for grownups (though many parents had cards made for their children as well).

The American Antiquarian Society, which owns over 5,000 such cards, dates the height of the fad to the 1860s, which coincides, of course, with the Civil War. And so you'll find lots of photos of soldiers and officers off to battle among cartes-de-visite collections.

According to the City Gallery page on the topic,

By 1862, the fashion of "having one's likeness photographed upon his visiting card," according to Scientific American, had been modified into the custom of distributing dozens of small portraits among friends. Every young lady expected to receive photographs from a relative, a love interest or friend and then with the aggressiveness of a "lady beggar" as Vanity Fair put it, she besieges all of her acquaintances for personal photographs in order to form her collection. Cartes de visite were often autographed with a signature at the bottom of the card just below the image for handing out to guests by a variety of prominent persons such as politicians, reverends, actors and dancers.

What to do with all the cards you might receive on New Year's Day? The St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls in 1877, in an article about homemade holiday gift ideas, we find these instructions for thrifty youngsters on how to make a receiver for cartes-de-visite, with accompanying illustration:

"For this you must procure from the tin-man a strip of tin three times as long as it is wide--say six inches by eighteen--with each end shaped to a point, as indicated in the picture. Measure off two bits of card-board of exactly the same size and shape; cover one with silk or muslin for a back, and the other with Java canvas, cloth, or velvet, embroidered with a monogram in the upper point, and a little pattern or motto in the lower. Lay the double coverings one on each side of the tin, and cross the outside one with narrow ribbons, arranged as in the picture. Overhand firmly all around; finish the top with a plaited ribbon and a little bow and loop to hang it by, and the bottom with a bullion fringe of the color of the ribbon."

If Ephemeral New York's wish is granted and the old tradition of calling returns, maybe shutterfly or flickr could come up with a handy equivalent of the carte de visite form.

I'm setting about making a white bean and ham soup, with leftovers from yesterday's Christmas dinner.

This year's ham came, I'm afraid to confess, from Whole Foods on the Bowery, a store with which I have an increasingly conflicted relationship (meaning I use it more than I should). The little pig was was tasty enough -- I glazed it with brown sugar, dijon mustard, and fig preserves -- and I'm sure the remains will make for a lovely soup. But I did feel a little guilty about the Whole Foods thing. While I was throwing about online for ideas about preparing what I'd bought, I made the realization (via this piece from the Times a couple years back) that I should have made my purchase at the East Village Meat Market or another local butcher. Oh, well. Next year. Or maybe I'll actually go for the traditional goose.



For more on how ham became a favored American food, see this recent piece by the cultural historian and literary critic David Shields.

And what was on your holiday table?

Last night's bedtime story was our annual reading of Clement Clarke Moore's poem "A Visit from St. Nicholas." Our favorite edition these days is the wonderful pop-up version created by Robert Sabuda and titled The Night Before Christmas Pop-up.


Afterward, I thought about updating the verses ...

'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;
The stockings were laid on the table with care,
In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there;
The children were nestled all snug in their beds,
While visions of Bakugan rolled in their heads;
And my wife with her laptop, and I with a pen,
Were settling in for the finale of Mad Men  . . .

My older son is just on the verge of no longer believing in Santa. He tells me that more than half his classmates think "it's just your parents." By an act of sheer willpower, he's chosen to believe for another year.

St. Nicholas wasn't always associated with Christmas. In fact, he was brought to America by John Pintard, who had founded the New-York Historical Society in 1804. Pintard sought to make St. Nicholas the patron saint of New York City and the symbol of the Historical Society, which voted in 1809 to name the saint -- in Dutch, Sancte Claus -- the patron of New Amsterdam, retroactively.

The transformation of St. Nicholas into Santa Claus was helped along by Washington Irving, who published his comic Knickerbocker's History of New York -- in part a response to the Historical Society's call for archival information  -- on St. Nicholas' Day in 1809. The book contained numerous references to St. Nicholas, depicted as Dutch burgher, a trickster with pipe. St. Nicholas' Day was traditionally celebrated on December 6.

The following year the Society sponsored the publication of a broadside (funded by Pintard) that featured a bilingual (Dutch/English) poem that began: "Sancte Claus goed heylig man" ("Saint Nicholas good holy man"). It was accompanied by an illustration that showed Santa Claus bringing gifts to children on St. Nicholas' Day.


It was, however, Moore's poem, published in 1823, that completed the transformation of St. Nicholas into the jolly red-suited figure who brings gifts on Christmas Eve. Moore was a friend of Pintard's and an arch-conservative who opposed the abolition of slavery. In the annals of American poetry, Moore was a one-hit wonder, but like Ernest Lawrence Thayer with "Casey at the Bat," the one poem is a classic of American popular culture.

The best history of the transformation of St. Nicholas and the American celebration of Christmas is Stephen Nissenbaum's The Battle for Christmas: A Social and Cultural History of Christmas that Shows How It Was Transformed from an Unruly Carnival Season into the Quintessential American Family Holiday (1996). You can also find information online at the St. Nicholas Center: see, in particular, their page on "St. Nicholas and the Origin of Santa Claus."

And yes, Santa did come to our house this year, and he did bring Bakugan. And Lego sets. Ho, ho, ho!

Broadcast in December 1948, and starring the same actors as the film from the previous year, a Lux Radio Theatre radio play of Miracle on 34th Street, in seven parts. Part the first:

One of my favorite moments in Ric Burns's New York: A Documentary Film comes near the end of the episode on the fight over Robert Moses's proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway, which would have cut a huge swath through the old Cast Iron District (now known as SoHo) in order to build an elevated, supposedly high-speed freeway that would have connected the bridges on the East side to the tunnels on the West.



The plan was opposed vigorously during a six-hour knock-down-drag-out fight at City Hall in early December 1962, during which Assemblyman Louis DeSalvio famously called Robert Moses a "cantankerous, stubborn old man" and said the time had come for him to release his grip on the city's development. (The plan was on-again-off-again for almost another decade.) Burns follows the announcement of the proposal's defeat with some news footage in which an older downtown resident, looking a bit of the gentleman bum with hat in hand, New York accent thick as lower Manhattan fog, says something like: "This'll be the best Christmas present the people on Broome Street ever had!"

I think of that old fellow quite often when I walk through my neighborhood -- most of which used to be part of a more sprawling Little Italy. The building I live in on Broome Street, along with the rest of the buildings on the north side of the street for several blocks, would have been razed to complete Moses's moronic shrine to the automobile. I wonder if that old man lived to the end of the decade, when the completion of Southbridge Towers down by the seaport -- built on 16 acres of demolished waterfront warehouses and tenements -- led to a mass exodus from Little Italy. Or did he hang out up here? Are his kids still in the neighborhood, or did they move to larger spaces way out in Brooklyn?

A few old timers still inhabit our neighborhood. You see them around some of the restaurants and bars, which, truth be told, we pretty much avoid. You see some older ladies in the grocery store or on occasion hanging out a fourth-floor window watching the supermodels walking dogs and shoppers consult guidebooks on the streets below. I see one older resident on occasion when I bike my daughter to school. She scowls at us and clutches her little dog close if I pop the bike on the sidewalk to avoid traffic, exactly the sort of thing old ladies in neighborhoods should do in response to obnoxious newcomers.

As annoying as festival season can be in Little Italy, what with all the sloughed off oil and puke in the gutters come morning, I love the street decorations and the Christmas music rising from loudspeakers on the corner or, better yet, from an occasional strolling brass ensemble. This is one moment in the season, too, when you can tell where the old timers actually live: they tend to decorate their fire escapes early in December, lights and fake pine garlands wrapping cast iron bars and ringing windows, giant cardboard candy canes wired firmly in place.

The intrepid writermama, who's much better than I am about carrying a camera to catch candid shots of Lower East Side life -- evidence of magic that still remains in crevices and corners -- took this shot of a tenement on Mott Street, below Houston, my favorite set of holiday decorations this season. (At least I'm pretty sure that's the building she's caught here! If not, there's one a lot like it.) I'd like to think these lights have gone up like this as long as anyone can remember.



What do the old timers do in your neighborhood this season?

Photo of Empire State Building from Little Italy via Wired New York. 

Well, the 2008 Santacon is already two hours underway, but you may be able to catch up with the crowd. They shouldn't be hard to spot. This year's red-and-white inebriated spectacle began at 10 am on 33rd St. between 6th and 7th and will rove around that part of town most of the afternoon. You must be fully costumed to participate.

I first witnessed Santacon several years ago by accident. We had a nice view of the Brooklyn Bridge from our old apartment down by the seaport and one morning I woke up to see hundreds of Santas -- every size, shape, color, gender, and national origin -- parading across the bridge. A sight I won't soon forget.

If you're not quite up to that level of revelry, try a quieter drinking experience and buy some locally handmade gifts and treats while you're at it. The 4th annual DBA neighborhood craft fair takes place at the cozy East Village bar DBA, First Avenue between 2nd and 3rd streets, Saturday afternoons in December from 3 pm to 7 pm. (Next week is the last chance!)

The DBA Urban Folk Arts & Crafts Fair has been central to our family's holiday experience since the fair's inception. Its key organizer and sometime DBA bartender -- Sacha, aka Stiggly's Holistics -- is one of our oldest friends in the city. She sells her handmade balms, pottery, and holiday puddings. My daughters, each year, have come up with some money-making enterprise or another: their famous sock monkeys (featured in the ad above) tend to sell quickly. Molly makes killer chocolate chip cookies and brownies from scratch and next week will sell a fall's worth of her own pottery. Anna, who once won our family a four-night, four-star trip to Monaco using only colored pencils, will take orders for custom portraits on greeting cards or for framing. She's raising money this year for an exchange trip to Paris in the spring.

So if you're inclined to kick back, drink a pint, listen to good music (I control the iPod dock!), and support local artisans, drop by and say hello!      

Several years ago at a friend's house in DC, we kicked off an annual habit of martinis and oysters before the big Thanksgiving meal. He and I shucked them ourselves -- my first time to wield an oyster knife -- and in spite of the fact that said friend sliced the side of his hand open that afternoon, we've repeated the habit every year since.

This year, for a much smaller dinner party, I ordered three dozen oysters from Wild Edibles: a dozen each of Wellfleets, Piper Coves, and Kumomotos (the former being hard to tell from one another, I thought, and the latter being almost a desert oyster -- a tiny little pocket of oystery goodness -- and a surefire crowd pleaser). The majority martini: a Plymouth Gibson.

Maybe it was the fact that we lived at the seaport when we first moved to New York, or maybe it was hanging out with a group of friends who occasionally got hankerings, around 2 a.m., to catch a cab up to Blue Ribbon in SoHo before they closed at 4. (Okay, we only did that once. More frequently we've stopped in at Shaffer City or, in our new neighborhood, Ed's Lobster Bar, which has the best lobster roll in the city, hands down.) Maybe it was reading Joseph Mitchell essays about the seafood-fueled adventures of Old Mr. Flood one too many times, but we've made it a habit to acquaint ourselves with local and imported varieties, differences of East vs. West Coast, and to order them in other parts of the world: Amsterdam, the south of France, or imported from New Zealand when we're in California. We've often lamented the days when New York's own oyster beds ruled the local roost.

In spite of having read and even taught sections of Mark Kurlansky's The Big Oyster -- his entertaining and informative history of New York City from the bi-valve's perspective -- I didn't realize that our current Thanksgiving tradition was merely resuming a long-standing tradition in New York and New England. Especially during the heyday of New York's oyster production (during the late 19th and early 20th centuries the city's waters produced around 700 million oysters a year) East Coast cookbooks unanimously and prominently featured oysters on the T-day menu.

Take this example from a turn-of-the-century cookbook, for instance:

Thanksgiving Dinner.

Like Christmas, Thanskgiving has its own bill of fare which has not been varied for many generations. Roasted turkey, pumpkin, mince and apple custard pies are served in almost all parts of the United States. A heavy breakfast, with chicken pie, and a late dinner are common rules. If shell-fish are in good condition, serve oysters on the half-shell or oyster cocktails as first course; if not, serve a clear soup. The turkey may be stuffed with oysters, or oyster sauce may be used in place of giblet sauce, or scalloped oysters may be served as a side dish. Oysters seem to be a part of the Thanksgiving dinner. Pumpkins, corn, nuts, fruits and bitter-sweet are the choice decorations.

Oysters on the Half-shell
Consomme a la Royal
Celery, Olives
Roasted Turkey, Oyster Sauce
Cranberry Jelly
Potato Croquettes, Cauliflower
Chicken Pie, Scalloped Oysters
Lettuce and Apple Salad, Water Thins
Toasted Crackers, Cheese
Coffee.

The food history timeline from which I took this menu first associates oysters with the Thanksgiving meal in 1620s, though the trend seems to have taken a real upswing in the Gilded Age and endured -- at least in the cookbooks sampled -- until around WWII. What happened then? They probably became too much of a luxury, I suppose, and in the city, the local beds were long since polluted and harvested into depletion.

At the moment, the reseeded beds in New York's harbor are good for cleaning up the water only: we probably won't see these beds yield edible oysters in our lifetimes. But as for me and my house, we're doing our part to bring the oyster back to its traditional place on the Thanksgiving menu, even if it means expending a little fuel to get them there. 

This photo, if the folks at Swapatorium are right and it was taken in 1932,  shows Felix the Cat at the ninth annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. Felix, the first of the Goodyear-designed oversized balloons that helped make the parade famous, had debuted in 1927. In early years, the balloons were released at the parade's end and the lucky souls who found them deflated days later could bring them to the department store to exchange for a gift.

For more on the parade's history, including more of the Swapatorium photos (which were discovered at an estate sale in Texas a couple years ago), check out the Bowery Boys' Thanksgiving podcast from last year. A bevy of other links on the parade's history (including sneak peaks at 2008 balloons) can be found here. Info and advice on viewing this year's parade here.

The city's Department of Parks and Recreation has several family programs planned for the weekend, some of which will be historically oriented.

For more T-day history flashbacks, check out this clip of the 1984 parade, featuring Tim Conway pimping Cabbage Patch Kids, which had stormed the holiday markets the previous year and would bring in something like $2,000,000  in '84 alone. Warning: this clip may scare small children. Or their parents.



Final tidbit: Did you know New York was the first state to make Thanksgiving an annual holiday? Happened in 1817. Take that, New England! More on T-day general history via the History Channel.