Christmas pt. 2: Setting the Scene
In the last post I said that part 2 would be about how a few wealthy citizens of New York City invented modern Christmas. However, in writing this post, I realized that there remains too much material to be covered in one post. Thus, this post will discuss the socio-political factors which inspired these citizens to re-invent the holiday, and the third post will discuss how they actually re-invented it.
The colony of New Netherland was founded by Dutch merchants in 1609. The colony was called New Netherland, and the island of Manhattan was called New Amsterdam. In 1664, the British appropriated the colony in what was largely a peaceful takeover. They renamed the colony as New York, and renamed Manhattan as New York City.
Through the duration of the eighteenth century, the urbanized areas of New York City did not extend above the present location of Wall Street. The land above Wall Street was mostly rural, and was occupied primarily by the estates of the wealthy. However, the immigrant population of Manhattan swelled at the turn of the nineteenth century, and grew so large that the wealthy fled from the urbanized areas north to their rural estates. The poor viewed these northern areas as common land, and resented the wealthy for taking it as their own.
The government realized that the urbanized areas of Manhattan could simply not contain the population any longer, and set out to urbanize the upper areas of the island. The government used eminent domain to plow through the private estates of the wealthy in order to create the grid system which characterizes Manhattan today. This made the wealthy feel attacked, as though the poor were taking their private property away with the help of the government.
With the dearth of a middle class, and inter-class resentments at an all time high in the midst of this urban development, Christmas became a battleground. The poor would first sweep through urbanized areas, drinking, and often targeting black neighborhoods and congregations for harassment, vandalism, and violence. They would then move north to the estates of the wealthy populace, targeting them for all night noise-making, vandalism, and robbery.
Christmas in early nineteenth century Manhattan was a time of barely disguised class warfare operating under the guise of the traditional Christmas begging tradition. This confounded the rich, who increasingly wished for Christmas to be a holiday of domestic entertainment.
Before the city had grown so expansive and diverse, wealthy citizens would spend the day visiting friends and socializing. Urban growth and class resentments made it difficult for the tradition to continue into the nineteenth century. Upper class nostalgia for this tradition (combined with a fear of the poor) caused it to be thought of as an old Dutch tradition, dying out as the population changed.
Using this nostalgic recreation of a pseudo-Dutch heritage, and the lack of proper domestic entertainments for the holiday season, three men would, in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, wrest Christmas from the hands of the poor, and shape the holiday into what present day Americans think of when they hear the word “Christmas.”
These three men were John Pintard, Washington Irving, and Clemence Clarke Moore; all of them members of the pre-Revolutionary British aristocracy; all of them politically conservative identifiers with Tory politics; all of them opposed to democracy; all of them threatened by the rapid urbanization of Manhattan; and all of them keen to bring Christmas back to the wealthy. And through the use of newspapers, storytelling, poetry, and the Dutch heritage of New York, they would.
Part 1 may be found here.
