Back in the 1790s, when European people were just muscling into our area in large numbers, Christmas doesn’t seem to have been a very big deal. To the extent that America had a Puritan conscience, it disdained the holiday as an unbiblical, semi-pagan Catholic superstition. (When the Puritans disliked something, they got their money’s worth out of the emotion.)
*It wasn’t until well after the Civil War that many employers in Corning started giving their workers a day off for Christmas. There’s a Hammondsport photo from around 1901, showing a full shift at the grape-packing house on December 25. A post card mailed around 1910 was postmarked in both Corning and Dundee on December 25, meaning that both offices were open and working, and someone was working to move the mail between the two communities.
*I recently had to go through the December 1872 issues of The Steuben Farmer’s Advocate, published weekly in Bath. I was researching one particular item, and so didn’t have time to really study the papers page by page, but as far as I saw, they didn’t even mention Christmas.
*Where Americans DID celebrate Christmas in the early days, it was often next thing to a riot (which is another reason that the Puritans criminalized the holiday.) In New York City gangs of youths forced their way into people’s homes, singing loudly and lewdly until bribed with enough food and drink to go on to the next house. Down south men celebrated Christmas with heavy drinking, enlivened by sneaking up on each other to shoot off firearms, with results just about as you might expect.
*Two Germans went a long way toward taming Christmas, not to mention popularizing it. Immigrant cartoonist Thomas Nast standardized the shadowy figure of Santa Claus, elaborating on his sleigh, his bag, and his vast North Pole complex, not to mention excited children and indulgent parents. (Nast’s Santa seems to rest firmly on the poem, “A Visit From Saint Nicholas.”)
*Christmas was big in Germany, and the German Prince Albert energetically brought trees and gifts and candles and other accouterments to his large brood at Buckingham Palace with the excited approval of Queen Victoria, who adored anything Albert did. Then as now London and “the royals” were style-setters in the English-speaking world, and Christmas became a fad, then a tradition.
*Nast and Albert were spreading their cheer right around the time of the American Civil War, and the new family-centered domesticated Christmas struck a chord with families sundered by the great conflict. Maryett Kelly wrote husband John in the Union army from their farm in Fremont, describing how their little son Scotty had received some candies in his stocking, along with a toy horse. John celebrated by doing absolutely nothing in camp at Savannah (which they were about to capture), and each of the men was issued a small drink of whiskey.
*By the late 1800s stores were garishly decorated and sales were abundant. In 1901 Christmas ads started running the day before Thanksgiving in the weekly Hammondsport Herald, breathlessly proclaiming how many shopping days were left. Santa Claus, one ad noted, is a common-sense old fellow, meaning that ANYTHING could be marketed as a Christmas gift – “just think of a better gift than shoes.” Or boots, or rubbers, or a cast-iron stove!
*Just before World War I Frank Burnside flew Santa Claus by biplane from Bath to Corning, where spectators lined the rooftops and crowded the landing ground in Denison Park, all courtesy of the Board of Trade. After the war, I suppose, Christmas became more the holiday that we know. Hope you enjoy it – whatever way you like!