The Battle for Christmas (23 page)

Newsboys may have been a new phenomenon in the late 1830s, but they fit a social and demographic profile that had long been associated with rituals of Christmas misrule: They were poor and youthful males. So it is no wonder that they took to acting up with particular intensity during the holiday season. This was as true in Philadelphia as it was in New York. An 1844 advertisement for one Philadelphia theatrical production ended with a notice assuring other prospective theatergoers that “[efficient Police have been engaged to preserve order; boys will be prevented from congregating in front….”
⁷⁰
Just a year earlier, in 1843, the Christmas-evening theatrical scene suggests the reason:

To put all this in context, consider the program presented at two theaters on that occasion. The matinee performance at the National Theater opened with a drama, “George Barnwell,” continued with a blackface show, the “Original Virginia Minstrels,” and ended with another drama,
“King of the Mist.” The Arch Street Theater matinee opened with “Hunter of the Alps,” continued with “a Comic Song,” and concluded with “the Colored Music Festival, by the Virginia Minstrels.”The evening show at that same theater opened with a drama, followed once again by the Virginia Minstrels, and concluded with “a new Pantomime, entitled ‘Sante Claus’—Old Krisskingle [played by] Mr. Winans.”

Old Krisskingle
. By 1843 this figure had become the lead character of a Christmas pantomime performed in concert with a minstrel show. (This would not be the only occasion on which Santa Claus converged with blackface minstrelsy. In about 1840 a collection of minstrel songs was printed in New York under the authorship “by Santaclaus.” And remember, too, the Belsnickles who went wassailing in blackface in areas of Pennsylvania.) Two years later Kriss Kringle would once again appear at the theater, this time in front of the lights, in the form of a costumed actor distributing gifts to the children who attended the show: “
KRISS KRINGLE
will deliver Presents of Toys, &c. to all his Juvenile Visiters [sic]….
KRISS KRINGLE
will positively appear, in propriae personae, and present Toys, Sweetmeats and Fruits to the juvenile visitors….”
⁷²

By this time Kriss Kringle was a ubiquitous presence in Philadelphia, and several places were announcing themselves as his “headquarters.” One of these places advertised that “‘K
RISS
K
RINGLE
’ has determined to make the Assembly Building his Head Quarters over the Holidays….” He would be appearing there with a ventriloquist for six performances on Christmas Day (every two hours from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.) But on that same day a bookstore, too, advertised itself as “K
RISS
K
RINGLE’S HEAD QUARTERS FOR
C
HRISTMAS
B
OOKS”:

Bookstores and theaters represented two different cultural worlds. If theatergoing was part of the rowdy world of Christmas carnival, reading books was part of the world of quiet domestic pleasures. By the mid-1840S Kriss Kringle had entered the world of books, and he was urging his youthful readers to do the same. In 1842 a Philadelphia publisher brought out
Kriss Kringle’s Book
, a gift book for children that explained the ritual of St. Nicholas (it even included Clement Clarke Moore’s poem, “A Visit from St. Nicholas”) and urged its youthful readers to “prepare” for his visit by acting “obedient to their parents, studious, respectful to their teachers, gentle to their play-fellows, and attentive to their religious duties.” If they did so, such children would be certain to receive “numerous tokens” of Santa Claus’s goodwill. And among these tokens there were sure to be books: “Saint Nicholas … loves to give the children nice little story books, such as will teach them to be good, and at the same time afford them a good deal of innocent amusement….”
⁷⁴

Santa in Blackface
. The cover page of a collection of minstrel songs published in New York in about 1840. The songs were written and performed by one of the best-known American minstrels, Thomas Rice, who performed onstage as “Jim Crow.” The exact reason for attributing the authorship of this pamphlet to “Santa Claus” is obscure.
(Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society)

In 1845 two other Philadelphia publishers entered the Kriss Kringle market. One came out with
Kriss Kringles Christmas Tree
, which contained a poem in which a boy chooses a book as his present, passing over the rowdier options of a “sword or drum.” The other publisher produced a book called
Kriss Kringles Raree Show, for Good Boys and Girls
. This, too, was a gift book. Its text consisted of a series of history lessons—thirty-eight very brief stories (two pages each), most of which were accounts of famous battles in American or European history.
⁷⁵

Santa Claus as Theater Manager
. This illustration, from the title page of
Kriss Kringle’s Raree Show
(1845), shows Kriss Kringle in the role of a theater manager, collecting tickets from the eager boys shoving to get into the show on Christmas Day. Kriss Kringle is depicted as a plebeian here, and he even smokes a short pipe!
(Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society)

Theater Interior with Curtain Down
. Kriss Kringle is now seated atop the chandelier at the top left, his pipe tucked into his cap. From this position he will draw the curtain for each change of scene. The audience itself suggests elements of misrule: One boy is sitting on the stage; the little girl in front of him is crying; and another little girl (at the right) is blowing a tin horn.
(Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society)

Theater Interior with Curtain Raised
. Only the scene onstage has changed here—the rest of the setting remains the same (as it does in every single illustration in this book). The dramatic scenes, this one showing Indians battling Conquistadores, are all represented as merely drawings on an inner curtain. This is a low-budget operation even in fantasy!
(Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society)

But the text of
Kringle’s Raree Show
is the least interesting thing about this book. What is more intriguing is the way the book was organized around the conceit implied by its title. A
raree show
meant either of two things.
⁷⁶
Its first meaning was “a show carried about in a box,” such as an exhibition of pictures, viewed through a magnifying lens inserted in a small opening at one end of the box (this would later become known as a
“peep show”). Indeed, each of the thirty-eight historical accounts contained a full-page picture—and instead of being divided into chapters, each account was labeled a “sight” (thus “Sight the Twenty-First” was “the Capture of Stony Point” during the American Revolution; and “Sight the Thirty-Eighth” was “the Battle of Lake Erie” during the War of 1812).

The second meaning of the term
raree show
, by extension, was large-scale and theatrical: “a spectacle of any kind,” or a “spectacular display,” especially a theatrical spectacle (often, apparently, one related to pantomime).
Kriss Kringle’s Raree Show
fit this definition because it pretended to offer the experience of going to the theater—specifically, the experience of a group of children attending a theatrical “exhibition” at Christmas. On the title page is pictured the arrival of the children at the theater. Kriss Kringle plays the role of theater manager in this picture. Standing at the entrance, he takes the children’s tickets as they attempt to press into the hall. He is pictured much as Moore described Santa Claus—a plebeian, short and plump, bearded, holding “the stump of a pipe” in his teeth. (But that is also, I suspect, very much the way an actual theater manager of the time might have looked.)

The book’s brief introduction sets the scene and also describes the interior of the theater. This description is accompanied by a full-page illustration of the interior of the theater, with the lowered curtain at its center (the inscription on the curtain is the title of the book). Kriss Kringle, the manager, now magically sits poised atop a candelabrum at the left side of the proscenium, where he will presumably manipulate the curtain for each of the “sights” in the show (or book). In the foreground we see the children who will be the audience (or readers). These children may not exactly resemble the real Philadelphia children who had disrupted theatrical performances two years earlier by “tossing each other … over each other’s heads and jostling the weak under foot.” But they aren’t exactly quiet or passive, either. One boy has already climbed onto the stage; several are laughing and talking, and waving (apparently to Kriss Kringle). The little girl on the extreme left is crying, and the little girl at the right is blowing a tin horn (presumably she has received it as a Christmas present; tin horns were such notorious noisemakers that they were later banned in the city of Philadelphia). Finally, several youthful couples appear to be taking the opportunity to do some flirting. I suspect that the artist drew the scene this way because he wanted to convey at least a semblance of how such a theatrical audience would have looked and behaved on an occasion like this—to provide, perhaps,
just enough verisimilitude to evoke in the young readers of the
book
something of the vivid sensation of actually
being there
.

On with the show. At the signal of a ringing bell, the curtain rises abruptly, and the performance begins. Kriss Kringle is still present, again in the role of theater manager: “He is enjoying the astonishment and delight of the children at the scene which presents itself on the rising of the curtain.”
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In each of the scenes that follow—the thirty-eight “sights”—the same full-page background illustration I have just described appears; the only thing that changes is the “sight” itself (i.e., the historical scene behind the curtain). The purpose of this repetition was presumably to save money and time on the books artwork; but it also inadvertently suggests what we already know from other sources: that a real audience would not have quieted down when the curtain went up.