Santa Claus with Sarah Archer
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I saved Latin. What did you ever do?

Welcome to You're Wrong About, I'm Sarah Marshall, and this week we are getting our ho-ho history on with friend of the pod, Sarah Archer, who is guiding us on her one-horse open sleigh through the history of Santa Claus. Where did he come from? Is he American? If not, why does he work here? How long has he been around? Who is Saint Nick? And how is he ethically producing all of those toys?

This episode, I think, will please the Christmas enthusiasts among you. And I think also is good for people like myself who are a bit more ambivalent about Christmas because it is a very complicated and emotionally fraught world.

that we all have to, I mean, get to share if we live in a society that celebrates it, which as Americans, we can't get away from that Paul McCartney song. So this is an episode that I loved doing because Sarah and I get to talk about the history of Christmas, how it became a holiday intended for children and theoretically about children, even if it ends up in adults fighting in toy aisles, and how

How the history of Christmas in many ways is a history of people being nostalgic for other people being nostalgic for other people being nostalgic for a time that never really was and how nostalgia can be a lovely thing and also a dangerous thing. And in the end, we talk about what presents you should get if you're very burned out on presents.

We also have a bonus episode up in bonus land on Patreon and on Apple plus subscriptions where Megan Burbank, one of our other beloved friends of the pod, it comes by and tells me all about the bachelor. I know of the bachelor, but I've never watched the bachelor. I think I'm scared because if I watched one episode and like it, then there are a million and they're all two hours long. And so instead I had Megan come by and give me a little bachelor nation one-on-one and I,

I'm excited for you to hear that one too. It's a little bit of American Studies slash joy slash anxiety slash more joy on top for the big finish. We are also still doing a couple of live shows in January. If you don't know, I've been very lucky to put on a live show called A Massive Seance with our friends over at American Hysteria, Chelsea Weber-Smith and Miranda Zickler and Miranda's Fleetwood Mac tribute band, The Little Lies. And we're going to be doing a live show called A Massive Seance

And we're doing a show in San Francisco, January 11th and in LA on January 24th. And we just did a couple of shows in Portland and Seattle. If you were there, we are so lucky to have shared that space with you. And if you weren't there, we were singing to you as well. Don't worry. And that is it for me for now. I hope you can make it to one of these shows in January. If you're inclined, if you're in the area and you're

If you're not, then we're just very excited to be making another year's worth of shows for you and sharing this funny ride. Now let's go learn about Santa. Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast where this week we are talking about Santa. Is he real? And if not, who is NORAD tracking? And with me today is Sarah Archer.

Santa scholar. Thank you. That's true, I would say. You've got a Santa book. That is true. I do have a Christmas book, and there's a lot of Santa content in it. Yes. It's what, 25% Santa? At least, yeah. What's the other 75%, and what's it called? So the book is called Mid-Century Christmas. It came out in 2016, so it's kind of a strange...

a strange similarity to the feeling of it came out in October of that year and then something happened. It was great. What a fun time to be promoting a book. And it's about Christmas during the Cold War. So it's aluminum Christmas trees and the Grinch and Charlie Brown and...

you know, sort of the material culture of modernism and Christmas and heavily, it's very, very visual. It's also kind of a great gift if you know that somebody loves Christmas and you don't know that person very well. It's just kind of like, yeah, this is on topic on brand. I mean, that's the main kind of thing being bought and sold in America at this moment, I think, is gifts for people who you don't know very well. Exactly. It's like a great gift for like your mother-in-law,

or your father-in-law or whoever. It's, you know, all the in-laws, all your neighbors. Yeah. So, but for this episode, I initially kind of thought Cold War Christmas is near and dear to my heart. It's so interesting. But we've been talking about Santa kind of as a figure, right?

And the origin story of Santa as a cultural figure is so fascinating and so weird. And it's actually mainly an invention of the early 19th century. So I kind of went ham on the 19th century for this episode. So we are so thrilled. I love the 19th century. So I thought what we would start with that you in in mellifluous tone could read the opening, the first half of a poem that we read.

don't necessarily know the title of or who wrote it or when it was written, but we all kind of know it. Yes, I would like to read that. Is that in the document that you have sent me, the dossier? The dossier, Sarah's Santa Files Companion, the Santa Files. Yeah, it should be underneath the little illustration at the top, which is mostly just for funsies. So this is the first half of A Visit from St. Nicholas by Clement Clark Moore, but much like

So many other important documents. I think most of us just know it by the first line, which is, "'Twas the night before Christmas when all through the house not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. The stockings were hung by the chimney with care."

in hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there. I do want to do it in the style of Rod Serling. I'm just going to try that. The children were nestled all snug in their beds while visions of sugarplums danced in their heads and mama in her kerchief and I and my cap had just settled our brains for a long winter's nap.

when out on the lawn there arose such a clatter i sprang from the bed to see what was the matter away to the window i flew like a flash tore open the shutters and threw up the sash the moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow gave the luster of midday to objects below when what to my wondering eyes should appear but a miniature sleigh and eight tiny reindeer

With a little old driver, so lively and quick, I knew in a moment it must be St. Nick.

Now Dasher, now Dancer, now Prancer and Vixen. On Comet, on Cupid, on Donder and Blitzen. To the top of the porch, to the top of the wall. Now dash away, dash away, dash away all. That's lovely. And it's only the first half. I mean, you kind of forget how long it is, right? So before we dive into our close read of the poem, I

I would love to know about your personal relationship with Santa Claus. Like, what are your memories? And what are your feelings? What experience did you have as a kid and about now? So like thinking back on it. We had a very pro Santa household, I think, because my family is sort of like that classic American thing of sort of like a mix of religions that sort of like cancel each other out. Mom's family was like...

semi closeted Jewish. And so she grew up going to Episcopalian church and then sent me to Episcopalian schools. And then she and my dad were just sort of like agnostic and the vein of like, why bother? Right, right, right.

And so we were just like all about Santa. And I think that Santa is really like in a way that seems actually very idolatrous. I think it's really like the secular Jesus that exists for kids whose parents like don't know what they are anymore. And speaking of that, what is your impression of where –

Santa Claus as we know him kind of in the US as a cultural figure comes from. So like, you know, there's a David Sedaris piece that talks about this six to eight black men. Yep. And about like how Santa is described in other countries and how I think like in I forget where there's a culture where Santa is from Spain and

I think that might be France. Yeah, that's right. Oh, right, because he has that other one about taking French class and talking about the Easter Bunny. Jesus shaves. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and just so, yeah, this idea of like learning at a certain age that Santa, that your Santa actually sort of like has an origin. And my sense is that there was a Saint Nicholas and that he was actually...

Much like St. Francis, not that fun, but has a really fun legacy and that he like did something nice for children. And I think he like helped girls out of sex work or something.

That's correct. I had this very, not so much a religious experience, but a very tradition heavy kind of family lore kind of Christmas, right? So essentially, the thing that you're describing in the Davis Sedaris text, I read those books when they came out too, and had the same impression that like, oh, this is really interesting. It's actually very different.

And I had assumed that the sort of experience of Christmas seemed like it's this old fashioned thing. And I just figured, like I think a lot of people do, that we were celebrating in a way that had been sort of handed down continuously, like through the mists of time. You know, everything, you know, Christmas trees, all these different things we do. People living in the high Middle Ages, like we're doing all the same things. What it actually is closer to is a Victorian tradition.

sort of fantasia of kind of what art historians would call like medievalizing. Oh, snap. Thinking back to, yeah. Because I love it when it's like, it's not just from an era or like an earlier era than you thought. It's like,

Victorians or somebody like doing somebody else. And it's like a fantasy of a fantasy. It looks old fashioned to us, but it also seemed old fashioned to them. And also probably, you know, they're thinking about druids, you know, because, you know, the story as I heard it was that this was, you know, Victoria and Albert based, but also people adopted it. They liked it. And, you know, the wicker man is never full, if you know what I mean.

So about St. Nicholas, you were right. Who was St. Nicholas? He was a real person. He was the bishop of a small coastal city called Myra, which is located, it was in the Byzantine Empire, but it's now part of Turkey. The thing that he's known for is exactly what you described. There's sometimes when this scene is depicted in art history, and actually in your companion document, there is a painting from the early Renaissance that shows this.

They're referred to as the dowerless maidens. They were unmarried daughters of a widower who was very poor. And St. Nicholas tossed money over the fence outside his home to prevent them from having to become sex workers. The association with gift giving is there. And again, this is almost 2000 years ago.

And so December 6th is his death date. And that's when St. Nicholas's day would be observed. And that's more likely to occur in kind of the Eastern right, you know, kind of Greek Russian world of Christianity. So for a long time,

We have been hearing about something called the war on Christmas, which both does and does not exist. And it does exist in that it is a thing people talk about, but it does not exist in that. As far as I know, there is not a coordinated effort by the liberal mob to cancel Christmas. But like, have you ever heard any kind of a leftist or a liberal complaining about someone saying Merry Christmas to them? You know, never in my entire life. And I like literally wrote a book about it.

Right. And if you're a kid and you're excluded because of your religion at school, then like that sucks. And like that is an issue that we should care about as a country. But that's also a whole separate issue that like none of this is has any thing to do with. And I guess the idea that like it's so offensive to be told happy holidays, it's just like, but...

Why did why does the existence of other holidays make your holiday less a holiday is the perennial question here? Yeah. When a person, let's say Bill O'Reilly or somebody like a Bill O'Reilly complains about this or complained about it circa 2005. That's really kind of when all this got started on Fox News. Bill do it live O'Reilly. He couldn't hurt a fly. Never, ever. Christmas, you know, in air quotes used to be.

Less commercial, more family focused. Oh, my goodness. Buying stuff. So what we will find out. Can we roll the footage of that? Let's roll that. Let's roll that beautiful bean footage because it's not true. First, we're going to go back to the Puritans who famously hated Christmas Christmas.

like they hated it the most. It was illegal to celebrate Christmas in Massachusetts between 1659 and 1681. You'd be fined five shillings. And before we get too deep into this, I also want to mention that

We're focusing on kind of a part of it. But the essential book on this topic is Stephen Nissenbaum's The Battle for Christmas, which was first published in 1997. And he is a professor emeritus of history at UMass Amherst. And he is like a super lovely guy. You can also hear him talking about it. I think there's an old episode of This American Life from maybe 20 years ago or so where he talks about this. But the Reverend Increase Matherer.

Yes. ...of Boston wrote in the 1680s. Related to cotton, but I forget if older or younger. Yeah. I think older. I think older, but...

That early Christians who first observed the nativity on December 25th did not do so, quote, thinking that Christ was born that month, but because the heathen Saturnalia was at that time kept in Rome and they were willing to have those pagan holidays metamorphosed into Christian ones. So what's Saturnalia? Are you familiar with the ancient Roman harvest festival of Saturnalia? I am kind of, partly because, and this is a...

Fun fact, I took Latin in sixth grade, which I remember nothing. Good for you. Good for me. We had to. I saved Latin. What did you ever do? But so Saturnalia, to my understanding, is the like...

pagan slash Roman question mark, like pagan under Roman rule, maybe year end kind of winter solstice celebration that the way it was taught to me, and I always, you know, I was certainly taught stuff that sort of

was a little bit revisionist in that sort of polite 90s way. But like, I never felt like I had teachers who were lying to me on purpose. And that really affects things, you know, for the better. And so I remember being taught probably is like a sixth grade Latin thing that like, in Christianity, they were like, these holidays aren't taking, how are we going to get people to do the birth of Christ thing? And some genius was like,

I know what we should do. Let's just have them do it when they have their big pagan winter celebration anyway. And then they'll just do our thing. Yeah.

Probably it was a lot more violent than that. It could have been more violent, but that is actually not far off from what most likely occurred. So Saturnalia was an ancient Roman harvest festival, happened mid to late December. Late harvest, but I get it's a warmer climate. It's a warmer climate. They're stomping grapes. Exactly. And it's, right, Mediterranean climate, during which, crucially, members of different social classes trade places. Oh, yeah.

Quasimodo, king of the fair. There was a sacrifice at the Temple of Saturn at the Roman Forum. There was a kind of carnival atmosphere of like indulgence, food, drink, debauchery of all kinds, a sense of play, like gambling was permitted, like things that were normally either frowned upon or against the law were fine. Drinking champagne at 10.30 in the morning. Yeah.

For example. And then after that, crucially, everything flips back to normal. And in the 4th century AD, which is when the Roman Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity, there's a belief, and it may be true, I could not find hard and fast evidence for this, that the specific date of December 25th was chosen kind of Cerulean belt Vogue style at the Council of Nicaea, which is in 325 AD. Uh-huh.

The method for determining when Easter will be every year was devised at the Council of Nicaea. So it's logical to assume that it may have been. And there are some early church fathers like I got. Have they shared how they pick it? Because I never know when it's going to happen. It's so it has to do. It's like the lunar calendar. It's a movable feast. That is the official name. It is called a movable feast. That's where that expression comes from.

So there are people like Augustine of Hippo and John Chrysostom, early church fathers, who refer to the date of December 25th in writings from the fourth century. So we can assume that roughly by that time, that was the date. And it was more or less when people in the Roman Empire observed the winter solstice, which happens right after Saturnalia. There's this interesting thing agriculturally where if you're in a temperate climate, you

you want to wait as long as possible to slaughter animals because the colder it is, the easier it is to preserve it by either by freezing. Right. Or you can preserve fruits and vegetables and whatever. Curing meat. Presumably also that would last for longer. Yeah. So I'm going to have, I'm going to send you over to your companion document for a moment to take a, get a, to clap eyes on St. Nicholas. And if you scroll down,

you will see a Greek icon, actually a Russian icon from a church in Novgorod. Love it. And an Italian painting from...

the 14th century depicting him with his dowerless maidens being a nice guy so that's so that's so you know not warm and fuzzy and the first one I would say he looks not unlike George Carlin very true but he kind of looks like he's saying like yeah yeah peace be with you right get out of here yeah he looks a little annoyed he looks a little uh like I'm busy

So one of the other things that Nissenbaum points out is that this is happening in the Roman world, sort of. But there's also winter festivals of all kinds happening.

happen any place that gets really cold. So Scandinavia, the, you know, Germanic Europe. For morale, which is interesting, right? Like parties, you know, we love to talk about Joseph Campbell and mythology recurring in different cultures. And I don't know how true people still think that is the way he said it. But what about parties?

Yeah. No, I think it absolutely makes sense because essentially you're – it's different populations of people with different cultures who are confronting similar climate conditions and agricultural – the rhythms of the agricultural calendar. And in a place that's really cold, having just been to Scandinavia over the summer, the idea of actually living in a place that's dark like 23 hours a day, like you need some – you need parties. You need candles and like sweaters and, you know, that's –

the sort of, we're focusing mainly on like Great Britain, that there was this tradition from the Middle Ages throughout the Renaissance into the early modern period of Christmas basically as a feast day, not focused on any sort of personification, although the personification of Father Christmas in Great Britain starts to appear at a later date. But essentially it was

a time when your local grandee, your landowner, sort of country gentleman, lord, whoever, would invite all the people kind of in his constellation, workers, farmers, servants, et cetera, neighbors, to his home. Somebody would dress up as a figure known as the Lord of Misrule. And this was usually a kid, like a teenager, who would dress up as someone who people knew. So it might be like the local bishop or somebody

you know, clergyman and kind of poke fun at that figure. And then that guy was like king of the banquet. And he would sort of somebody who was his social superior would have to wait on him. So this is very clearly whether it was conscious or not, or intentionally or not, there's a very strong parallel with the spirit of Saturnalia, where there's this like, class switch that gets played with, and then everything flips back to normal. And there were things that we would recognize from Christmas today, like feastings, the sort of

Evergreen plants like holly and ivy, Christmas pageants, little gifts, charity, dressing up in finery. Can you talk about wassailing? Yes. Actually, wassailing is literally the next bullet point in my notes. I think wassailing should make a comeback. It absolutely should. So wassail, the noun, it's actually just a kind of cider. But wassailing...

is mentioned in a number of Christmas carols, and it sounds very charming. You know, wassail, wassail all over the town. Many of us first heard of it. By many of us, I mean me in...

the 1994 version of Little Women. Of course, because Christmas isn't Christmas without any presents. So my impression of wassailing until relatively recently was that it was this very charming, sweet custom where people would kind of hold a bowl and kind of come to your door and say, do you have any wassail for us? And then politely say goodnight. And it turns out that it is more...

complex and more aggressive than you might think. So your next fun thing that you're going to read is a lyrical description from 1648 from a poem called Ceremonies for the Christmas Holiday by the English writer Robert Herrick. You're giving me such fun stuff to read.

Come bring with a noise my merry, merry boys, the Christmas log to the firing, while my good dame she bids ye all be free, and drink to your hearts desiring. We've come here to claim our right, and if you don't open up your door, we will lay you flat upon the floor. Again we assemble a merry new year, to wish to each one of the family here, may they of potatoes and herrings have plenty, with butter and cheese, and each other dainty.

Some of the pronunciation of these words has changed in the past few hundred years, and sometimes poems are a little hard to read for that reason.

What contemporary holiday slash event does this remind you of? Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, it feels totally Halloween-y. Exactly. It can be very cute, but it can also, you know, if you get caught without candy, things can turn. Yeah. It was not meant entirely to be neighborly. It was also, there was a touch of like class warfare in that because it tended to be young men. Mm-hmm.

While sailing, knocking at the door saying – one of the other poems that Nissenbaum references talks about white bread and brown beer, which is a way of saying like the good kind of bread and the good kind of beer, like not the watered down stuff, right? Yeah. And so it sounds a lot like Halloween. It's not kid-focused, but –

But it's the only bulwark against this kind of going totally off the rails is a fixed unshakable class hierarchy. So the practice of wealthy property people visiting each other on Christmas Day doesn't really fit into this category. That's kind of a different thing.

Well, it's also interesting how it feels like there's this sort of like yearly ritual of appeasing the working class. And yeah, the, you know, the, I don't think they had sharecroppers exactly, but whatever the equivalent was at the time. Well, I mean, if you were a serf or you were, you know, and if you were, if you lived on somebody's estate. Or if you were indentured, I guess. You were indentured or you were a tenant farmer, you're, you're, you are entirely at the mercy of your Lord. And this is, this gets into another kind of interesting shift. We haven't got a Lord.

Between the old world and the new world, if we're still using that terminology, there's probably a better term for it. But in Europe, especially before the Industrial Revolution, they understood class very differently from the way that we understand class, and that it was a more unchanging kind of intrinsic trait of you as a person. And

And in pre-enlightenment, you're a particular kind of person and you have an occupation or a role that fits that status, like a different kind of trade or a craft or you're a member of the clergy or a knight or a landowner. Like how your head shape determines what kind of personality you have. Like if you have a mendacious brow or whatever. Yeah, there's so many things that like...

You would like to think are extinct, but I'm sure we could both find like 15 podcasts talking about this right now, but that you can see as sort of tendrils of this culture that was created in order to keep some people digging potatoes and a few people eating the potatoes. Yeah, it's not gone. It's I mean, but the thing that is gone to some extent is that if you are a member of the high nobility or royalty, then your contract is with God.

And if you're familiar, if like some high school part of your brain, the phrase the great chain of being is still rattling around, this idea that everybody has a role and everybody kind of reports to the next highest kind of person. And that you as a farmer, your job is to dig potatoes and your Lord's job is to make sure that you are taken care of.

Naturally, this did not always occur or even usually occur. And we know that because many revolutions have occurred since this was the status quo. But in theory, your job as somebody who was from the nobility or upper orders of society was to sort of take care of the people from the lower orders. And in New York City, circa 1800 or so, which happens to be the birthplace of Santa Claus,

This world order is kind of crashing into mercantilism and a multifaceted society with immigrants and different kinds of people that turns all of these relationships on their heads. So the truth about Santa is that he was invented in the early 19th century in New York City.

In that era, New York is growing very quickly. It's a major seaport and there's lots of immigration. There's lots of wealth, but it's the kind of rich people who occupy the upper strata aren't like mineral tycoons or industrial titans like of the Victorian age or the Gilded Age. We have to sort of wait a few decades for that. Circa 1800. We don't have our Carnegie's and our Frick's yet. Precisely. The people who are really rich in New York at this moment are gentry, basically. And the most elite groups

are known as the knickerbockers. In the most literal sense, it means a landed gentleman, gentry, gentleman. You own land and your land produces income. That's what I'll be if I grow a lot of garlic this year and I can sell it at the farmer's market. You already are. You're getting there.

So people in the professions are kind of like the help, like accountants, lawyers, etc. And people, a gentleman doesn't have a job, he has an income. Which may I say, is so true to how people live today, because now it's just that your family has enough money. And instead of you do have land, but you often just have like, you know, like the sort of succession Murdoch.

where it's, you know, like, daddy bought a lot of TV stations, you know? We're not using this term yet because it's not the Industrial Revolution, but you own the means of production. You own the land, right? So the most elite groups in this context, this term knickerbocker, I actually, I need to dig more into what the etymology is of that because it's a term. Is it Dutch? It refers to people of English descent, specifically not Dutch. Okay.

Okay, that's interesting. Is it Dutch people talking about them?

Well, I think they were more active in the late 1700s, if ever. There weren't tons of them. And then the waves of immigration cut. But there is this Dutch character of New Amsterdam that was kind of the founding early decades. Right, it's like lingered in place names, I guess. Exactly. It's the tons of Dutch place names all over New York. Yeah, this is like an illusion that there were more Dutch people around. So their high church Anglican or Episcopal landed in...

and socially and politically conservative. So there are three key guys who Nissenbaum identifies from this group who are essentially responsible for sort of midwifing Santa Claus into existence as we know him. It was a breech birth. So they needed to call in the big guns. Yeah.

It's like, we need some wasps for this. We need some people with waistcoats. So we talked about West Sailing. One of the civic challenges that the Knickerbocker-type persons really disliked was that West Sailing had come to America and

And groups of young men, largely recent immigrants, people from probably literally my ancestors, people from Ireland and Germany, demanded beer. They played cacophonous music in what's – this is my new favorite word – what's known as a calathumpian band, which basically means like instruments slash anything that makes noise. And it's like late at night. Calathumpian band? A calathumpian band. So this is essentially your way of like –

It's something that you can do. You're not going to get arrested for murder, but you are going to torment a rich person in their house if you're making noise all night long. That Akita, Evita, just won't shut up.

These guys, the sort of Calathempian, the wassailers, on one level, they're sort of sympathetic figures to us because their targets are the estates of these rich people behind wrought iron fences who are guarded at night by watchmen who largely come from the same strata of society that the

the rebelers do. But they would also do stuff like harass congregants at black churches. And like they were kind of like equal opportunity nitwits at various times. So it's not it's a complicated it's a mob doesn't you can't really count on a mob to punch up a mob is going to punch in any direction past a certain size. And part of this is because one of the reasons that there's sort of class resentment more so than there would be normally is that

If you're living in a rural area in this time in America, you and you have even a small farm, you can put things up for winter. You can can or, you know, jar fruits and veggies. Oh no, are bad things going to happen to canned goods? No, no, no, no, no. Canned goods are fine. Okay, all right. Thank God. It's just that if you live in a city and let's say you're a casual laborer, let's say you're a dockhand. If the river freezes, you don't have work.

And you can't really store food because you're living in, you know, probably at this age, not a tenement, but sort of, you know, you're living probably in cramped quarters. And there's not a kind of safety net in the same way that even the very imperfect safety net of the kind of feudal system of Europe provided, which is not something that we tend to think of as being this like very generous way.

Right. But like if you're like if I'm a sexy stevedore in early 19th century New York, then like the local rich guy isn't going to bring me a meat pie on Christmas Day. Absolutely not. But you might go torment him late at night because you're you're understandably annoyed. So our first guy is the aforementioned John Pintard, who lived from 1759 to 1844.

He was a successful merchant who lived on literally on Wall Street because people used to live there. And I guess they do again. And he was a big like civic booster and fan of holidays and commemorations of all kinds. He helped establish the celebration of Independence Day on Delife Worth. He helped found the New York Historical Society and something called which is still very much a going concern. It's a wonderful place. Yeah.

And something called the New York Society for the Prevention of Pauperism, which, as you can probably guess, did not solve all of the problems of pauperism that he saw around him. I don't know. People don't talk about pauperism anymore. I guess it's okay now. You know, that's good. But basically, I mean, honestly, it sounds it 200 years has passed, but basically it's like call 311, right? Like he was concerned about like both just as a matter of goodwill and what

you know, being aware of human suffering, but also kind of as a quality of life concern in air quotes. Like there was just, it seemed like there were always more unhoused people, more poverty, you know, more people who needed work, more sick people. It just, and you know, more people immigrating more all the time. And there was no way to kind of like meet everybody's needs. And it was chaos. And,

And his letters show over the years that sort of throughout the first decades of the 19th century, he was experimenting with different kinds of midwinter feasts. There were like open houses on New Year's Day or quiet family gatherings on Christmas Day and celebration of St. Nicholas's name day on December 6th.

And he was working through all these ideas, this, you know, charity, civic life, community, Christianity, all that stuff. On New Year's Eve in 1820, there was a break-in in his house on Wall Street, which initially there was a kind of a scurrying, which turned out to be like one of his, a member of his household staff starting a fire very early in the morning. But then a Calathumpian band came along and kept him awake. So this makes a big impression on him. And he starts thinking like,

why does this holiday have to be like this and what could be done? And then he invented a Festivus for the rest of us. For the rest of us. The feats of strength. Yeah.

So that's John Pintard. Our second guy is probably a guy you've heard of, Washington Irving, who was born in 1783, right? And he's probably born in 1783, died 1859. So kind of roughly contemporaneous. Probably best known for having written Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. But he also made a really big... Two bangers.

absolute bangers, but also is kind of underappreciated, I think, for his contribution to Christmas lore, because he wrote a series of short stories in 1819 called The Sketchbook, and even actually wrote some of it sitting at tables at the New York Historical Society. So this is a very kind of insular group of dudes. The Sketchbook includes four essays on the topic of sort of old English Christmases, which are more or less imaginary kind of Tudor and Stuart era stories.

England, this idea of kind of a merry jovial Christmas where of the old order, where like the landed gentry... The great American tradition of just making stuff up. So essentially, it's a portrait of Christmas in which the old order is intact.

Everybody knows their place. Landed gentry entertain and all of their dependents, workers, peasants were jolly. Everybody was happy. There was no scary wassailing. Everybody had a good time. No one is menaced by a street tough. They were very well received in England and America. And he freely admitted to never having experienced or having any direct knowledge of anything like this. So to the extent that it was like a

a fantasy, it really sort of, it's an idealized Christmas that really foregrounds this idea of noblesse oblige. Right. And he wasn't like claiming to have found like a lost manuscript by a real tutor. I think there's absolutely a grain of truth in what he's talking about, but it is very much this kind of crackling fire, lovely, you know, Irish wolfhound on the carpet kind of lovely, you know, idea. Yeah.

Our third and perhaps most essential guy is Clement Clark Moore, who lived from 1779 to 1863. He was born during the American Revolution and died during the Civil War. So it's like,

super duper, just how American can you possibly get, right? He wrote the poem A Visit from St. Nicholas, of which we've heard part one. And this is, it's not really part one and part two. That's just kind of how I split it up. But Moore was a quintessential textbook knickerpocker. He taught Hebrew and other ancient languages at the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church. And he was a great

He received so much income from his family's property, which included on his mother's side, the entire neighborhood of Chelsea. What? That he never had to. No, seriously. Honey, he owns Chelsea. So John Pintard looked at somebody like Clement Clark Moore was like, oh, these people are really rich. Like he never had to work. And so he was able to, you know, he decided to profess. No wonder he had time to write such a long poem. Exactly.

Like infinite time. And so the poem sets the scene that in almost every way is actually kind of Christmas as we know it. It's reindeer on the roof or Christmas Fantasia. Surprise, surprise. It could be argued that Christmas as we know it is once again a reaction against petty crime in a way that forces everyone to be nostalgic for something that never happened. Yeah.

Love it. There are a few exceptions. One is that there's no Christmas tree because these were not in fashion until the 1840s. And the other is that Santa Claus himself... What did they put the presents under? On the mantle and in the stockings. Oh, they didn't get big enough presents back then. They were getting like an orange and a book and a book and a... I do love oranges. You know, a pencil. I mean, like, maybe I'm going to... Maybe I'll give everyone an orange and a book this year. I bet they'll love it. So Santa Claus himself...

and his reindeer are all tiny. But nevertheless, the die is cast. The poem was published in 1823 and we're sort of off and running in Santa Claus lore. Wait, how tiny are they? Like physically tiny or just barely in it? So he says elf. Oh, what? He's elfin. That's the problem with Santa. I think we made him too big. I was never into sitting on Santa's lap when I was a little kid, which when you think about it is a very good policy based on all the other stuff adults tell you the rest of the year. What we have learned.

And I think we really, if maybe if Santa was played by smaller performers, it would be a little bit less daunting for a child. You know, maybe everyone could go down a size and the elf, the elves could all be just like one foot tall. Yeah.

And so the second half of the poem, which I will now invite you to read, tells us more about what he looked like in this imagined Fantasia. And then in a twinkling, I heard on the roof, the prancing and pawing of each little hoof. As I drew in my head and was turning around, down the chimney, St. Nicholas came with a bound. He was dressed all in fur from his head to his foot, and his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot.

A bundle of toys he had flung on his back, and he looked like a peddler just opening his pack. His eyes, how they twinkled! His dimples, how merry! His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry! His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow, and the beard of his chin was as white as the snow. The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth, and the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath.

he had a broad face and a little round belly that shook when he laughed like a bowl full of jelly he was chubby and plump a right jolly old elf and i laughed when i saw him in spite of myself a wink of his eye and a twist of his head soon gave me to know i had nothing to dread

He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work and filled all the stockings, then turned with a jerk and laying his finger aside of his nose and giving a nod of the chimney. He rose. He sprang to his sleigh, to his team, gave a whistle and away they all flew like the down of a thistle. But I heard him exclaim, or he drove out of sight. Happy Christmas to all and to all a good night.

Love it. It's so weird how both familiar and unfamiliar this is. Isn't it wild? It's like you think you it's almost like you sort of think you have it memorized. But he doesn't even say Merry Christmas. I know. Happy Christmas to all of you.

So this is the moment when Christmas begins to shift toward a new population. Children who are the unquestioned focus of Christmas now, but never were before. And in this time period, kids...

were dependents, but they weren't sentimentalized in the same way that they are. They were more akin to like miniature adults who were kind of at the bottom. Right, we haven't had the Victorians yet inventing childhood while, you know, using child labor to bind their books, I have to assume. In a strange way, making Christmas a child-centered holiday wasn't only about indulging kids, but Stephen Nissenbaum argues that it was actually a way of

Yeah.

From that angle, their invention of Santa Claus was part of what we can now see as a larger, ultimately quite serious cultural enterprise. They chose an invented past that didn't really belong to anybody, which was very smart because it meant that it wasn't like, this is only for rich people. This is only for Dutch people or Knickerbockers or Irish people.

And for his part, in the years that immediately preceded writing A Visit from St. Nicholas, Clement Clark Moore was witnessing very rapid change in New York City. In 1811, Nisabam writes, New York City Council approved a grid system of numbered streets and avenues that would crisscross the island above 14th Street.

By the time Moore wrote A Visit from St. Nicholas, New York was expanding north through Chelsea itself. In fact, in late 1818, something called Ninth Avenue was dug right through the middle of his estate, the land having been taken from him by eminent domain. So there's this moment where he's kind of, which is, it's like not a big deal, right? It's fine. But it's also makes sense.

In that he's somebody with lots of acres who's watching it become industrialized or become urbanized. And that makes him sad, right? Yeah. There's an anxiety about sort of the loss of the pastoral New York, which to be fair-

I guess he wasn't overreacting because it did go away. Exactly. And there's also there's a couple of little clues that are not probably obvious if you're living in the 21st century, which most of us are, that St. Nicholas in this poem is transformed from this like

magisterial Greek Orthodox saint and bishop into this little elfin creature who's working class, right? Because he has a little sack. He's like a peddler. Right. He's like tapping the side of his nose before he goes back up the chimney. I mean, he's actually a lot more Dick Van Dyke and Mary Poppins coded than I realized.

And he also is said to smoke the stump of a pipe, which in this time is a visual signal of solidarity with working people. Wow. It allowed this group of men to assign a kind of invented common ancestor to all the different kinds of people who were living in New York at that time. Wow.

And as Santa grew in popularity, he also grew in size because the Victorian Santa that we're more familiar with, he's a full sized guy. And he's majestic, but he also has a new job, which is what I would term the craft washing of capitalism. God damn it. Right. Because he has to run a toy factory.

Because he has to run a toy factory. And this is something that I don't think the our early guys were thinking about because they were living. They had one foot. Why worry about where elves get toys? You know, I mean,

So that's one of the key things that isn't emphasized in the early 19th century, but then becomes like the essential trait of Santa in the second half of the 19th century. And that's largely because... That he's a foreman in a relentless sweatshop. And kind of, and it's his job in a strange way to kind of smooth over the new concept of shopping as a leisure activity.

The earliest department store in New York is something called Arnold Constable, which did not last very long, but it was opened in 1825. Macy's, which is heavily, you know, is like hand in glove with like the Santa industrial complex, doesn't open until 1858. So this is way past the kind of origin story. A newcomer. And Americans had kind of complicated feelings about shopping. Like Yankee thrift was very much a value that a lot of people held.

And there's a big focus on keeping kids inside because outside they will be snowballing. And this was the term for like hurling snowballs at each other and other people. So shops begin using Santa as a kind of street icon. These early decades, you start to have like prepackaged puzzles and toys and games that parents can buy for their kids, keep everybody indoors. Well, tell me a little bit

little bit about the shopping anxiety because I do find it actually difficult to compute because it does feel like at this point not not necessarily shopping per se but just the like unending desire for more stuff as like as the thing that will keep us safe is such a part of our character because it's been bred into us through trauma but what did it used to be like

There's this skepticism and there's actually her book, The First Christmas in New England, Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1850 writes, there's a character who complains actually kind of like Charlie Brown a century later, that the meaning of Christmas has been lost in a shopping spree. So already there's this sense of like,

you know, there's are we going to spoil our kids, you know, and they're just we're not in a sea of stuff yet. In the second half of the 19th century, the US and Great Britain both have something emerging that looks like a consumer society, which is a new thing. There's a growing middle class, there are more people who in a previous generation, there would have been a tiny population. Now there are plenty of lawyers and accountants and doctors and dentists and people, you know,

People with discretionary income who are not rich like the Pintards and the Moors of the world, but have income to spend on little luxuries and the palaces of commerce, so to speak, in the form of department stores, which are now... And I imagine there's anxiety and also the fact of like, we've created the middle class and now we have to make sure that they remain on the side of the wealthy. Exactly. Because if they take sides with the working class, then we might be kind of screwed, actually. Yeah.

And so a department store, like the really luxurious ones, gives an ordinary person a little taste of that because they're these sumptuous, beautiful, big, impressive edifices. And actually, I'm going to send you back over to our companion document, which

to look at the earliest iterations, illustrations of Santa's workshop. So this is Santa Claus and his works. And it is this like almost like it's like a Renaissance ceiling. Like it's like the Sistine Chapel ceiling. It's like there's all of these like him at his carpentry shop.

at his ledger, kind of keeping track of who's good and bad. It's open, but the pages are like half of his height. And it's clearly like the book itself is so much bigger than him. You're like, oh, that's a lot of kids. He's like, you know, crafting all these little dolls and sewing a little dolly clothing. And so all of this is painting him as

very much within the context of what scholars would call the craftsman ideal that emerges in the second half of the 19th century. This is the height of the Industrial Revolution, that he's kind of being used his image to smooth over the grubbier side of mass production and conspicuous consumption. And so, you know, this is a time in American history when we have steam powered ships and locomotives, telegraph, magazines and newspapers, you know, it's not like the Middle Ages at all.

But there is this medievalizing turn and the Gothic revival and a kind of re-enchantment with the handmade that we call the arts and crafts movement. Which makes sense. So people like the John Pintards and Clement Clark Moors of the world in, let's say, in 1800 could afford sterling silver, which means like solid, pure silver, you know, tea set, you know, flatware, or a porcelain teapot or a lacquer tray imported from Japan or China. Right.

Fifty years later, people who were quite a few rungs down the social ladder from those guys can afford electroplated nickel that looks like – that has silver – it's called silver plate or a papier-mâché tray that looks like lacquer but isn't or wallpaper that looks like – that's been industrially printed instead of hand-blocked. And all of these techniques, these kinds of things that made people like John Ruskin and William Morris, the design reformers, crazy –

take shortcuts and use technology to produce goods that look fancy, but cost less. And they invite consumers to decorate and also kind of zhuzh themselves socially, right? Because it's genteel. So what is the famous William Morris quote about like, bring nothing into your house except something, something? Nothing that is not useful or beautiful. Particularly in the last like 5-10 years, it feels like

And minimalism and also the sort of, you know, the more the cottagecore approach, which I am, you know, I make, I think I make no secret of being very into I'm constantly sending you pictures of onion braids, you know, I don't know, I just find it so much more interesting to look at the history of design and sort of these dynamics that loggerheads with each other.

In terms of what else is going on. And it makes sense today when it feels like there is this kind of water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink kind of a thing where like we have stuff like there's so much stuff that it's a huge problem. Right. Because America is sending all its garbage everywhere and our bodies are full of microplastics apparently. And yet the attempt to find something that works or looks like it's advertised as or isn't unbelievably flimsy or

is so difficult. And so it feels like we're in a similar moment in a way, although I what does that feel true to you? Okay, it feels like 1000% true, because essentially, in a society where people want to make money, and want to save money buying goods, wholesome, you know, impeccably crafted household goods that are made by a trained person with talent using real materials, and

And have those things be affordable at scale. That's impossible. Like nobody's ever figured out how to do this. Except Santa. Well, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Because if you buy something, wrap it and put it under a tree and it's quote unquote from Santa, it's almost like it gets transfigured from a mass merchandise product into a handmade good or at least like a thoughtful gift. Yeah.

And the persona linked people across the whole spectrum of capitalist enterprise. And I want to read you one final brilliant passage from Stephen Misenbaum. Santa Claus managed to reconcile opposites. He customized mass production. He maintained a personalized relationship with his enormous mass market. After all, his clientele was all but universal. And he did it all from motives that were in no way entrepreneurial.

Santa Claus magically combined what in reality had become a series of separate roles. He was simultaneously the gifts producer, distributor, seller, purchaser, and giver. In a new age of commodity production, what Santa Claus was able to offer, what he offered to grownups, was the moral equivalent of a world that had never wholly existed in the first place. It was the fading world of the household economy. Yeah.

And there's a lot to be learned by the fact that while Santa may have his workshop in the North Pole, he lives at Santa Land, which is just another way of saying Macy's. And with that, I invite us both to watch a wonderful clip from Miracle on 34th Street. Should I do the honors? Yeah, please do. Three, two, one. I told you he'd get me one. That's fine. That's just dandy. Listen, you wait over there. Mama wants to thank Santa Claus, too.

listen what's the matter with you don't you understand english i tell you macy's ain't got me nobody's got me i've been all over my feet are killing me now you don't think i would have said that unless i'm sure do you you can get those fire engines at schoenfeld's on lexington avenue only 8 50 a wonderful bargain sean fells i don't get it oh i keep track of the toy market pretty closely does that surprise you sir

*laughs*

I gotta watch that movie again. It's been a while. It's so good. It's so good. But it's like, isn't this fascinating that this idea of kind of, it's like this movie from 1947 is,

is like beamed down from the 1870s this kind of workshop it's like oh he's a real guy he knows your kid he knows the other department store that has it because Macy's ain't got any but this other place has got any like this almost being like a logic puzzle of like Santa wants the little children to get their toys but like

he can't break kayfabe while he's working for a department store he's yeah the santa who won't follow the rule book and it's goodwill that it's somehow it's capitalism and it's very successful capitalism but really but it's it's goodwill that's the main thing that's christmas spirit

Yeah. So to go back to people who complain about how Christmas, quote unquote, used to be one way or another, when Christmas became a child-focused holiday, it also became commercial, though those things happened roughly at the same time. And they're kind of separated at birth. Like there really never was a time when Christmas was sort of about toys and kids and being inside and having eggnog and not about buying stuff.

And so that like you sort of can't have one without the other. I mean, I hear it's like that in other countries, but I haven't seen it with my own eyes, if you know what I mean.

There's kind of a cruel joke in the fact that we have this idea of like Christmas is for children. It's for making their dreams come true. And therefore you, the parent have to work your ass off to buy the specific product that you might not even be able to find for them amidst mounting social pressures and, you know, a huge onslaught of media telling them what tokens mean that they're properly loved. And this thing where like there's nostalgia for the good old days of spending time with family, but like,

you're using the fantasy of Christmas in order to keep people working so that they can't spend time with their families. Right. And also, I mean, typically what you're remembering when you remember, quote unquote, what Christmas was like is when you were a kid, which means that, you know, you probably weren't responsible for like buying all the gifts or, you know, making roast beef or decorating, you know, all that stuff was like your parents were worried about that. And the other thing is, is a couple of years ago, I wrote something for The Cut called Santa is a Mom.

And that it was essentially the argument that like the secret of Santa Claus is not that he's not real. It's that he's he's your mom. Yeah, Santa is your mom, especially if she goes to the trouble of having different wrapping paper for Santa than the household wrapping paper. Yeah, it's very important to do that. The baked goods, the kin keeping the sort of, you know, like women are traditionally in charge of cards, like sending cards to everybody.

you know, keeping track of gifts, like inviting people over, do we have enough ironed napkins, like blah, blah, blah, you know, it's a whole all of that, like project management. This is the kind of area where I would say men, in air quotes, help. So they invented Santa Claus very successfully. But they tend not to be the sort of keeper of the tradition in the most literal way like that tends to be interesting, because there are these like,

very gendered hobbies that it feels that obviously are not as gendered as we act like they are like certainly men can send cards and women can catch fish or you know get drunk in a deer blind or whatever but like that so much of our culture is about this culture of just like mutual confusion about what the person you're married to is spending most of their time on which just seems a little bit tragic.

Being a kid, you eventually come to this point when you become aware that he's, you know, quote unquote, not real. And you realize, like, what is real. But then, like, the sort of substitute for that is that you then get to be part of the Santa edifice. Like, you get to be on the other side of that and kind of, like, create the magic for somebody who's littler. You become one of the Santas, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Which I actually have always sort of liked. No, I do like the natural Santa order. And it is kind of like...

Yeah, I guess all I would say all I want, you know, for for Christmas is for people to get stuff for their moms. That's what we should do. Santa, Santa should serve moms. Or if you don't like your mom, get something for a different mom. I don't care. Yeah, the idea of Santa actually doing the ultimate feminized labor because he like makes it all happen overnight in a way that nobody sees.

Although he does get to get a lot of press for it. So that is different. So that's Santa Claus. I'm as surprised as you are. You know, it's wild. I guess what's nice is that it's never not been a weird time to celebrate Christmas. And we have never not been lying to ourselves about it. And that's cool. But like, what do you think Christmas, you know, and this year too, right? It's like, yeah, a lot of people are spending time with people that

who expressed by who they voted for very recently that they apparently don't care if their family members live or die. So that makes the holidays even more difficult than usual. It's, you know, and this thing of it's just, yeah, it has, I mean, Christmas, I think, is like, has such power for sweetness and connection. And also it is so...

powerful as a kind of blunt instrument for families to use, especially to demand closeness when they don't deserve it necessarily. And I just wonder about like, yeah, what can the Santa of today do for us?

In an ideal world, we all have the very cozy, wonderful Christmas. I certainly had as a little kid. I was very lucky. My parents were divorced, but they both made the best of it and were cordial with each other. And I had these wonderful Christmases. Not everybody gets to have that. Not everybody has the kind of childhood where they get to be carefree and just be thinking like,

oh, am I going to get my Garfield telephone this year? Like, is this the year? Because they're worried about having enough to eat or they're worried about how their younger brother isn't going to school or they're, you know what I mean? So I think that there's a lot, if you are in a situation, and I'm really sorry if this applies to you, where your mom and dad don't,

voted for that guy and it just feels like a dagger in the heart, it's okay to not spend a holiday with them. You can not do that. You can spend a holiday. You can cook for your friends. You can go to a movie. You can do kind of Jewish Christmas like my husband and I sometimes do and have Chinese food and watch something on HBO. You can do lots of things with your family, whatever that means to you. And I think that's something that we

That Christmas doesn't belong, just like the, you know, like 4th of July. It doesn't belong to the bad guys. It doesn't belong to Republicans. It belongs to everybody. And the fact that they're so upset and so, like, going to such lengths to...

you know, insists that it does, like, just proves that they know that it doesn't. There is absolutely nothing wrong with kind of doing what, you know, John Pintard, etc. did and kind of invent a tradition for yourself if that's what you want to do. And it's a tradition, maybe that connects you with people that you don't know very well, but are going to be your become your chosen family. Yeah, it can be it really can look like anything. And so it doesn't have to be Santa. I personally like the Santa myth, but it doesn't have to be that. And also, you

you can be all by yourself on Christmas and I've done it many times and I really like it. And, you know, it's like, there's, yeah, there's so much assumption about aloneness and loneliness being the same thing. And they're really not. And I think especially, yeah. And just kind of knowing that you're safe in your own space can be a really great gift, I think. Yeah.

Yeah. You're the best. Well, likewise. Ms. Sarah Archer, is there anything that you want to tell people about? You've got a newsletter, you write books, you have a Christmas book. What should people, if people want to stuff stockings, what should they stuff them with? Oh my goodness. I mean, I would be thrilled if you, you don't have to buy stuff, but if you do want to buy stuff. You certainly don't. But if you, if for whatever reason you feel like it.

This is one of the trillions of things you could get. Impress your mother-in-law who loves Christmas. So I have three books. One of them is Mid-Century Christmas. There's also a stocking stuffer edition that's a little smaller, which is kind of fun. There is the Mid-Century Kitchen, which is all about the post-war kitchen. Which is my favorite. Which is Sarah's personal favorite. And there's Catland, the soft power of cat culture in Japan, which is all about cat culture in Japan. So if you have a crazy cat,

person that you love or someone who loves Japanese art history or folklore or anime, that's a great stocking stuffer. It's like a little seven inch square book. I have a newsletter on Substack and I've got my website where you can see a lot of my kind of back catalog of writing. I write for Architectural Digest and New York Times and some different, you know, design publications and

And you can find me around. I'm not on Twitter anymore. I nuked my account. It's gone. So that's where it's at. And I'd love to hear from you. You've brought me a lot of joy this year. Oh, well, likewise. Thank you for that. You're so very welcome and likewise. Yeah, it is a joy. We're very lucky. We are. And that was our episode. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for muddling through another holiday season with us.

Thank you to Sarah Archer. You're a gentlewoman and a scholar. You can find Sarah's book, Mid-Century Christmas, wherever fine books are sold. Thank you to Carolyn Kendrick for editing and producing. And that's it for us for this episode and this year. Happy holidays. Be safe. Don't shoot your eye out.