Skipped History is a newsletter focused on overlooked and underexamined events, movements, and people that have shaped American history. In this installment, host Ben Tumin speaks to Stephen Nissenbaum, a professor emeritus at UMass Amherst, about the holiday season’s jolliest, most iconic figure. They explore the debauchery that used to characterize Christmas, and why elite New Yorkers in the early 1800s invented Santa Claus to quiet growing social unrest.
As Tumin says, “The motivations behind the invention of Santa were not exactly pure.”
A condensed transcript edited for clarity is republished below with permission.
Ben Tumin: Let’s begin in early modern Europe. How was Christmas celebrated from the years 1500 to 1800?
Stephen Nissenbaum: Well, there have always been people who tried to make Christmas a purely religious holiday. But the majority of people saw the Christmas season as a time to let loose.
December was the one time of year when there was virtually no outdoor work to be done in temperate zones of Europe and North America. It was also the only time of year when fresh meat, wine, and beer were ready to consume. So, Christmas was often a season of drunkenness, overeating, and debauchery.
To give you a sense, one English clergyman in the 1700s thought that Christmas caroling should be outlawed because it involved cross-dressing and “rioting and chambering.” (“Chambering” was a common euphemism for sex.)
Ben Tumin: That helps contextualize Christmas songs like “Do You Hear What I Hear?”
Umm, I hope not!
Stephen Nissenbaum: ...yes.
Another tradition associated with Christmas was wassailing, which included singing but was more or less a form of begging. Bands of mostly young males would go around to the houses of the well-to-do and demand the best food, the best wine, the best beer—the stuff that you’d typically save for your family.
But on this occasion, the well-to-do gave gifts to the wassailers. This was part of a long tradition of what you might call “social inversion” on Christmas. At every other time of year, the poor owed their labor and sometimes their goods, the product of their labor, to the rich. But in December, the rich felt a moral obligation to give to the poor—in exchange, peasants offered their goodwill for the rest of the year.
This tradition served a purpose. Far from destroying the social hierarchy, it sustained and reinforced the hierarchy. It allowed lower classes to vent within clearly defined limits.
Ben Tumin: On a related note, can you describe how similar rituals of social inversion existed in the slaveholding South?
Stephen Nissenbaum: Yes. In all of my research, I wasn’t able to find a single instance where white enslavers didn’t give enslaved Africans a day off at Christmas time (at minimum). Enslavers often provided food and liquor for reveling, and though enslaved peoples often enjoyed Christmas, abolitionists criticized how, like in Europe, the holiday celebrations were intended to maintain order.
Ben Tumin: In your book, you quote Frederick Douglass, who wrote “these holidays serve as conductors, or safety-valves, to carry off the rebellious spirit of enslaved humanity.”
Stephen Nissenbaum: Mhm. I’ll add, too, that a lot of enslaved people took their time off as an opportunity to escape.
Ben Tumin: Shifting back to Santa and the North, how did Christmas celebrations change entering the 1800s?
Stephen Nissenbaum: Entering the 19th century, Christmas traditions underwent their biggest transformation in the last thousand years, at least as far as I can tell.
The change coincided with the rise of industrial capitalism. As the Industrial Revolution accelerated in the late 18th century, cities like New York exploded in growth. The tradition of wassailing became more impersonal, and the rich increasingly viewed groups of young people in the streets during the Christmas season as threatening mobs.
Ben Tumin: This brings us to Clement Clarke Moore, author of “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas.”
Stephen Nissenbaum: Yes, Clement Clarke Moore wrote “The Night Before Christmas” (or “A Visit from St. Nicholas”) in 1822. At the time, he owned the Chelsea estate, which encompassed a vast area (the modern-day neighborhood in New York is named after this estate).
Moore opposed growing calls to abolish slavery, and he also opposed the gridding of New York. In 1811, the New York City Council implemented a plan to construct a grid system of numbered streets and avenues that would crisscross Manhattan. By 1821, the city had seized much of Moore’s land through eminent domain.
The Santa Claus he described in “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” was a direct result of this frustration, as well as Moore’s fear of the growing “misrule” on New York City streets during Christmas.
Ben Tumin: The first line of the poem is, “‘Twas the night before Christmas when all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.” I suppose that’s an aspirational view of Christmas considering the unrest actually occurring outside Moore and his pals’ houses.
Stephen Nissenbaum: Yes. And immediately after the opening lines, you get a symbolic household invasion, but it’s a totally unthreatening one. Most of the poem goes on to describe this jolly figure and to make it clear to the narrator and of course to the reader that this house invader has not come to take, but rather to offer.
You can see the whole poem as a reference to outside wassailers demanding entry into the patrician narrator’s house, but this time it's harmless, and this Santa Claus figure has come to bring gifts to kids—by design. Moore wanted to shift the recipients of the wealthy’s largesse from peasants to members of their own families. That way, the old ritual of social inversion would still exist, but the rich would no longer have to interact with the poor.
Ben Tumin: Where did this idea of Santa come from? Did it exist before?
Stephen Nissenbaum: Moore was part of a group of conservative men who called themselves Knickerbockers. The Knickerbockers were fond of inventing Dutch traditions that harkened back to a supposedly calmer and more peaceful time. To be clear, the Knickerbockers weren’t Dutch, but they used the fact that a couple of hundred years earlier the Dutch had controlled New York (then called New Amsterdam) to invent a mythical, quaint Dutch tradition.
Ben Tumin: So did the Dutch celebrate Christmas with Santa Claus? Or was Santa kind of like Häagen-Dazs in that he was a “Dutch” tradition created by non-Dutch New Yorkers?
Stephen Nissenbaum: Häagen-Dazs originally comes from the Bronx?
Ben Tumin: Yes.
Stephen Nissenbaum: Well, yes, then kind of like Häagen-Dazs, I don’t want to say Santa was fake but he was almost fake.
Technically there were Dutch people who, going back in time, celebrated Christmas with a St. Nicholas figure who’d come to punish bad kids and give gifts to good kids. Catholics practiced this tradition but notably, the Dutch who populated New Amsterdam were almost exclusively Protestant, and they insisted on getting rid of exactly those kinds of celebrations.
So, there was a faint glimmer of historical fact in saying that Santa Claus was an old Dutch tradition, but he wasn’t part of New York history and really he was invented by Knickerbockers like Clement Clarke Moore.
Ben Tumin: If I may, Santa seems to be a manifestation of New York’s upper classes' eagerness not to address the ills of industrial capitalism but to push them out of sight. Does that seem like a fair assessment to you?
Stephen Nissenbaum: I think that's eloquently put.
I would only add that by the 1830s and 1840s, celebrating Santa Claus on Christmas wasn’t just an upper-class ritual. Rather, thanks to the reprinting of Moore’s poem, which proved indelibly popular, the tradition spread very quickly among the middle classes and even those aspiring to join the middle classes. So celebrations of Santa rapidly permeated all of American society and transformed Christmas into the private celebration we know today.
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