Posted on 12/04/2002 2:43:44 PM PST by afraidfortherepublic
Every year, the lights go up a little earlier. Every year, more people ignore the ghosts and jack-o'-lanterns of Halloween, sail right past the Pilgrims and turkeys of Thanksgiving and proceed directly to Christmas.
The first house on our block was decorated in October, even before the leaves were down.
The stores, of course, are much worse offenders. I was still wearing a T-shirt when the seasonal aisles in our local Kmart came alive with fake greenery and blinking lights. Christmas seems to fill an entire quarter of the year, and the day is fast approaching when back-to-school sales will go head-to-head with holiday specials.
Our ancestors were different, weren't they? Not for them, this obsession with shopping and spending that grips us every holiday season. They kept Christ in Christmas, gathering in reverence around the Nativity scene and shunning the crass commercialism that rules our celebration. Didn't they?
Well, guess again. I sampled Christmas issues of the Milwaukee Sentinel from the 1800s, and what I found surprised me. Yes, the 19th century was less secular and less cynical than the 21st; the newspaper carried Yuletide poetry, lengthy sermon excerpts and detailed stories about the good works being done during the Christmas season.
But it was not hard to find the dollar signs hiding in the greenery or the unmistakable signs of holiday stress.
Consider a Christmas editorial from 1846 - the same year Milwaukee became a city. The Sentinel's editor began, innocently enough, by invoking the spirit of a Dickens Christmas: "The return of the Holiday season, associated from early childhood with pleasant memories of family gatherings, friendly greetings, and general festivity, seems to diffuse a genial glow throughout the whole community and to stir up in every heart its best and purest feelings."
There followed a baldly promotional listing of stores in the ragtag frontier town that offered toys, books, dry goods, groceries, variety wares and "articles of dress and fancy work."
"He must be hard to please, indeed," the editor coaxed, "who cannot find something to his taste in making the round we have indicated. To those who think of buying we say, buy quickly."
Milwaukee's commercial pace quickened perceptibly as the century wore on, and the Christmas rush got more and more hectic.
In 1898, the Sentinel noticed a transformation in downtown Milwaukee: "There is an epidemic of brown-paper parcels. They form processions on the streets - one sees packages coming and going as he sees bits of green moving everywhere on a Palm Sunday. . . . Indeed, the bundles seem to have possession of the streets and the cars, and the human beings are subordinate and not essential."
The newspaper had particular sympathy for the shopper, typically male, who put off his purchases until the last minute: "All day long he will wander from place to place like a peddler and will find no peace. . . . He is tired, cross, snubbed, and finally despairing. Late in the day he buys something particularly inappropriate at a price far beyond his means and is thoroughly unhappy."
The engine of Christmas commerce was in high gear by the end of the 19th century. December issues of the 1898 Sentinel were larded with advertisements for all types of gifts.
Heyn's store offered willow doll carriages for 33 cents and dolls for 39 cents. (These were "J.D. Kestner's celebrated corked and stuffed, kid body, bisque head Dolls," normally priced at 65 cents.)
Gimbel's advertised 100-piece sets of porcelain dinnerware for $4.98 and sets of Haviland china for less than $8.
Espenhain's, another downtown department store, sold "Genuine Mountain Lion Rugs, full head, open mouth, value $35, a handsome present, at $22.50."
J.B. Thiery & Co. had "High-Grade Kimball" pianos starting at $265, and Ripple's, on 3rd St., promised to "Make Your Feet Merry" with $3 shoes.
American Beauty roses, however, sold for the surprisingly modern price of $24 a dozen in 1898. "Worth their weight in gold," said the Sentinel, reporting a rush of out-of-town orders, "especially from millionaire lumbermen in the Northern woods."
(You can multiply by 21 to find the current dollar values for all these items. Most were still astoundingly cheap, although the roses would have cost more than $500.)
With so much to buy, Christmas festivity turned to Christmas frenzy. Dec. 24, reported the Sentinel, was "a wild carnival time of belated gift-buying."
Men were once again the principal offenders. I confess to a feeling of familiarity with this description: "Men almost invariably leave their Christmas buying to the last, and then at the eleventh hour rush forth intent only on spending a given sum in a given time. . . . What he wants is to spend his money, as speedily and smoothly as possible."
The result was "many a feminine tear over masculine density of intellect."
But it wasn't just last-minute shoppers who found the commercial crush of Christmas simply too much at times. Male or female, the relentless pressures of the season made some Milwaukeeans want to scream.
The Sentinel quoted a particularly expressive malcontent in 1898: "Christmas is overdone and overrated. It is a season of reckless extravagance, of entailing obligations on other people and of striving to meet obligations that ought never to have been thrust on one. It's a bore, a stupid farce, and I'm done with it. Not a present shall I make."
Feeling a little overwhelmed by all the holiday hoopla? Take heart. You're carrying on an old Yuletide tradition.
John Gurda, a Milwaukee historian, writes for the Crossroads section on the first Sunday of each month.
I start Christmas early but for a different reason. So that I can be all done with preparations by Thanksgiving so that by this time of year, I can just sit by the tree and sip my eggnog with a roaring fireplace and a good book. (In recent years, with also a laptop running Free Republic)
I do want one of these, although I think the dog would never be the same:
Espenhain's, another downtown department store, sold "Genuine Mountain Lion Rugs, full head, open mouth, value $35, a handsome present, at $22.50."
Sad, but since you won't be getting snow in S. CA as a signal, it's probably understandable.
Sounds like a good plan -- especially that FreeRepublic on the laptop part.
Maybe, maybe not. It would be interesting to research it.
That would be something, wouldn't it? I have a picture of my grandfather as a 3 year old boy taken in Oregon, circa 1892, and he is standing on a white, or light colored, fur rug, holding some kind of stick or pull toy. I've always wondered what kind of fur it was. It's rather shaggy, with long hair lapping over my grandfathers high button shoes, and resembles a wolf or polar bear in my mind. I imagine the rug belonged to the photograper, as it is a studio portrait. It is interesting how tastes change.
Backatcha, and a Happy New Year, too.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.