The Boston Anticks: "Occupy Christmas"

I demand a return to the traditional Christmas of the 18th and 19th centuries - the kind of Christmas that had led the Puritans to suppress and then outlaw the holiday: rowdy public displays brought on by excessive drinking, the mocking of established authority, the invasion of private, wealthy homes, and aggressive forms of begging (to the point of physical harm).

The rest of this post is taken from Stephen Nissenbaum's The Battle For Christmas: A Cultural History of America's Most Cherished Holiday (pp. 5-11, 38, 42-43, 53-55, 94, and 96-99; published in 1996 and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize):

In early modern Europe, roughly the years between 1500 and 1800, the Christmas season was a time to let off steam - and to gorge. ... Animals could not be slaughtered until the weather was cold enough to ensure that the meat would not go bad ... December was also the month when the year's supply of beer or wine was ready to drink. And for farmers, too, this period marked the start of a season of leisure. ...

Excess took many forms. Reveling could easily become rowdiness; lubricated by alcohol, making merry could edge into making trouble. Christmas was a season of "misrule," a time when ordinary behavioral restraints could be violated with impunity. It was part of what one historian has called "the world of carnival." ... Christmas "misrule" meant that not only hunger but also anger and lust could be expressed in public. ... Often people blackened their faces or disguised themselves as animals or cross-dressed, thus operating under a protective cloak of anonymity. ...

Here is how the Reverend Increase Mather of Boston put it in 1687:

The generality of Christmas-keepers observe that festival after such a manner as is highly dishonourable to the name of Christ. How few are there comparatively that spend those holidays (as they are called) after an holy manner. But they are consumed in Compotations, in Interludes, in playing at Cards, in Revellings, in excess of Wine, in mad Mirth...

[Reverand Henry] Bourne singled out two particularly dangerous seasonal practices, mumming and (strange to modern readers) the singing of Christmas carols. Mumming usually involved "a changing of Clothes between Men and Women; who when dressed in each other's habits, go from one Neighbor's house to another ... and make merry with them in disguise." ... As for singing Christmas carols, that practice was a "disgrace," since it was "generally done, in the midst of Rioting and Chambering, and Wantonness." ("Chambering" was a common euphemism for fornication.) It was another Anglican cleric, the sixteenth-century bishop Hugh Latimer, who put the matter most succinctly: "Men dishonour Christ more in the twelve days of Christmas, than in all the twelve months besides."

The Puritans knew what subsequent generations would forget: that when the Church, more than a millennium earlier, had placed Christmas Day in late December, the decision was part of what amounted to a compromise, and a compromise for which the Church paid a high price. ... From the beginning, the Church's hold over Christmas was (and remains still) rather tenuous. There were always people for whom Christmas was a time of pious devotion rather than carnival, but such people were always in the minority. It may not be going too far to say that Christmas has always been an extremely difficult holiday to Christianize. Little wonder that the Puritans were willing to save themselves the trouble.

The Puritans understood another thing, too: Much of the seasonal excess that took place at Christmas was not merely chaotic "disorder" but behavior that took a profoundly ritualized form. Most fundamentally, Christmas was an occasion when the social hierarchy itself was symbolically turned upside down, in a gesture that inverted designated roles of gender, age, and class. During the Christmas season those near the bottom of the social order acted high and mighty. Men might dress like women, and women might dress (and act) like men. Young people might imitate and mock their elders ... A peasant or an apprentice might become "Lord of Misrule" and mimic the authority of a real "gentleman." ...

The most common ritual of social inversion during the Christmas season involved something that is associated with Christmas in our own day - we would call it charity. Prosperous and powerful people were expected to offer the fruits of their harvest bounty to their poorer neighbors and dependents. ... But the modern notion of charity does not really convey a picture of how this transaction worked. For it was usually the poor themselves who initiated the exchange, and it was enacted face-to-face, in rituals that would strike many of us today as an intolerable invasion of privacy. ...

The poor - most often bands of boys and young men - claimed the right to march to the houses of the well-to-do, enter their halls and receive gifts of food, drink, and sometimes money as well. And the rich had to let them in - essentially, to hold "open house." Christmas was a time when peasants, servants, and apprentices exercised the right to demand that their wealthier neighbors and patrons treat them as if they were wealthy and powerful. ...

It was not enough for the landlord to let the peasants in and feed them. On this one occasion he had to share with them his choicest food and drink, his private stock. ... The historian E.P. Thompson has noted that landed gentlemen could always try to use a generous handout at Christmas as a way of making up for a year's accumulation of small injustices, regaining in the process their tenants' goodwill. In fact, episodes of misrule were widely tolerated by the elite. Some historians argue that role inversions actually functioned as a kind of safety valve that contained class resentments within clearly defined limits ...

Nowhere is the variety of forms in which New Englanders celebrated Christmas, and their occasional intersection or even conflict, better revealed than in the region's major urban center, the town of Boston. ...

Several sources, taken together, make it clear that a tradition of aggressive Christmas mumming (a variety of wassail) was practiced by some of Boston's poorer inhabitants over a period of at least thirty years, beginning no later than the early 1760s and continuing at least into the mid-1790s. These groups called themselves the Anticks, masked troupes who demanded (or forced) entry into the houses of respectable Bostonians at Christmas. Once inside, they engaged in a dramatic "performance" and demanded gifts of money in return.

The first piece of evidence of the existence of the Anticks is sketchy, taking the form of an oral report given to a folklorist late in the nineteenth century by a man whose mother - born in about 1752 - had told it to him. ... The man, Samuel Breck, belonged to a very wealthy family. He was born in 1770 and lived in a mansion in central Boston during the years when the Anticks paid their holiday visits (his recollections presumably date from the years around 1780). Breck recalled the Anticks as "a set of the lowest blackguards" who were "disguised in filthy clothes and ofttimes with masked faces." They "went from house to house in large companies, and bon gre, mal gre, obtruding themselves everywhere, particularly into the rooms that were occupied by parties of ladies and gentlemen." There they "would demean themselves with great insolence." ...

This often went on for half an hour. Breck remembered that even after the men finally left, "the house would be filled with another gang." (Apparently there were multiple bands of Anticks.) Breck concluded by recalling an especially significant cultural point, that the victims of such visitations did not feel entitled to expel the Anticks from their houses: "Custom had licensed these vagabonds to enter even by force any place they chose." ...

As early as 1772, a New York newspaper complained that the absence of "decency, temperance, and sobriety" at Christmas was so serious a matter that it belonged in the courts. The problem was caused by "[t]he assembling of Negroes, servants, boys and other disorderly persons, in noisy companies in the streets, where they spend the time in gaming, drunkenness, quarreling, swearing, etc., to the great disturbance of the neighborhood." The behavior of these rowdies was "so highly scandalous both to religion and civil government, that it is hoped the Magistrates will interpose to suppress the enormity."

By 1820 Christmas misrule had become such an acute social threat that respectable New Yorkers could no longer ignore it or take it lightly. ... [B]ands of roaming young street toughs, members of the emerging urban proletariat, were no longer restricting their seasonal reveling to their own neighborhoods; they had begun to travel freely, and menacingly, wherever they pleased. Often carousing in disguise (a holdover from the old tradition of mumming), these street gangs marauded through the city's wealthy neighborhoods, especially on New Year's Eve, in the form of callithumpian bands, which resembled (and may have overlapped with) the street gangs that were now vying for control of the city's poorer neighborhoods. Throughout the night these bands made as much noise as they could, sometimes stopping deliberately at the houses of the rich and powerful. In 1826, for example, such a gang stopped in front of the Broadway house of the city's mayor; there they "enacted" what a local newspaper termed "a scene of disgraceful rage." ...

In 1828 there occurred an extensive and especially violent callithumpian parade, complete with the standard array of "drums, tin kettles, rattles, horns, whistles, and a variety of other instruments." This parade began along the working-class Bowery, where the band pelted a tavern with lime; then it marched to Broadway, where a fancy upper-class ball was being held at the City Hotel; then to a black neighborhood, stopping at a church where the callithumpians "demolished all the windows, broke the doors [and] seats," and beat with sticks and ropes the African-American congregants who were holding a "watch" service; next, the band headed to the city's main commercial district, where they smashed crates and barrels and looted at least one shop; still unsatisfied, they headed to the Battery (at the southern tip of the city), where they broke the windows of several of the city's wealthiest residences and tried to remove the iron fence that surrounded Battery Park; finally they headed back to Broadway for a second visit. This time a group of hired watchmen were waiting for the callithumpians; but the band stood down the watch force, and, in the words of a local newspaper, "the multitude passed noisily and triumphantly up Broadway."

What are we to make of scenes like these? Once again, E. P. Thompson makes a convincing case that it would be misleading to interpret them either as wholly conscious political protest or as mere revelry that got out of hand, a kind of nineteenth-century frat party. Historians of American cities have agreed with that assessment. One of them puts it like this: "Riotous disorder, racial violence, and jolly foolery for neighbors and audiences existed side by side ... for decades. ... Customary Christmas license combined with seasonal unemployment made the winter holiday a noisy, drunken, threatening period in the eyes of the respectable." ...

[In 1828, there occured in New York a] New Year's Eve parade in which more than a thousand "persons of all ages" marched down "many of the principal streets of the city" committing "outrageous" acts. The mob

moved from one end of the city to the other, making the most hideous noises, committing many excesses, and for several hours in succession, disturbing neighborhoods where they thought proper to become in some measure stationary, to such a degree that sleep and rest, for the sick or for the well, were entirely destroyed. No nocturnal tumult or disturbance that we have ever witnessed, was in any measure equal to this. We understand that wherever the watch offered to interfere for the purpose of preventing mischief; they were either overpowered, or intimidated by numbers, and the mob had undisputed possession of the streets until a very late hour in the night. ...

To read the city's newspapers at mid-century is to encounter upbeat editorials about Christmas shopping and the joyous expectations of children juxtaposed with unsettling reports of holiday drunkenness and rioting. ... On December 26, 1840, a party of German-Americans (they were "engaged in fiddling, dancing, and making night hideous with their discordant din") engaged in a serious street battle with the police in which twenty-five people were arrested. But on the same day, the paper announced that "the holidays are at hand - the merry days to which childhood and youth look forward throughout the year with such anticipation and delight" ...

In 1848 George Templeton Strong was able to note casually that Christmas was "essentially an indoor and domestic festival," but when he took an omnibus to go shopping that same day, he noted that "[t]he driver was drunk and the progress of the vehicle was like that of a hippopotamus." Two years later, with accounts of Santa Claus and Christmas shopping plastered lavishly throughout the pages of the Tribune, gangs of youths were still roaming the streets at Christmas, making trouble wherever they went. By this time the gangs even had names, such as "[t]he Short Boys, Swill Boys, Rock Boys, Old Maid Boys, Holy Ch—s, and other bands of midnight prowlers [who] should have been in state prison long ago." New Year's Eve, 1851-52, was ushered into the city by what the Tribune termed "a Saturnalia of discord, by Callithumpian and Cowbellian bands, by musketry and fire-crackers, by bacchanal songs and noisy revels, which for two hours after midnight made sleep not a thing to be dreamed of." One man was arrested "for entering, uninvited, the house of Philip Herring, during his absence, and insulting his wife." And a group of about 150 men (most of them apparently Irish, and all of them drunk) invaded a fashionable Broadway restaurant and systematically destroyed the furniture, threw food and dishes around the place, and finally (before the police arrived) assaulted the owner, his wife, and their staff. All in all, upwards of one hundred men were arrested that night "for entering residences in which they never were before, and where they knew not a soul, and after eating and drinking without molestation to their hearts' content, maliciously breaking decanters, dishes, scattering the provisions about the premises, and not content with that, in many instances breaking windows, doors, and behaving more like fiends than like men."

At the heart of all this disorder, the Tribune reiterated, was the prevalence of alcohol during the Christmas season: "In the Eleventh Ward an unusual number of men were arrested for drunkenness, creating a mob, exciting a riot, insulting females, and other offenses to which men of low breeding, when intoxicated, are addicted." Such behavior was abetted by certain business establishments; local bars actually served drinks gratis on Christmas Day, in a holdover from the old English custom demanded of innkeepers ... The results, Horace Greeley reported, were obnoxious:

The first flash of morning discovered the liquor shops in full operation, with wassail bowls of smoking punch, and "medicine" of all sorts, free as water. This dangerous and wicked temptation was the means of setting a great many young men and boys in a state of crazy intoxication long before noon. As early as 10 o'clock we saw, in Broadway, between the Park and Broome-st., about a dozen parties of boys, each numbering from four to ten persons, nearly every one grossly drunk, and four fellows, in as many parties, entirely helpless, and being dragged along by neck and heels by their hardly less drunk companions.

What had changed, then, was not that the rowdier ways of celebrating Christmas had disappeared, or even that they had diminished, but that a new kind of holiday celebration, domestic and child-centered, had been fashioned and was now being claimed as the "real" Christmas. The rest of it - public drunkenness and threats or acts of violence, "rough music" - had been redefined as crime, "making night hideous." In part, this was accomplished through institutional means (in 1828 New York introduced a professional police force to replace the private "watch" that had failed to control the previous year's callithumpian riot). And in part it was accomplished through the manipulation of language itself. Henceforth, newspaper stories about Santa Claus would appear under the heading "Christmas," while stories about callithumpian activities would be relegated to the police column. In the terminology of a later age, those activities would be marginalized.