 What if I told you that Christmas, the holiday we know and love so well, was a capitalist conspiracy to indoctrinate the working class into bourgeois culture and values? At one end of the conspiracy was the very real circle of New York City antiquarians and aristocrats trying to snuff out earlier forms of the holiday, replacing these folk practices with distinctly quiet, calm, peaceful, productive, contemplative, bourgeois forms of the holiday we know today. At the other end stands their greatest creation, the defrocked Bishop Santa Claus and his apparently vast, never-ceasing workshops fed by partially enslaved elf labor. This classic product of American culture was specifically designed to infiltrate your mind and integrate you more fully into the scheme of bourgeois interests. Welcome to Liberty Chronicles, a project of libertarianism.org. I'm Anthony Comegna. So I asked, what would you say? And if you tell me I'm crazy, well, frankly, you'd have a point. Yet this is a fairly standard historical interpretation of the American Christmas celebration right down to the slave master Santa. Historians very often fall into traps like that, reading far much into their sources and forgetting to consider that people may have genuinely preferred our modern Christmas to forms that came earlier. It's easy to assume that new cultural products or movements are foisted on an unthinking public, but methodological individualists know better. People are always and actively choosing to spend their money in time. Rather than yammering on and on about how commercialized and capitalist Christmas has become, it is much more useful to know why we celebrate Christmas the way we do. Who came up with this modern holiday? Why? And if indeed it was a capitalist conspiracy, why did people so widely accept it into their lives? If you were to clear your mind and put the phrase American Christmas in pictures, chances are it would look a lot like the initial setting in Clement Clarke Moore's poem, A Visit from St. Nicholas. It's late at night Christmas Eve or early Christmas morning. There's a fire slowly sputtering out in the hearth. The children's stockings are waiting, hung from the mantle. Everyone is asleep upstairs. And the word is Santa will drop by at some point before morning to fill up the house with new toys. But Clement Clarke Moore was not reflecting common practice when his poem was published in 1823. He was inventing a new tradition almost out of whole cloth. Let's remind ourselves what he came up with. A visit from St. Nicholas, Clement Clarke Moore, 1823. T'was 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. The children were nestled all snug in their beds while visions of sugar plums danced in their heads. And Mama and her kerchief and I in 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 my 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. More rapid than eagles his coarsers they came, and he whistled and shouted and called them by name. 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. As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly, when they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky. So up to the housetop the coarsers they flew, with a sleigh full of toys and St. Nicholas too. 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 in all 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 round little 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, up 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 ere he drove out of sight. Happy Christmas to all and to all. A good night. Clement Clarkmore is an interesting figure from a transformative time in New York history. From 1790 to 1835, the city's population rose nearly nine times, from 33,000 to 270,000, mainly poor Irish Catholic immigrants. City planners responded by turning Manhattan into a vast grid work of numbered streets. People crowded into the city's first all-poor neighborhoods and hedged the wealthy into their old estates, now often guarded by armed watchmen. New York's upper crust consisted primarily of Episcopalians of British descent. Moore's father was an Episcopal bishop, and his family history lay on the Tory side of the revolution, then the Federalist side of the Constitution. Clement Clarkmore himself wrote tracks attacking Jeffersonianism, which he thought radical, and he even owned five slaves at the time his famous poem was published. He was also one of the city's wealthier landholders. He had inherited Chelsea, yes, the whole neighborhood, from his mother. The property stretched from 19th to 24th Street and 8th to 10th Avenue. It was valued at about half a million dollars in 1830, but as early as 1818, the city's new population pressed in on Moore from all angles. That year, the city seized and purchased a strip of his estate to build 9th Avenue right up the middle. Moore resisted New York's market revolution in some ways, yet he was a key participant in it and a major figure guiding it in what he thought a more healthy, stable direction. He moved his family out of Chelsea mid-century and spent much of his later life grumbling about the world steadily democratizing when once it had been so respectable. Earlier in his life, Moore focused on a set of reformist cultural products evolving out of the New York Historical Society. At the NYHS, a small set of antiquarians conspired over the decades to resist many of their society's ongoing changes and to transform, invent, or channel others in more bourgeois directions. The conspirators included Clement Clark Moore, of course, but also Washington Irving and the banker philanthropist Jonathan Pintard. They were acutely aware of how quickly their city was changing and their main mission was to write history so they would not be swept aside by it. Pintard in particular was a reformer at heart, a lover of folk culture who recognized the functional purposes of celebrations like those which came before a visit from St. Nicholas. The first important fact about pre-modern Christmas was that it was a seasonal celebration stretching through much of the winter. Europeans used the holiday to play with periods of misrule during which the normal rules of acceptable behavior relaxed or inverted. Social hierarchies were temporarily suspended or inverted for a time of carnival or enjoyment of the flesh and dressed as animals, the revelers might elect a child their bishop or assemble the lords of misrule to preside over the festival. Holidays were a period of blowing off steam, having fun and relaxing the standard social and political tensions that ruled their world with iron fists. The English Puritans abolished these sorts of pagan and Catholic celebrations, but 18th century English continued to engage in wassaling. Wassilers were essentially drunken mobs, which paraded through town, marched up to the local lords doorstep and demanded the use of the house and tribute in goods or money. Landlords who refused the crowd must have seemed a lot like wealthy residents of neighborhoods invaded by poorer children on Halloween today. If they complained they seemed terribly uncharitable to people they could easily help. In the old days of feudalism lords were supposed to protect the people and keep them fed in times of famine. In the new early modern world of private enclosed estates and wage labor though, those old social obligations broke down and transformed. Holiday misrule made for the perfect moments of releasing social tensions, times when the wealthy could safely meet the poor's demands for relief without actually abolishing or disrupting the social order. In a letter to his daughter in January 1822, Jonathan Pintard described an encounter with a New Year's Calathompean Band. Basically, Wassilers playing raucous, noisy, unpleasant music. Calathompean bands or parades were usually not complete without heavy drinking and fistfights between large numbers of seasonally unemployed factory workers. The factories were closed of course because their water meals were frozen over and what's a hand to do then but go cause some trouble for men of a state like Pintard. Pintard's recollection of New Year's Eve is very similar to Moore's poem published a year later but Moore takes the Calathompeans who disturb Pintard's sleep and turns them into the mythical Santa Claus rewarding good little bourgeois children for staying indoors and behaving themselves. Letters from John Pintard to his daughter Eliza Noel Pintard Davidson, 1816 to 1833. New Year's Mourn, 1821. I closed the old year by attending Divine Service Last Eve in the Lutheran Church where some elegant and appropriate hymns and music were performed. After a most delightful mourn, the afternoon was clouded or and the evening threatened a snowstorm. Wet prevented Mom and Sister from accompanying me. I had determined to rise early in order to commence the New Year with the dawn and to have a few moments to chat with my dear daughter before breakfast. For this purpose I desired Tamar, our domestic servant to kindle a fire in my office. She is a very early riser but through fear of oversleeping herself she had risen about half past four and went upstairs to look at the clock for the time. Sister's room is directly over the back parlor. She heard someone take the key and deliberately open the door and called to Mama. Who with her masculine spirit rose to light a candle by the lamp. I threw on my clothes in haste and down we sailed, found the back parlor door a jar but nothing out of place. We went downstairs to examine the street door when Tamar explained the mystery. On retiring to rest again, the bands of music, bagpipes, drums and fiefs and boys bells rang, proclaiming happy New Year. Interrupting all repose till daylight when I arose. Leaving Mama and sister to take a little rest till nine when I shall call them. The day is beautiful. After church the ceremonial and friendly visits will take up my time till three when our little family party will assemble round our festive board and when your healths will be drunk with all affection and old-fashioned formality. Among other visits the trustees of the Savings Bank are to wait on West Bayard Esquire at half past one to pay the compliments of the day as a mark of respect for the faithful and diligent discharge of his duty as president of this benevolent institution. I did not get home from the bank on Saturday night till past ten. We took in ten thousand one hundred one dollars from one hundred twenty seven depositors and our receipts at the close of the last eighteen months amount to nearly half a million half the sum which my warm anticipation had allowed to be deposited in seven years. My dear little grandchildren were not forgotten. Monday second New Year's Day being very fine the old good custom of mutual visitings and cordial greetings was observed with unusual animation. After an excellent discourse from my French pastor I went to the Savings Bank which was crowded especially with children with their gold pieces and bright dollars New Year's gifts. We took in nearly seven thousand dollars and had to dismiss many who came too late in order to wait in a body on our president and the mayor and company. I did not get home from my tour till past three when I found Aunt Helen, Craig and Davis and we sat down to an excellent dinner of venison. The first in many years at your father's table and drank all your healths individually. Mother, father and children wishing you every joy and comfort. Mince pies and all the assortments of pastry which your sister so well prepares abundantly garnished the dessert. We passed a social afternoon grateful for the blessings we were enjoying. While the ladies were entertained I read my sober books musing on the rapid flight of time, the fewness of my remaining years and reflecting on departed friends and how few remain of the companions of my youth and of my immediate family. In swiftly sprawling cities like New York during the market revolution these temporary moments of folk social leveling often turned into exercises in democratic oppositional politicking and that is what people like Pintard and Moore were so worried about. Pintard especially wanted to create a distinctly middle-class winter holiday that could channel the sociological need to release tension into productive bourgeois practices. Over three decades he experimented in his own life first celebrating St. Nicholas's feast day on December 6th then shifting to New Year's and finally settling on Christmas with help from co-conspirator Clement Clark Moore. Both men grasped something which Washington Irving hinted at in his sketchbook stories. If you mythologized New York's old Dutch culture in just the right ways you could invent new traditions all New Yorkers could adopt of their own free will as part of their local identity. Irving's sketchbook stories introduced the familiar version of Santa presented as the patron saint of New Amsterdam. Pintard was one of the circle's keener historical thinkers and he recognized that American Protestantism did not have these kinds of social releases like the Catholics had festivals and saint's days. He explained his point of view in another letter to his daughter May 1823. Tuesday 27 May 1823 On Saturday the Linnaean Society celebrated the birthday of Linnaeus at Flushing about 200. The day was fine and the ceremonial infestivity went off in high style with much pleasantry. I was not present for the best reason not being a member nor invited a proof of my extreme sequestered life though it would have been an agreeable relaxation after many weeks of assiduous duty. Still on the whole it is best that I should refrain from these public parties all together. My spirits like bottled champagne are too apt to effervescence and overflow by the excitement of company and mirth which the phlematic are too apt to impute to an excess of that quotation which can alone exhilarate them. This impression not easily refuted is unfavorable and for my soul I cannot repress my generous feelings nor wear the mask of hypocrisy. Had I not been a secretary of the American Bible Society I think that once for all and on so great an occasion I should have attended the spectacle yesterday. I am not one of those severe moralists who reprobate public amusements in the gross although to avoid offense I partake so little of them. The hard-working part of society must have occasional relaxations. Our Protestant faith affords no religious holiday and processions like the Catholics. From the period of the Jews and heathens down through the Greeks and Romans the Celts the Druids even our Indians all had and have the religious festivals. England retains numerous red-letter days as they are called which afford intervals of rest together with the Christmas Easter and Whitson holidays for all the public offices banks and company. But with us we have only independence Christmas and New Year three solitary days not enough and which causes so much breach of the Sabbath in this city for youth pent up mechanics and laborers will seek fresh air and rural exercise on that day in spite of all human laws to the contrary. If America's Protestant culture did not naturally allow for holiday festivities so necessary when the poor were crowding in so quickly on the rich men of historical vision like Irving and Pintard would have to invent it themselves by constructing an ideal past complete with holidays for social venting. The conspirators hope to control the course of their cities present and future. The Irish Catholics weren't the only ones who knew how to have fun but for God's sakes people keep it in your own homes. What the historical society needed was a way people could celebrate the winter season at home with their own families without the ability to so quickly shape themselves into a disruptive and demanding mob. Pintard provided the methods of celebration Irving the respectable likable holiday hero and Moore put it all in verse. But Irving's Santa Claus in the sketchbook stories was still a saint still noticeably a bishop with a Dutch long pipe to boot. Moore's Santa your member is a jelly old elf who smokes a short and stubby pipe. In old New York culture everyone recognized the long pipe as an aristocrat's device a holdover from the days before cheap and disposable clay pipes. Working class people broke their pipe stems for no other clear reason than to differentiate themselves from elites. Over time the difference between pipe size could often tell your place in New York's social standings. Moore and Pintard took Irving saintly patron of New Amsterdam and dressed him up as one of the working people themselves the bringer of joy to private households of well-behaved little bourgeoisifying children. Kids who grew up with benevolent figures like this both a patriarchal judge of good and bad and an endless stream of rewards for obedience these children would never turn calithumpian they wouldn't drift towards spiritually dangerous or politically disruptive Catholicism and democracy. They would remain good little Protestant business people with their minds on their own affairs and their hands always diligently busy at their work which would be dutifully rewarded by the powers that be. So there it is the conspiracy that created Christmas but before we attribute too much power and influence to this handful of moneyed antiquarians let's remind ourselves that culture is a communicative meaning-building process like any other kind of communication it requires at least two parties a speaker performer and a listener receiver without either there can be no sharing of meaningful information Irving Pintard and Moore clearly had their own reasons for wanting to make their version of Christmas supreme but what about the hundreds of millions of Americans who have adopted it and celebrated it since then can we really say that all of those people are merely passively absorbing a plot to fool them into compliance with modern capitalism right down to loving that cruel master of elf labor that huckster of coca-cola Santa Claus a holiday figure now greater than Christ himself the truth is there was indeed a conspiracy to create Christmas but to understand why we celebrate the way we do today you'll have to ask the millions of Americans who had nothing to do with the New York Historical Society why did they choose more and more every decade to celebrate by buying presents for close family members holding private meals in individual households and visiting perhaps a few close relatives and friends and then returning back to work the holiday was invented from above for sure but as Pintard knew well it had to serve a purpose from below to be of any constructive use in a democratic age Liberty Chronicles is a project of libertarianism.org is produced by Test Terrible if you've enjoyed this episode of Liberty Chronicles please rate review and subscribe to us on iTunes for more information on Liberty Chronicles visit libertarianism.org