by Gerry Bowler
Said the gentleman, taking up a pen, “it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the Poor and Destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir.”
“Are there no prisons?” asked Scrooge.
“Plenty of prisons,” said the gentleman, laying down the pen again.
“And the Union workhouses?” demanded Scrooge. “Are they still in operation?”
“They are. Still,” returned the gentleman, “I wish I could say they were not.”
“The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?” said Scrooge.
“Both very busy, sir.”
“Oh! I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course,” said Scrooge. “I’m very glad to hear it.”
“Under the impression that they scarcely furnish Christian cheer of mind or body to the multitude,” returned the gentleman, “a few of us are endeavouring to raise a fund to buy the Poor some meat and drink, and means of warmth. We choose this time, because it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices. What shall I put you down for?”
“Nothing!” Scrooge replied.
“You wish to be anonymous?”
“I wish to be left alone,” said Scrooge. “Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don’t make merry myself at Christmas and I can’t afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned – they cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there.”
“Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.”
“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
– Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, 1843
Ideas about Christmas charity were in a state of flux in the nineteenth century in both Britain and the United States. The older methods of caring for the poor over the holidays – expecting largesse from the local landlord, turning to the parish church, or going door to door questing – were more appropriate to a feudal or rural past now disappeared, but new ways had yet to be fully negotiated socially. Urbanization and industrialization had separated many of the poor from their natural communities in which they might have sought succour and posed the middle class with a moral problem. There was little aid from government sources aside from the almshouses for the infirm poor and the workhouses for the able-bodied where American jurisdictions chose to follow the British example and erect a system of social welfare whose main purpose was to discourage most indigent people from applying for it. Despite the growing prosperity of America, there was wide-spread poverty: women’s wages were notoriously less than required to survive, dangerous workplace conditions killed and maimed tens of thousands of breadwinners each year, and seasonal variations meant large increases in unemployment during the winter months.
In J.H. Ingraham’s little novel, Santa Claus, or The Merry King of Christmas, Santa Claus has encountered the spirit of Charity, who has enlisted him to “make mankind the givers.” His thousands of elfin helpers were to visit the homes of Boston to see where the wealthy had too much and the poor too little. They disperse throughout the city, some mounted on hummingbirds, some slipping though keyholes or broken windows, and discover a world of injustice where babies cry on the breasts of dead mothers and rack-rent landlords oppress the honest labourer. Charity proclaims that “for this night Equity hath come to judgment on this earth” and orders Santa Claus and his fairy army to take from the rich and give to the poor, which sends 150 fairies to push a golden car holding an orphaned baby down the chimney of a childless couple. Santa Claus and Charity then convey the wealthy in dreams to show them what good things have been done with their riches so that when they wake their compassion will continue.
Americans could not always count on a fairy Santa Claus to alleviate their poverty and bring about social justice, but there was an increasing belief that people of goodwill should imitate his benevolence and become Santas in their own right. Even Santa Claus admitted this. Having provided the poor children of urban America with magic skates so that they might glide over land, sea, and air to visit his establishment in Wonderland, he tells them after a time of fun that they must return to their poverty. However, he says, there are kind hearts in the world who will care for them: “You shall not be left to freeze in the cold street, Tommy. I will see that somebody looks after you, Jamie; and, Jacky, I know a man who wants to straighten just such a foot as yours, and make you strong and well.”
Emphasis was placed on charity at a personal rather than an institutional level. An ever-present fear in nineteenth-century social thinking was that charity might prove debilitating and cultivate a culture of dependency. In an encounter with prosperous and upright citizens, poor families could receive not only material help but also the moral guidance they so desperately needed to remedy their condition. In imitating Santa Claus, the children of the well off were taught to provide, for the urchins and urchinesses, gifts “as good as new” labelled “For a girl who tells the truth,” “For a good boy,” and “For an honest boy.” Even those who did not agree with social Darwinism, which argued that it was better for society that the sick and indigent die off, were quick to distinguish between the “idle poor” – the shiftless dope fiends, drunkards, and such riffraff – and the “deserving poor” whose misfortune’s were not of their making. Stories, both fictional and documentary, about families in need of help at Christmas seldom featured two parents – the needy heroes and heroines were usually plucky widows, pathetic orphans, or overburdened single fathers. Take, for example, the story of three motherless children – Tilly, Sammy, and Emmie – who are accidentally provided with toys meant for richer children and who resolve to enjoy owning them for only a brief moment on Christmas morning before returning them to their rightful owner, the woman whose mean spirit cost their father his job with the railroad. The hard-hearted woman is touched by their honesty and decides to let the children keep the toys and to convince his employer to rehire their father.
The poor of late-nineteenth-century popular fiction are remarkable for their reluctance to accept charity. The proud widow of “Captain Santa Claus” would rather see her children go giftless at Christmas than stoop to ask for help, especially from the “fiercely mustached” Hal Ransom, who has long sought her hand. Fortunately, his persistent benevolence wins her over:
Then she put down her box, and stepped impulsively toward him, two white hands outstretched, tears starting from her eyes, the color surging to her lovely face – “Where can I find words to thank you, Captain Santa Claus?”
He rose quickly, his face flushed and eager, his strong hands trembling.
“Shall I tell you?” he asked.
Her head was drooping now; her eyes could not meet the fervent love and longing in his; her bosom heaved with every breath. She could only stand and tremble when he seized her hands.
Parents and teachers were always alert to the danger of the idea of Santa Claus creating generations of greedy children. Writers reflected on how little it had taken to please them in the old days and bemoaned a heightened sense of entitlement they sensed in the younger crowd. (These critics were probably right in perceiving a new attitude. As America became a consumer society, children were taught to place a higher moral value on material possessions and less emphasis was placed on discouraging envy.) An 1897 cartoon contrasted the Christmas wishes of the “old-fashioned” and the “modern” boy. The former, written beneath the light of a kerosene lantern, reads:
Dear Santa Claus
Ples-Bring-me-a-new-sled-and-a-knife-and-a-Bag-of-candy-i-am-trying-to-be-a-good-Boy.
P.S. Ide-Like-a-Few-Moore-Marbles-if-you-can-spar-them
Good-by – From
Willie Smith
The missive of the modern child, written under an electric light,
shows a somewhat different attitude:
Dear Santa Claus
I want a bicycle and a horsles carriage a yatch and you had better bring me another gun and a bigger camera my old one is too small
Yours truly
Harold Percival Smith
P.S. Hurry up about it too
A 1911 satire criticized the excesses to which hapless parents resorted in order to buy the affection of their children at Christmas. A young lad who been given a motor car examines it scornfully and tells his mother: “Well, all I’ve got to say … if I’ve got to drive a four-cylinder machine when everybody else is driving a six, the other kids will have the laugh on me.” Then, turning to his father, he asked, “Dad, what did they stick you for this junk?” His father could only blush. The author said that children were not the ones to blame – they were at heart still as easily satisfied as earlier generations had been, but parents had piled gifts on them and smothered Santa Claus “under heaps of silk and gold,” making Christmas “a mere occasion for showing off before our little ones, bragging with big gifts.” In a similar vein, the Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock portrayed fathers playing with the toy trains intended for their boys at Christmas while the mothers fixed up the dolls meant for the girls. Meanwhile, the children were upstairs gambling and smoking the cigars they were going to give their dads:
“Dandy, aren’t they?” Edwin Jones was saying to little Willie Brown, as they sat in Edwin’s bedroom. “A hundred in a box, with cork tips, and see, an amber mouthpiece that fits into a little case at the side. Good present for Dad, eh?”
“Fine!” said Willie appreciatively. “I’m giving Father cigars.”
“I know, I thought of cigars too. Men always like cigars and cigarettes. You can’t go wrong on them. Say, would you like to try one or two of these cigarettes? We can take them from the bottom. You’ll like them, they’re Russian – away ahead of Egyptian.”
“Thanks,” answered Willie. “I’d like one immensely. I only started smoking last spring – on my twelfth birthday. I think a feller’s a fool to begin smoking cigarettes too soon, don’t you? It stunts him. I waited till I was twelve.”
Inculcating generosity among children at Christmastime was a consistent theme in late-Victorian books and magazines. In “Santa Claus in the Pulpit,” a thoughtless child falls into a reverie during a church service and looks up to find that the preacher has become Saint Nick. The saint demonstrates to the congregation his Grand Stereoscopic Moral Tester, which reveals the reality that lies behind Christmas gifts. A necklace for a rich man’s wife turns out to be a chain of human hands – the hands of poor seamstresses who work ceaselessly to earn a pittance but whose labour provides the wealth that buys the jewels. The lens of Santa’s device reveals that the fur coat purchased by a saloon owner is really composed of “bloated and brutal faces of men; haggard faces of women; pinched faces of little children; bloody faces, with marks of deadly wounds on cheek or forehead; maniac faces glaring out from the screen with meaningless rage.” The silver and gold cup of a greedy child is but a tarnished pewter mug because of the recipient’s ingratitude, while the simpler presents made by hand or saved for by diligent children are revealed in their true glory. Santa informs his listeners that he will never give to the covetous but only to those “people whose pleasure it is to give pleasure to others; good-willers, cheerful workers, loving helpers, generous hearts, who have learned and remembered the words of the Lord Jesus, how he said, ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.’ ”
Sometimes a writer could report that the lesson had lodged in the hearts of the very poorest. In “Wulfy: A Waif,” middle-class readers are given the real-life example of a stunted, lame, motherless child of the streets of New York’s Bowery district. He falls among well-meaning women of a charitable disposition who fill his dirty stocking with Christmas gifts. He asks the ladies to thank Santa Claus for his bounty, but before too long he has given it all away, to his sister in the reformatory and to his friends. His benefactors ask if Wulfy isn’t sorry that all his presents have gone.
Wulfy looked sober too for a minute, and his worldly-wise little lip quivered childishly. Then a smile broke over his face, he gave a brief chuckle, as was his wont when pleased, and then croaked jubilantly: “I had ’em once.”
Happy Wulfy! In this short sentence he had found a philosophy of life … Santa Claus had given him the two greatest pleasures in life: the pleasure of possession and the pleasure of sacrifice.
The lesson of selflessness was, of course, taught rigorously in home and church. A recitation piece for Sunday schools entitled “A Letter to Santa Claus” urged children to consider Christmas giving as part of their missionary duty.
Now let us go to the far Western prairie,
And find the Red Indian we read of in story;
On the dark, cold hearths let us kindle a light,
Till the sad little faces are happy and bright;
Let us bring them mittens, and nice little toys,
Who ne’er of our Christmas have e’en guessed the joys.
Come join with us, then, for we firmly believe,
It is ever more blessed to give than receive.
Another target of fictional inducements to imitate the charity of Santa Claus was the flinty-hearted capitalist who always seemed to be in need of moral reform. In “A Snow-Bound Santa Claus,” a railroad magnate has determined that in order to cut costs he will terminate a particular worker for being too principled. Fortunately, his train is trapped on Christmas Eve in Great Bear Pass and on board are a party of children who befriend him and whose stockings he fills as they sleep. He learns that their father is his honest employee – they have lost their mother but can now join him because he has a good job. Naturally, the father’s future is assured by the now-wiser rail baron.
“Be off,” snarls a bloated plutocrat to a beggar on Christmas Eve. “Go to Associated Charities … Go to the devil!” This is Berryman Livingstone, protagonist of Santa Claus’s Partner, a turn-of-the-century novel. He is successful, rich, and dissatisfied on Christmas Eve. He abuses the goodwill of his employees, chastises frolicking children, and shoves poor boys out of his way on the crowded street. Despite his wealth he is pitied by his overworked clerk, John Clark, whose large family and loving wife are treasures beyond anything that the miserly and lonely Livingstone possesses. Readers who suspect they have fallen into a remake of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol are correct. We see, in flashback, how the years have hardened the once-tender Livingstone heart and how his love of wealth came to cost him the love of his life. Like Ebenezer Scrooge, Livingstone undergoes a conversion. This change is not wrought by ghosts but by a look into a mirror that reveals a horrifying sight: “a hard, wan, ugly old man” with sharp, cold eyes. He falls to his knees and prays to be made like a little child again (another reference to Matthew 18:3) and remembers his clerk’s cherubic daughter. He borrows her to act as “Santa Claus’s Partner” in an evening of toy shopping for her, her family, and the little patients of the Children’s Hospital. On his way to redemption, he makes his clerk into a full partner and rediscovers his lost sweetheart.
(The predictability of this sort of Christmas epiphany undergone by the wealthy was parodied in a 1916 short story where a rich man bringing toys to a poor family is set upon violently by the children: “Hit him with the brick in the Tribune, Percy! It’s Santa Claus and we’ve got him!” He discovers that their mother is his long-lost love; he proposes to marry her and raise her unruly brood, to whom he promises: “You’re all coming to live with me and be rich and unscrupulous!”)
Santa Claus was more than an inspiration for personal charity; he was also a spokesman for organizations who sought to make Christmas a more enjoyable experience for the poor and helpless. In December 1891, Salvation Army Capt. Joseph McFee was attempting to raise money to provide a free Christmas dinner for San Francisco’s poor. Remembering a charity pot in Liverpool, England, into which donations were thrown by pass
ersby, he won civic permission to set up a “kettle” at the entrance to the Oakland ferry. Its success spawned imitators, and by 1895 the kettle was used in thirty Salvation Army corps on the West Coast. In Boston, army officers refused to co-operate for fear of “making spectacles of themselves,” but other volunteers made sure the idea went ahead. Before long the Salvation Army was hiring homeless men to tend the kettles dressed as Santa Claus, and these bell-ringers became a familiar sight on North American streets until the army discontinued the practice in 1937 because the sight of so many Santas was proving too confusing to children. Such work is continued by another Christian charity, the Volunteers of America (VOA), who since 1900 have recruited many of their Sidewalk Santas from the ranks of the scarcely employable. The five original soliciting Santas who appeared on the streets of Los Angeles were quickly arrested and charged with creating a nuisance before a public outcry secured their release. Today the VOA operates its own Sidewalk Santa Claus School, and its graduates hit the streets on the day after Thanksgiving to raise money for hundreds of charitable projects across the United States.
In 1914, the Santa Claus Association was formed in New York to “preserve children’s belief in Saint Nicholas” by answering kids’ letters to the gift-bringer gathered from the thousands of pieces of mail sent to Santa at the post office. This charity spread to nineteen cities across the United States but suffered a blow in 1928 when the New York post office refused to co-operate any longer. Letters to Santa Claus from needy children are still answered by a number of North American organizations, including Canada Post, which responds to more than a million letters a year. Some of these letters are on the cute side of the ledger. Devon of Lundar, Manitoba, wrote Santa Claus to ask: