Christmas Was Celebrated With Drunken Riots
Today, Christmas is the quintessential family holiday that most Americans associate with a bundle of emotions and images. A blanket of white snow; Santa and his reindeer; malls playing non-stop Christmas music for Holiday shoppers reveling in an orgy of spending; presents under an evergreen tree; family and loved ones gathered around a dining table groaning beneath a sumptuous feast. The only controversial thing about it nowadays seems to be that fraction of the public who grow livid if they hear others say “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas”. That is pretty tame, however, to how many Americans viewed Christmas in centuries past, as a time of drunken riots, in which the streets were transformed into free for all drunken brawls.
There was a time when many feared and loathed Christmas, and in the 1600s, the Massachusetts Bay Colony made celebrating Christmas a criminal offense. The Puritans were not upset so much by the religious devotions, as by the disorders that accompanied Christmas celebrations. While many American families tended to commemorate the holiday with wholesome outdoors activities such as skating or watching horse races, Christmas for single men was a time to get wild.
The tendency to get wild on Christmas – and the corresponding concern about the out of control loud and frequently violent celebrations – reached a peak in the 19th century. In cities such as New York and Philadelphia, marked by sharp racial, ethnic, and economic divisions, Christmas was a time for dangerous mob actions. Working class young men would get liquored up, dress up as women or put on blackface, and hit the streets looking for trouble.
Many of them donned masks – a forerunner of Philadelphia’s Mummers Parade – which led contemporaries to label them “fantasticals”. They were also referred to as “callithumpians” – partly from their habit of thumping things (and people). The celebrants would gather in groups, and mocking real music by banging on pots, cowbells, improvised horns, and singing off key, make their way from tavern to tavern. There, they would demand free drinks, and beat up anybody who objected.
Forming themselves into gangs, the drunken celebrants, many of them unemployed, would often parade – or stagger – into rich neighborhoods. There, they would beat drums, sing loudly, ring doorbells, express social discontents, smash windows, fire their guns, and otherwise make themselves disagreeable and “make the night hideous”. Knifings, shootings, arson, and other acts of mayhem and murder were common. It was a reminder to the day’s one percent and upper classes that class conflict and violence seethed beneath America’s surface.
The authorities were largely powerless to do anything about the disorders, and understandably, respectable citizens back then condemned Christmas as a disgrace. Newspapers railed against “the drunken men and boys in the street” and the “black sheep … who made night hideous with Galathumpian doings“. In 1844, an editorial in the New York Ledger deplored the streets being overrun with a “riotous spirit … our city has almost daily been the theater of disorders which practically nullify civil government “.
Pressure from above finally led to the creation of modern police forces capable of effective crowd control. They kept the celebrants out of the business districts and wealthy residential areas, and confined their disorders to their working class neighborhoods. A cultural shift also took the wild partying from holy Christmas, and made the secular New Year’s the time for cutting loose instead.