148: The Angels Wanna Wear My Red Suit
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Ocomo you faithful, joyful and triumphant, and let us have for once a rational adult conversation about Santa Claus. You listen to a special Christmas edition of This American Life from WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, I'm out of glass. And let us head back my friend. Back for a moment, before Christmas lights were invented, back before Macy's department store goes up on 34th Street, back before the moment Charles Dickens writes a Christmas carol, back my friend to the molten lava core at the very center of modern Christmas. The day that someone first believed in Santa Claus. Someone has actually figured out when this happened, and it's in 1822, in America, in New York City. And do we have to thanks for the whole thing? A bunch of rich guys. And not just any rich guys, aristocratic rich guys who all agreed that there were big, big problems with the entire American experiment, then very young, then more young to them than the Star Wars trilogy is to us. And these guys did not like it one little bit, they were very suspicious. Of democracy, modern capitalism, Thomas Jefferson. They just saw it as chaos, and as a takeover of the city, and really the whole country by the mob. This is Stephen Nissenbaum, who's written a history about all this, called The Battle for Christmas. Ordinary people, by which they really meant the middle classes, were taking over the city commercially and politically. They called these people the mob. And one of the dreadful areas of mob rule, from their point of view, was what happened at Christmas every year. There was all this public groutiness at Christmas, it was celebrated the way we celebrate New Year's Eve now. Yes, exactly. If you were worried about the mob, the one time of year when you probably had to be most done your guard, was the Christmas season. During Christmas, roving bands of tufts went from door to door, demanding drinks, and making threats. There was riotous noise making, massive public drunkenness. You can understand why these rich guys just hated it. And so they set out to create new traditions. Traditions that they hoped might replace all this debauchery. Starting around 1810, they tried to convince people that a certain 4th century Catholic saint, St. Nicholas, you may recognize the name. It was in fact, the patron saint of New York. For about a decade after that, they tried to make his saint's day, which is December 6th, into a regular December holiday on the island of Manhattan. Now these guys were very serious about the whole business of creating new holidays for the new nation. At least one of them was involved in the creation of Washington's birthday, Columbus Day, and the 4th of July. But this seemed Nicholas's thing. It was just not catching on. If you saw the way that they portrayed St. Nicholas, in a handout that one of these guys
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