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Christmas of Future Past

In 1900, a Newspaper Forecast 'Christmas Day: A Hundred Years Hence'

Dec. 23 - Imagine Christmas without Santa Claus, without gift-giving and without reindeer.

What would be left?

Modern Christmas, according to a prediction from 100 years ago today.

Had the prediction come true, celebrants would be bypassing church for the museum, and kids would get no toys and just one day off from school.

Following is the text of the Dec. 23, 1900, prediction from The Chicago Sunday Tribune, edited slightly to compensate for physical defects in the original source copy:

Christmas Day: A Hundred Years Hence

Christmas day in the year 2000 dawned bright and clear over Chicago, only that comparatively few persons were interested in it at that early stage. Santa Claus and St. Nicholas had been myths for 75 years, and the ravages of the 25 years before had stripped the north woods of their evergreens. The reindeer was extinct and the furry robes once accredited to those guardian genii of Christmas were to be found only in museums of natural history.

So Chicago slept - slept until the sun was reflected in the frosty window panes and until the white snow on roofs and in streets and lawns was streaked by long, dazzling shafts of light.

But it was Christmas, in spite of the fact that the children had to be awakened for breakfast and that there was not a sock or a stocking in all of Chicago. For changes had been written upon the face of Chicago in a hundred years - changes in keeping with that material transformation that had made it a city of four million people and a seaport open to the shipping of all the world.

Grandfathers and grandmothers could recall the time when Christmas was something else than it was at this end of the twentieth century. Some of them, indeed, were old enough to remember how they had searched the downtown shops of the city and crowded and fought and jammed through heavy storm doors to the counters, where hundreds of other scrambled for goods hauled down by weary clerks.

For the Christmas of 2000 was a reactionary result: Disaffection had arisen with its customs in the early '20s. As the nineteenth century had progressed in its utilitarianism the spirit of Christmas became lost. It came to be a season for trampling down a thousand fellow-beings in order to give the trophies of the fight to a dozen. Then, as means of communication grew, man's circle of acquaintance was enlarged, until the custom of gift giving became so colossal in dimensions that reform began.

This reform was insidious in the beginning. It was at first an ethical protest against the juvenile fiction of Santa Claus, Kris Kringle, and St. Nicholas. Just as insidiously the lovers of the forests had protested against the destruction of the evergreens. These were the straws indicating the storm of Christmas reform methods. Society, which long before had ceased to give wedding presents, took up the protest. It became vulgar to give presents to acquaintances; then only the children in the family were remembered, and finally, when mechanical toys became so intricate and so nicely adjusted that machinists had to be employed for weeks after Christmas to keep them going, even the children were forced to drop the holiday expectations.

Santa Claus Forgotten

With Santa Claus only a memory, with the pine forests of the North passed into fertile fields, and with a new spirit revivifying the religious feast, the season of Christmas had become the thing it should be.

For church creeds were as dead as was Santa Claus. The Westminster Confession and the the [Anglican church's] thirty-nine articles existed only in a glass case in the Public Library Building. School children who could repeat the Declaration of Independence from end to end might not have heard of either of the others. From every pulpit the fellowship of man had been preached for three-score years, and on this broad line, as far as social conditions made it necessary, the day was observed.

This necessity was limited, for social conditions had been revolutionized. These conditions began to change; when the state began to acknowledge its responsibility toward all its citizens; when it began to realize that poverty and crime were only the surface marks of a diseased social body; when it began treating criminals as it had been treating the diseased and the insane.

Schools of correction had taken the places of prisons, asylums had taken the places of the penitentiaries. With the abolition of the death penalty for certain crimes, the protection of society as the object of criminal law had been accentuated until the burden of proving his innocence was put upon the wrong-doer. Citations from the courts calling upon men to show cause why they should not be committed for reformation or to life confinement in an asylum had cleared the city of its pest spots, physical and social. Vagrancy was a crime, and because of this opportunity had been given to all workers.

As a result, there were no Christmas dinners in public institutions. Men at the head of these refuges drew only honor from their positions. Politics had been divorced from them, and every day the food served was of a character to please palates and satisfy the body's needs. The state, acknowledging itself as the keeper of these wards of society, cared for them and dismissed sentiment; there were no political ends for it to serve and it had been abandoned. At all institutions the largest liberty compatible with public safety was allowed on this day, as on other days.

Only One Day's Rest

For the one day only the schools of the city had closed. The abolition of the old Christmas customs had brought it about naturally and easily. Money had ceased to be the end toward which all people moved, and with the opportunity gone for the hasty piling up of millions society was looking to economy. The loss of ten days in closed schools had become intolerable, financially and ethically, and in the hearts of most of the children was the feeling that the one day was a sufficient sacrifice.

That Christmas morning, large numbers of these schoolchildren went to the Coliseum to hear Fernando Jones lecture on the old-time Christmas as he knew it at the end of the nineteenth century. He told of the time when the Christmas snow in Chicago was so black and grimy that one could scarcely see a shadow on it. He told of the ... boats that used to come in from Michigan loaded with Christmas trees, and how they used to stick on the tunnels that were just underneath the bed of the old river. The children were especially pleased when Mr. Jones told them how men used to stand on the sidewalks down-town for days before Christmas winding up birds, and elephants, and camels, and beetles, and then letting them run around in circles under the feet of the people, who were expected to buy them for children's Christmas presents.

But, if the children were delighted with Mr. Jones' description of these curious mechanical toys, they were serious enough when he touched upon the “Christmas face” of the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century.

This face Mr. Jones described as being almost indescribable. He said that it was hardly sad, hardly pathetic, hardly appalling, hardly stern, and hardly vicious. It was a mingling of all. He said that a woman, for instance, looking this way at any other season of the year would have half a straight lane made for her through the most crowded street. Just before the Christmas holiday, however, he said, nine-tenths of the grown people began to look that way; that at these times they seemed to become all elbows, packages, and set chins. Many a time he had seen men and women so loaded down with packages for Christmas giving that they could hardly see over them, but that, in spite of this, they would start through one of the great storm doors of a department store just behind other groups laden in the same way. Sometimes one of these doors would fly shut, breaking delicate articles and almost knocking the breath out of the owner.

Visit to the Museum

After the lecture, at the suggestion of Mr. Jones, hundreds of these children went to the Chicago Museum of Christmas Antiquities, where they saw many of those queer mechanical toys. Most of them were too far rusted and disabled to run, but the museum attendants explained their mechanisms.

In the museum was a fine representation of a Santa Claus, clothed in real fur. The reindeer, however, were artificial creations, though the plush skins were said to be excellent imitations of the real animals' coats.

On the morning of the Christmas day the small parks of Chicago were great attractions for the people. With the perfection of combustion for coal in 1935 and the previous perfecting of insulation for electric wires, the heating, lighting, and motive powers of the fluid in Chicago passed into control of the city. Central distributing plants had been established at intervals all over the city, the site of the plants being the centers of the small parks. Each of these 100 parks was a conservatory; closed in with non-breakable glass, into which the waste heat energy of the plants was distributed. In each of these parks beauty and utility had been combined until gardening and fruit culture were paramount.

Some of these parks, with an area of ten acres each, became the kitchen gardens for wide neighborhoods. Such households as chose to do so drew upon these parks' supplies, presenting coupon books as authority for it. On Christmas day and on Thanksgiving day especially these gardens would be thronged, especial effort having been made to meet the occasions.

On this particular Christmas morning more than the usual number of patrons crowded the deliver-rooms for the reason that only recently it had become popular for citizens to volunteer and work in these public gardens under supervision of the head gardeners. to some extent this form of exercise had displaced golf, though the game was still popular and was played indoors on the Winter Palace links on the north shore.

Utilization of Art

This adaptation of the public parks to the needs of public gardening had come about. ...

But when electric transit, noiseless, dustless, and giving a service of 80 miles an hour, made suburbs of territory 55 miles away from the mouth of the ship canal, the lines of the old down-town district disappeared. The “skyscraper” was replaced by a building that would have been inutile without artistry. With time to live and place to live assured to the citizen, he had begun to ask for more. With the scramble for wealth no longer his chief incentive he began to need for something more than the utilitarian. Art came, undisguised, and made its impress upon the whole fabric.

The passing of the horse, the attainment of perfect combustion for coal, and the education of the people in cleanliness and sanitation had made Chicago clean. Rational dress made out-of-doors in all weathers an attraction, and sidewalks and pavements of almost indestructible material were further inviting to pedestrians, to drivers of the swift noiseless vehicles, and even to passengers in the underground trains, whisked along at lightening speed by the forces of compressed air.

As part of the great chain of streets, avenues and the boulevards in Chicago, wide post roads, smooth and well-kept, radiated north, west and south, reaching out to a hundred towns. Cars operated on compressed air and running on rubber-rimmed wheels had put the country more than ever in touch with the city, socially and economically, and thousands of citizens spent the day in he country, while thousands of country people thronged the churches, theaters, libraries and museums of the city.

In general, however, citizens of Chicago living at home spent the day at home. Living had become rational before the coming of the rational Christmas; home was becoming the thing it should be. Long before this, [certain types of apartments] had been abandoned. It had served its purpose in the times when the activities of the new city did not allow a man of ordinary means to shoulder the responsibilities of a home. But rapid transit had made distances immaterial, and ground room had become a necessity instead of a luxury. Home became a place in which children were expected to be born, and in which children's children might be expected to play when the builders were gone.

Homekeeping Made Easy

Public utilities had grown until homekeeping was easy. Light, heat, and power were to be tapped in every household, the placing of an electric plug determining which should be drawn from the municipal plant. Electricity heated water and turned the family washing machines, sewing machines, floor sweepers and dusters. It lighted the house, heated it in winter, and drove machinery for cooling it in summer. It ran the lawn mower and the snow sweeper and did service in a hundred ways.

By this means the Christmas dinner, which once was eaten at restaurants and hotels as a labor saving and cheaper method, became a pleasure to scientific cooks. Recognition that the art of living was in close relation to the art of cooking and of keeping clean, domestic labor had taken on a new dignity. It was labor no longer. Stripped of drudgery, it necessarily had become art. Foods long ago had been correlated, with reference to the proper distribution of nutritive elements. Purity in manufactured foods had become imperative, for the reason that every housekeeper had an elementary knowledge of chemistry.

Thus, while the Christmas dinner had become easy because of domestic equipments, it was doubly easy of serving because of the standard dishes that had been added to the nineteenth century list of milk, eggs, butter, and cheese.

In general, the observance of the day in Chicago was quiet. Only fifteen arrests were made by the police in all the metropolitan district and most of these were for minor offenses.

-- (1900@and.2000), December 23, 2000

Answers

Did Gary North write this pablum?

-- Docta Norte (gimme@your.money), December 23, 2000.

One thing for sure--English sentences are much shorter now than they were a hundred years ago!

-- The long and the (short@of.it), December 24, 2000.

The long and the (short@of.it), Sentences were longer back then because they were descriptive, people had to use their minds to picture what was being said. Remember this was before TV where everything is shown to you and little thinking is used to "picture" what is being "shown".

There are some interesting things about that story, if you realize what existed and what didn't at that time.

-- Cherri (sams@brigadoon.com), December 24, 2000.