Christmas in Chicago

by Fanny Butcher

Chicago’s delight in its Christmas tree is at the same time the delight of the child in any glittering gaudily lighted scene, and the delight of the youth who remembers his baby days and his passionate belief in Santa Claus and sees in the great tree a monument to the few years that have intervened.

There is romance in that thought. Within the memory of many men and women who walk beneath the great tree, within the lifetime of one of the thousands of trees that have been brought to the making of the great tree and its lesser relatives, the spot did not exist at all where now the gigantic realization of a dream of a Christmas tree stands. It was a wave on its way to lap a sandy shore, or caught in the fastnesses of ice. And the shore when it was reached was a spot where children picnicked in summer, where horses were brought to the water’s edge for a drink, where wagons were washed, where the water itself was dipped up in buckets and carried into the little houses of the village. It was a spot where bemuffled children slid back and forth in winter, cautiously keeping inshore. The spot where the great tree stood the first time it was made, before the outlying communities had their separate celebrations, on the land just east of Madison Street and north of the Art Institute, was in the very early days a public burying-ground. Rude storms from the east frequently gnawed at the earth until it had given up its hidden coffins, battered them into fragments, and left scattered, gruesome remains on the shore when the calm came. Within the lifetime of a man it has grown from burying-ground to the waterfront park of one of the great cities of the world.

On any Christmas Eve in those days–and some are still alive who remember it–the smooth motor-filled boulevard which magnificently borders the city was a country road, frozen in deep ruts, or, if the weather had been mild, a sandy morass, thick and impassable. And the streets just west of it, the streets which are filled with Christmas shoppers, with ballyhooers for jumping bunnies and sparklers and little rubber men who stick out their tongues and great tin lobsters which waddle around on the sidewalk, the streets which are thick with human beings and every known mechanical device to lure them and give them comfort and excitement–these same streets were frozen bogs of pathways barely worth the name of road, often with an abandoned cart mutely crying their impassability. Signs proclaiming ‘No bottom here’ told the tale which the rivers of mud only hinted at. The very street, where an elevated whangs by overhead, a street car clangs its warning to the holiday crowds, and ceaselessly honking motors make a bedlam of the air, is the scene of the classic story of the man who, in the early days, was up to his ears in mud. From a spot identical with one which is being stepped over by thousands, so the story goes, a pedestrian offered to throw out a lifeline to the mud-imprisoned neighbor. ‘Don’t worry about me,’ he is said to have answered, ‘I’m on a good horse.’ That story delighted our grandfathers.

The sidewalks, lined with gaudy windows wheedling dollars from the passers-by and noisy with street hawkers, passionately supply last-minute gew-gaws for the tired men and women who have had to shop late because they had no money to shop early–sidewalks smooth and wide and sturdy to the tramp of millions of feet–not over a lifetime ago were narrow strips of wood, raised on stilts, with enough room underneath for children to play and for rats to hold continuous convention. Within the memory of its oldest inhabitants those same planks which served as walks were the scene of many a fiasco when an arrogant Indian would calmly push a child off into mud which almost smothered it–an indignity which had to be borne by the members of the community who still remembered the horrors of the Fort Dearborn massacre. Those same lordly concrete ways were the scene in the early days of many a romantic moment when carriages and carts were drawn up to the very doors of the houses and shops and whatever strong male arms that happened to be present were offered to lift the ‘wimminfolks’ safely from one dry spot to another. High hip boots, they all wore, those early Chicago cavaliers, and of necessity.

Is it not a legitimate glitter of pride in the twinkling eyes of the great tree when it looks upon the vast and teeming loop of the city and remembers that, not so long ago but that men now living can remember, the whole prairie south of the river was a great bog, dry at times, but always at the mercy of every rainfall, and of the seepage from the erratic river that flowed now into the lake and now from it? Ten feet lower than the land to the north of the river it was–this spectacular loop of Chicago, which is unlike the same space of ground anywhere else in the world–and only the dreamers could see that it could ever be made into a city. Is the pride out of place when one remembers that the first civic accomplishment of the village was the gigantic one of raising the level of the south bank and its adjoining acres until it was no longer sick with sogginess? And may it not also be a matter of pride that that river, so gayly going its own unreasoning way, now north, now south, was tamed to the quiet dignity of flowing in one direction?

Would it not give any city a Christmasy feeling of triumph to realize that the land which looks out upon its harbor, land which to-day is weighed in ounces of gold, where great hotels and shops harbor the riches and fripperies of the world, was, within the memory of men and women still actively a part of the city’s life, the pasture for the whole town south of the river? It has been many a year since a cow wore down the grass by the roadside of Michigan Avenue, or munched its way about on the prairie, but no more than sixty years ago all of the residents of the South Side took their cows out in the morning and went for them at night. The community practically ended at Wabash and Adams Streets, and the favorite grazing lands were the spots where the Blackstone and Stevens Hotels now have their roots. Even as late as 1871, the year when the world was shocked by the news of the great Chicago fire, cows were still wandering about contentedly in the prairies.

Mayn’t the city well wear a mammoth Christmas tree as an adornment this Christmas morning when it looks upon its vastness, when it remembers that, from a mere handful of settlers less than ninety years ago, it has become the home of over three millions? In hundreds of thousands of homes in the vast miles that make Chicago as large and populous as many a monarchy, there are small replicas of the great tree, jeweled with many colored electric bulbs sheltering gifts, each single one of which would have dowered a bride in the older days. A diamond bracelet, dangling to the delight of some eager daughter or wife, is a bauble which, in those days, would have bought the entire loop. A house and an adjacent block of ground could have been purchased with the money that has been spent for one of the many shiny new motor cars that stand in front of hundreds of shiny little brick houses for the first time this Christmas morning.

In the old days, a pair of shoes, woolen underwear, warm mittens, or a highly extravagant ‘fascinator’ knitted by skillful fingers were the gifts which elicited shrieks of joy from the recipients. An orange was the height of luxury for a child; and he had one orange, not a basket full of them. One wealthy old settler tells with heart-breaking candor of his envy at the sight of a playmate who owned and devoured one large orange before his yearning eyes, and how the memory lasted for years. The highly humanized modern doll, that does everything but think, now walks under the adoring eyes of its ‘mama’ and says ‘Papa’ and ‘Mama’ with equal tenderness to-day. In the early days a little girl was being pampered by her mother when she found among her useful Christmas gifts a creature made of rags and which had to have all of its talking and walking done for it.

Parties all over the city as big as a country are gay with boys and girls home from preparatory schools and colleges and fathers and mothers and grandfathers and grandmothers, all apparently the same age, all living lives made easy by modernity. In the great hotels that face the tree, there are numberless Christmas celebrations, where the guests are all handsomely dinner-jacketed and gowned, all very sophisticated, all having eaten just a little too much and perhaps tippled less wisely than well, dancing something that in the early days of Chicago would have shocked the city fathers. And there is much conversation about the small high-powered roadster that this one found in his Christmas stocking, and the jaunt to Palm Beach as soon as the Christmas gayeties are past, and the new bridge rules, and there is more rich food and bubbly drink. Cosmopolitan, typically modern American they all are, with yearly trips to Europe to furbish up a wardrobe or to buy knick-knacks for the new house. There is as much wealth in the persons of the guests as in the old days the whole territory west of the Hudson would have boasted.