Christmas in Chicago

by Fanny Butcher

In the memory of one of the grandmothers who is lending, for an hour or so, the dignity of her presence to the party, Christmas was the homiest of the home festivals. The whole season was a simple preparation for the only really passionately anticipated event of the year–New Year’s Day. On Christmas there were family gatherings, with long dinners of prairie chicken and whatever frivolities the clever housewife could concoct, with no fresh fruit, no nuts, no out-of-season vegetables, and no skilled French cooks. The ‘hired girl’ was a blessing (or the curse) of only the few wealthy homes. The caterer had never been heard of, and when he finally did make his appearance fifty or sixty years ago he supplied nothing except ice-cream. In the wealthiest households a fiddler might be had in, but not guests outside the family. Usually some member of the family had enough talent to play the simple music which the dances required. And such dances! Square, sedate, but hilariously thrilling to grandmother as well as granddaughter.

There would be no extravagantly glittering Christmas trees. Very few families except the Germans had a tree at all. Boughs of evergreen were tacked over the doors and the windows, gathered from the great woods north and west of the city, the woods which are now a part of the most populous miles in Chicago.

If the family happened to live on the north shore of the river and was bid to a family Christmas on the south shore, it dragged itself, of necessity, across the Chicago River on a hand ferry at Rush Street, or crossed at Dearborn Street on a bridge operated by hand cables. And whether the party were joyously gay or not, as moral upright villagers they must needs be at home and in bed by ten o’clock, or, if distance and utter levity demanded, they might possibly sneak in at midnight.

While the tree is still on the lake front, it will watch the mobs rushing into the city on New Year’s Eve for the bacchanal which has come to be the American custom of welcoming in the New Year. In the old days, every one was so excited about New Year’s Day that they hadn’t time to waste on its eve. In the rare households where the ladies of the family were not receiving, a basket was hung on the doorknob in which the callers left their cards. Otherwise, the ladies, furbelowed in their most extravagant gowns, ‘received’ and kept an accurate account of the number and names of the gentlemen who honored them. The days after New Year’s were spent in comparing notes and–for the beaux–in recovering from hot toddy and fried oysters and chicken salad, which the fair hostesses had probably spent half the night before preparing.

The nearest approach to the casual, large, group parties, which the Christmas holidays see nowadays, was, in those days, the Firemen’s Ball. Every one who was any one belonged to the fire brigade. The young blades of the village rivaled one another in their devotion to it. A fire was a social event of the first water. The town was very wooden, and fires were frequent and thorough. Whenever one started, the entire town dropped everything and rushed to see the fun. The men dressed themselves up in their opéra-bouffe outfits and pumped water–until Long John Wentworth gave them an engine that didn’t need hand pumping–and the ladies arrived as soon afterwards as possible with sandwiches and pots of coffee. One met every one at a fire.

It was meet that the Firemen’s Ball should be the civic social event of the year. It happened in January. The one in 1847 was a triumph long remembered. There were ten hundred and fifty invitations, all written and delivered by hand (no engravers or post for the meticulous hostesses of those days). It was held in the firehouse and the élite of the city attended.

For the Christmas festivities nowadays the long, luxurious trains which roll into Chicago from the East bring many guests who stay a day and dash on to another city in equally luxurious trains. They don’t realize it, but the city which they are visiting so casually is the railroad center of the United States. Mankind surges through its land gates as it surges through one of the great ports of the world. But things were far different in the early days. Any one who wanted to be in the village of Chicago for Christmas couldn’t decide on December 24th at two o’clock in the afternoon and arrive on Christmas morning from the East. Weeks were spent in the journey. Covered wagons served for the ordinary travelers, but the élite came by boat. For a week, if the winds were fair, they were uncomfortable and crowded and badly fed and sick while the boat hurried toward Chicago from Buffalo. And the days they had spent–or weeks–to get to Buffalo! It was never considered much of a trip. They finally arrived and found a town which well deserved its name of ‘garden city,’ and their enthusiasm for its quiet and comfort after the long hard trip must have had much to do with the increasing numbers which year after year made the arduous trip.

The Christmas feast was not planned the day before Christmas, either. Days of hunting the fowl which were its backbone preceded the work of the housewife. The father and the boys did the shopping for her with guns. There were no great slaughterhouses to supply her with dressed fowl. The packing industry wasn’t even heard of. For many years now Chicago has been known as the ‘pork-packing town.’ Every visitor who comes from overseas insists upon being shown through the ‘Yards.’ English poets have celebrated Chicago for its stockyards odor, and missed the fresh spiritual fragrance of youth and a zest for life that simply exudes from the city through its smoke and its dirt and its city smells. But in the early days pigs were just pigs, and not a world advertisement. They were a nuisance, not even a luxury. The village had to pass an ordinance that ‘any pig or hog running at large without a ring in its nose shall be fined $2.00 collected on conviction of such offense before a justice of peace.’ Pigs running around loose in the suavities of Michigan Avenue–isn’t that enough to give the giant tree an extra glimmer of mirth and of pride at what the years have done?

In the darkness of the nights between Christmas and New Year’s–nights which are now hectic with sirens of motors and the scrape of shifting gears and the continual swish of human voices and the blare of lights–within the memory of men and women living, the quietness of a town safely shut in by its own fireside was in the air, with the occasional call of the town crier–‘Lost! Lost! Lost! Little girl seven years old!’