"Making Night Hideous": Christmas Revelry and Public Order in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia

FOR MOST OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY RESPECTABLE PHILADELPHIANS condemned Christmas as a disgrace. Philadelphia's Christmas was then an essentially public celebration, unfolding in taverns, alleys, and squares, and although it grew out of European festive patterns and rural customs, the festival took its shape and meaning from the city's working class and the changing conditions of urban life. Riot and revelry, disguise and debauch gave police and property owners reason to fear the approach of the holiday. The history of Christmas in Philadelphia exemplifies the conflict within and between classes over behavior in public; confrontation over the form and enactment of the street festival was sharp and recurring. Middle-class disapproval and hostility were recorded in reportage, editorials, ordinances, and municipal policies, while celebrants' resistance found expression in the streets and the evolving forms of revelry. Press accounts of holiday activities provide a unique year-by-year record, not only of this conflict, but of working peoples' festive behavior. Moreover, the evolution of the street Christmas into an organized, sanctioned New Year's pageant the Philadelphia Mummers Parade -provides an example of the transformation of urban public culture in the nineteenth century. The history of Christmas and its transformation can be examined along several dimensions: its origins in older customs and urban social life, its enactment in relation to the identities of its creators, and the attempts to suppress it by its opponents. Critical to its history are ethnic and class relations in the city and the special position of urban youth. This street festival emerged in the early nineteenth century, with urban working-class culture in general, from the convergence of older ways of life with unprecedented conditions. Cultural diversity distinguished Philadelphia's working people: the mingling of Germans, former slaves, Carribbeans, native Americans, Catholic and Protestant Irish, and migrants