THE BIRTH OF THE MERRY OLD ELF

Somewhere among the jumble of memorabilia I have preserved over the years is a handwritten letter with my name and childhood address on it.  It is postmarked “The North Pole”, and is signed, Santa Claus in bright red ink. It continues to raise some interesting insights into one of our most enduring seasonal traditions.

The name Thomas Nast is seldom heard these days, and where it is, I doubt it is associated with Christmas.  But the fact is  this immigrant American who arrived here from his native Germany at the age of six,  a century-and-three-quarters  ago, has touched our national Christmas tradition far more than the casual historian might suppose.

By the time he was 13, Nast had already begun a career as a newspaper illustrator.  He was destined to become one of the most influential cartoonists of his day, his biting satires a regular feature of Harper’s Weekly.  His work directly affected the outcome of one of New York’s most famous political campaigns, and it was Nast who invented the Republican Elephant and the Democrat Donkey.

What is less known is that he also invented America’s Santa Claus.  The idea of Father Christmas, or St. Nicholas, came to our shores with the first Dutch settlers, who pictured this mythical character as a tall bishop of serious demeanor, clad in black clerical robes, and carrying a birch wood staff.

Thomas Nast set about changing this image with a cover design he did for an issue of Harper’s Weekly in December,1863.  He was burned out on serious subject matter, and tired of reporting on the grim war news coming from the battlefields of the Civil War.  In this drawing he depicts a fanciful Santa Claus, visiting a Union Army outpost, clad in the stars and stripes, and distributing toys to the soldiers. He entertains the crowd with a jumping jack dangling from a hangman's noose, its chest bearing the name "Jeff" for Confederate President Jefferson Davis. In the background Nast pictured soldiers  playing games, trying to capture an escaped pig and trying to climb a greased pole.

In the years that followed, Thomas Nast refined his idea of what Santa should really be like, deciding that the country needed someone who was brightly dressed, full of good cheer, and anxious that children should strive to be “nice”.  Nast and his artist’s pens turned Santa into a toy-maker headquartered at the North Pole, and in an illustrated children's book he published in 1866, he added a reindeer-drawn sled filled with toys.  Over a period of twenty-three years, the cartoonist who loved Santa Claus left us a legacy that has become a heart-warming part of every Christmas.. . a “right merry old elf” who refuses to be taken too seriously.

THE BLIZZARDS OF YESTERYEAR

Ever since a personal adventure which led to being snowbound for three days in a mountain cabin, I have been an avid collector of winter survival stories, and weather phenomena from out of our national past.  And I am not alone.

Somewhere in the remembered past of nearly all of our northern tier of states, is the story of a blizzard or two, and many of us who grew up with grandparents who were story tellers, have heard them. 

Folks who were attentive to nature’s warnings might have noticed that the autumn of 1886 in much of the West was filled with such omens.  The birds which ordinarily stayed through winter headed south.  Hibernating animals fortified their lairs with extra care, and sought shelter early.  From November 1886 through February 1887, blizzards followed each other across the western plains, from Montana on the north to Texas on the south.  Howling winds and sub-zero temperatures accompanied heavy snow.  Following on the heels of a summer-long drought, the unrelenting winter storms took a heavy toll:  nearly 90% of the West’s free-ranging cattle were wiped out in what the day’s ranchers forever after knew as “The Great Die-Up”.  So devastating was this winter of blizzards that it was the death knell of free-ranging.  Never again would the great herds wander unfettered across the vastness of the American West.

Those of us who grew up on the knees of Eastern grandparents and great-aunts and uncles who were around during those last decades of the nineteenth century have heard our share of tales about “The Great Blizzard of 1888”.  It struck on March 12th, bringing unprecedented snowfall to the East Coast, where cities like New York were paralyzed, and hundreds of thousands of citizens were trapped in their homes, barns and places of employment.  In that great city alone, 400 people died and millions of dollars in damages were recorded.  For 36 hours the storm pounded the area, virtually isolating the city from the rest of the world.  Firefighters were unable to respond to blazes which broke out as citizens tried to survive the cold.  Those who lived through it never forgot “The Great Blizzard of 1888”.

Just two months previous to that event, another century-type storm hit the mid-west.  Because of the time of day the blizzard exploded over Nebraska and South Dakota, it became known as “The Schoolchildren’s Storm”, so many children were marooned in school houses on the northern plains.  Out of that storm came a national heroine whose name, Minnie Freeman, became a household word.  When the storm blew out first the windows, then the roof of the tiny sod schoolhouse in which she and her children were trapped, she decided to lead her charges to safety.  Lashing them together with whatever ropes and pieces of clothing were at hand, she started out in the teeth of the gale, for a house she knew stood about a mile away. Her exploit was heralded widely by a fascinated press, and she eventually received 80 marriage proposals along with her adoring mail.  A song “Thirteen Were Saved” or “Nebraska’s Fearless Maid” became The Song of The Great Blizzard of 1888.

Weather statistics suggest that if you live long enough, and happen to be in the right place at the right time, you stand a good chance of experiencing a blizzard of your own.  With that thought before us, it’s a good idea to equip your home and your family car with “The Big One” in mind.

                                                

NEITHER RAIN, NOR SLEET : THE "SNOWSHOE EXPRESS"

We’ve all heard of the Overland Express, and of course the Pony Express.  But how much do you know about the “Snowshoe Express” ?

Back in 1856, an unusual plea was printed in a Sacramento newspaper:

People Lost to The World,

Uncle Sam Needs a Mail Carrier . . .

read the two-line appeal.  The unusual story which began with those brief words has been all but forgotten among those tales of daring-do which spice the history of our Mail Service.

Scattered along the ridges of the High Sierras between Nevada and California were dozens of mining camps and the isolated communities which grew up around them.  For much of the year, winter storms and twenty-five foot snow drifts effectively cut the inhabitants of these camps and villages off from the rest of the world.  From the first snowfall to Spring thaw, there were no lines of communication and the remote gold-seekers were strictly on their own.

A Norwegian-born Californian named John Thompson, himself a prospector-turned-farmer, read the newspaper advertisement and, after some trial experiments, presented himself to the U.S. Postmaster in Placerville with a plan.  Equipped with a set of what he called “Norwegian Snowshoes” - long wooden skis- constructed from childhood memories, ten feet long and weighing a good 25 pounds, Thompson proposed to carry the mail.  Real snowshoes were known as "webs" or Canadian snowshoes while the long skis Thompson used were often called "Norwegian skates". The post office quickly signed him on.

For the next 13 years, “Snowshoe Thompson” became the winter angel for hundreds of isolated families, carrying 80-pound sacks of mail over uncharted miles of the most perilous alpine country in North America, with 1 or 2 blankets and only such dried foods as he could fit into his pockets.   In time the people along his bi-weekly route came to depend upon him, not only for mail, but for medicines and emergency supplies. John Thompson was much more than a carrier of mail and supplies. He was a powerful man of exceeding generosity and a deep sense of devotion to the people he served.

 In December of 1856 he found a miner named James Sisson lying on the floor of a cabin in obvious distress with both legs frozen and gangrenous. Thanks to Thompson's efforts and rapid back-country travel the man was transported to the care of a medical Doctor who upon examination refused to perform the needed amputation without anesthetic. To provide the needed pain-killer Thompson skied another 90 miles to Placerville, then another 50 to Sacramento and finally the same distance in return. Sisson survived the ordeal and eventually moved back east.

Sadly, the postmaster in Placerville never came through with any of the promised pay for Thompson’s unique service and it fell to the families he served to compensate him as they were able.  Finally, with the completion of the Central Pacific Railroad in 1869, the need for Thompson’s “Snowshoe Express” ended.  His grateful clients petitioned Congress to grant a pension to their devoted carrier, but it never happened.  His tireless energy finally gave out, and he died at the age of 49 unable to complete the spring planting of a grain crop on his farm.

 As a collector of philatelic cancellations, I would give almost anything to run across one of those envelopes once carried by the skiing mailman of the high Sierras bearing his own handmade postmark:  “SNOWSHOE EXPRESS - 1857”.

There remains one last postscript to the story of John Thompson.  The unusual service he rendered may have been forgotten, but the long wooden “snowshoes” he used left their mark.  The sport of cross-country skiing in the U.S. West owes its origins to his example.

LOST TRADITIONS AND THE DEMISE OF NEIGHBORHOODS

            You can no longer even find the town of Coytesville on a map of New Jersey; it has long since been absorbed into the sprawling collection of ambiguous and ever-changing bedroom communities serving as way stations for New York City commuters. But in my circling mind it looms ever larger in importance. Founded and laid out in the early 1800s by my maternal great-grandfather, its’ very name is eponymous with one of my own and its imprint lies deep in my spiritual DNA. For the first 14 years of my life it was my home, and my own mother, like her own, had never known any other; with family roots imbedded in the same sod on which Washington’s rag tag army had encamped in its most desperate days and whose musket balls and cannon shot I could find untouched beneath mere inches of forest duff.

            I thought of this once again as another Thanksgiving celebration came and went, surrounded by three generations of my own posterity, not one among whom has ever walked where I played hide-and-seek beneath arching oaks which were two hundred years old, now doubtless paved over by “progress”.

             One of my Thanksgiving Day memories is of a local tradition which saw neighborhood children dressed in colorful costumes roaming the streets and ringing door bells, usually armed with a cast-off purse or money bag, asking “Have ya anathin’ for Thanksgivin’?” Usually small coins or other treats were happily handed out from stacks waiting just inside every doorway for the playing out of a much-enjoyed event known as “Ragamuffin Day”. As a kid I assumed that “ragamuffins” were universal; that they inhabited the streets of every American community during this festive season. Only years later would it dawn on me that this was not true; that ragamuffins and their colorful antics had been born in New York City’s Brooklyn neighborhoods where European families had settled, and from which the observation would branch out only to nearby enclaves – obviously to my own. Popular in the 1930s and 40s, it would die out in postwar years, and would remain only a fond memory for folks of my generation who had lived there.  Interestingly, historians looking back on the ragamuffin parades which took place in New York City in those largely-forgotten days believe that the famous Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade had its birthing with those costume-clad clown-like ragamuffins of bygone times.

                        My favorite dictionary defines the word tradition as “the passing down of elements of culture and time-honored practices from generation to generation”. I subscribe wholeheartedly to the belief that traditions – whether family-centered, locally-born or widely held – are the glue that binds us together, and endows us with a sense of identity that clings protectively in good times and in bad. I, for one, take comfort from the notion that if our parents and grandparents could return for an ethereal visit to our 21^st century family, they would recognize us as their own, and find reason to take pride in the things they passed down to us. I sometimes feel - on special occasions - that they even sit at our table with us.

            While I try hard to convince myself that we live in the best of times, and that even better days are still ahead, there is part of me that laments the loss of the kind of closely-knit and caring neighborhoods of the past many of us grew up in, and I find comfort in the words of the great Scottish poet and thinker James Barrie who wrote “God gave us the gift of memories that we might have June roses in the November of our lives”.