I recently was looking at an old book that my great aunt Marcella Billups Richards had. It was an old family book from Columbus, and its title was “The Gift: A Christmas and New Year’s Present for 1836.” It got me thinking about what Christmas was like in Columbus of long ago? Christmas in the 1800s was a far cry from today’s commercialized holiday.
In his journals, Stephen A. Brown, an early resident of Columbus wrote of attending LaGrange College in North Alabama in 1841. The college later moved to Florence and is now The University of North Alabama. His Christmas “vacation” was too short of a time to be able to come home, so he described staying in Alabama and enjoying “the festivities of the season, winding up with an old fashioned ‘candy-pulling.’” He spent Christmas in 1850 attending a party in Aberdeen. Lucy Irion Neilson said of her 1860 Christmas in Columbus:
“Christmas passed very quietly at Willow Cottage.” Willow Cottage was her Columbus home. On Christmas Day in 1893, T.C. Billups had breakfast with his children and then left his home at 905 Main Street to go and check on his farm, now the site of the Golden Triangle Regional Airport. He came home that evening to attend a family gathering at the home of his brother, Gen. Saunders Billups.
A more complete picture of how Christmas was viewed in the early days of Columbus is shown in the pages of Columbus newspapers for December 1838. Interestingly, there is little mention of Christmas. The Steamboat Iberia had arrived Dec. 9 with a large stock of merchandise for a “fall and winter supply of seasonable goods.” A notice titled “New Goods! New Goods!!” told how the steamboat had arrived from Mobile with merchandise for nine different Columbus stores. Examinations were to be given in both the male and female departments of Franklin Academy (the Columbus public school) the week of Dec. 17-21. The public was invited to attend and observe.
Judge Vaughn returned from a visit to Texas and brought to the newspaper office of the Columbus Democrat “a singular species of frog with an immense number of horns; it is a rare curiosity.”
Only one store in town was advertising Christmas gifts. Pfister & Goodwin advertised many books, such as “The Gift of 1839,” “Peter Parley’s Christmas Tales” and a bound set of the “National Portrait Gallery.” “The Gift 1839” is a later version of the Billups family Christmas present from 1836 ”The Gift: A Christmas and New Year’s Present for 1836.” One of the stories in the 1836 book was “Manuscripts found in a Bottle” by Edgar A. Poe. Books were one of the most popular gift items of the 1800s, and it is common to see old books with Christmas gift inscriptions written in them.
In 1837, there was one big public event in Columbus that made the newspapers. Christmas Day, 1837, was celebrated by a 1-mile race at the Hyde Park Racecourse. There was free admittance, but there was an entry fee of $25 to enter your horse. The purse was $250 plus all entry fees. After Christmas, the Columbus Democrat reported: “Christmas passed with a great deal of hilarity and good feeling.
Indeed, we never saw on any occasion more joyous and happy faces on our streets. There was a slight fall of snow on the evening previous; and the weather was unusually cold for this latitude, but it did not interrupt the ‘feast of reason and flow of soul.’”
Before the 1800s Christmas was a mostly religious celebration. Then in 1823, Clement Clarke Moore’s poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” was published. Now popularly known as “The Night Before Christmas,” Moore’s poem popularized the notion that it was on Christmas Eve that St. Nicholas traveled on a sleigh pulled by reindeer and came down the chimney delivering gifts. Its popularity grew in the 1830s, but the earliest publication I have seen in Mississippi was in the Woodville Republican on Dec. 23, 1851, under the heading of “A Happy Christmas to All!”
Moore’s poem was followed in 1843 by Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” then in 1863 Thomas Nast’s iconic image of St. Nicholas or Santa Claus first appeared, and in 1965 “A Charlie Brown Christmas” was broadcast. By the mid-1800s the celebration of Christmas was beginning to resemble that of the present day, and in 1863 Santa Claus also took on his modern appearance. Prior to Thomas Nast’s image of Santa being published in 1863, there was no set image of St. Nicholas or Santa Claus in use. He might be skinny, or he might be fat. He could have a red suit, or it could be green. It was Nast who created and popularized the image of a jolly fat man with a white beard and a red suit. In the beginning, though, it wasn’t always toys and children that made Santa smile in those first images. In Nast’s first illustration, Santa is handing out presents to Union soldiers while holding a Jefferson Davis figure with a noose around his neck.
By the mid-1800s the celebration of Christmas was beginning to become commercialized. An 1866 advertisement by Rueff’s in the Oxford Falcon advised that stockings should be well stuffed so children could find what all “the good man Santa Claus” had placed in their stockings after coming down the chimney on Christmas Eve. And, of course, Rueff’s Store had all that Santa needed to buy.
Advertising parodies of Moore’s poem quickly became popular and remain so. Divelbiss’ Bookstore in Columbus found “The Night Before Christmas” to make good advertising copy and published in the Dec. 11, 1921, Columbus Dispatch:
Twas the night before Christmas and all through the store
the book shelves were empty from ceiling to floor
with a smile on his face lay the dealer in bed
as he thought of the joy all his books were to spread
Spread Joy by making this a book Christmas
and get them at Divelbiss.
One of my favorite Christmas stories was published in a Columbus paper in 1838. It was an incident that occurred shortly before Christmas. A tailor was traveling on foot when he encountered a highwayman, whose “brace of pistols looked rather dangerous than otherwise.” The robber demanded “stand and deliver,” and the tailor quickly handed over his “well-stocked” purse. The tailor then asked the robber to do him a favor and fire both pistols into the crown of his hat so that he could tell his friends though he had been robbed he put up a good fight. “His request was (accepted) to, but hardly had the smoke from the discharge of the weapons past away when the tailor pulled out a rusty old horse pistol, and in his turn politely requested the thunderstruck highwayman” to hand him everything of value he had including his two single shot pistols.
Merry Christmas.
Rufus Ward is a Columbus native a local historian. E-mail your questions about local history to Rufus at [email protected].
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