Christmas 2000 -- As Seen From 1900
Dec. 23, 2000 — -- Imagine Christmas without Santa Claus, without gift-giving and without reindeer. … What would be left?
Modern Christmas, according to a prediction from 100 years ago today.
Had the prediction come true, celebrants would be bypassing church for the museum, and kids would get no toys and just one day off from school.
Following is the text of the Dec. 23, 1900, prediction from The Chicago Sunday Tribune, edited slightly to compensate for physical defects in the original source copy:
Christmas day in the year 2000 dawned bright and clear over Chicago, only that comparatively few persons were interested in it at that early stage. Santa Claus and St. Nicholas had been myths for 75 years, and the ravages of the 25 years before had stripped the north woods of their evergreens. The reindeer was extinct and the furry robes once accredited to those guardian genii of Christmas were to be found only in museums of natural history.
So Chicago slept — slept until the sun was reflected in the frosty window panes and until the white snow on roofs and in streets and lawns was streaked by long, dazzling shafts of light.
But it was Christmas, in spite of the fact that the children had to be awakened for breakfast and that there was not a sock or a stocking in all of Chicago. For changes had been written upon the face of Chicago in a hundred years — changes in keeping with that material transformation that had made it a city of four million people and a seaport open to the shipping of all the world.
Grandfathers and grandmothers could recall the time when Christmas was something else than it was at this end of the twentieth century. Some of them, indeed, were old enough to remember how they had searched the downtown shops of the city and crowded and fought and jammed through heavy storm doors to the counters, where hundreds of other scrambled for goods hauled down by weary clerks.
For the Christmas of 2000 was a reactionary result: Disaffection had arisen with its customs in the early ’20s. As the nineteenth century had progressed in its utilitarianism the spirit of Christmas became lost. It came to be a season for trampling down a thousand fellow-beings in order to give the trophies of the fight to a dozen. Then, as means of communication grew, man’s circle of acquaintance was enlarged, until the custom of gift giving became so colossal in dimensions that reform began.
This reform was insidious in the beginning. It was at first an ethical protest against the juvenile fiction of Santa Claus, Kris Kringle, and St. Nicholas. Just as insidiously the lovers of the forests had protested against the destruction of the evergreens. These were the straws indicating the storm of Christmas reform methods. Society, which long before had ceased to give wedding presents, took up the protest. It became vulgar to give presents to acquaintances; then only the children in the family were remembered, and finally, when mechanical toys became so intricate and so nicely adjusted that machinists had to be employed for weeks after Christmas to keep them going, even the children were forced to drop the holiday expectations.
Santa Claus Forgotten
With Santa Claus only a memory, with the pine forests of the North passed into fertile fields, and with a new spirit revivifying the religious feast, the season of Christmas had become the thing it should be.
For church creeds were as dead as was Santa Claus. The Westminster Confession and the the [Anglican church’s] thirty-nine articles existed only in a glass case in the Public Library Building. School children who could repeat the Declaration of Independence from end to end might not have heard of either of the others. From every pulpit the fellowship of man had been preached for three-score years, and on this broad line, as far as social conditions made it necessary, the day was observed.
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