New York gave America Christmas, and Chicago gave us this creepy sidewalk Santa in 1902. He would murder you and your children while you slept. (Image by "Chicago Daily News.")

We know that New York City gave America the Thanksgiving holiday, but it was responsible for Christmas as well. An excerpt from the “1783-1843” section of Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace’s amazing Gotham:

“Wealthy New Yorkers didn’t invent the new cult of domesticity, which was a characteristic of emerging bourgeois culture throughout the Atlantic world. They did, however, give it Christmas–a holiday that became synonymous with genteel family life and a quintessential expression of its central values.

For 150-odd years, probably since the English conquest, the favorite winter holiday of the city’s propertied classes was New Year’s Day (as distinct from the night before, which was the occasion for revelry and mischief among common folk). Families exchanged small gifts, and gentlemen went around the town to call on friends and relations, nibbling cookies and drinking raspberry brandy served by the women of the house. Sadly, according to John Pintard, the city’s physical expansion after 1800 rendered this ‘joyous older fashion’ so impractical that it was rapidly dying out.

"Washington Irving had identified Nicholas as the patron saint of New Amsterdam, describing him as a jolly old Dutchman, nicknamed Sancte Claus." (Image by John Wesley Jarvis.)

As an alternative, Pintard proposed St. Nicholas Day, December 6, as a family-oriented winter holiday for polite society. In Knickerbocker’s History, Pintard’s good friend Washington Irving had identified Nicholas as the patron saint of New Amsterdam, describing him as a jolly old Dutchman, nicknamed Sancte Claus, who parked his wagon on rooftops and slid down chimneys with gifts for sleeping children on his feast day. It was Salmagundi-style fun, of course; although seventeenth-century Netherlanders had celebrated St. Nicholas Day, the earliest evidence of anyone doing so on Manhattan dates from 1773, when a group of ‘descendants of the ancient Dutch families’ celebrated the sixth of December ‘with great joy and festivity.’ Certainly nothing remotely like the Sancte Claus portrayed by Irving had ever been known on either side of the Atlantic.

Mere details were no obstacle to Pintard. On December 6, 1810–one year to the day after the publication of Irving’s History–he launched his revival of St. Nicholas Day with a grand banquet at City Hall for members of the New-York Historical Society. The first toast was to ‘Sancte Claus, good heylig man!’ and Pintard distributed a specially engraved picture that showed Nicholas with two children (one good, one bad) and two stockings hung by the hearth (one full, one empty)–the point being that December 6 was a kind of Judgement Day for the young, with the saint distributing rewards and punishments as required. St. Nicholas day never quite won the support Pintard wanted, and he eventually ran out of enthusiasm for the project. Sancte Claus, on the other hand, took off like a rocket.”