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Gilberts: Christmas in 1857 was a different than Christmas in 2021

It’s almost Christmas Eve 2021 and I know many are exhausted from the shopping, cooking, planning and pleasing that modern Christmas seasons entail.

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It’s almost Christmas Eve 2021 and I know many are exhausted from the shopping, cooking, planning and pleasing that modern Christmas seasons entail. So perhaps now is the best time to momentarily escape and come back to a Christmas Eve from more than 160 years ago. Grab my tailcoat and think of me as the Ghost of Christmas Past. Let’s fly!

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I think we should take a random newspaper trip back 164 years ago to 1857. I assumed Christmas was slightly different then, as there would not be the crass over-commercialization of the holiday as it exists today. But I wasn’t was prepared for the almost complete ignoring of Christmas and New Year’s in Chatham and Kent County.

There were few ads in the December edition of the Chatham Planet that even acknowledged that Christmas was nigh. John Pankhurst, a bookseller in Chatham located “next to J. & W. McKeough”, was one of the few merchants in Chatham who mentioned that he had “new gift books of every kind imported from England expressly for this Christmas”.

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In fact, on Christmas Day 1857, the Planet published an edition and in the smallest print imaginable stated under a small black headline that read “To All Our Readers” – “We wish a Merry Christmas and plenty of Good Cheer.” That was it! No editorial, no review of the year, no reference to the birth of Christ, not even a melancholy, soppy story about a memorable past Christmas (as I have been known to do on occasion).

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Christmas in the mid-19th century was mostly a religious feast day, and that message certainly came through loud and clear in the Chatham Planet of 1857. Keep in mind that it would not be until 1863 that Thomas Nast drew the first Santa and that whole “Santa Claus Cult” began.

Although Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol had been written 14 years earlier, the transformation of Christmas from a religious to a secular a very commercialized holiday had not yet hit Chatham in 1857. It was not until later in the Victorian era that Christmas would grow into the “commercialized monster” it is today.

Rather than Christmas, Chatham in December 1857 was caught up in the upcoming federal and municipal elections … at least if you believe what you read. Every newspaper issue in December contained pages of election ads and election editorials. I am not sure what is more annoying – excessive Christmas advertising or excessive Christmas politicking.

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There was also some concern expressed by a reporter about the new bell that had been recently placed in Chatham’s Town Hall on King Street. I thought for sure the article would mention how nice it would be to have that bell chime on Christmas morning or at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve, but that was not the concern of The Chatham Planet. Their concern was that the new bell, at more than 1,200 pounds, would be too heavy for the belfry of the town hall and that it would collapse.

However, if you wanted to celebrate the holiday season of 1857, you could do so in a number of ways.

If you liked the traditional song about “I Saw Three Ships Come Sailing In…” you could, for an undisclosed amount of money, go on a shopping trip to Dresden and purchase for your loved one the 62-ton schooner “Catherine and Margaret.” It was described as a vessel suitable for “transporting lumber or grain.”

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At the Fashionable Hat Store in downtown Chatham you could buy gifts of “hats, caps, Buffalo Robes and ladies furs”.

At Chatham’s so-called Walmart of the 1850s, the W. & W. Eberts Store at the corner of King and Fifth streets, you could buy, “at the best prices,” Labrador herring, green codfish, Owen Sound trout, fresh lobster, furs, hats, boots, clothes, crockery, groceries and “dry goods of all sorts.”

At William Thackeray’s store on King Street, one could buy for Christmas “splendid looking glasses” (so much more evocative a description than simply “mirrors”) of different sizes and patterns in rosewood, mahogany and walnut frames.

For Christmas or New Year’s dinner, one could make a reservation at John Degge’s “The Shades Saloon,” located under “the Ebert’s New Brick Block” (corner of King and Fifth streets) and enjoy a fine meal consisting of such exotic delicacies as oysters, lobsters or sardines “with every variety of pickles”.

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Looking to go away for the holidays in 1857? Well … you could rent a cutter, a buggy (either closed or open), a carriage, or a saddle horse from either Israel Evans or Abram Rayno for very “reasonable prices,” provided you were “paying in cash.”

If you really wanted to “get away” in style, or perhaps take that “final trip,” you could also rent an “excellent hearse constructed upon the most approved principle” from Mr. Evans.

Christmas 1857 in Chatham was not – at least according to the newspaper of the day – a terribly exciting place to be.

Yet on the other hand it was rather refreshing to read a newspaper from December of any year and see it relatively devoid of Christmas hype that now seems to begin, as it did this year, the day after Labour Day.

The Gilberts are award-winning historians with a passion for telling the stories of C-K’s fascinating past.

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