Satanesque?
Or consider Christmas – could Satan in his most malignant mood have devised a worse combination of graft plus buncombe than the system whereby several hundred million people get a billion or so of gifts for which they have no use, and some thousands of shop-clerks die of exhaustion while selling them, and every other child in the western world is made ill from overeating – all in the name of the lowly Jesus?
Upton Sinclair: Money Writes!, 1927[1]
From The New-York Times December 25, 1866:
Christmas. …
ONE OR TWO THINGS MORE.
Gotham candy (and liquor) stores open on Christmas Day
To-day, of course, business will be generally suspended. Candy-stores will keep open where full pocketed little ones may exchange their pennies for candies and sick headaches, and we fear that corner liquor-stores will be available for the full grown monsters, who, if they don’t buy candies they buy worse, and get the headaches like the babies.
At the Custom-house, entrances and clearances of vessels will be made from 9 to 10 AM. This will be the only business of the day, and at the Post-office the doors will close for deliveries of the mails at the last hour named.
What Mrs. Grundy saw?
A balloon ascension is promised us, by a daring navigator of the ethereal blue, and is to take place between 3 and 4 o’clock of the afternoon and from the City Hall Park. Mrs. Grundy is going up with him, so it would be well for people of sensitive organizations to be on the lookout and on their good behavior.
So having given you all the news that we could gather, we say once more, “A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year” to all! …
I second that wish on this Second Day of Christmas.
Merry Christmas!
From the Library of Congress: toy department from Puck December 17, 1913; sugar plums; John Bachmann’s 1865 bird’s eye view; country Christmas
- [1]Seldes, George, compiler. The Great Quotations. 1960. New York: Pocket Books, 1967. Print. page 158.↩
