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An old Christmas card from the collection of the Pilgrim Monument and Provincetown Museum, the greeting reads, “The time honoured greeting again I send, A Merry Christmas to thee my friend.” Printed on the back is a similar picture but with pansies — “The end of the Old year now is near, I therefore wish thee A Happy New Year.” |
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From One Year to the Next
“And this is merry Christmas. How many familiar associations do the words recall to mind. My mind reverts back to the days of my youth and in fancy I hear the well-known voices of my beloved friends as each one tries to be the first wishing me a merry Christmas. I can even see the stockings as they hang in the chimney corner waiting for that mysterious being called Santa Claus to pop down the chimney and fill them with sugar plums and candy,” wrote Clara Ryder in her journal kept on a whaling voyage aboard the barque N.D. Chase on December 25, 1857.
Like many of us at this time of year, Clara was recalling holidays past and comparing them to the present. Aboard ship with Clara Ryder was her young son Frank Bunchina Ryder, whom she fondly called Bub. “Even Bub,” she continues, “wishes to know if Santa Claus won’t come to the coast of Africa and bring him some presents and on being told that we had no chimney for him to come down in said he should think he could come down the stove pipe into the galley. …. And now for the manner in which we spent the day our vessel was underweigh early in the morning. Standing along the coast near the shore looking out for whales but did not see any. All hands employed in ship’s duty as usual. I sewed and looked after the children.”
Clara Ryder’s attitude regarding Santa Claus’s inability to bring presents to her young son and the lack of celebration aboard ship seem rather unfeeling until one realizes that, Christmas was not a big event in America until the 1860s, according to historian Daniel Boorstin in “The Americans,” and the habit of giving gifts at Christmas didn’t gain widespread acceptance until the late 1800s.
Margaret Koehler, in “Recipes from the Portuguese of Provincetown,” describes Portuguese holiday traditions and Menino Jesus displays, now seldom seen or remembered, “Sometimes, if a family’s display was relatively small, it was set in the front window or, if it was placed elsewhere, the window was filled with lighted candles. Either was an invitation to friends and strangers alike to drop in and share a continual ‘open house’ from Christmas Eve to New Year’s Day. When guests came, they were served homemade beach plum or elderberry wine, or the Portuguese port or Madeira, and special holiday sweets such as trutas and suspiros.”
As it is today, music was also very much a part of holiday celebrations in the past. Koehler writes, “On Christmas Eve men would gather in groups to go from house to house singing carols in their soft swishing, native tongue and strumming their seven stringed guitarres.”
New traditions replace old traditions. The Pilgrim Monument is lit. There is a dinner for senior citizens sponsored by the Provincetown Business Guild. Open houses and parties still take place, although now open only to invited family and friends, and an occasional group of carolers is heard. Despite the continual gray weather, Provincetown is not without good cheer at this time of year. Holiday spirit is not absent, it has just changed, and someday we will look back and recall with nostalgia this year in Provincetown.
[Laurel Guadazno is curator of education for the Pilgrim Monument & Provincetown Museum.]
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Dec 16th, 2004