Free The Battle for Christmas by Stephen Nissenbaum Page A

News-Boy’s Christmas and New Year’s Verses.” It begins:
    The Boy who Weekly Pads the Streets,
With all the freshest News he meets,
His Mistresses and Masters greets.

    Christmas Begging Broadside . This Boston “Carrier’s Address” was delivered during the 1770 Christmas season. The final verse asks patrons to bestow a “few shillings on your lad.” Similar broadside pleas were used by other “plebeian” residents of Boston. One, dating from the mid-176os, was from a blacksmith’s apprentice: “This is unto all Gentlemen who shoes [sic] here, / I wish you a merry Christmas, a happy New Year: / For shoeing your Horses, and trimming their Locks, / Please to remember my New-Years Box.”
(Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society)
    And it goes on:
    Christmas and New-Year, Days of Joy,
The Harvest of your Carrier Boy,
He hopes you’ll not his Hopes destroy….
    [That] His generous Patrons may inspire,
By filling up his Pockets higher! 83
    Three other carriers’ addresses wished their recipients “a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year,” and asked, respectively, for a “few shillings,” “some pence,” and a “lib’ral hand.”
    To be sure, this ritual was a far cry from the boisterous begging we have encountered in European popular culture (and will reencounter shortly in Boston itself). The paper carrier approached his patrons individually, not as part of a gang. As far as we know, he did not demand entry into his patrons’ houses or threaten damage if refused a gift. Above all, theverses that the carrier handed to his patrons were written by his employer. This was a ritual that was largely controlled and regulated from above—and perhaps that was its point. Nevertheless, it
was
a form of door-to-door begging, in which poor and youthful clients approached older and more prosperous patrons. It involved the exchange of gifts for expressions of goodwill, and the exchange was mediated by a “performance”—the token gift of a verse that expressed the essence of the exchange. The ritual’s roots in wassailing are clear, and they were probably in the back of the participants’ own minds. (And if the newsboy was not tipped, he was always capable, like his modern descendants, of leaving water-soaked newspapers at his patrons’ doors.)
The An ticks: Mumming in the Houses
    As begging goes, the “Carriers’ Addresses” may have been pretty tame stuff. But that is not to say that other forms of begging, more aggressive or threatening, did not take place. Evidence of such activity is hard to come by. Generally, the only public disorders reported by eighteenth-century Boston newspapers were those occasional crowd actions that had serious and overt political meaning (such as the Stamp Act riots of 1765). Episodes of a more ordinary nature—including the less politicized rituals of the Christmas season—did not make it into print.
    With one vivid exception. Several sources, taken together, make it clear that a tradition of aggressive Christmas mumming (a variety of wassail) was practiced by some of Boston’s poorer inhabitants over a period of at least thirty years, beginning no later than the early 1760s and continuing at least into the mid-179os. These groups called themselves the Anticks, masked troupes who demanded (or forced) entry into the houses of respectable Bostonians at Christmas. Once inside, they engaged in a dramatic “performance” and demanded gifts of money in return.
    The first piece of evidence of the existence of the Anticks is sketchy, taking the form of an oral report given to a folklorist late in the nineteenth century by a man whose mother—born in about 1752—had told it to him. 84 It serves chiefly to date the origin of the Anticks at least as far back as 1760 or so. The second report, too, is from the later recollection of a Bostonian who recalled their visits from the years of his childhood. But his is a detailed account of the Anticks’ actual “performance.” The man,