Title: Christmas in Chicago
Author: Butcher, Fanny
Language: English
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[Illustration: Waterfront and buildings]



  CHRISTMAS IN CHICAGO


  BY
  FANNY BUTCHER


  WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
  THERESA GARRETT ELIOT

  [Illustration: Dancers]

  BOSTON AND NEW YORK
  HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
  The Riverside Press Cambridge
  1926


  COPYRIGHT, 1926, BY FANNY BUTCHER

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED


  The Riverside Press

  CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS

  PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.



[Illustration: Street scene]



CHRISTMAS IN CHICAGO


A flare of lights. A giant tree tapering up and up until it seems to
melt into the sky, except that the glittering star which crowns it puts
to shame the gentle glimmerings in the background of the blue-black
heavens. Spangles, like a circus-rider’s dress, flutter in the swish of
air, blaze out in the footlight glare of the barrage of lights which
are turned on the tree. The family Christmas tree giganticized to a
tree for the family of the great city.

And underneath, thousands upon thousands of human beings tramping
about in the snow, listening to a band, watching the fluttering bangles
of the spectacular tree. A river of motors slowly flowing past the
picture–slowly, whether they will or no, for there is no hurrying in
the mass that drives down to see the tree.

In the mêlée that worms about beneath the tree there are men and women
from the four corners of the earth. There are faces moulded in such
fantastically different casts that you cannot but wonder how mankind
can be all one mankind. There are voices thick with the gutturals of
Middle Europe, soft with the sunshine of the South, and heavy with the
interminable consonants of the North.

There is a medley of sound, human voices of all the tones of the
earth’s surface doing that peculiarly unmusical feat of all talking
at once, and being heightened rather than subdued by the din of the
band trying to be heard in a bellowing of that gentle lullaby ‘Heilige
Nacht.’ And the overtone is always the honking of impatient motorists
or gayly inclined ones who feel that the best way to express approval
in modern life is to make as loud and raucous a noise as possible.

And all over the city, in its endless miles of boulevards and parks,
little brothers of the great tree are glittering against the sky. And
underneath those others, as underneath the great tree itself, mankind
swishes and huddles and gazes and talks. Miles and miles apart they
are, from the steel mills on the south painting the sky a flame red to
the fastnesses of suburban sobriety and sedateness on the north, from
the vast new bungalow-studded southwest to the factory-dotted northwest
merging into two-flat buildings and inter-urbaned real estate plots.

The municipal tree of Chicago–whether it be the great tree on the lake
front or the offspring which each local community rears as a pledge of
its own Christmas joys–is a triumph of civic ideals. It is a symbol
to the thousands, who are strangers–if not in fact, at least in that
pitifully intense way in which mankind can be alone in the millions
that make a great city–that the city is human. And it has been such
a short time that the city has been human–that it has had time to be
anything but a growing, hungry, physically developing giant of a child.
Out of its rompers, Chicago is now, and present at the great moment of
decorating the Christmas tree of the ‘children.’

There is something adolescent and very charming and very _naïve_ about
this Christmasy Chicago. It has just reached the time when it feels
that the world is taking some notice of it, when it feels its first
thrills of conquest, when it cleans out its pockets, throws away
the broken knife blades and the slightly worn wads of gum and the
marbles and substitutes the picture of the chorus girl and the pocket
comb. It is washing behind its ears. And it can blush with gorgeous
_naïveté_ at the thought of making a social _faux-pas_. It is terribly
self-conscious, and like all growing youth it still has its cosmic
dreams.

Chicago’s delight in its Christmas tree is at the same time the delight
of the child in any glittering gaudily lighted scene, and the delight
of the youth who remembers his baby days and his passionate belief in
Santa Claus and sees in the great tree a monument to the few years that
have intervened.

There is romance in that thought. Within the memory of many men and
women who walk beneath the great tree, within the lifetime of one of
the thousands of trees that have been brought to the making of the
great tree and its lesser relatives, the spot did not exist at all
where now the gigantic realization of a dream of a Christmas tree
stands. It was a wave on its way to lap a sandy shore, or caught in
the fastnesses of ice. And the shore when it was reached was a spot
where children picnicked in summer, where horses were brought to the
water’s edge for a drink, where wagons were washed, where the water
itself was dipped up in buckets and carried into the little houses
of the village. It was a spot where bemuffled children slid back and
forth in winter, cautiously keeping inshore. The spot where the great
tree stood the first time it was made, before the outlying communities
had their separate celebrations, on the land just east of Madison
Street and north of the Art Institute, was in the very early days a
public burying-ground. Rude storms from the east frequently gnawed
at the earth until it had given up its hidden coffins, battered them
into fragments, and left scattered, gruesome remains on the shore
when the calm came. Within the lifetime of a man it has grown from
burying-ground to the waterfront park of one of the great cities of the
world.

On any Christmas Eve in those days–and some are still alive who
remember it–the smooth motor-filled boulevard which magnificently
borders the city was a country road, frozen in deep ruts, or, if the
weather had been mild, a sandy morass, thick and impassable. And the
streets just west of it, the streets which are filled with Christmas
shoppers, with ballyhooers for jumping bunnies and sparklers and little
rubber men who stick out their tongues and great tin lobsters which
waddle around on the sidewalk, the streets which are thick with human
beings and every known mechanical device to lure them and give them
comfort and excitement–these same streets were frozen bogs of pathways
barely worth the name of road, often with an abandoned cart mutely
crying their impassability. Signs proclaiming ‘No bottom here’ told the
tale which the rivers of mud only hinted at. The very street, where an
elevated whangs by overhead, a street car clangs its warning to the
holiday crowds, and ceaselessly honking motors make a bedlam of the
air, is the scene of the classic story of the man who, in the early
days, was up to his ears in mud. From a spot identical with one which
is being stepped over by thousands, so the story goes, a pedestrian
offered to throw out a lifeline to the mud-imprisoned neighbor. ‘Don’t
worry about me,’ he is said to have answered, ‘I’m on a good horse.’
That story delighted our grandfathers.

[Illustration: Street scene]

The sidewalks, lined with gaudy windows wheedling dollars from
the passers-by and noisy with street hawkers, passionately supply
last-minute gew-gaws for the tired men and women who have had to shop
late because they had no money to shop early–sidewalks smooth and
wide and sturdy to the tramp of millions of feet–not over a lifetime
ago were narrow strips of wood, raised on stilts, with enough room
underneath for children to play and for rats to hold continuous
convention. Within the memory of its oldest inhabitants those same
planks which served as walks were the scene of many a fiasco when an
arrogant Indian would calmly push a child off into mud which almost
smothered it–an indignity which had to be borne by the members of
the community who still remembered the horrors of the Fort Dearborn
massacre. Those same lordly concrete ways were the scene in the early
days of many a romantic moment when carriages and carts were drawn up
to the very doors of the houses and shops and whatever strong male arms
that happened to be present were offered to lift the ‘wimminfolks’
safely from one dry spot to another. High hip boots, they all wore,
those early Chicago cavaliers, and of necessity.

Is it not a legitimate glitter of pride in the twinkling eyes of the
great tree when it looks upon the vast and teeming loop of the city and
remembers that, not so long ago but that men now living can remember,
the whole prairie south of the river was a great bog, dry at times,
but always at the mercy of every rainfall, and of the seepage from the
erratic river that flowed now into the lake and now from it? Ten feet
lower than the land to the north of the river it was–this spectacular
loop of Chicago, which is unlike the same space of ground anywhere
else in the world–and only the dreamers could see that it could ever
be made into a city. Is the pride out of place when one remembers that
the first civic accomplishment of the village was the gigantic one of
raising the level of the south bank and its adjoining acres until it
was no longer sick with sogginess? And may it not also be a matter of
pride that that river, so gayly going its own unreasoning way, now
north, now south, was tamed to the quiet dignity of flowing in one
direction?

Would it not give any city a Christmasy feeling of triumph to realize
that the land which looks out upon its harbor, land which to-day is
weighed in ounces of gold, where great hotels and shops harbor the
riches and fripperies of the world, was, within the memory of men and
women still actively a part of the city’s life, the pasture for the
whole town south of the river? It has been many a year since a cow
wore down the grass by the roadside of Michigan Avenue, or munched its
way about on the prairie, but no more than sixty years ago all of the
residents of the South Side took their cows out in the morning and
went for them at night. The community practically ended at Wabash and
Adams Streets, and the favorite grazing lands were the spots where
the Blackstone and Stevens Hotels now have their roots. Even as late
as 1871, the year when the world was shocked by the news of the great
Chicago fire, cows were still wandering about contentedly in the
prairies.

Mayn’t the city well wear a mammoth Christmas tree as an adornment this
Christmas morning when it looks upon its vastness, when it remembers
that, from a mere handful of settlers less than ninety years ago, it
has become the home of over three millions? In hundreds of thousands
of homes in the vast miles that make Chicago as large and populous as
many a monarchy, there are small replicas of the great tree, jeweled
with many colored electric bulbs sheltering gifts, each single one of
which would have dowered a bride in the older days. A diamond bracelet,
dangling to the delight of some eager daughter or wife, is a bauble
which, in those days, would have bought the entire loop. A house and an
adjacent block of ground could have been purchased with the money that
has been spent for one of the many shiny new motor cars that stand in
front of hundreds of shiny little brick houses for the first time this
Christmas morning.

In the old days, a pair of shoes, woolen underwear, warm mittens, or a
highly extravagant ‘fascinator’ knitted by skillful fingers were the
gifts which elicited shrieks of joy from the recipients. An orange was
the height of luxury for a child; and he had one orange, not a basket
full of them. One wealthy old settler tells with heart-breaking candor
of his envy at the sight of a playmate who owned and devoured one large
orange before his yearning eyes, and how the memory lasted for years.
The highly humanized modern doll, that does everything but think, now
walks under the adoring eyes of its ‘mama’ and says ‘Papa’ and ‘Mama’
with equal tenderness to-day. In the early days a little girl was being
pampered by her mother when she found among her useful Christmas gifts
a creature made of rags and which had to have all of its talking and
walking done for it.

Parties all over the city as big as a country are gay with boys and
girls home from preparatory schools and colleges and fathers and
mothers and grandfathers and grandmothers, all apparently the same
age, all living lives made easy by modernity. In the great hotels that
face the tree, there are numberless Christmas celebrations, where
the guests are all handsomely dinner-jacketed and gowned, all very
sophisticated, all having eaten just a little too much and perhaps
tippled less wisely than well, dancing something that in the early
days of Chicago would have shocked the city fathers. And there is
much conversation about the small high-powered roadster that this
one found in his Christmas stocking, and the jaunt to Palm Beach as
soon as the Christmas gayeties are past, and the new bridge rules,
and there is more rich food and bubbly drink. Cosmopolitan, typically
modern American they all are, with yearly trips to Europe to furbish
up a wardrobe or to buy knick-knacks for the new house. There is as
much wealth in the persons of the guests as in the old days the whole
territory west of the Hudson would have boasted.

In the memory of one of the grandmothers who is lending, for an hour or
so, the dignity of her presence to the party, Christmas was the homiest
of the home festivals. The whole season was a simple preparation for
the only really passionately anticipated event of the year–New Year’s
Day. On Christmas there were family gatherings, with long dinners of
prairie chicken and whatever frivolities the clever housewife could
concoct, with no fresh fruit, no nuts, no out-of-season vegetables,
and no skilled French cooks. The ‘hired girl’ was a blessing (or the
curse) of only the few wealthy homes. The caterer had never been heard
of, and when he finally did make his appearance fifty or sixty years
ago he supplied nothing except ice-cream. In the wealthiest households
a fiddler might be had in, but not guests outside the family. Usually
some member of the family had enough talent to play the simple music
which the dances required. And such dances! Square, sedate, but
hilariously thrilling to grandmother as well as granddaughter.

There would be no extravagantly glittering Christmas trees. Very few
families except the Germans had a tree at all. Boughs of evergreen were
tacked over the doors and the windows, gathered from the great woods
north and west of the city, the woods which are now a part of the most
populous miles in Chicago.

If the family happened to live on the north shore of the river and was
bid to a family Christmas on the south shore, it dragged itself, of
necessity, across the Chicago River on a hand ferry at Rush Street, or
crossed at Dearborn Street on a bridge operated by hand cables. And
whether the party were joyously gay or not, as moral upright villagers
they must needs be at home and in bed by ten o’clock, or, if distance
and utter levity demanded, they might possibly sneak in at midnight.

While the tree is still on the lake front, it will watch the mobs
rushing into the city on New Year’s Eve for the bacchanal which has
come to be the American custom of welcoming in the New Year. In the old
days, every one was so excited about New Year’s Day that they hadn’t
time to waste on its eve. In the rare households where the ladies of
the family were not receiving, a basket was hung on the doorknob in
which the callers left their cards. Otherwise, the ladies, furbelowed
in their most extravagant gowns, ‘received’ and kept an accurate
account of the number and names of the gentlemen who honored them.
The days after New Year’s were spent in comparing notes and–for the
beaux–in recovering from hot toddy and fried oysters and chicken salad,
which the fair hostesses had probably spent half the night before
preparing.

The nearest approach to the casual, large, group parties, which the
Christmas holidays see nowadays, was, in those days, the Firemen’s
Ball. Every one who was any one belonged to the fire brigade. The
young blades of the village rivaled one another in their devotion to
it. A fire was a social event of the first water. The town was very
wooden, and fires were frequent and thorough. Whenever one started,
the entire town dropped everything and rushed to see the fun. The
men dressed themselves up in their _opéra-bouffe_ outfits and pumped
water–until Long John Wentworth gave them an engine that didn’t need
hand pumping–and the ladies arrived as soon afterwards as possible
with sandwiches and pots of coffee. One met every one at a fire.

[Illustration: Three women]

It was meet that the Firemen’s Ball should be the civic social event
of the year. It happened in January. The one in 1847 was a triumph
long remembered. There were ten hundred and fifty invitations, all
written and delivered by hand (no engravers or post for the meticulous
hostesses of those days). It was held in the firehouse and the _élite_
of the city attended.

For the Christmas festivities nowadays the long, luxurious trains which
roll into Chicago from the East bring many guests who stay a day and
dash on to another city in equally luxurious trains. They don’t realize
it, but the city which they are visiting so casually is the railroad
center of the United States. Mankind surges through its land gates
as it surges through one of the great ports of the world. But things
were far different in the early days. Any one who wanted to be in the
village of Chicago for Christmas couldn’t decide on December 24th at
two o’clock in the afternoon and arrive on Christmas morning from the
East. Weeks were spent in the journey. Covered wagons served for the
ordinary travelers, but the _élite_ came by boat. For a week, if the
winds were fair, they were uncomfortable and crowded and badly fed and
sick while the boat hurried toward Chicago from Buffalo. And the days
they had spent–or weeks–to get to Buffalo! It was never considered much
of a trip. They finally arrived and found a town which well deserved
its name of ‘garden city,’ and their enthusiasm for its quiet and
comfort after the long hard trip must have had much to do with the
increasing numbers which year after year made the arduous trip.

The Christmas feast was not planned the day before Christmas, either.
Days of hunting the fowl which were its backbone preceded the work of
the housewife. The father and the boys did the shopping for her with
guns. There were no great slaughterhouses to supply her with dressed
fowl. The packing industry wasn’t even heard of. For many years now
Chicago has been known as the ‘pork-packing town.’ Every visitor who
comes from overseas insists upon being shown through the ‘Yards.’
English poets have celebrated Chicago for its stockyards odor, and
missed the fresh spiritual fragrance of youth and a zest for life that
simply exudes from the city through its smoke and its dirt and its city
smells. But in the early days pigs were just pigs, and not a world
advertisement. They were a nuisance, not even a luxury. The village had
to pass an ordinance that ‘any pig or hog running at large without a
ring in its nose shall be fined $2.00 collected on conviction of such
offense before a justice of peace.’ Pigs running around loose in the
suavities of Michigan Avenue–isn’t that enough to give the giant tree
an extra glimmer of mirth and of pride at what the years have done?

In the darkness of the nights between Christmas and New Year’s–nights
which are now hectic with sirens of motors and the scrape of shifting
gears and the continual swish of human voices and the blare of
lights–within the memory of men and women living, the quietness of
a town safely shut in by its own fireside was in the air, with the
occasional call of the town crier–‘Lost! Lost! Lost! Little girl seven
years old!’

Chicago has left those days behind it, but memories of them make
sweeter the complete security and comfort of the city in these days.
And the dazzling pyramid of jeweled green, a giant’s dream of a
Christmas tree, is a symbol of the child’s fairy-tale come true. It is
a Christmas _boutonnière_ tucked into the proud buttonhole of Chicago.




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