14. Instead of Spreading Good Cheer, Christmas Celebrants Used to Spread Unrest and Hooliganism
Nineteenth-century Christmas celebrants in America often donned masks – a forerunner of Philadelphia’s Mummers Parade. That led contemporaries to label them as “fantasticals“. They were also referred to as “callithumpians” – partly from their habit of thumping things (and people). Instead of spreading good cheer and peace toward men, the celebrants often went about spreading unrest, violence, and hooliganism. Christmas partiers back then often gathered in groups, and mocking real music by banging on pots, cowbells, improvised horns, and singing off-key, made their way from tavern to tavern. There, they demanded free drinks, and beat up anybody who objected.
Forming themselves into gangs, the drunken celebrants, many of them a collection of the unemployed, the criminal, and the ne’er do wells, often paraded – or staggered – into rich neighborhoods. There, they would beat drums, sing loudly, ring doorbells, express social discontents, smash windows, fire their guns, and otherwise make themselves disagreeable and “make the night hideous“. Knifings, shootings, arson, and other acts of mayhem and murder were common. It was a reminder to the day’s upper classes that class conflict and violence seethed beneath America’s surface.
