Holiday Peddling, 1851
A bundle of Toys he had flung on his back,
And he looked like a peddler just opening his pack. [Clement Clarke Moore (attributed), “A Visit from St. Nicholas,”1823]
Americans, in general, are not poetry lovers. The average person may know “The Star Spangled Banner,” and some may be able to identify a few poems by Robert Frost. Christmas carols are the only other rhymes widely known, and fewer can quote them as we become an increasingly secular society. Among the poetry of the season is Clement Clarke Moore’s “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” Now perhaps better known as “Twas the Night Before Christmas,” this 1823 verse is both well-loved and culturally significant.
Coming in at a short 548 words, Moore’s poem created many of the tropes still a part of the Christmas myth we tell our children, and the myth that Hollywood and Madison Avenue hold in a death grip. Borrowing from Washington Irving, Moore introduced into our culture many of the main themes of the Christmas legend: flying reindeer, a portly toy distributor, sliding down the chimney. Even if you can’t recite the entire poem, some words from it bring back Christmas memories, like “tales of sugar plums,” “dash away all,” “laying his finger aside of his nose”, and the “peddler just opening his pack.” [i]
In 1851, noteworthy future Westerville diarist Lucinda Lenore Merriss penned the following entry for December 11:
The old toy man was here, got a pleaster [sic, plaster] [of] paris lady 12 ½ ct [ii]
In this entry, just a few days before Christmas, was a peddler opening his pack! Was he St. Nick?
Although Lucinda Merriss (later Cornell) did not use the word “peddler,” in all likelihood the “old toy man” was a peddler. Known since antiquity, peddlers were salesmen who had no fixed place of business. Known by many names (huckster, hawker, monger, traveling salesman), they were often the lowest rung of the retail world. Going door to door, or village to village, the peddler sold his merchandise in a world where travel was difficult, and selling was limited to what the mobile entrepreneur offered.
In the United States, the heyday of peddling was between the Revolution and the Civil War. Later in the nineteenth century, peddlers lost business to advances in transportation and the rise of catalogs like Sears and Montgomery Wards. But even as late as the 1960s, specialty items such as vacuum cleaners, brushes, and cosmetics were sold door-to-door. The traveling salesman survives in humor and pathos, some of it tawdry.[iii]
It may seem like a tortured route, from Christmas to Westerville. For me, at least, the connection between Lucinda Merriss’s diary entry and Santa-as-peddler is quite clear. It may resonate differently for others; I leave it to the reader to agree with the connection. That was 1851; in 2023 I wish you holiday joy however and wherever you find it!
Santa, as described in “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” was a tiny, soot-covered elf who looked “like a peddler.” Illustration: Arthur Rackham.
[i] https://www.nysl.nysed.gov/collections/stnick/
[ii] Lucinda Cornell, From the Cornell Diaries (Westerville, 1979), p. 31.
[iii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peddler