There were a few reasons for the lean look of Christmas in 1858, as reflected in the columns of that year's Herald.
Traverse City was an isolated outpost in northern Michigan's dense wilderness, accessible only by Indian trails in the winter. Its 150 residents had little money to spare.
Also, publisher Morgan Bates had founded his Republican newspaper only eight weeks before in an area that would be dominated by Democrats until Abraham Lincoln's election in 1860, and the Herald had few local advertisers.
"There was nothing to advertise and no one to read it if inserted," he reminisced years later. Something else, however, was also at play. The modern American notion of the "old-fashioned Christmas" was still in its infancy.
The commercialization of Christmas had barely begun, thanks to the stern influence of Puritan forefathers. They frowned on celebrating Christmas for fear it would inspire the raucous revelry of northern European mid-winter festivals that pre-dated Christ's birth. In fact, Christmas celebrations were illegal in early colonial Massachusetts. Boston repealed the law in 1681, but Christmas was not declared a legal holiday until 1856.
It would take almost a century for Americans to distill Christ's birth, gift-giving, caroling, Christmas trees, cards, Santa Claus and shopping into a distinctly American version of the holiday. And the nation's newspapers, magazines and downtowns would be willing participants in that transition.
The first mention of an American Christmas tree can be traced back to a diary entry in Lancaster, Pa., in 1821. The following year, Dr. Clement Clark Moore, a theologian, wrote his now classic poem, "The Night Before Christmas," for his children in 1822. The story, which a friend later gave to a newspaper, was the first clear American depiction of Old St. Nick.
Moore's Saint Nicholas didn't look like our Santa today, possibly because Moore, a well-known theologian, was versed in northern European anthropology and ancient traditions. His St. Nick wore fur clothes and was a small, spry old guy with a miniature sleigh pulled by tiny reindeer.
It would take until the 1930s for Americans to merge Europe's Old Man Winter, Father Christmas, Sinter Klaas, Pere Noel, Kris Kringle and St. Nicholas into the wholesome image of the kindly old gent he is today, with a white beard, paunch and red suit trimmed in white fur.
Charles Dickens' 1843 book "A Christmas Carol" about the transformation of a miser named Scrooge was also an important component in developing today's sentiments about the spiritual power of the season.
Thomas Nast, a well-known illustrator for Harper's Weekly, was another American artist who helped shape Santa's image, starting in 1863 with his first Civil War illustration of a bearded man, wearing striped Uncle Sam pants and a star-studded dark jacket trimmed with fur, talking with Union troops on a battlefield. Nast, who went on to be America's greatest political cartoonist, would continue illustrating Santa scenes for the national weekly until 1886.
On Sept. 21, 1897, the New York Sun published the now classic answer to 8-year-old Virginia O'Hanlon's letter "Is There A Santa Claus?" which Christmas historians today see as a tribute to faith in a lasting Christmas spirit.
"Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Santa Claus," the editorial by newsman Francis Pharcellus Church began.
"He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no VIRGINIAS. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished."
Saturday Evening Post illustrator J.C. Leyendecker is credited with creating the first enduring image of the American Santa Claus in the 1920s. Leyendecker's image and Moore's classic children's poem also inspired Muskegon artist Haddon Sundblom's illustrations of Coca-Cola's Santa from 1931 to 1964, now often considered the standard American image.
In 1939, Santa's eight reindeer were joined by a ninth, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, created by Robert L. May, a Montgomery Ward ad copywriter. By 1946, the department store chain's Santa had given away 6 million copies of the original poem, which later would be turned into an animated film and song.
Today, Rudolph may, as the poem says, still be recalled as "the most famous reindeer of them all" -- at least on cloudy Christmas Eve nights in northern Michigan.
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