An Old Fashion Christmas

“Some of the Unconscious Humor and Pathos of the Great Holiday”
(San Francisco Chronicle, 1888)

In a January 1^st, 1888 San Francisco Chronicle article* titled: “Odd Celebrations: Queer Observances of Christmas, The People Who Dine Alone” the paper (in a sort of post-holiday blind item debriefing) takes note of the lone “old bachelors” and eccentrics who spend Christmas Day dining alone in restaurants around the City, or in other unorthodox ways. San Francisco has long been a place where dining out as a matter of course was the normal thing to do, as it was a frontier city that sprung up around the early flush of the state’s gold fever, when men were suddenly far removed and disengaged from hometowns and family hearths. By the 1880s, however, the City had settled into a more establishment identity.

So the yearly solitary holiday ritual of one middle-aged “conservative and successful business man” is deemed curious enough to note. Each year on Christmas day he took his meal in the same room out at the Cliff House Hotel, where he has a leisurely multi-course meal, tips the waiter generously, goes to smoke his cigar on the balcony, then “takes his buggy and drives away to town.” The writer speculates that “…there is a woman somewhere in it—a woman no longer of the flesh and blood, but an intangible recollection of the past that stirs the heart of the steady-going merchant, and makes him for one day in the year a different being.”

It’s observed that “The large contingent of old bachelors does not, however, supply all that is curious in the ways of observing Christmas,” and that there are “other eccentric people who celebrate Christmas day in fashions that the steady-going family man never dreams of.” (Though, are steady-going family men really so immune to dreams of observing the holiday in the manner that the author then goes on to recount?!). Apparently, that Christmas day a “well-known pioneer resident and property-owner” was found drunk and “dancing like a lunatic” on the beach, with  another “highly respectable old resident gloriously full and peacefully snoring off the effects of his overindulgence”! They were discovered by a little boy who, concerned that the one passed out on the sand was dead, went to the police. Makes one wonder what "pioneer families" they did hail from! But the back story for the antics of these two early San Franciscans is more interesting: 

“It transpired that they have been for many years in the public habit of celebrating Christmas on the sand dunes near Fort Point, where in early days they lived together in a rude tent and spent their first Christmas after leaving New York. Every Christmas the two pioneers take a couple of bottles of the necessary stimulant and go out to the sand hills, and sitting down where their old tent stood, proceed to talk of bygone days and empty their flasks.”

So, sloppy inebriation and all, it’s a wistful, sentimental tableau! And so really, in essence, the men have a traditional Christmas.

Cliff House, stereoview, 1880s

* San Francisco Chronicle (1869-Current File); Jan 1, 1888; ProQuest Historical Newspapers: San Francisco Chronicle (1865-1922) p. 30; through www.sfpl.org.