Sinterglass in New Amsterdam
by Walter H. Van Hoesen
From de Halve Maen, January, 1956 Vol XXX No.4
Another Christmas and New Years will have come and gone before this issue of De Halve Maen reaches its members, but some of the holiday spirit and memories will linger just as they did back in the days of New Netherland. As a matter of fact, many of the customs we associate with the observance of the two occasions date from that period.
It is just past Thanksgiving as these lines are written to meet a printer’s deadline for copy, but it is not too early for signs of Christmas. Streets and store windows are decorated as a part of the commercialized effort to spur gift buying, and plans are in the making for much celebrating in the weeks ahead, but in times gone by, things were much different.
It was about three centuries ago when New York was still New Amsterdam that the ancestor of our present-day Santa Claus first made an appearance in America. He was a bishop in the person of a kindly white-bearded old man in flowing robes riding a white horse. Accompanied by a Moorish servant on foot, he traveled from door to door rewarding good children with a gift of cookies or an article of clothing, while his aide admonished the naughty and left behind a bundle of birch rods.
The old man had his origin sixteen centuries before in Asia Minor, and because of his good works, he was made a saint while still quite young. His fame spread all over Europe, and when he first appeared in New Amsterdam, the children called him Sint Nicolaas or Sinterklaas. His round of visits took place not on Christmas Eve as we know it, but on December 5th to mark the good saint’s birth. The date is observed to this day by a meeting of The Saint Nicholas Society each year since its founding at the urging of Washington Irving back in 1835.
Unlike the merry celebration now associated with Christmas, this was a solemn occasion. Sinterklaas was considered a holy man and beloved, as well as revered, by young and old. It was more than one hundred years after the passing of New Netherland before Santa Claus was heard of, and then it was by the process of word translation from Dutch into American English. As time went on, the season for visitations extended from December 5th to Christmas Eve.
It remained for Washington Irving, creator of Rip Van Winkle and other legendary figures of the Hudson River “Dutch country,” to write for the first time about “the tubby little fellow with the jolly manner.” That was early in the nineteenth century, and just before Christmas in 1823, Clement C. Moore’s poem “A Visit from Saint Nicholas” or “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” was published.
Saint Nicholas was depicted in drawings for the first time in the 1860s by Nast, the famous caricaturist, but Santa Claus remained a vague and shadowy figure until just before the turn of the twentieth century when the New York Sun’s editorial on “Yes, There Is a Santa Claus” settled the matter once and for all.
The custom of going home for Christmas had its start in the farming areas of what used to be New Netherland. Whether it was on Long Island, up the Hudson, or in the northern counties of New Jersey, younger members of the family have looked ahead over the years to opening gifts and eating dinner at the old home. It has become a practice the country over, and to a lesser extent, the clan gathers on Christmas Eve to light a Yule log and listen to the Christmas story.
New Year’s Day was observed in New Netherland as a major religious occasion, according to accounts handed down to us in old diaries along with reports of Christmas. Even before there were churches in almost every community, the visiting domine conducted special services, and as time went on, it came to be the custom to “see the New Year in” by holding a watchnight service. It was quite the proper thing on New Year’s Day to go calling on neighbors or relatives for the purpose of wishing them well. Stories of New Amsterdam tell of such occasions when the men would raise their glasses in toasting one another while the women and children gathered in the front room to talk.