America 1870-1900 - HOLIDAYS [continued]

Part 6 HALLOWEEN AND THANKSGIVING

Halloween and Thanksgiving are lumped together, as they should be, bracketing the not yet invented holiday of Barbvember wherein it is all about me from the second the candy hits the floor on Halloween to the moment the turkey hits the table on Thanksgiving.  But I digress…

Halloween is all about how a gal is going to dang well get married someday! There is a nice Betsy-Tacy connection here in the going down the stairs backwards to see the face of your future husband in a mirror. Risking a broken neck on the off chance that you will get some inside information? Not my style. I will be sitting over here putting apple seeds on my face, thank you very much.

There is mention of Pagans and “the harvest festivals of the ancient Semetic tribes”, but no indication of people who might be Pagan or Semetic still existing. Halloween is for kids and tomfoolery around marriage. And Thanksgiving is a “reminder of tribulations of the less fortunate.” Ah yes, the guilt. I forgot that used to be a thing. We don’t have guilt in America anymore unless it is directed at others. We are a nation of perfect people who have a hard time recognizing when they have been oppressing others for 400 years.

We finally have some people of color who are both non-fictional and not wanted men! There is a picture of some 15 black scholars and their three teachers who are dressed circa Little House on the Prairie. Some quite clever backwards google image searching informs me that this photo was taken around 1899 at the Whittier Primary School in Hampton, Virginia. That school was a practice school of the Hampton Normal School which was a teachers’ college after the Civil War and is now Hampton University. The students have a homemade cabin on the desk and the words “The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers” is on the board behind them. It will be some 100 years or so before public education starts mentioning that there was history on this continent prior to the landing of the European settlers. Don’t hold your breath, children!

Part 7 CHRISTMAS

We begin the Christmas section with a terrifying lantern slide of a family of eight.  Spry, child hoisting Grandpa, bearded prosperous Dad, two little girls behaving daintily, two little boys behaving boisterously, a baby of indeterminate gender - intersex perhaps? I’m grasping at straws here…- and a clearly exhausted Mother. She’s just a bit slumped over in her chair, just as much as her stays will allow. You can’t really read her expression, but I would bet that she is thinking, “Whoever bought my son this drum should DIE!” No jury in the land would convict you, Madam.

“A Christmas Carol” was sweeping the nation like baby fish mouth to counteract “the [vocabulary alert!] refulgent* style of the Victorian Christmas.” And The Ladies’ World, in December of 1892 is doubling down on keeping the guilt:gilt ratio in check. It turns out that my cheap and crafty ways are timeless and also it is probably my fault that my husband is an alcoholic due to my monstrous greed. Just kidding, it’s 2020, my husband is just pandem-drunk. Phew!

So it is a white Christmas, from a representation standpoint. There is one little picture of a child’s scrapbook that has a little black child kind of tormenting a little white child, sticking out their tongue and maybe pinching her. You know how Judge Potter Stewart said of obscenity, “I know it when I see it”? Well, that is the racist vibe on this picture. It’s just gross.

And that’s the holidays! The score is 18 positive and 1 negative depiction of people of color and a bunch of decorative females and one who created art that was diminished by the patriarchy.  We’ve still got nothing on the gay front, but next chapter is THE FRONTIER and there will be cowboys - perhaps they inspired Randy Jones.

* refulgent - I had to look it up, which is one of my favorite things! It means bright and shiny.

No footnotes this time around - all images from Time-Life Books. This Fabulous Century 1870-1900. New York: Time-Life Books, 1970.