The Merry Christmas Time
James McCune Smith's first Christmas editorial for the Anglo-African
~ This entry is part of my project of identifying, compiling, and editing the complete written and spoken works of James McCune Smith (1813-1865) in association with Northumbria University and funded by the British Academy. ~
Title: The Merry Christmas Time
Date: December 1860
Source: The Weekly Anglo-African, 29 December 1860, p. 2
Transcribed: Amy M. Cools, updated 24 December 2025
Text:
The Merry Christmas Time.[1]
Far away from the sun, on the very verge and rim of his orbit, when a ponnd[2] [sic] additional of centrifugal momentum would cause old earth to secede[3] from the planetary union and plunge us all into a dimmer abyss than threatens South Carolina,[4] what a nice, warm, healthful, cheery institution is this merry Christmas time.
We old folks sit cozily by the fire, pipe in hand,[5] stirring our hot lemonade and sweeping the vistas of the past with telescopic eyes, now merry with pleasant,[6] or brimming with sad reminisces.[7] How much better―don’t frown, good wife!―how much better the doughnuts, the olekoks[8] and the kroellers[9] tasted when New-York was all this side of the stone-bridge at Canal-street![10] Better, yes better, for teeth and digestion and stomachic capacity were then at an enormous premium.[11] We can distinctly remember two dinners three teas―not counting those that fell out with us by the way―and the enormous supper comfortably put away on Christmas day and evening.
But the merry Christmas time is for the young. It is the special hour for muscular Christianity on the part of the young men, who speed over immense distances in a twinkling of time in search of dimpling cheeks and gladdened eyes―awaiting with shy dissent their welcome coming.[12] How the poor fellow trembles, fumbles in his pocket, crumbles the package in his nervous hands, chokes as he vainly essays the well conned speech, and wishes himself through the floor or ceiling.
Merry Christmas is the children’s day! How long expected, how gladly welcomed by them. Hear their sweet voices, their pattering feet,[13] witness their joy in gifts, their braveries, their graceful rompings and big eyed wonder. Throughout Christendom their tiny voices send up a not unwelcome choral song to Him who has said “Suffer little children to come unto me and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of Heaven.[14]
The merry Christmas time should be a season for other things beside merry making. There are precious and gentle duties which can be performed at no other time so well nor so gracefully. “The poor ye have always with you.”[15] And the poor are never so poor as at this season of the year. The special class to whom we now allude are those who have struggled honestly and faithfully in the battle of life but on whom the sun of success has failed to shine. They started out along with us, have labored as hard, perhaps harder than we, they have always kept up appearances―but oh how difficultly do they keep the wolf from the door! Or there are those whom in our youth we knew well to do and surrounded with their Christmas comforts, with their young―alas, now gone before them―as our playmates, but whom swift age has overtaken and grim poverty.[16] To either of those classes, too proud to ask, this season affords a graceful opportunity to give what we know is needed without fear of refusal. Half a load of coal to old Uncle A., or a fine fat turkey to old Aunty B., how well she knows how to roast it!―or a pair of plain warm blankets to old Mr. L, would be gifts twice blessed.
Reader, with the means or even the possibility to give, you cannot imagine until you have tried, how much these little benevolences add to the joy of the merry Christmas time.
[1] This is the first of three Christmas editorials McCune Smith wrote for the Anglo-African. See also ‘Our Christmas Story’, The Anglo-African, 26 December 1863; ‘Christmas!’, The Anglo-African, 24 December 1864.
[2] Apparently a typographical error for ‘pound.’
[3] A convention called by the legislature of South Carolina voted unanimously (169-0) to secede from the Union effective 20 December 1860. Several other Southern states quickly followed. See James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (Penguin Books, 1990), 234–35.
[4] McCune Smith’s mother Lavinia was born and raised in slavery in South Carolina. McCune Smith’s old and close friend Robert Hamilton recalled that she ‘was from Charleston, S.C.’ and had left ‘behind her a large circle of relations.’ See ‘Dr. James McCune Smith’, The Anglo-African, 9 December 1865. Lavinia continued to have connections to Charleston and South Carolina. For example, she and McCune Smith’s aunt Sarah McCune (almost certainly Lavinia’s sister) helped rescue a young woman who sought to emancipate herself rather than return to slavery in Charleston. Her pursuers knew to look for her at Lavinia and Sarah’s house, so they asked their friend Lucretia Bell to hide the young woman instead. See Philip A. Bell, ‘Underground Railroad in New York: No. 1’, The Elevator, 18 January 1873.
[5] Though McCune Smith was a teetotaller, he was apparently a regular pipe smoker, at least since the mid-1850s. See, for example, ‘The Odd Fellows’ Celebration’, Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 12 September 1856.
[6] See such pleasant reminisces in the editorials listed in the footnote for the title of this essay, above.
[7] McCune Smith and Malvina Barnett Smith’s first child, Amy, died on Christmas Eve, 24 December 1849. McCune Smith wrote to his friend Gerrit Smith a few months later: ‘After a year of ailment, at times painful and distressing, always obscure, and which she bore with child-like patience, it pleased God to take her home to the company of Cherubs who continually do Praise Him… [O]ne thing I feel deeply grateful, her mind was serene to the last, and intelligently hopeful of a Blessed Immortality. She died on Christmas eve and lacked 5 days of six years of age. My dear wife was sorely afflicted…’ About two years after writing that letter, McCune Smith told of meeting a black New York street news-vendor who had lost his legs in a shipwreck on Christmas Eve in Frederick Douglass’ Paper. Upon hearing the vendor’s story, McCune Smith wrote, ‘The tears rushed from my eyes: for on that very night, when the poor sailor struggled with the cold and storm, and met his terrible misfortune, there came into my household a messenger for my first born: sweet, patient little sufferer, after a year of hopes and fears, and deep agony; in the intervals from distress, that day her young hopes were gladdened with to-morrow’s Christmas tree and the expected adornings from a mother’s loving hand. But long ere midnight came,’ Amy died. McCune Smith pledged to hire and stock a shop for the vendor in her memory. See James McCune Smith to Gerrit Smith, 6 February 1850, Gerrit Smith Papers, Syracuse University Libraries; ‘“Heads of the Colored People,” Done with a Whitewash Brush: The Black News-Vender’, Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 25 March 1852. I have not yet been able to find any records pertaining to that shop.
[8] McCune Smith’s reminisces of the Dutch pastries he feasted on in his youth is apparently inspired by a passage in Washington Irving’s ‘Sleepy Hollow’ about ‘the ample charms of a genuine Dutch country tea-table, in the sumptuous time of autumn. Such heaped-up platters of cakes of various and almost indescribable kinds, known only to experienced Dutch housewives! There was the doughty dough-nut, the tenderer oly koek, and the crisp and crumbling cruller…’ See Washington Irving, A Book of the Hudson, Collected from the Various Works of Diedrich Knickerbocker (G. P. Putnam, 1849), 62–63 (In Internet Archive). McCune Smith was often inspired by Irving’s work, including in his choice of ‘Communipaw’ – which Irving described as ‘the renowned village [where] the intrepid crew of the Goede Vroew first cast the seeds of empire… the parent of New York’ – as his pseudonym as New York City correspondent for Frederick Douglass’ Paper starting in 1851. See ‘Communipaw’, in A Book of the Hudson, Collected from the Various Works of Diedrich Knickerbocker, by Washington Irving (G. P. Putnam, 1849), 12; ‘Messrs. Editors [18 December 1851]’, Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 25 December 1851.
[9] The ‘olykoek’ or oil cake was a deep-fried pastry made of sweetened dough and sprinkled with sugar. It was an ancestor to today’s doughnut, but softer in the centre because without a central hole, the innermost dough didn’t cook as thoroughly. The kroeller or cruller (from the Dutch word for ‘curl’) was a similar sweet pastry but long and twisted. See Kevin Davis, Look What Came from the Netherlands (Franklin Watts, 2002), 18. 20.
[10] That stone bridge, which carried Broadway over the street and former canal that once helped drain the Sixth Ward where Collect Pond had been filled in, stood at the Ward’s northwest corner. See Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City To 1898 (Oxford University Press, 1998), 359–60; Carla L. Peterson, Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (Yale University Press, 2011), 56–57; S. Stiles, City of New-York, Edward Walker, 1840, Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division, The New York Public Library. Another nineteenth-century New Yorker, describing his own boyhood about a decade or so before McCune Smith’s, recalled that ‘“the stone bridge,” which stood where Canal-street now crosses Broadway… was considered “out of town”… This bridge spanned a small stream which conveyed water from the Collect [Pond] on the east side of Broadway… to the west side.’ See ‘Early New-York: The Old Stone Bridge at Canal-Street and Broadway’, The New York Times, 9 April 1886. In his story for Frederick Douglass’ Paper of a boot-black he had known since childhood, McCune Smith wrote that ‘New York had barely reached Canal Street’ in the mid-1820s. See ‘Heads of the Colored People - No. 2: The Boot-Black’, Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 15 April 1852.
[11] In a later Christmas essay, McCune Smith recalled the generosity of family, friends, and neighbours in lavishly bestowing treats on the children: ‘But Christmas times in Old New York! …We little fellas, well muffled up, and largely provided with pockets, would swarm down town to Aunty Robinsons, Mrs. Downings, Mrs. Hoffmans, Mrs. VanGiesens and others, and toward night fall come safely home, literally stuffed inside and out with doughnuts, crollers, and other sweets too numerous to mention.’ See ‘Christmas!,’ AA, 24 Dec 1864. ‘Mrs. Downing’ was probably Rebecca, the wife of oyster merchant Thomas Downing who lived and worked on Pell Street; the Downings were close family friends. ‘Mrs. VanGiesen’ likely refers to Catherine, the wife of Marcelus M. Van Giesen, a merchant who lived at 335 Broadway. ‘Robinson’ and ‘Hoffman’ had become such common names in New York City that there were many associated with ‘down town’ addresses; without anything else to go on, they haven’t been identified. See William A. Mercein, Mercein’s City Directory, New-York Register, and Almanac (William A. Mercein, 1820), 418; Thomas Longworth, Longworth’s American Almanac, New-York Register, and City Directory (Thomas Longworth, 1821), 443; Thomas Longworth, Longworth’s American Almanac, New-York Register, and City Directory (Thomas Longworth, 1822), 172, 453; ‘Obituary: Thomas Downing’, New York Times (New York), 12 April 1866; Serena A. M. Washington, George Thomas Downing: Sketch of His Life and Times (Milne Printery, 1910), 3; American Antiquarian Society, Index of Marriages and Deaths in New York Weekly Museum 1788-1817, 2: Labagh-Zuntz (American Antiquarian Society, 1852), 775.
[12] The boot-black of McCune Smith’s FDP essay also courted his future wife in a ‘muscular Christianity’ context, but much more boldly than the young men in this essay. Like many other ‘colored youth fresh from the country,’ the future boot-black went one day to one of the huge regular feasts put on by anti-slavery, well-to-do New Yorkers, this one after a service at St Philip’s. The young man ‘adjourn[ed] to the vast kitchen’ and met a young woman. ‘[T]he pleasant chat, at first about the “deep sermon,” then gradually warm[ed] into positive courtship! and such courtship! None of your Mexican warfare, with the artillery of the eyes fired at long distances, but the close grappling of iron arms round substantial waists, and that positive contact of “lips that are lips.” See ‘Heads - Boot-Black,’ FDP, 15 Apr 1853.
[13] McCune Smith could now write happily of pattering little feet, with four healthy children at home. Only a little over six years before, McCune Smith lamented in FDP, ‘The leaves are falling in our lane; and the trees, stripped and gaunt, seem prepared to wrestle with the coming storms; and the blossoms are withered, and the little feet no longer patter in our door-way.’ See ‘Heads of the Colored People - No. X: The Schoolmaster’, Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 3 November 1854. By then, four of McCune Smith and Malvina’s five children had died, three of them that summer, leaving nine-year old James Ward as their only child. But the arrival of Mary Maude on 21 September 1855 marked a new era of expansion of the Smith family. She was followed by Donald Barnett (ca. February-April 1858) and John Murray (April 1860). The last Smith child, Guy Beaumont, was born about a year and a half after his essay was written. See Amy M. Cools, ‘Roots: Tracing the Family History of James McCune and Malvina Barnett Smith, 1783-1937, Part 3’, Journal of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society 37 (2020): 63–65. (Subsequent research has corrected some details in this article – for example, the Smith family had only ten known children in all - ‘Mary S.’ was entered in error for the name of the eldest, Amy, in the record of Smith family interments in Cypress Hills Cemetery [*see also replies for this post below for an additional correction in this footnote, and more details] and the Smith family children who died in the summer of 1864 didn’t all die from cholera. The article, however, is otherwise mostly correct.)
[14] See Mark 10:14 in The Holy Bible, Containing the Old and New Testaments [King James Version] (William W. Woodward, 1813), 741. (In Internet Archive)
[15] See Matthew 26:11 in Holy Bible, 728. (In Internet Archive)
[16] These old friends and acquaintances that had failed to find success and/or had since fallen into old age and poverty have not been identified.
This is so beautiful! I also love the footnotes. I don't recall the Bible being corrected to 10 children. Is there another Bible?
Great footnotes. Such a treat to read. Thanks for this yuletide essay.