Highlights of California Christmases Past

As busy as they were at establishing 21 missions, the Franciscan priests sent to California in 1769 by a Spanish king, still found time to teach the native Indians to play the lute, violin, trumpet, metal triangle, and to sing Christmas carols in Spanish. At Mission San Jose and possibly other missions as well, Indian neophytes enacted a church play at Christmastime.

Under Mexican rule, secularization of those missions—which began in 1834—disrupted ordinary customs that had been established for 65 years. At Christmastime, however, the beloved religious practices of California’s residents of Spanish ancestry were observed as usual. People set up crèches in their homes. Outlying ranchers joined townspeople to enjoy music from guitars and mandolins, to dance until daylight, and to participate in religious rites. They gave blankets, handkerchiefs and young cattle to their Indian employees on December 25th, but only gave presents to one another on January 6, the Feast of the Epiphany of Three Kings.

Also, during Mexican rule, a Swiss adventurer named John Sutter built a large, walled trading post in the Sacramento Valley. His establishment contained a kitchen large enough to feed the dozens of tradesmen, craftsmen, fur trappers, gardeners, and others who lived and worked at the compound. Life on a frontier in the 1840s meant hard work from dawn until well past nightfall, but holidays inspired festive preparations of specialty fare. On Christmas Day in 1847, Sutter’s tanners and shoemakers threw a dinner for all the employees. The tables groaned with pig’s feet and peppers, beef chili, winter vegetables, stews and soups, fish served with suitable sauces, an assortment of baked or roasted wildfowl, and cakes and puddings. 

A few months after that festive Christmas dinner at Sutter’s Fort, the January 1848 gold discovery turned pastoral California into a hotbed of mining and commercial activity.

In the early Gold Rush years 1849-1851, thousands of predominantly male, and mostly young, treasure hunters were far away from the ordinary comforts and the familiar faces of home.  A number of preachers in the gold camps or town saloons offered short holiday services, and some miners dodged the pain of a cold, lonely day by singing old Christmas carols like “Jingle Bells” or “Away in a Manger” around camp fires.  Some indulged in brandy-soaked revelry that left the celebrants with headaches for days afterward. Many miners ushered in Christmas Day by whooping, or firing their guns into the air.  

The Gold Rush was a rough-and-tumble, and often lawless, era. In San Francisco, the Bull Run—also known as Hell’s Kitchen and Dance Hall— occupied a three-story building at Pacific Street and Sullivan Alley, with a dance hall and bar in the cellar, another on the street floor, and a brothel upstairs. It opened in the fall of 1868 and celebrated its first Christmas with a free-for-all brawl in which half a dozen men were seriously hurt.

Christmas first became a national holiday in December 1870, having been created as such by the United States Congress on June 28, 1870. On Tuesday, December 20, 100,000 Christmas trees of all sizes and prices went on sale in San Francisco, but  Christmas Day that year was a bit unusual in itself, in that it could be celebrated on either one of two days (or both, according to individual whim), because December 25 fell on a Sunday. Therefore, Monday the 26th, by more or less common popular consent, was declared to be the official holiday, with banks, and many other businesses, closed.

In the late 19th century, family holiday dinners were usually a formal feast of several courses. A typical Christmas Day dinner menu from Fanny Farmer’s 1896 cookbook included consommé with bread sticks, roast goose with potato stuffing, Duchesse potatoes and cream of Lima beans, and lettuce salad with cheese straws. Dessert was English plum pudding with brandy sauce, plus assorted cakes, candies, and coffee.