Thoreau’s Christmas

Thanks to Calliope, Inc., we have a glimpse of how Christmas was celebrated at Thoreau’s household. As the site says, “Here is a Christmas memory that Henry’s brother John wrote to a young boy in 1839, when John and Henry Thoreau were in their twenties--”

When I was a little boy I was told to hang my clean stocking with those of my brother and sister in the chimney corner the night before Christmas, and that ‘Santa Claus,’ a very good sort of sprite, who rode about in the air upon a broomstick (an odd kind of horse I think) would come down the chimney in the night, and fill our stockings if we had been good children, with dough-nuts, sugar plums and all sorts of nice things; but if we had been naughty we found in the stocking only a rotten potato, a letter and a rod. I got the rotten potato once, had the letter read to me, and was very glad that the rod put into the stocking was too short to be used.