Posted on 12/23/2007 7:40:24 AM PST by knighthawk
Yep. The Original Chritmas day was more of a festive celebration, mush like Thanksgiving. It was NY that commercialized it and changed the reason for the season into a secular commercialized holiday, with Santa as the focus and greed and abundance of material crap the measure of how great your Christmas will be.
So if you too believe this holiday is being exploted to perverse commercialized levels, protest by please sending all your newly bought Christmas material crap in care of Bommer.....
Charles Dickens gets the credit.
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I try not to determine the spirituality of Christmas by the number of presents I buy.
However, here is one fellow in NY who figured out how to pay for his presents by charging people to come down a ladder in the blizzard of 1888. I guess you could say that New York also invented extortion.
After a long time somebody in the street raised a ladder. It was too short to reach the track. To get on it one had to swing down and grope with his toes for the topmost round, seeing nothing numbed and confused by the elements raging about him and the cold, hustled by other behind and himself crowding others in front in such eager haste on the part of all that the ladder was kept full of descending men for some time.
Then [someone] brought two ladders lashed together and so made long enough to extend above the side wall of the track so that it was comparatively easy of access. He charged twenty-five cents for each descent, by his route, standing at the top of the ladder and collecting from each person, shouting from time to time, "Look out down b'low, don't let the ladder slip." From here.
Never let it be said that all New Yorkers have a heart.
I hope you have a wonderful Christmas and a terrific New Year!
Let's be fair, he "conceived and took the initiative in creating" Christmas (like Al Gore did to the Internet).
Bagels AND Santa?? Thank you, New York!!
Just kidding. MERRY CHRISTMAS from New Brighton to Tottenville!
Clement Clarke Moore developed Chelsea as a planned community with such innovations as "air shafts" to prevent fires. Of course, the world remembers him for inventing the reindeer and sleigh, but the Friends of Dorothy should venerate him for giving them their neighborhood.
I annoyed Freeper Cacique while we worked on a campaign in Queens back in '02 by pointing out this historic sight everytime we were on Northern Boulevard.
Sorry I’m so later getting back to you. My server was down.
Yup, that was it. I’ve brought this up on other threads in the past and was surprised how few here know about it.
Merry Christmas my FRiend.
The Bowne House...know it well. };^)
Clement Moore has a tie to Elmhurst as well. The playground across Broadway from the phone co. building was the site of his uncle’s farm house where he supposedly wrote “A Visit From St. Nicholas.” I remember an old house, not sure if it was the same one, on the site of todays park. The park and the old P.S. 13 at 94 St. and 55 Ave. were named for him.
“How do you celebrate Christmas on Staten Island? Do you guys decorate the Camaro with lights? “
No, we hang candy canes and tinsel from the clothes lines strung from the back porch to the telephone pole.
And the Camaro’s been replaced by a Cadillac Escalade, all shiny black and chrome-y,lol.
Merry Christmas to you Garden Staters.
Anyway, in the words of Clement Moore "MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL!!!"
You too my friend!
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