The New Year's Drunk

The history of holidays in America is often described as the shift from male-dominated street display to female-dominated home display. Holidays such as Christmas and Halloween underwent major transformations in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In early American history these holidays were often characterized by parades, pranks, “mumming,” and carnival-like atmospheres on the streets of towns and cities. Typically centered around young males, these displays eventually gave way to more family-focused, interior or home-bound holiday traditions that were overseen primarily by women. New Years Drunk

This bit of holiday history is important for hearing the whispers of this postcard. By the postcard era (1907-1910) nearly every holiday had shifted from a focus on young men engaged in pranks and revelry to a focus on “proper” display and decorum. Every holiday this is, except New Years. New Year’s Eve was still the domain of rowdy revelers on the street.

We know postcards were primarily circulated among rural and small town Americans (see the research), Americans who viewed the city with a great deal of ambivalence. In holiday postcards, nearly every image that pictures an outdoor scene is imagined as a rural landscape, or at most, a small village or town. Every holiday that is, except New Years. New Years cards frequently depict all the hallmarks of a full city—multi-story buildings, wide streets, large squares and parks.

Putting the drunk in context

Rural Americans were doing their best to create a very nostalgic universe of images for themselves through postcards.

There is a parallel between the one holiday that was still rowdy and the one holiday postcard that depicted cities. This was not accidental. Rural Americans were doing their best to create a very nostalgic universe of images for themselves through postcards. They did so at a time when they felt like the rural life was under attack, and that America was becoming more and more urban (which it was). By picturing holidays as almost entirely rural affairs, they were making some larger claims about America’s most important days. They were saying that the “best” Christmases or Easters or Thanksgivings were those of the countryside.

At the same time, they were calling attention to the one holiday that didn’t fit the mold, and emphasized that difference by picturing it squarely in the urban environment. We know from our history of holidays about the existing tensions: the carnival-like versus the quietly homebound; the street versus the parlor; male “mumming” versus female propriety; friendly revelry versus domestic peace. Postcards like the stumbling drunk on the city street just added yet another layer—urban versus rural. All of those “bad,” suppressed elements of the rowdy, street, and male-oriented revelry also became crafted as distinctly urban phenomenon in postcards.

By channeling any hint of urbanity into the one holiday that lacked a strong counter-narrative of domestic, interior, child- and family-oriented bliss, postcard users could ensure such slippage did not occur in other, reclaimed holidays that were now seen as part of the nostalgic, rural ideal.