The sights and sounds of the Christmas season! So familiar, so heart-warming. There was a time when their appearance put a tingle in the air---and a warmer feeling towards our fellow man. These holiday customs have been around for all of our lives. To us, they’ve always been a part of Christmas. But they had to start somewhere.
That’s where I come in.
This year’s subject? Well, I don’t want to give it away too soon. Besides, you folks are a pretty sharp bunch. You’ll probably be ‘way ahead of me in a paragraph or two. It does concern one of the hallmarks of the season, one we see every year, not only in real life, but in Christmas-based movies and television shows.
Let’s just say that it starts with a man named James Edgar.
James Edgar was the founder and owner of the Boston Store, in Brockton, Massachusetts. He was known as “Colonel Jim” to his employees. But their children, and the children of all the customers who visited the Boston Store, called him “Uncle Jim”.
Edgar had a novel way of promoting his store. He liked to walk the floors dressed in costume. A sea captain. A Scottish Highlander. A cricket batsman. On the Fourth of July, he mingled among his customers dressed as Uncle Sam or George Washington. On Thanksgiving, he would be a Pilgrim or one of his favourites, “Big Chief”, the Indian. This large, gregarious man was a world-class showoff.
You never saw Frank Woolworth or J. C. Penney doing that. And that was only one of the ways that James Edgar wasn’t your typical wealthy businessman of the late nineteenth century.
James Edgar was born in Duns, Berwickshire, Scotland in 1843. As a boy, he apprenticed to a cloth merchant, working long, grueling hours for fifty dollars a year. So, it’s no surprise that, as a young man, he sought greener, or at least more lucrative, pastures. At the age of twenty-two, he moved to St. John, New Brunswick, Canada. But, unable to make a go of it there, he pawned his last worldly possession, a gold watch, for a train ticket to Boston, where he found a job with Hugo, Brown, and Taylor Dry Goods Store. He made twelve dollars a week, more money than he had ever made in his life.
Over the next dozen years, Edgar changed employers a few times, gaining experience in the mercantile trade. He was smart as well as likeable, and he realised that he could make more money working for himself. In 1878, he and a partner, George W. Reynolds, established the Boston Store in Brockton, Massachusetts.
Brockton was a good choice for a new department store. It had a thriving shoe and leather industry, and its civic leaders had an eye toward the future. In 1883, a three-wire underground electrical system was installed, personally supervised by Thomas Edison, providing central power to Brockton’s hospital and school and fire department. Edgar saw that his store was soon outfitted with electric lights and cash registers.
It was more than a good business move. It made his employees’ workdays easier. Unlike the robber barons and their cutthroat business practises of the era, James Edgar was a generous boss. He paid his workers almost double the usual rate and awarded them shares in the company stock. He closed the store early four days of the week, so they could spend time with their families.
Edgar’s generosity extended to his customers, as well. He installed the Edgar Layaway Plan, in which the money customers deposited for future purchases would earn 4% interest.
By the end of the decade, James Edgar’s reputation for kindness and consideration had made the Boston Store---soon to be renamed the Edgar Department Store---a wildly profitable concern. But it was in 1890 when this big-hearted businessman would make his mark on the holiday culture of America.
Have you figured it out, yet, gang?
As the Christmas season of 1890 drew near, Edgar was looking for inspiration. In past Yuletides, he had dressed as a clown, walking his store and handing out candy to his customers’ children. But the clown thing had gotten old. He wanted a new idea---and he found it, thanks to political cartoonist Thomas Nast and Nast’s depictions of Saint Nicholas, Santa Claus, that had appeared on the cover of Harper’s Weekly every Christmastime since 1862. Edgar hopped on a train to Boston and found a tailor to make a Santa suit for him, based on Nast’s renderings.
A few weeks before Christmas, Santa Claus made his first appearance in the Edgar Department Store. Actually, his first appearance in any department store, for James Edgar was the first department store Santa. Unlike his contemporary brethren, who sit and let the children come to them, Edgar’s Santa roamed the store, seeking out the little ones, passing them pennies and listening as they confided their Christmas wishes.
The youngsters were awestruck. In 1976, Edward Lowery Pearson, then in his nineties, told a reporter from Modern Maturity magazine about being a small boy in December, 1890, accompanying his parents to the Edgar Department Store.
“You can’t imagine what it was like,” said Pearson. “I remember walking down an aisle and, all of a sudden, I saw Santa Claus! I couldn’t believe my eyes, and then Santa came up and started talking to me. It was a dream come true.
“He gave me a memory I have treasured all my life.”
The response was phenomenal. The word that Saint Nicholas was at the Edgar Department Store spread, and shortly, parents and children lined up outside the store to meet Santa. They came from as far away as Boston and Providence, Rhode Island, and even New York. And that was during the early hours of the day; when school let out, the line would extend over two city blocks.
Initially, Edgar has planned on playing Santa only an hour a day, three hours on Saturdays. But the demand to see him was overwhelming. To avoid disappointing the children, Edgar hired his nephew to play Santa full time.
It didn’t take long for the major outfits, like Macy’s and Higbee’s, to see what was happening. By the turn of the century, most department stores hosted their own Santas. And, now, of course, the department-store Santa is a fixture of the Christmas season.
Modern-day Brockton has not forgotten James Edgar. True, the Edgar Department Store closed its doors in 1989. But in 2008, a plaque dedicated to Edgar was mounted at the corner of Main and Centre Streets, the original site of the store. He’s been further memorialised in the James Edgar Playground occupying the local park off Winthrop Street, and every Yuletide, the town honours his legacy with a public reading of “The Story of James Edgar” and holds a parade in his honour.
You see, the beneficence of Uncle Jim Edgar went beyond Christmas and his department store. If a local family had a child in need of medical attention, Edgar paid for it anonymously. He gave jobs to youths from struggling families to help them make ends meet, even if his store had no need for additional employees. And on every holiday, he threw lavish picnics in the park and rented trolleys, often numbering thirty or more, to enable children in the surrounding communities to attend.
At the time of his death, in 1909, James Edgar was still revered as the town’s grand old man. His funeral service was held in his second-floor apartment in Brockton. When the schools let out for lunch, the sidewalks were jammed as hundreds of boys and girls filed past his casket to pay their respects.
“I have made a barrel of money,” he once said, “and I have spent it as freely as I have made it. Thousands of it goes back to the people from whom I made it, for I fully believe in that kind of exchange.”
Gilded-Age magnates like J. P. Morgan and Cornelius Vanderbilt would have scoffed at him.
But, as far as the children befriended, helped, and enchanted by James Edgar were concerned, they had gotten as close to the real Santa Claus as they could ever imagine.
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From Cheryl and myself, to all of you, our fondest wishes for a Merry Christmas, and many more of them!
Replies
A Merry Christmas to you, sir, and a Happy New Year!
Thank you, as always, for the wonderful seasonal story.
Yet another great seasonal story! Thanks, Commander, and Merry Christmas.
As Paul Harvey would say "now you know the rest of the story".
A belated Merry Christmas to all!