Winter Wonderlands: Outdoor Adventure and the Reinvention of Christmas, 1870–1900

ABSTRACT

For many Americans, Christmas became inextricably linked to a celebration of the outdoor life in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. Earlier generations of genteel folk in New York had taken the festival indoors, setting a fashion for many of the customs recognised to this day, and shaping a celebration of family and piety, home and consumption. But Christmas did not stay indoors forever. Appealing to a growing, broad middle-class interest in outdoor sports during the Gilded Age of the 1870s-1890s, a proliferating range of magazines shaped new ideas about leisure and recreation, and in festive special issues, about Christmas too. Sitting by the fire in dark and chilly December, readers of magazines like Forest and Stream or Outing could find encouragement to enjoy an active, outdoor Christmas Day, to venture into the winter landscape on skate or sled perhaps, or equally to lose themselves in stories of sport and adventure that could take them on imagined escapes, to the icy forests and mountains of the North, to sunny Florida and California, or to faraway lands, overseas. In these ways outdoor-sports magazines brought to mind wonderlands of thrill and enchantment. In the process, they reimagined Christmas for the twentieth century and the age of individualism and play, leisure and consumption.

KEYWORDS:

• Christmas
• Outdoor sports
• outdoor adventure
• magazines
• leisure and consumption
• Gilded age

SOFTER than footfalls cushioned in the deep

Moss of a dream, far Christmas revels creep

Into this woodland heart, with chime and cheer

And season-joy that peopled cities keep

Silent the yule-tide spirit of the wood;—

’Tis perfect, though, if only understood,

For templed oak and sun-aspiring pine

The Sovereign Giver gave his greatest good.

Aloysius Coll, ‘Christmas in the Forest’. (Coll 1901).

Introduction

‘Our resources for pleasure are boundless and varied’, Charles Hallock declared in his first Christmas editorial for the sporting magazine Forest and Stream, December 1873, ‘and none of them all are more enjoyed than those which the open air affords’. It had been a year of economic crisis, and even, he added, ‘it is said, old Santa Claus is poor’. Time to find solace in the true meaning of Christmas, then. There would be the cheer of the nineteenth century’s cosy Christmas. Readers would ‘burn the Yule log and brighten their homes with the holly and yew’, and light ‘candles that gleam in the branches of evergreen’ Christmas trees. It was time for Christian worship too. But, as well as looking inward to the comforts of home, or to the community of the church, Forest and Stream encouraged its readers to look outward, to a world joined in celebration, from ‘merrie England’ to Rome, to Moscow, and all across the USA, from ‘the straight-laced Puritans of New England’ to ‘the cavaliers of old Virginia’ and ‘the exhuberant negroes [sic] of the far South’, all with their own festive customs. Above all, Hallock reminded readers of the pleasures that lay outside. There would be heard ‘the jingle of bells over the crisp and creaking snow, the ring of the gleaming skate on the polished ice’. Although ‘the woods are bare and cheerless, the water-courses bound by fetters of ice, and the whole earth covered with snow’, Forest and Stream suggested, the best of Christmas was enjoyed out of doors (N.A. 1873). By 1898, the magazine was under a new editor, George Bird Grinnell, but he expressed the same sentiment, and was if anything even more emphatic: ‘Christmas as we know it, is in a degree a celebration of outdoor life’. (N.A. 1898b).

For all that, the outward-looking Christmas Forest and Stream described was something of a reinvention of the Gilded Age – those latter decades of the nineteenth century that followed the end of the Civil War. Earlier, as Penne Restad (1995), Steven Nissenbaum (1996), and others have shown, in the years around the middle of the nineteenth century, the genteel folk of New York had taken Christmas indoors, turning away from disreputable popular revelry on city streets to reimagine the festival as a celebration of piety and family. Christmas indoors had its own attractions, as Hallock’s editorial acknowledged. It was a time for reflection, for the comforts of home, and for contented consumption, respectably mystified by the figure of Santa Claus. There were treats to eat, and above all gifts for children. Hymns, carols, and parlour games offered gentle amusement. Increasingly, as Leigh Eric Schmidt put it, Christmas would be implicated in ‘the commercialisation of the calendar’, which is to say, in the coming age of consumerism (Schmidt 1991). Yet, while it is not often fully acknowledged, Christmas did not remain indoors forever, and what is more its reemergence in the later nineteenth century was accompanied not merely by a new commercialism, but also an encouragement to discover winter wonderlands of sporting thrills, enchantment, and adventure.

The magazines of sport and recreation in which this new idea of Christmas would take shape were themselves creations of the Gilded Age. They marked a generational change. Unlike the old sporting magazine Porter’s Spirit of the Times, for example, they adopted a self-consciously wholesome image, looking to the countryside and the wilderness while disavowing gambling and the sort of urban entertainments that were associated with saloon carousing. As a consequence, they could more easily appeal to both men and women of polite society and the respectable middle class. First came Forest and Stream. Established in New York in 1873, it was the first to build a sustained national readership, before a slew of new titles came on the market in the 1880s and 1890s, including the three that emerged in the West before going on to dominate the market in the twentieth century, Sports Afield (established in Colorado, 1889; it later moved to Illinois), Field and Stream (originally Western Field and Stream, Minnesota, 1896; it later moved to New York), and Outdoor Life (established in Colorado, 1898). There was also the now largely forgotten Outing (published in New York from 1884; originally The Wheelman, Boston, 1882), which would briefly lead the pack during the early 1900s, its growing popularity tracking a broadening interest in an expanding range of leisure pursuits, from bicycling to college sports (McLaughlin 2020).

Not that readers of sporting magazines like Forest and Stream necessarily ventured far if at all into the wilds at Christmastime. The bleak midwinter was not conventionally the time for visiting the wilderness, and still there were other ways to feel connected to the outside world. Remaining closer to home, as winter narrowed opportunities for recreational pursuits, outdoor-sports magazines encouraged readers to embrace new pastimes, showing opportunities for excitement, enchantment, and adventure that followed with the changing season. But, whereas that sporting reader’s favourite author, James Fenimore Cooper, had tracked the annual cycle of traditional country pursuits through the Christmas turkey shoot in his 1823 novel The Pioneers, magazines surveyed a broadening field of leisure, recreation – and imagination (Cooper 1999). They presented the winter landscape as a place for modern seasonal sports. A frozen stream or pond became a skating rink or a snowy hill a run for a toboggan; writers sought out mystery in the stillness of the forest in winter, suggesting a deeper spiritual connection with the natural world might be found by observing the play of light on frozen branches or the mysterious gloom of twilight. Even city folk could find wonder close to home by taking the bracing air and watching the birds on a Christmas walk in the park. Or, then, there were wonderlands of the imagination. For those who preferred to remain comfortably indoors, there were vicarious thrills, tales of outdoor adventure to rival the largely British tradition of fireside ghost stories – to which Charles Dickens had of course famously tipped his hat in 1843 with A Christmas Carol (Dickens 1984). Along the way, a new understanding of festive entertainment came into being.

Reading had all the more importance in wintertime for offering housebound adventurers an escape into fantasy. It was material for ‘those sedentary sportsmen who cannot spare time to go afield themselves yet love to accompany others in imagination upon their hunting and fishing trips and various other recreative pleasures’, as Sports Afield, expressed it in its December 1894 editorial (N.A. 1894). Perhaps it was not so bad to be confined to the hearthside at Christmas with good reading, and it was becoming more acceptable to indulge in escapism too. Tastes were changing. In days gone by, sensational journalism and adventure stories were scorned in respectable society as ‘low-brow’ cheap entertainment. But, as the nineteenth century drew to a close, disapproving attitudes softened (Roggenkamp 2007). It became more acceptable to picture oneself, as F. Childe Hassam’s illustration for cycling magazine The Wheelman evocatively suggested in 1883, lost in ‘midwinter reverie’, in fantasies of sport and adventure (Figure 1). When it was snowing outside, an evening of fireside reading provided its own comforts. Outdoor-sportswriting had a particular relevance at Christmastime, then, in connecting the reader’s mind to the natural world of wild things by describing landscapes that could seem out of reach on a dark December night in the city.

Figure 1. F. Childe Hassam, ‘A Midwinter Reverie’. From The Wheelman (Hassan 1883).

Small and specialist, outdoor-sports magazines did not have the bumper subscription lists of the generalist titles that were enjoying their heyday at this time, the likes of Century, Atlantic, or Munsey’s, but they were part of the same publishing revolution Jan Cohn (1989), Richard Brodhead (1993), Matthew Schneirov (1994), and Richard Ohmann (1996), have described. They similarly encouraged the emerging culture of consumerism, promoting sporting goods, gadgets, specialist clothing, camp food, and remedies. Essentially, they described the great outdoors as a place for spiritual, physical, and moral renewal to be achieved through the leisure pursuits of the consumer economy. And they packed Christmas into that framework.

At the same time, both the generalist magazines and these specialist outdoor-sports publications shared an overlapping interest in travel writing, regional peculiarity, and local colour. Consider that while Forest and Stream developed out of the distinctive sporting culture of the Northeastern United States, along with rival titles it had an important function in explaining the West to a national readership in the decades after the coming of the transcontinental railroad and the resultant growth of travel and commerce, for example. Or that as these magazines looked to the South they eased reconciliation with the states of the defeated Confederacy by promoting Dixieland as a destination for sport and recreation. As well as popularising the sort of nostalgic myths about Christmastime on the plantation that Robert May has recently subjected to critical scrutiny, they developed a new idea of the South as a playground for tourists seeking an escape from harsh northern winters (May 2019). Meanwhile, outdoor-sports magazines looked beyond America’s borders, too, anticipating the emergence of the American empire at the century’s end.

Each of the various sporting magazines had a slightly different outlook. Where Brodhead found Harper’s organised a vision of America and the world around the perspective of the metropolitan Northeast – the centre from which readers were presumed to look out upon various regional customs, and the standard against which those were to be judged – outdoor-sports magazines were more diverse (Brodhead 1993). So, for example, whereas Forest and Stream was based in New York, Outdoor Life from Colorado was self-consciously styled as a magazine of the West. Nevertheless, what all of those sporting magazines shared was an assumption that they connected individual sportsmen and sportswomen to a national culture, the city to the wilderness, and America to a wider world of sport and adventure overseas. As they described the celebration of an outdoor Christmas, then, these publications contributed to the growing cultural coherence of the nation and an understanding of a world increasingly interconnected by leisure and tourism.

While retaining many of the elements of the indoor festival of family, piety, and consumerism, outdoor Christmas promised more excitement and emotional intensity. Writers might evoke the thrill of adventure or describe the sensation of being out in the natural landscape in winter. The silent forest rather than the church became the place for authentic spiritual experience of Christmas. It was a time for connecting with nature as well as family, for fantasies of adventure that might take the imagination far from home, to foreign lands, on adventures in the winter landscape, or recall the thrill of rapid movement on runner or skate through a park or garden transformed by snow. To that extent, the celebration of outdoor life at Christmas was not unrelated to the cultural impulse T. J. Jackson Lears described as ‘antimodernism’, a turn-of-the-century rebellion against domestic comfort and the sophistication of the city that was, paradoxically, the way Americans shaped a new individualism for the consumer age; antimodernism turned out to be another way of being modern (Lears 1981). That said, Lears did not include the outdoor turn of Christmas in his narrative, although it was surely deeply implicated in the broader current of those times. Magazines could appeal to a related yearning for adventure and a similar longing for authentic experience and spiritual intensity, shaping a new culture for the coming twentieth century of individualism and play along the way. They beckoned readers outside, to experience the invigorating air for themselves at Christmastime, and meanwhile encouraged fireside reverie with articles and stories that described wonderlands of thrill, enchantment, and adventure.

The following study examines the Christmas special numbers of the major outdoor-sports magazines appearing between the first festive issue of Forest and Stream in 1873 and the turn of the century. It is organised in two sections. The first explains how magazines reimagined Christmas out of doors before the second then looks at the way writers shaped ideas of the landscape in fantasies that moved from the cold of the Northern winter out into wider vistas of adventure. It shows how, in flowing from nonfiction outdoor-sports journalism into adventure fiction, and sometimes blurring the border between the two, magazines invested Christmas with excitement and new sources of wonder.

These were, it should be noted, decades of experimentation for outdoor-sports magazines, and there was relatively little consistency across publications and through the years. In some years, ‘Christmas’ or ‘Holiday’ numbers had a special designation, and editors went to an extra effort to pack the pages with the best material; in other years, Christmas passed with scarcely a mention. The tempo noticeably picked up toward the turn of the century, seeming to track a steadily increasing beat of Christmas spirit, although each magazine was different. Forest and Stream was very effusively Christmassy at times; Field and Stream rarely so (even though Charles Hallock edited both the former in the 1870s and the latter when it first appeared in the 1890s). Actually, to designate a winter issue as the ‘Christmas’ or ‘Holiday’ number without including any festive content was itself a meaningful contribution to a changing culture. It was to suggest that Christmas could be best celebrated not merely by honouring the customs of the indoor festival of family and piety, but enjoying time alone, reading about outdoor pursuits and wilderness adventure while sitting by the fire (Figure 2). In the closing years of the nineteenth entry, in this way, outdoor-sports magazines documented changing ideas of Christmas.

Figure 2. Snowshoes: the perfect gift for Santa Claus? (Turner 1897).

An Outdoor Christmas

Newly installed as managing editor of Western Field and Stream—the Minnesota upstart rival to his old magazine, Forest and Stream—Charles Hallock turned to a nationally respected sporting authority for inspiration as he drew up his inaugural Christmas message in 1896: himself. In fact, Field and Stream’s festive message that year was to be a barely reworked copy of Hallock’s inaugural Christmas editorial for Forest and Stream, twenty-three years earlier. There were the same descriptions of the bare woods and ice-fettered streams; the warm cheer that awaits indoors, the yule log, the holly and fir boughs, and the boxes hanging on the tree. There, expressed in largely the same words, was the same expansive vista from New England to old Virginia and the South, together with traditional festive customs, the turkey shoots, the fox hunts, and the like. The wording was largely the same throughout (N.A. 1896b). Yet, what is striking is how far, since 1873, outdoor-sports magazines had meantime shaped a new understanding of Christmas, introducing modern sporting pastimes and describing the attractions of the Northern winter.

In fact, as editor of Forest and Stream, Charles Hallock (1873–1880) had done much to inform that new idea of Christmas as the magazine moulded the modern culture of outdoor recreation during the 1870s and 1880s. Effectively establishing itself as the voice of the nation’s sportsmen and sportswomen, Forest and Stream had been able to gain such influence to a large degree because it carried the imprimatur of metropolitan cultural authority. It occupied offices in New York City, the capital of commerce and publishing. Hallock and his successor, George Bird Grinnell (1880–1911), came from old, monied Northeastern families and were pillars of the sporting establishment. They addressed their readers in a compelling editorial voice, recalling the traditions of the genteel hunting-and-fishing set that had made the Adirondack Mountains their summer vacationing home in the years before the Civil War. That said, Hallock founded the magazine to appeal not merely to sporting folk of old money, but also to the new commercial classes of the Gilded Age, the newly rich and the new middle class (McLaughlin 2020; Reiger 1975). These were what ‘Nessmuk’ (George Washington Sears), would call in more demotic terms the ‘Grand Army of “Outers”’ (using the gender-neutral term of the time for outdoor enthusiast), composed of ‘mechanics, artists, writers, merchants, clerks, [and] business men’, which is to say, all ‘workers, so to speak’ (Nessmuk 1900. Originally 1884., 3). Still, that ‘Grand Army’ had conditions of membership: respect for the sporting traditions espoused by Forest and Stream was assumed. And so, as Forest and Stream published correspondence with clubs and societies around the country, reported on competitions and events, and campaigned for conservation, it became the nucleus of an otherwise disparate sporting community and assumed the role of arbiter of what properly constituted a national culture. Along the way, the outdoor Christmas it presented to its readers would itself go on to acquire national currency.

The first thing to note is that the modern outdoor Christmas had little space for vernacular traditions like the old festive turkey shoot. Not just a custom of Virginia, as Hallock implied, it was actually quite widespread along the eastern seaboard. James Fenimore Cooper’s 1823 novel, The Pioneers, describes a Christmas turkey shoot, for example, and it was a longstanding mainstay of rural life, a moment of festive carnival revelry. Yet, there was very little about a turkey shoot that sat comfortably with the principles of fair chase that Forest and Stream espoused, or its disapproval of liquor (N.A. 1878). A turkey was typically tied to a rail or locked in a box with only its head protruding, and competitors were invited to take shots in turn, often in between visits to the tavern. One Forest and Stream correspondent, ‘Jacobstaff’, presented a nostalgic reminiscence of a turkey shoot from his youth, perhaps sufficiently distanced in time to be the subject of sentimental humour at inverted expectations. So, while ‘crack shots for miles around’ arrived to compete, he wrote, the turkey survived thirty-six shots this year, ‘and then was killed by a hilarious hiccuping Hibernian, who never shot a rifle before in his life’. To add to the embarrassment of the sharpshooters, ‘He had come reeling out of the tavern’ (‘Jacobstaff’ 1873). Such stories were nonetheless something of an exception in Forest and Stream and in the magazines that emerged in its wake. Fred Mather’s ‘Christmas Turkey Shoot’ article for 1897 described a notably cleaned-up affair, a competition fuelled by coffee (‘drinking and rifle shooting were not good company’) (Mather 1897). Although, where turkeys made an appearance they usually featured in gently humorous stories about rustic stock characters, and were typically being hunted in the wild (Dodge 1895; Robinson 1900; Sandys 1895; Torrance 1898).

Nor did that other American Christmas tradition, fox-hunting, the counterpart of the British Boxing Day meet, generally hold anything more than a quaint interest for outdoor-sports magazines, in which the preferred leisure pursuits of the urban middle class generally took precedence. Even though new fox-hunts were being established through the latter nineteenth century, they were at best peripheral to the development of national sporting culture as the major magazines conceived it (Potts 1912). Outing took an occasional interest. Its 1893 Christmas number (the January 1894 issue) provided an evocative description of a festive hunt in Southampton County, Virginia – it had been the centre of the Nat Turner rebellion, as it happens, although this did not stop the writer from referring in nostalgic terms to the ante-bellum plantation and a time ‘when rich and poor, black and white, old and young, joined in a grand jubilation’, supposedly. Described as day of festivities culminating in a feast, ‘country mirth’, and music on the fiddle and banjo, the Christmas fox hunt appeared in Outing as a vaguely aristocratic, rural tradition of the South (Hunter 1894). It can be understood as something of a small contribution to the work of national reunion, which Nina Silber has described in other contexts (Silber 1993). In effect, it consigned the Old South to nostalgic memory, and in the process cleared space for other pursuits to shape the future of national sporting culture.

In a similar way, pushing fox-hunting into the category of curiosity, there was a rare Christmas appearance of English customs in R. Monckton-Dene’s article for Outing’s 1891 festive number, for example. ‘A Run With the “Dukes”,’ follows the hunt in Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire, describing what was literally an aristocratic pursuit and introducing readers to the Duke of Rutland, the Marquis of Granby, and the ancestral seat, Belvoir Castle (Monckton-Dene 1892). But examples of this sort are thin on the ground.

Possibly, the subject might have appealed to readers of Outing as far as it went, or at least, the magazine expressed an interest in comparisons with English customs, fox hunting included, during those years of James H. Worman’s editorship (Pearse 1889). But, in general, outdoor-sports magazines evinced little interest in this pastime. Forest and Stream published a description of a rustic Indiana fox drive in 1874, although that was not a Christmas hunt, rather a community ritual of farming’s slow time in February (Hampton 1874). Two years later, its Christmas issue featured an account of hunting foxes with a rifle in the forest of Vermont, but that was also of a different order (‘Mush Quash’ 1876).

An outdoor Christmas more typically involved modern winter pursuits. Skates and sleds were held to be first-rate gifts for children, for example. (N.A. 1885). Successive festive magazine covers depicted the pastimes of the winter season in like terms: a hunter contentedly sitting smoking by a campfire as his snowshoes lie on one side, a deer and a turkey hang on the other (1893); a dog sled (1894); a speed skater (1895). As it encompassed a wide range of pastimes, Outing covered varied sports, games, and recreation in the ice and snow, each lending themselves to Christmas reading. There was an account of the exploits of Alpine mountaineers (Montefiore 1893). There was snow-shoeing and tobogganing, ice skating, and ice yachting (Anderson 1893; Howard 1890; Taylor 1893; Vaux 1890; Woodworth 1886). At times, writers looked north to Canada, with its great variety of winter pastimes (Orton 1898). Or they encouraged friendly competition. Beverley Bogert’s piece for the Christmas 1892 issue urged American readers, men and women, to take up ice hockey so the USA might one day challenge Canada in their national game, for instance. With a brief summary of the rules and illustrated descriptions of basic techniques, it could well have inspired readers to take up this new sport. Rather than harking back nostalgically to old Christmas traditions, Outing encouraged readers to adopt a modern winter sport (Figure 3; Bogert 1893).

Figure 3. Winter sports at Christmastime. (Bogert 1893).

Whereas traditional Christmas sports were often part of the communal life of the country, modern outdoor pursuits more typically expressed the individualism Lears associated with the coming age of consumption (Lears 1981). And in the same spirit, there was often an interest in the individual experience of the natural world. For some writers, winter could be a beguiling season in which to discover new, previously unseen richness in nature, or to find a new spiritual connection with the landscape. J. Parker Whitney delighted in the ‘wholesomeness and vitality’ of the winter forests of Maine, for example. ‘The singing of the wind around the tree tops or about the gables and the whirling flakes have more charm’ than any summer scene, was his view, and in the unfolding description readers could find encouragement to imagine an idealised winter scene, the landscape transformed by a carpet of fallen leaves in reds and yellows, or ice and snow (Whitney 1896).

Similarly, for Edwin Irvine Haines, writing his Christmas bird notes in the same 1896 issue of Forest and Stream, winter held an austere fascination, and he encouraged his readers to imagine the scene while tempting them out, to explore local woods, fields, or parks. ‘There is a potency in the sense of utter desolation in the soundless forest on a winter day’, he wrote. Walking in ‘the cold light of day, and the still colder and quickly gathering darkness’, it could seem ‘a bleak and forbidding season’. Yet, for all that, the woods were full of wildlife, and readers need not stray far to find it – although they would be venturing out themselves, or with family and friends, rather than as part of a communal ritual. The junco, or snowbird, was to be found all around, and ‘all you have to do is go into a field if you live in the country or into Central Park if in the city’ to see it. There were hairy woodpeckers on Hunter’s Island, New Rochelle, or starlings in great numbers in Pelham Bay Park. Rare sandpipers might be found on Long Island (Haines 1896).

Western Field and Stream encouraged a similar sensitivity to the changing seasons, observation of the natural world in winter, and it found the sport-adjacent pastime of photography (‘hunting’ with a camera) apt. ‘Winter has charms which are well worth capturing upon the sensitive film’, the magazine insisted in ‘When Days are Short’, before going on to suggest a number of suitable subjects: ‘leafless trees laden with hoar frost; the waterfall struggling in the icy grasp of winter; the broad fields covered with their snowy mantle, above which a hardy shrub here and there thrusts its rugged branches in dark contrast to the glittering whiteness; a few sheep searching patiently, as they scrape away the snow where it is thin on the knolls’. It was an encouragement – as the article suggested – to amateur photographers to fill their homes with ‘pictures with a living interest, pictures that grow dearer as the years go by’. The article was at the same time teaching readers how to look, to have an individual response to the landscape, and to find wonder in the winter scene (N.A. 1896a).

The appeal of outdoor pursuits in the winter, magazines often suggested, could be found in experiences that heightened the senses. Writers remarked on the invigorating sensation of being physically active in the cold, defying the chill. ‘It is wonderful how the excitement keeps the blood moving’ in the cold temperature, Forest and Stream declared in a review of ‘Winter Trap Shooting’ in 1897 (N.A. 1897). Or, as readers were advised in Outing’s 1897 Christmas issue, one who takes to show-shoes and ‘dons a cold-defying garb’ of woollens ‘is ready for a tramp which will make his blood stir in earnest’. The author described his own experience of the winter wonderland to be discovered there. ‘Marvellous shadows stretch far over the glistening snow’, he wrote, while ‘countless lights twinkle and flash from the close-built city’ (‘Nomad’ 1897).

In summarising the appeal of the Northern winter in 1896, addressing residents of the sunny South who might be looking for a festive vacation, Field and Stream checked off a list of images that recalled that new, modern idea of outdoor recreation at Christmas time. There was ‘the swing of the snowshoe on an elastic bed of white’; there were ‘flying toboggans’; there was the sound of sleigh bells or ‘the ring of cutting steel’ of skates upon the frozen lake; there were ‘maidens in soft furs’ taking the ‘pure and bracing air’; at home, there was awaiting the ‘good cheer of turkey and plum pudding’. (N.A., 1896c). The snow underfoot; the dizzying movement; the sound of runners and skates; the feel of crisp air and snug furs; the warmth of home. The winter wonderland could be an assault on the senses.

In this way, magazines represented the cold as physically invigorating, addressing housebound readers who might yearn for an escape from the cosiness, or closeness, of an indoor Christmas – those spiritual fugitives from modernity Lears (1981) and Bederman (1995) have described in their studies of turn-of-the-century culture, fleeing from what they supposed to be the enervating influence of comfort and ‘over-civilisation’. Take a hunting trip North, Field and Stream’s Christmas 1898 editorial urged readers in these terms. Clad in furs and moccasins, ‘A few days will accustom you to the snow-shoes’, the magazine insisted, ‘and you will wonder at the comfort of a bed midst the snows’ that you have heaped into a shelter, while you then revel in the intense sensations of the winter forest, ‘the fragrant balsam boughs underneath, the clear northern moon shining through the pines, a pile of blankets above you’. For all those readers sitting ‘in the foetid air of the radiator’ at home in winter, the magazine predicted ‘the memory of that northern trip will cling to you as something that was a life event’. (N.A. 1898a).

Or, for those who would never make the trip, they would have to do with Field and Stream’s brief and tantalising evocation, and their own imagination. But then, if Christmas had to be spent indoors, or mainly so, reading could at least provide welcome respite. For housebound devotees of the open air, magazines offered temporary escape into imagined worlds. Time spent reading could even be understood as a special festive celebration of outdoor life. That world of imagination, the fantasy life of outdoor adventure at Christmastime, is the subject of the next section.

Winter Wonderlands

‘A rich treat is in store for those whose good fortune it shall be to sit down in a cozy corner with the Christmas Number of FOREST AND STREAM’, the magazine announced in its 19 December 1896 issue, promoting the next week’s festive number. (N.A. 1896d). By the 1890s, fantasies of outdoor adventure had an increasingly important place in magazines of sport and recreation, even changing festive priorities: the celebration of Christmas out of doors could readily become an indoor, sedentary celebration of the outdoor life at Christmas time, in reading. So, when introducing its Holiday special of 1899, Outdoor Life proudly declared it to be ‘a symposium of the best literary and illustrative matter that can be gathered from the pens of our Western sportsmen-writers’. It was intended ‘to breathe the spirit’ – wait, though; in this case not the spirit of Christmas, rather – ‘of the West’ (N.A. 1899). From evocations of the outdoor life to stories that conveyed the sensation and mystery of the Northern winter or described escapades in the snow and ice; or in tales of adventure that took readers on flights of fancy to the Old West, or overseas to exotic lands or sunny climes, these magazines revealed thrilling and enchanting wonderlands that pointed the way to a new understanding of Christmas.

Sometimes, writers connected the home with the outside world, returning from sport and recreation to the hearthside of the cosy indoor Christmas. So, for J. Parker Whitney, for example, writing in the 1896 issue of Forest and Stream, while winter invited ‘robust recreations of skating, ice-boating, tobogganing, and snow-shoeing’, the experience of being out in the cold weather would ‘heighten the comforts of indoors’ when returning to ‘the home fire at night’ (Whitney 1896). Alternatively, though, writers took the opportunity to bring nature into the home, as it were. As George Bird Grinnell suggested in his first editorial in December 1880, the evocative smells associated with Christmas were a reminder of the home’s connection to the forest and to the natural world outside. ‘This week our homes are decorated with the simple boughs brought in from the woodland and fragrant with the spicy odor of the forest’. This is, he wrote, an ‘expression of man’s sympathy with Nature’ (N.A. 1880).

That sympathy might be understood as having deep, mysterious roots, adding a layer of wonder to the modern home. ‘[I]t is now, at Christmas, that we remember […] that our forefathers were dwellers in the forest’, whose ‘camps were pitched by the running brooks or the peaceful lakes’, Grinnell wrote in his 1881 editorial. ‘To-day we recall that time by going forth into the woodland and bringing thence sweet-smelling branches, green leaves and bright berries to adorn our homes’, so that ‘woodland perfume pervades the house’ in winter (N.A. 1881). Or there might be an expression of nostalgia for childhood, and a sense of a lost connection with nature. The smell of the evergreen Christmas tree, Grinnell wrote in 1898, ‘calls back the tired dweller among bricks and mortar fresh memories of the snowy days of his distant boyhood on the old farm’. (N.A., 1898b). In different ways, he sought to connect the middle-class home at Christmas with the natural world beyond the city, and to impart a sense of wintertime wonder.

For some writers, the winter forest, invested with sentimental meaning, bridged everyday reality and a world of enchantment, and a deeper, spiritual connection to the landscape. Herbert W. Gleason’s ‘Winter Ramble with a Camera’ for Outing’s Christmas 1899 issue became in those terms a spiritual journey to the enchanted heart of the forest, for example. ‘I lingered among the pines, held by the fascination, studying them, drinking in their resinous atmosphere, listening to their whispering voices and taking to heart the message they had to give’, he wrote. ‘It was a holy hour, filled with thoughts and emotions’. For Gleason, the forest was ‘one of the holiest temples of the Most High’ (Gleason 1900). Where writers invested the winter landscape with a sense of wonder and mystery, fantasy might follow closely behind. In a notable literary offering from the celebrated illustrator Oliver Kemp, appearing in the 1898 issue of Forest and Stream, a sentimental response to the landscape inspired the narrator’s romantic musings. ‘Where the cool breezes come up from the valley and talk in silent tones to the murmuring pines, there was a certain spot in darksome woods where the river, shining, lay’, he wrote. ‘There seemed to be a great prayer throughout it all’. This enchanted landscape then carried him away in romantic reverie as he elaborated a tale of love across the divide of warring indigenous tribes (Kemp 1898). The winter forest opened the door to adventure and flights of fancy in this way.

If the search for spiritual meaning shaped some writers’ responses to winter, others described fantasies of play. Writers exploited the potential for thrill and excitement in a landscape transformed by ice and snow. In descriptions of rapid movement on skate or runner, writers gave emphasis to exhilaration and heightened awareness, intense feelings that moved beyond an everyday sense of the world. ‘Life felt buoyant, strong and sweet!’ in the words of Charles Gordon Rogers’s poem, ‘The Skaters’, appearing in Outing’s Christmas 1896 issue (Figure 4; Rogers 1897). There was similar, joyful abandon in the ride evoked in Outing’s poem, ‘Sleigh Bells’, also for the Christmas 1896 issue. The musical sound of the bells mixed with laughter to ‘set the nerves a-thrilling’ (Fletcher 1897). Writers might hint mildly at the scandalous potential for sexually charged sporting thrills, as young men and women were thrown together while hurtling through the winter landscape. ‘He who has never yet bravely stood upon the runner-board of a careening, unruly ice-boat, in a bitter, driving wind, and had his trousers tightly hugged just below the knees by a frightened, laughing maiden, has not yet filled to the brim his cup of joy’, suggested Elmore Elliott (Elliott 1897). C. Turner’s verse insisted, as a sleigh ride for two, ‘stirs the life blood through the health-filled veins’, so that poets who write of spring are quite wrong, and winter is ‘the time that lights the flame of love’ (Turner 1898).

Figure 4. ‘Life felt buoyant, strong and sweet!’ (Rogers 1897).

A related variety of outdoor thrill could be found in descriptions of dauntless struggles against the elements in ice and snow. At times, writers blurred the lines between realism and fantasy as journalism and adventure met in stories of outdoor pursuits in extreme environments. There was, for example, George Cantwell’s account of a party of men and women on an ascent of Mount Tacoma (also called Tahoma or Rainier), which moved quite freely between genres. Richly illustrated with photographs, it had the appearance of modern journalism, in format. At the same time, through, it crossed freely between genres, by emphasising, in turn, the everyday sporting experience and the danger and thrill of an expedition through the frozen landscape. ‘At daybreak we emerged from under our blankets and kindling a fire of the wood we had packed up, soon had a hot cup of coffee and some bacon nicely fried’, he wrote, in a manner familiar to readers of outdoor-sports magazines. ‘This, with some hard tack and sweet chocolate, made us a good breakfast, and after disposing of it we felt better, though’ – he continues, hinting at the adventure to come – ‘the wind still blew a gale and it was impossible to travel against it along the dangerous trail’. Getting underway, they soon find stones and icicles ‘broke loose and came bounding down’ along the route; the altitude takes its toll as the climbers are ‘compelled to stop for breath about every dozen steps, and every spurt the climbers attempted told heavily against them’. Still, in this case it is lighthearted fun, and despite the adverse conditions and mild threat of peril throughout, they achieve their objective without serious mishap (Cantwell 1896).

Combining such exploits with a Christmas theme in adventure fiction, John Corbin’s short story for Outing’s 1891 festive issue (January Corbin 1892) was a cautionary tale for any young reader contemplating an escape to the wilderness instead of visiting with family. ‘A Christmas Ascent of Mount Adams’, describes the story of thrill-seeking college students, self-described ‘Christmas skedaddlers’ who attempt to avoid the season’s festivities, and get into difficulty in snow and ice (Figure 5). Ultimately, the plot is resolved as they find their way to safety with their guide’s backwoods family, learning the value of Christmas along the way (Corbin 1892).

Figure 5. ‘Christmas skedaddlers’ on a difficult festive ascent of Mount Adams. (Corbin 1892).

At times, writers presented Christmas adventure stories as if they were tales retold around the fireside. There was, for example, the tale of a ‘tenderfoot’ novice hunter’s first trip to Colorado, written as a Christmas reminiscence, and providing a moment of excitement in Forest and Stream’s festive issue of 1888. An adventure among howling wolves and coyotes, ice and snow, under glittering stars, it describes the mountains ‘silent and more weird in winter than ever’, transformed into a mysterious landscape for adventure. The narrator struggles over a ridge, into the dark night, and through a storm (‘the snow drifted in impossible mountains’, and he scrambles, ‘stepping, sliding and falling, frantically trying to climb the icy slope’). He completes the trip with frozen, frost-bitten feet, his appetite for adventure sated. But, in a nod to the conventions of outdoor-sports, the author ends by reflecting on the invigorating nature of the experience: on balance, the narrator concludes, ‘taken as a whole I enjoyed it’ (‘Tile’ 1888). Or, similarly, in his contribution to the 1891 issue of Outing, Ernest Ingersoll offered story within a story, retold over Christmas dinner, in a seasonal contrivance. There are multiple conventions of the genre in this tightly plotted tale of adventure and mystery. The narrator, with his companion, discover a dying prospector, who hands them a mysterious tiny key and speaks in a delirium of hidden treasure; there is an encounter with a ferocious bear, and at the end of it all, the discovery of a cache of gold. In the final moment, a dramatic twist as it is revealed the dead prospector was the estranged father of the narrator’s wife-to-be (Ingersoll 1892).

Where tales of daring outdoor exploits borrowed more heavily from adventure-story conventions they tended to become Christmas-themed versions of dime novel fantasies. In the 1893 issue of Sports Afield, for example, Walter M. Wolfe offered a tale of Christmas exposure in the Rockies, following the narrator from a draughty shelter (‘The wind whistled down the wide-mouthed chimney and the snow drifted in through the chinks in our cabin’) on a hunting trip in the beauty of the winter landscape (‘In the clear, cold starlight, we started out through the cedars toward the sunrising’), through an encounter with a marauding mountain lion (‘It seemed but an instant until Hank was down with a great form towering over him’), before ending with a family of kindly prospectors offering hospitality, concluding with a romantic twist as the narrator’s male companion falls for a young mountain woman (Figure 6; Wolfe 1893). In a similar style was Edward Kemeys’s tale of outdoor hunting adventure and misadventure in snowy Colorado over Christmas (Kemeys 1887). Or, opening the December 1896 issue Field and Stream, William Bleasdell Cameron spirited readers away to the romantic lands of the mythologised Hudson Bay Company in a tale of snow-shoes, capots, furs, dog-sleds, and ‘the lashing, smoking blizzard’ of the Northern winter (Cameron 1896).

Figure 6. ‘It seemed but an instant until Hank was down with a great form towering over him’. (Wolfe 1893).

In Christmas stories, the figure of the wolf presented writers with a ready symbol of the mysterious and threatening forest in winter. In Drummond Foster’s story of Christmas in the wilderness for Field and Stream in 1898, readers encounter hard-drinking woodsmen and wolves in the harsh, unforgiving Michigan winter at Christmastime. ‘The north wind surged through the forest with all its old time fierceness, the snow swept around her girlish form and she scrambled through the underbrush and around fallen timber with the fiendish yell of the wolves in her ears’ (Foster 1898). Or, Ella Loraine Dorsey’s short mystery story, ‘Ivan of the Mask’ for Outing’s 1893 issue was set in Russia, in the frozen forests among the wolves (Dorsey 1894). There were more Russian wolves in Ernest Seton Thompson’s contribution to Forest and Stream in 1896, although in this case he described a humorous tale of a hapless baron, who goes hunting in the snow only to end up dangling from a tree, hanging from a rope trap, with dozens of snapping brutes beneath him – until his retainers arrive to disperse the pack (Thompson 1896).

Yet, while the wintery theme matched one idea of Christmas, outdoor-sports magazines frequently pointed readers away from the North to broadening horizons. Amidst the tales of sport and adventure in frozen mountains and snowy forests were travel accounts and adventure stories that might transport the reader to far sunnier climes, pointing the way to the South and to California, which, as Henry Knight Lozano has shown, would increasingly gain a hold over the American imagination as destinations for tropical tourism around the turn of the twentieth century (Lozano 2013). A new idea of America was coming into being as leisure and recreation connected the disparate regions of the nation together, and outdoor-sports magazines played a part in that process – and not least at Christmastime.

So, leaving memories of the Civil War far behind in the embrace of the new tourist economy, Field and Stream claimed Florida was ‘The Sportsman’s Elysium of the South’. For ‘when the North lies fettered and pale’, Florida enjoys ‘the sun and balm of the salt air’ (Wack 1900). Or, according to The Wheelman, in California, ‘we do not see the decay of the summer; there are no melancholy days’. Such a Christmas, with ‘the freshness and beauty of spring’, had its own distinctive attractions (Wells 1883). Opening wide horizons of the imagination at Christmastime, outdoor-sports magazines often combined articles and stories on the theme of the familiar Northern winter with forays into warm and sunny lands. Field and Stream’s 1896 offering took readers away to Florida, where oranges hung in the trees, and then to the snows of Labrador (Fairchild 1896; Fletcher 1896). Outing’s Christmas number for 1899 (January 1900) had an account of deer hunting in snowy eastern Maine and then in the gentle winter of Georgia’s sea islands (Cunningham 1900; Loct 1900). Or, in the Holiday Number of 1900, Outdoor Life opened with an article about tuna and sea bass fishing off sunny Santa Catalina Island, California before ‘A Yule-Tide Reverie’ brought readers back to the snowy winter of the North (Mathes 1900; Wright 1900).

Not coincidentally, as the United States was beginning to extend its imperial ambitions beyond its borders, into the North Pacific with the acquisition of Alaska (1867), and soon Hawaii (1893), before the Spanish-American War (1898) and the age of Theodore Roosevelt, Christmas stories evinced an emerging curiosity about a world shaped by global empires. Readers of Forest and Stream might discover a new way of seeing Christmas ‘under the palms’ in Samoa, or contemplate festive dinner in Venezuela (Churchill 1900; Connelly 1900). Or, bringing to mind the Pacific setting of Ballantyne’s 1857 story Coral Island, an article for Forest and Stream’s 1886 issue appeared as ‘reminiscences of the Southern seas’, for example, presented as a gunboat memoir (Ballantyne 1906. Originally 1857; N.A. 1886). Alternatively, something to recall Kipling perhaps, was an account of a winter hunt with the Nawab in northern India (Captain Sahib 1897). And, at a time of public fascination with Polar exploration and international competition, Ralph Graham Tabor published an Arctic castaway story, relocating the familiar premise of Robinson Crusoe to the frozen North (Tabor 1896).

The spirit of these expansive Christmas adventure stories was captured by Forest and Stream in its 1889 editorial: the Christmas number that year ‘consists of thirty-two pages, with added illustrated supplement’, and it ‘has never been surpassed’ in ‘the wide geographical range of contents and the diversified character and entertaining qualities’, spanning the globe, from Jamaica and Brazil to France and further eastward to Japan, bringing ‘accounts of sport, life and adventures in foreign lands’ (N.A. 1889). Once an indoor celebration of family and piety, Christmas was becoming a time to enjoy fantasies of sport, travel, and adventure, even where those might take the reader far from what could even by the 1870s be nostalgically recalled as ‘traditional’ festivity. One invented tradition of the nineteenth century was being adapted by coming generations. The cosy Christmas was being joined by a new idea of celebration, as Americans looked ahead to the twentieth century and went in search of thrill, enchantment, and adventure in wonderlands of entertainment.

Conclusion

Under the influence of outdoor-sports magazines, Christmas became a time for play and imagination in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. Their writers encouraged Americans to look outward from their homes to idealised winter landscapes of sport and recreation, to widening horizons of adventure in the forests, the mountains of the West, and the sunny Southland, or overseas to a world being reshaped by empire. As Christmas became increasingly bound into the emerging consumer economy during those years, magazines of outdoor sport and recreation encouraged their readers to embrace new ways of joining in celebration. While sometimes acknowledging old communal traditions like the turkey shoot or fox hunting, they promoted new, modern sporting pastimes suited to an age of individualism and consumption, skating, tobogganing, and so on. And as Americans sought out authenticity in an age that could seem blandly artificial, these magazines told readers how to look anew at the winter landscape, to find spiritual meaning in natural places.

For all that, for most Americans, most if not all of the time, reading would stand in for the authentic experience of the outdoor life. In vivid descriptions, evoking the thrill of outdoor sports or the mystery of the forest and lonely mountain, the sound of wild wolves or the chill of winter snows, writers could transport their readers far from the cosiness of the Christmas fireside on dauntless adventures. Often, those writings had a connection with Christmas, even if only as a narrative contrivance to give seasonal context to an otherwise generic adventure story. But, then adventure stories themselves were as a consequence woven into the magazine’s assumptions about their readers’ celebration of Christmas. Departing from the chill of the North, articles and stories cast off for warmer climes, the South, the West, and overseas. In the process they added to the emerging sense of national coherence that came with reconciliation in the decades after the Civil War and with the incorporation of the West, and they offered an expanding global vista that anticipated America’s growing influence. In ways that were real and especially imagined, magazines of sport and recreation took America’s Christmas out of doors and into new wonderlands.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Malcolm McLaughlin

Malcolm McLaughlin is Associate Professor of Cultural History at the University of East Anglia. His current research is an exploration of outdoor-sports and adventure writing in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century.