This short item from the Fargo Forum of 11 December 1916: “The towns of the state seem to have taken up well with the community Christmas pageant idea.” The “idea” of a Christmas pageant—the phrasing intimates that in 1917 Christmas pageants were not traditions, but a new thing, catching on.
Admit it, all of you who have been in a Christmas pageant as a kid or, worse, managed one as an adult. There was a moment, surely, when you thought or even said, Whose crazy idea was this, anyway? Well, I’m getting close to answering that question.
The great historical scholar of American pageantry as a community enterprise is David Glassburg, who published his book on American Historical Pageantry in 1990. The heyday of pageantry, he says, was the period 1900-1917. Community historical pageants combined history, entertainment, and boosterism.
As for injecting the pageant idea into Christmas festivities, the first example I have found is in Fargo, 1914, with the Sunday school of First Baptist Church staging a “Christmas pageant.” Tthe same year, in Bismarck, the Presbyterians enjoyed a “beautiful Christmas pageant” conducted by “the senior members of the Sunday school.” So, I can't tell you just who started the pageant thing, but it happened in 1914.
Christmas pageants proliferated the next few years. The first small town to have one was Oakes, in 1915, courtesy of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Which raises the point, Christmas pageants emerged in the English-speaking churches (Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian), not in the ethnic immigrant parishes. Devils Lake, Williston, Dickinson, and Grand Forks were other early locales. Once the Great War had begun, it was common to take up collections for European children’s relief.
And then there was the community of Harvey, which entered into Christmas pageantry in epic style in 1917. The community outlined two full days of Christmas festivities, culminating in a pageant around the giant Christmas tree erected at the intersection of Lincoln Avenue and Second Street.
Let it be noted that the mayoral proclamation announcing the event, closing all businesses for the duration, was Julius Sgutt. Sgutt was a Russian Jewish homesteader who proved up, opened a clothing store in town, anchored a social network of Jewish families along the railroad line, and became a successful politician.
At dusk of the second day, eight trumpeters walked the streets of Harvey, summoning the citizenry to the Christmas tree. City lamps were extinguished, the tree was lit, and they all sang “Silent Night.” Thereupon a battery of searchlights illuminated one nearby roof after another—shepherds on one, angels on another, a stable, the wise men—and then the ground beneath the tree, where stood the creche. There ensued a little morality play wherein a group of rich men refused to give alms, but were exhorted with the words of Matthew 25:40 to do good “unto the least of these,” and so they showered gifts on their unfortunate neighbors.
All this was described in detail by the celebrated Fargo attorney Melvin Hildreth, who happened to be in town. Melvin Hildreth, the nation’s foremost divorce lawyer, defender of the country's most infamous murderer, profoundly moved by the community exercise. Which was organized, I have to add, by one Harold Bachman, a North Dakota Agricultural College graduate.
