Washington Irving & New York Easter

Mr Coulombe discusses the role of Washington Irving in the creation of the "secular Easter" of bunnies and Easter egg hunts, which is now under attack.

From One Peter Five

By Charles Coulombe, KC*SS, STM

The good old Dutch festivals, those periodical demonstrations of an overflowing heart and a thankful spirit, which are falling into sad disuse among my fellow citizens, were faithfully observed in the mansion of Governor Stuyvesant. New year was truly a day of open-handed liberality, of jocund revelry and warm-hearted congratulation, when the bosom swelled with genial good-fellowship, and the plenteous table was attended with an unceremonious freedom and honest broad-mouthed merriment unknown in these days of degeneracy and refinement. Paas and Pinxter were scrupulously observed throughout his dominions; nor was the day of St. Nicholas suffered to pass by without making presents, hanging the stocking in the chimney, and complying with all its other ceremonies.
—Washington Irving, Dietrich Knickerbocker’s History of New York.

April of 2025 has a great many holidays and momentous events to remember.  April 18 and 19 are the 250th anniversary of the battles of Lexington, Concord, and Menotomy in Massachusetts, and so shall usher in the beginning of our national Semiquincentennial.  This year, however, those days are also Good Friday and Holy Saturday.  Of course, on April 3 we already have had the birthday of that genial first of all American writers, Washington Irving. 

Now, I must admit a lifelong love of the work of the “Sunny Master of Sunnyside,” as American Heritage magazine dubbed him.  Long before I read them, my father told me the stories of Rip Van Winkle and the Headless Horseman.  As a child in Mount Kisco, NY and Manhattan in the early 1960s, I loved the valley of the Hudson and its many stories and legends.  When we moved to Hollywood, California, I was extremely homesick – and from the time I could read, I read Irving – as much for solace for homesickness as for sheer joy in his work. As the California sun beat down on the endlessly riotous Los Angeles streets, Irving would take me back to the scenes of my earliest memories:

A drowsy, dreamy influence seems to hang over the land, and to pervade the very atmosphere. Some say that the place was bewitched by a High German doctor, during the early days of the settlement; others, that an old Indian chief, the prophet or wizard of his tribe, held his powwows there before the country was discovered by Master Hendrick Hudson. Certain it is, the place still continues under the sway of some witching power, that holds a spell over the minds of the good people, causing them to walk in a continual reverie.

What work it was! Dietrich Knickerbocker kept me laughing; his scarier tales gave me a bit of a chill; his writings about Christmas spurred a particular love of that festival which if anything has grown over the years.  What attracted me most about his work, I suppose, was his geniality, his love of humanity as he found it, and – as the years went by, his exposing his readers ever more to the world as he grew ever more aware of it.  Irving, although very much a regional writer, grew to love the many parts of both America and Europe that he explored. His affection was returned by both the British and Spanish publics.  Starting out with the typical anti-Catholic prejudices of his time and place, he outgrew them and spent his later years removing the anti-Catholic bits from later editions of his earlier works.  It is perhaps a fitting tribute to him that the church in Tarrytown built as the Washington Irving Memorial Episcopal Church is now the Immaculate Conception Catholic Church – not only did the Spanish he loved prize and fight for that particular doctrine, but it is also presently a refuge for the Tridentine Mass.  He would no doubt be happy that his home, Sunnyside, is a major attraction in the area.  One can only guess what he would make of the current management of his old parish, Christ Church, Tarrytown, but at least they remember him.

In any case, his attitude of trying to see the best in things, and looking at them on their own merits has not gained Irving a lot of friends in academe over the past century.  Typical was the late Vernon Parrington’s commentary:

An incorrigible flaneur, Irving’s business in life was to loaf and invite the picturesque. A confirmed rambler in pleasant places, in the many lands he visited he was a lover of the past rather than the present, seeking to recreate the golden days of the Alhambra or live over the adventurous mood of the fur trader.

He mockingly declared of Irving that for him:

Progress might be bought at too dear a price. The bluff squire with his hounds, the great hall with its ancient yuletide customs, the patriarchal relations between master and man, seemed to him more worth while than the things progress was substituting for them; so he turned away from the new and gently ingratiated himself into the past in order to gather up such fragments of the picturesque as progress had not yet destroyed.

Parrington was furious that this terrible behaviour was rewarded:

So Irving gently detached himself from contemporary America, and detached he remained to the end of a loitering life, untroubled by material ambitions, enjoying the abundance of good things that fell in his way, mingling with prosperous folk and liking everybody–men as diverse as John Jacob Astor and Martin Van Buren and John P. Kennedy–and unconsciously taking the colour of his environment, careful to turn into limpid prose such romantic tales as he came upon and achieving thereby both reputation and profit–a pleasant blameless way of living, certainly, yet curiously unrepresentative of the America in which chance had set him and which was to claim him as its first man of letters.

I would submit, however that in this current time of unending wrangling on every front in public and private life, that it is precisely Irving’s spirit that America needs most right now, on the eve of our 250th anniversary.  This was a man who, while dedicated to the spirit of the man for whom he was named and who had “blessed” him when Irving was a boy – and about whom he wrote a fine biography – could nevertheless understand the Loyalist view, putting into poor old Rip Van Winkle’s mouth the words, “I am a poor, quiet man, a native of the place, and a loyal subject of the King, God bless him!”

Irving’s work in reviving Christmas bore fruit on both sides of the Atlantic; but inspiring to him as his English experiences of the holiday were, his fascination with the feast long predated his leaving New York.  It was in his native city that he encountered the Dutch love of the feast – so different from New England and elsewhere.  In some ways, for good and ill, the secular Christmas that’s such a part of American life is centred in New York – and that in turn is in great part due to Irving.  His writings about St. Nicholas’ importance to the Dutch inspired Clement Clarke Moore’s poem, “A Visit from St. Nicholas.”  Indeed, the whole cultus of Santa Claus and American Christmas in general is in large part a New York creation – from Moore to Thomas Nast’s cartoons, the New York Sun’s famous “Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus” letter, to Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas,” to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, to the Rockefeller Centre Christmas Tree, to Miracle on 34th Street, and on and on.

But what is less known – although Irving did not contribute directly to the revival nearly as much as he did Christmas – is that, with some slight encouragement from him in the beginning, New York and its Dutch heritage played a crucial role in the creation of the secular Easter which even in my childhood was enormously important.  Easter Eggs came to us as a joint effort of the Dutch in New Amsterdam and the German settlers in Pennsylvania – but it is no mistake that the largest Easter Egg colouring company in America is called “Paas” – the Dutch word for Easter.  It was, to be sure, the Pennsylvania Germans who actually brought the Easter Bunny over – but it was a German lady, Frau Zehner, whose sales of toy stuffed bunnies in 1890s New York popularised them.

One Easter custom that definitely arose in New York was 5th Avenue’s Easter Parade, subject of both an Irving Berlin song and a lovely movie starring Judy Garland and Fred Astaire.  In the late 19th century, that famous avenue was the preserve of the wealthy, and it boasted the most fashionable congregations in the city: St. Nicholas Dutch Reformed Church (now one with the ages); St. Thomas Episcopal Church; Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church; and our own St. Patrick’s Cathedral.  On Easter Sunday, the well-heeled congregations thereof, after attending their respective Easter services – the men in formal morning dress, and the ladies in the latest fashions of a very fashion-conscious age – would emerge froorm their houses of worship.  They would then promenade up and down the Avenue; it was a genial, pleasant scene that Washington Irving would undoubtedly have loved.

In time, this became a regular institution – and indeed, the centrepiece of a New York Easter.  The bunnies, eggs, and baskets, the omnipresent Easter lilies – generally imported from Bermuda – were all a part of it, of course.  Holy Week was observed by the various churches in their own manner; but the solemnity was reflected in larger ways.  Good Friday, April 5, 1956, is forever memorialised in an iconic photograph depicting the skyscrapers at 60 Wall Tower, 20 Exchange Place (formerly known as City Bank Farmers Trust Co.) and 40 Wall Street lit up with crosses of light to honour the day.  That would be unthinkable to-day – and the Easter Parade has become a bit freakish, in the style of the French Quarter’s version of Mardi-Gras.

New York City on Good Friday, April 5, 1956

Nevertheless, back in 2014, I had my first chance to experience the Easter Parade as an adult.  I was staying in Goshen, Connecticut, at the storied Mary Stuart House.  Having been to Maundy Thursday at the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in Waterbury, I went to the Stations of the Cross at Lourdes in Litchfield the following day and attended the Good Friday Services at Regina Laudis Abbey.  Thence I drove down to Greenwich, Connecticut, left my car with my cousins, and took the train into New York City, staying with friends in Greenwich Village.  As ever, in that part of the world, I though very much of Washington Irving, and the comparison and contrast between New York and New England which was an underlying theme in his American stories.

The following night, I attended the 1955 Easter Vigil at Manhattan’s Holy Innocents Church.  Back to the Village for a few hours sleep; I dressed in my own morning dress and then went up to St. Agnes by Grand Central for the 11 AM High Mass of Easter in the Tridentine form which that parish used to boast.  After that, it was off to Fifth Avenue, and the Easter Parade.  It was an amazing cornucopia of the grotesque, the amazing, and the beautiful.  For all of the silliness, it felt strangely right to do – and again, like something old Irving would have enjoyed.

When it ended, I sought refuge in the King Cole Bar of the St. Regis hotel.  Devilled Eggs and lambchops in keeping with the Easter theme were delicious – and then I noticed a group of young men and women at the bar itself.  The ladies were all dressed in lovely hats and dresses – gloves and all; their escorts were in cutaway coats and striped trousers.  The one of them said that I was the oldest individual he’d ever seen in a morning coat!  They had, of course, also been in the parade.  They were a fun bunch to be sure, and the drinks and the stories flowed.  However, I had dinner with my cousins to attend to.  But as I made ready to leave, as a fare well we began to sing “In Your Easter Bonnet.”  The whole bar took it up, most having doubtless been in the parade themselves.  It was a lovely moment – one that stands forever in the memory.  A wave of the top hat, and I was off to Grand Central, and the train to Greenwich.  Back in the bosom of my family, I enjoyed a delicious ham dinner as a fitting ending to the day.

I have had many memorable Holy Weeks and Easters since then, in many different places – and several different liturgical rites.  I have experienced and come to relish the pre-1955 Rites, and seen a Passion Play on Good Friday in London’s Trafalgar Square, of all places.  But in its liturgical and cultural variety, that Holy Week and Easter of 2014 will always be with me – not least for its geniality.

Easter is about Christ’s triumph over death, and His opening the gates of Salvation to those of us who choose to accept what He brings us.  It is a foretaste of the Heavenly Banquet, of that endless joy, wherein doing His Will is as natural as doing our own is now.  Until then, so long as we sojourn in this darkened world of sin and shadow, we must try ever to keep our eyes on that end.  We have a higher mission, in trying to save our own souls, and to help others do the same.  But we have a lesser mission, which oddly enough is often bound up with the higher – and that is to make this world as pleasant as we can for those others, and so for ourselves.  It should never replace that higher mission – but our pursuit of the higher should never let us forget the lesser either.  That is the great lesson Washington Irving has to teach us to-day – that where we can, we should make the good pleasant.  It is a small thing, but no less essential for all that.

Pictured: Participants in New York City's 2007 Easter parade