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It’s 1820 and the snows of December are settling onto the streets of New York City.
这是1820年的场景，12月份的大雪覆盖了纽约市的街道。
While some cozy up to the fire and spend time indoors to celebrate Christmas and the new year, many are out on the streets making noise.
当一些人舒舒服服地坐到火堆前，在室内庆祝圣诞节和新年时，许多人走上街头制造噪音。
In the early 19th century, the week between Christmas and New Year’s was marked by public revelry and misrule.
在19世纪早期，圣诞节和新年之间的一周是公众狂欢和混乱的一周。
The workers and laborers of New York City spent the week reversing the norms of their city.
纽约市的工人和劳工花了一周的时间改变了其城市的常规样貌。
They took their partying out onto the streets, played loud music in what are called “callithumpian parades,” and generally made a ruckus.
他们在街上举行派对，在所谓的“胡乱敲打游行”中播放响亮的音乐，通常会引起骚动。
As industrial capitalism expanded its factories, improved its machinery, and exploited increasingly more laborers on the wage market, the 1820s witnessed the growth of the urban proletariat.
随着工业资本主义扩建工厂，改进机器，并在工资市场上剥削越来越多的劳动力，19世纪20年代见证了城市无产阶级的发展。
So, that week of public revelry in the 1820s wasn’t just a time of pleasure and release for those toiling away under their capitalist bosses, it was also a time to reverse their power– if only for a moment.
因此，19世纪20年代那一周的公众狂欢，对于那些在资本主义老板手下辛勤工作的人来说，不仅是快乐和放松的时刻，也是扭转他们权力的时候--哪怕只有一小会儿。
When these roving callithumpian parades hit the streets, they did so in the neighborhoods of the rich and powerful.
当这些胡乱敲打巡回游行走上街头时，他们是在有钱有势的社区里进行的。
In Stephen Nissenbaum’s book the Battle for Christmas he recounts one such scene in 1826, when “a gang stopped in front of the Broadway house of the city’s mayor; there ‘enacted’...‘a scene of disgraceful rage.’”
在《圣诞节之战》中，斯蒂芬·尼森鲍姆讲述了1826年的这样一个场景，当时“一伙人停在市长的百老汇大厦前；那里‘上演了’……‘可耻的愤怒场面’。”
So, during the Christmas season the newly minted urban wage-laborers were using the traditions of public revelry as a weapon to brandish their discontent and achieve some means of agency.
因此，在圣诞季期间，新生的城市打工者会利用公众狂欢的传统作为武器，表达他们的不满，并获得某种代理手段。
Nissenbaum notes that December for the growing population of industrial wage laborers meant uncertainty.
尼森鲍姆指出，对于不断增长的工业工资劳工人口来说，12月份意味着不确定性。
It could mean increased hours at work to keep up with business-as-usual, or for others, forced unemployment because winter freezes ground water-powered factories to a halt.
12月份可能意味着增加工作时间，以保持正常工作，或者对其他人来说，由于冬季冻结了地下水工厂，12月份可能会迫使他们失业。
This mean the Christmas season was marked by an acute feeling of working class discontent about their conditions.
这意味着，圣诞季期间，工人阶级会对自身状况感到强烈不满。
So, as Nissenbaum goes on to write, “the Christmas season, with its carnival traditions of wassail, misrule, and callithumpian ‘street theater,’ could easily become a vehicle of social protest, an instrument to express powerful ethnic and class resentments.”
因此，正如尼森鲍姆继续写道的那样，“圣诞季，伴随着狂欢的传统，即报圣诞佳音、混乱和胡乱敲打的‘街头剧场’，很容易成为一种社会抗议的工具，一种表达强烈的种族和阶级怨恨的工具。”
Throughout the early 19th century, the traditions of public revelry were wielded on the streets of urban centers like New York City, as a means of protest.
在整个19世纪早期，公众狂欢的传统在像纽约市这样的城市中心的街道上演，作为抗议的一种手段。
Christmas represented an opportunity for social inversion, where as journalist Paul Ringel writes, “poorer people could demand food and drink from the wealthy and celebrate in the streets, abandoning established social constraints.”
圣诞节代表着社会反转的机会，正如报纸撰稿人保罗·林格尔所写的那样，“穷人可以向富人索要食物和饮料，在街上庆祝，抛弃现有的社会约束。”
But the capitalist class– the wealthy elite– who were made to feel unsafe in their homes during the Christmas season didn’t sit idly by while these gangs of revelers upended their social structure.
但是，当这些狂欢者颠覆了他们的社会结构时，那些在圣诞季期间在家里感到不安全的资产阶级——富有的精英——并没有傻坐着。
They had a plan.
他们制定了一个计划。
They sought to change the traditions of Christmas itself.
他们试图改变圣诞节本身的传统。
John Pintard was a propertied man.
约翰·平塔德是个富有的人。
A man of fine tastes who felt threatened by the presence of poor and houseless people on the streets of New York, that he started the Society for the Prevention of Pauperism in 1817.
是一个品味高雅的人，他因为纽约街头出现的穷人和无家可归的人而感到威胁，于是在1817年成立了预防贫穷协会。
His goal was to rid the city of public begging and drinking, in order to make the streets of the growing city safe for wealthy property owners like himself.
他的目标是消除这座城市的公开乞讨和饮酒行为，好让像他这样富有的业主能够安全地居住在这座日益发展的城市的街道上。
He inevitably failed.
不出所料，他失败了。
But that wasn’t his only quest.
但这并不是他唯一的追求。
Throughout the beginning of the 1800s, John Pintard, who established the New York Historical Society, and is partly responsible for popularizing July 4th and Columbus Day as holidays, wanted to “civilize” Christmas.
在整个19世纪初，约翰·平塔德建立了纽约历史学会，并在一定程度上推动了7月4日和哥伦布日的普及，他想让圣诞节变得文明起来。
Pintard developed a buckshot of different traditions surrounding Christmas and New Years in reaction to the public revelry of the working class.
平塔德创作了一系列围绕圣诞节和新年的不同传统，以回应工人阶级的公众狂欢。
He introduced St Nicholas to the US, held indoor banquets for his friends at City Hall to celebrate that Saint on December 6th, and invited extended family into his home for parties on New Years.
他将圣·尼古拉斯引入美国，12月6日在市政厅为他的朋友举办室内宴会，来庆祝圣·尼古拉斯，并邀请大家庭成员在新年到他家参加派对。
By 1830, though, Pintard finally set his sights on Christmas day–December 25th.
然而，到了1830年，平塔德终于把目光投向了圣诞节--12月25日。
A day he sought to encourage family-oriented private gatherings.
这一天，他试图鼓励以家庭为中心的私人聚会。
Specifically, he wanted to build holiday traditions that replaced the public revelry now deemed out of fashion and distasteful by the capitalist class, with one focused on gift-giving to children.
具体来说，他希望设立节日传统，以取代现在被资本主义阶级视为过时和惹人反感行为的公众狂欢，其中一个传统是把重点放在给孩子们送礼物上。
As Nissenbaum writes in The Battle for Christmas, “The children of a single household had replaced a larger group of the poor and powerless as the symbolic objects of charity and benevolence.”
正如尼森鲍姆在《圣诞节之战》中所写的那样，“一个家庭的孩子已经取代了一大群穷人和无权无势的人，成为了慈善和仁爱的象征对象。”
Pintard was not alone in his quest to transform the holiday, however.
然而，平塔德并不是唯一一个想改变这个节日的人。
He was part of a group of wealthy urbanites who called themselves the Knickerbockers.
他是一群富有的城市人中的一员，他们自称是“纽约人”。
The group included short-story author Washington Irving and poet Clement Moore who both used their skills with the pen to draft new myths of Christmas, like in Moore’s The Night Before Christmas.
这群人包括短篇小说作家华盛顿·欧文和诗人克莱门特·穆尔，他们都利用自己的写作技巧起草了关于圣诞节的新神话，比如穆尔的《圣诞前夜》。
A now famous poem that wove together various traditions to shape Christmas as a quiet, cozy child-centric day of presents and a magical visit from Saint Nicholas.
这是一首现在很有名的诗，它将各种传统交织在一起，将圣诞节塑造成一个安静、舒适、以儿童为中心的日子，当天会有礼物和圣·尼古拉斯的神奇造访。
The Knickerbockers did not single-handedly transform the holiday, but they were instrumental in developing the traditions behind them.
“纽约人”并没有做到以一己之力改变这个节日，但他们在发展节日背后的传统方面发挥了重要作用。
They produced new ways of celebrating Christmas that appealed to those scared of the rapidly urbanizing and industrializing public spaces of the 19th century.
他们创造了庆祝圣诞节的新方式，这吸引了那些对19世纪快速城市化和工业化的公共空间感到恐惧的人。
As journalist Paul Ringel writes in The Atlantic, middle-class parents latched onto the traditions that Pintard and the Knickerbockers drummed up, because “they encouraged young Americans to associate the joys of the holiday with the morally and physically protective space of the home.”
正如报纸撰稿人保罗·林格尔在《大西洋月刊》上所写的那样，中产阶级父母对平塔德和“纽约人”宣扬的传统产生了浓厚兴趣，因为“他们鼓励美国年轻人将节日的快乐与家庭的道德以及身体保护空间联系起来”。
In short the introduction of St Nicholas and the spirit of family- and kid-oriented gift-giving in the home, was a reaction to the proletarian public revelry and holiday unrest in the beginning of the 19th century.
简而言之，圣·尼古拉斯的引入以及以家庭和儿童为中心送礼的精神，是对19世纪初无产阶级公众狂欢和节日骚乱的一种回应。
The elite transformed Christmas to feel safe from the workers they exploited.
精英们改变了圣诞节，让他们感到安全，不受他们剥削的工人的伤害。
But how did we go from kids receiving sugar plums by firelight to this?
但我们是怎么从孩子们在篝火旁接受糖李子变成这样的呢?
For that we need to turn to Santa Claus.
为此，我们需要把目光转向圣诞老人。
