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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. This is how we end the week. If you're a fan of holiday window displays, there's a new one you might think about checking out and where is it? Well, it's at our own WNYC theater, the Greene Space, at our SoHo location 160 Varick Street. It opened last night in collaboration with a live arts collective Piehole. It rolls out daily in the style of an Advent calendar through December 21st and features animatronics, videos, and original music on a handcrafted diorama. If you get a chance to go, you also might hear a familiar voice narrating the story. It's me. You'll hear my voice coming out of the body of an animatronic narrator mouse.

Let's have some fun and learn a little New York Christmas history with Piehole members Allison LaPlatney and Alexandra Panzer here to talk about the installation, but also how the story it tells is inspired by a variety of historical Christmas traditions and how New York, in particular, had a big role in shaping what the holiday looks like in this country today. Alison and Alexandra, first of all, thanks for inviting me to be a voice in this project. It was so much fun to do. Now that you've conquered the Greene Space, welcome to the radio side of WNYC.

Alexandra Panzer: Thanks, Brian. Well, thank you for voicing our little narrator mouse. I hope no one told you what massive fans we are because that would make this really, really awkward.

Allison LaPlatney: Yes, very embarrassing.

Brian Lehrer: Very nice of you. I've introduced you as members of Piehole, but how would you describe yourselves as artists, historians, or for the uninitiated of Piehole itself, what is a live art collective?

Alexandra Panzer: Well, we've been making work for about 10 years here in New York, and a little bit more, I guess. I think the common thread throughout what we make is exploring what it means for something to be live and what it means for something to be theater. We've been in all sorts of different spaces and traditional theaters and in VR spaces and worked with puppets and very interdisciplinary work, but throughout it all, we're just trying to figure out what makes something theater and that led us here to this window display. We have pretty regular debates about whether or not this counts as theater.

Brian Lehrer: Well, it counts for me. They say radio is theater of the mind.

Alexandra Panzer: Yes, absolutely.

Brian Lehrer: If you have an installation that leaves something to the imagination, but still has video and animatronics and there's a diorama, it's theater. Because this is radio and we don't have pictures, Alexandra, could you describe the installation visually? What will people actually see if they come look at the Greene Space windows?

Alexandra Panzer: Oh, yes. If you come on down to Charlton and Varick, you'll see this giant, handmade paper mountain and topped by an antenna that's blinking and at the base of the mountain, there's a little village of mice who love Christmas and love nothing more than Christmas TV. I think we can all relate. There'll be some little animatronic mice and different elements.

I don't want to give too many spoilers, but there'll be all sorts of little animatronics and then all sorts of little screens and a big billboard with our main screen that will show the episodes that air daily. Yes, all sorts of little things to explore and it's totally interactive. If you come down and you've missed a few episodes, there'll be a couple of different ways you can actually trigger previous episodes to play. In that way, you can either show up in person at sunset for each day's episode or you can come and play the episodes whenever is convenient for you.

Brian Lehrer: Wow. It is sequential, right? Something new goes live every day through the 21st.

Alexandra Panzer: Yes, that's right. It tells a story. There's an adventure and each day is a new episode. Again, they air at sunset and then every day you can watch all the episodes that have aired up until that day, and then the finale is on the solstice, on the 21st.

Brian Lehrer: That is cool. You can go on the 20th and like you binge-watch a TV series, you can binge-watch the Greene Space windows installation. Allison, let's talk about some of the historical research that you all did to inform the story. You shared some notes with me that reference hundreds of years of Christmas history. Where do you want to start? Maybe with pre-1600 Christmas traditions, which you reference.

Allison LaPlatney: Sure. Hi, everyone. I'm Allison. I was a founding member of Piehole and then I stepped away to get my graduate degree in library science and history. I was asked to test my new degree in looking things up by doing the research for this project. We did a bunch of reading, and one of the discoveries that we made is that Santa Claus is essentially a New Yorker. The pre-19th century history to that, that I think is helpful to know is that while Christmas started being celebrated in a variety of ways around the fourth century, and it was planted on top of the Roman Saturnalia, but there was always an anxiety about what is Christmas, how should Christmas be celebrated.

That anxiety came to a head when the Puritans outlawed Christmas in England and America in the 17th century and were particularly successful in New England. I guess they didn't outlaw it in America because it didn't exist, but they were successful in New England in stopping the momentum of Christmas as it gathered new traditions. That led to this Christmas void that started to be filled in the 19th century.

The way that people celebrated Christmas was very uneven. People celebrated Christmas however made sense to them. A lot of the way that Christmas was celebrated was as a season of misrule, as a carnival time when people would go out into the streets fabulously drunk, dressed in costumes, and in New York, especially, people were really into shooting guns on Christmas Day.

Brian Lehrer: It's like SantaCon meets Texas.

Allison LaPlatney: Exactly. SantaCon is a very traditional Christmas in a lot of ways.

Brian Lehrer: SantaCon, for people who don't know, a lot of people get dressed up like Santa Claus, get drunk and walk down the street.

Allison LaPlatney: Exactly. That actually, now that you mention it, brings together a couple of the things that we ended up being interested in. The story of how Santa Claus is a New Yorker, shall I get into it?

Brian Lehrer: Sure.

Allison LaPlatney: All right, let's do it. One of the texts that we ended up referencing a lot was Stephen Nissenbaum, The Battle For Christmas, which was a Pulitzer prize finalist from 1997. He tells us incredibly compelling story about how the wealthy New Yorkers who founded the New York Historical Society really made an effort to designate St. Nicholas as the patron saint of New York around the early 19th century, in order to invoke a simpler, romanticized, pre-revolutionary Dutch identity that they hoped would serve as an antidote to the urban disorder that they were fearing on their doorsteps that was especially evident during the Christmas season.

Brian Lehrer: Wow. Can I stop you there for a minute because these days when people try to implement all kinds of restrictions or whatever that are meant to recall a simpler, nostalgic time, maybe it's the 1950s or maybe if they want to go really, really far back, it is the early 1800s, which they would consider a simpler, less complicated time. You're saying at that time, they wanted to go back because there was already the sense that New York was becoming a complicated place, and they wanted to hearken back to pre-Revolutionary War days.

Allison LaPlatney: Exactly, and with Christmas especially. This is why Christmas is such a great lens for social history. It comes to the fore at Christmas because many of them would write, "I remember the Christmases of my youth. The Christmases of my youth were different, more authentic, calmer. The rich and poor were in harmony when I was young." Whether or not that was actually true, who knows, but it's always true in one's memory. There's an authentic Christmas, just beyond your reach into the past.

Brian Lehrer: Move to that.

Allison LaPlatney: Yes, exactly. That's something we have in common with 19th Century New Yorkers, but in 1810, John Pinard, who was a merchant and he was the first secretary of the New York Historical Society, organized a St. Nicholas Day dinner, and he commissioned this broadsheet with a picture of St. Nicholas as this bishop in front of a fireplace with some stockings, and this was the first image we really see of St. Nicholas in New York.

This was around the same time that Washington Irving, who might be a familiar name from Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. He was also a part of this circle. He published a satirical history of New York, in which he invokes St.Nicholas multiple times as the patron saint of New York. This desire to really create this patron saint as boosterism for New York also, but also to give this lineage back to New Amsterdam.

Washington Irving describes his St. Nicholas as a caricature of a Dutch person, so not a bishop. He's giving him this more vernacular character, and then this all sort of reaches ahead and continues to influence every Santa ever since in 1823 when a visit from St. Nicholas was first published. That's probably a poem that we're all familiar with, was the night before Christmas and all through the House, et cetera. That's the poem that started it all. It was written by another member of this circle Clement Clark Moore, who was the richest of them all. His family estate was a little place called Chelsea, I don't know if any of us have heard of it.

Brian Lehrer: I think I've heard of that.

Allison LaPlatney: Yes. He was basically a nimby whose land was being seized, so you can imagine how distressed he was at the rapid urbanization of the 1820s.

Brian Lehrer: Was there kind of an anti-immigrant cast to this? 1820s it was among the white people, it was mostly British and German people here. I think the big Irish wave hadn't even started yet then. Never mind Italians and Jews and people from Latin America and everybody, but they were hearkening back to a simpler time when it was mostly Dutch.

Allison LaPlatney: Yes. I think there is concern about immigration. There's concern about just the rapid rise in population in general and the rapid rise of urban poverty, which was something that they didn't have a lot of pre-existing familiarity with, or at least that they had imagined did not exist before 1800. [chuckles] Again, imagining this time before the problems that we have now.

It's interesting that you bring up the immigration point because this is a really interesting point that Nissenbaum makes, is that in A Visit from St. Nicholas, Clement Clarke Moore basically describes St. Nick as a tiny little working-class Dutch elf. In so doing, he creates this tiny little domestic Christmas where a kindly working-class immigrant comes into your nice house and gives your children gifts instead of what these guys actually feared was happening, which was in unruly public Christmas where all of the immigrants and poor people you're afraid of come into your house wearing masks and scream, sing until you give them a gift, which is the Moming tradition, right?

Brian Lehrer: Yes.

Allison LaPlatney: So it's--

Brian Lehrer: He was originally envisioned as an elf. Now we have John Goodman as the physical embodiment of Santa Claus big guy's [unintelligible 00:14:02] staff. Let me jump you ahead to where the windows come in because there's a Christmas shopping Windows tradition that is really what you're playing off in this installation at the Green Space. I'm not sure which one of you wants to take that.

Allison LaPlatney: I think we can both talk about it. I guess I can say briefly, yes, that just it felt really appropriate to be doing this project in New York because the tradition of Christmas Windows is so long-standing here, and certainly with Macy's being the standard bear for that starting in the 1880s. We learned that actually a puppeteer named Tony Sar, was responsible first for doing a puppet parade in one of Macy's windows, and then ended up flipping that scale around and designing the balloons for the Thanksgiving Day parade, which I think really cemented that event and that image as the starting of the Christmas season.

We have a history with puppetry and with dioramas, with miniatures and with playing around with scale, so that influence of a puppeteer on Christmas imagery really spoke to us, but Alexandra, I think you can speak [unintelligible 00:15:26] to the window stuff.

Alexandra Panzer: Well, and I think what we really wanted to, this thing that Allison is mentioning about the domestic, trying to make a Christmas a really domestic interior private holiday was something that we're a little bit trying to push back against and trying to bring it a little bit out into the streets again. We wanted to contribute something to outdoor culture and outdoor winter culture, which is tough because it's so cold, but is also really important.

Especially the last couple of Decembers have been so stressful for everyone with the surges and the three-hour testing lines and everything. We were trying to think combine these ideas and think like what could we make that would contribute some like, outdoor experience that would maybe lift people's spirits a little bit, but also be COVID proof something that you could go--

Brian Lehrer: Yes, outdoors.

Alexandra Panzer: Yes, be outdoors and something that could also add a little like structure to December a little Christmasy holiday festive routine of humbling over to the Green Space and seeing what's happening on Christmas Mountain.

Brian Lehrer: That's got to be the last word because we're out of time, but I'll just tell the listeners that the story that you tell in the windows, it's a real crisis Folks, in the little Mouse City that they depict because of all the things to plunge society into a state of deprivation, they lose their TV reception. As the narrator, I know how this ends, but no spoilers for me.

Folks, if this sounds interesting to you or just a little bit of Christmas fun, and if you'd like to hear me narrate one Mouse's journey into Christmas Mountain, come to the Green Space at 160 Barrack Street to check it out between now and December 21st. Allison LaPlatney and Alexandra Panzer from PieHole who did this with the Green Space, thanks for all your work and thanks for coming on the show. Thank you so, so much.

Alexandra Panzer: Thank you.

Allison LaPlatney: Thank you, Brian.

Alexandra Panzer: Love you guys. Merry Christmas.

Allison LaPlatney: [laughs]

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