Fort Vancouver celebrates with relics of Christmas past

There’s comfort to be found in routine. For many, ’tis the season for hall-decking, for light-hanging, for feast-making and gift-wrapping.

It can feel like these traditions have been around forever. But in Vancouver, it’s a little more specific than that — exactly 180 years, in fact.

That was when Father Francois Norbert Blanchet held the first-ever formal Roman Catholic service at a Hudson’s Bay Company building. He arrived with his partner, fellow French Canadian priest Modeste Demers, in November 1838 in response to written requests from company employees.

That season, Vancouver saw its first, formal Christian religious service, with Blanchet and Demers leading the Catholic congregation that would eventually become the St. James Church. Nearly two centuries later, the Proto-Cathedral of St. James the Greater still stands in downtown Vancouver, a continuing reminder of some of the earliest organized Christianity in the Pacific Northwest.

And while times have certainly changed — indoor plumbing comes to mind — it’s striking to look back and realize just how resilient many of our holiday traditions have proven to be.

The early days

Those years are most thoroughly documented by “McLoughlin’s Fort Vancouver Letters First Series, 1825-38.” They follow John McLoughlin, builder of Fort Vancouver and regional superintendent of the Hudson’s Bay Company, a British fur trading company.

If one is fascinated by trade routes and malaria bouts, it’s riveting stuff. For most other purposes, it’s unreadably dry.

“The people that wrote letters were mostly the Englishmen who were the clerks and the officers of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and the letters they wrote were virtually all businesslike. So to find personal letters that described life and events, they’re just not all that common,” said Paul Deming, an amateur historian at the Proto-Cathedral of St. James.

Luckily, there are some scattered but more colorful accounts of those early holiday celebrations. Meet Betsy, whose story proves that relatable figures can be found in the most unexpected pockets of history.

“The ladies all behaved well,” wrote fort visitor Letitia Hargrave, wife of a Hudson’s Bay fur trader and prolific letter-writer. She was recounting a Vancouver Christmas while visiting her husband in the 1840s.

“Only my friend Betsy ‘got dronk’ as she told me and was carried home.”

Getting “dronk” was a favorite Christmas pastime in the days of Hudson’s Bay Company residents at Fort Vancouver. Employees would receive a gift from the company, which often included rum or wine in addition to treats like pork, honey and sugar.

The subsequent party was called a “regale,” according to local historian Pat Jollota.

“They did mention that it would get pretty rowdy,” Jollota said.

In the darkest, coldest, harshest part of the year, holiday celebrations gave workers a respite from their exhausting conditions. In a recounting of Fort Vancouver’s history from the National Park Service, an American missionary wrote that on Christmas morning the fort’s employees and their families would “dress themselves in their best attire, accelerated movements were seen in every direction, and preparation is made for dinners, which are sure to be furnished in their first style, and the greatest profusion; and the day passes in mirth and hilarity.”

Indoor and outdoor recreation became the main activities of the day, according to the park service’s account.

“Some engaged in gambling,” American pioneer Joel Palmer noted, “some singing, some running horses, many promenading on the river shore, and others on the large green prairie above the fort.”

The celebrations predated the arrival of Blanchet and Demers, but the priests’ presence added more organized religious gravitas to the season. In 1842, McLoughlin made his first communion and formally joined the Catholic faith during the Christmas midnight mass.

In 1846, Vancouver’s first church opened its doors: St. James, a little wooden building that sat on a plot of land that’s now at the northwest corner of East Fifth Street and Fort Vancouver Way.

A decade later, Mother Joseph of the Sacred Heart and four Sisters of Providence arrived at Fort Vancouver on Dec. 8, 1856.

“The first thing they did was start getting (the church) ready for Christmas, and they had very little time,” Deming said. “The very rough building was 10 years old — they scrambled to make the church look halfway decent by Christmas.”

By then, the modern-day Christmas traditions influenced by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert of the United Kingdom had found solid roots across the Atlantic. Christmas trees were common.

“What we call Christmas now really wasn’t a custom until Victoria’s time,” Jollota said. “About the same time the fort came into existence.”

Lasting relics

Dumb judgment, much like the holiday spirit, is timeless. Look no further than “Vancouver Area Chronology: 1784-1958,” an exhaustive timeline kept by the Clark County Historical Museum.

“Dec. 1866 — Some boys illegally cut Christmas trees in the public square, now Esther Short Park,” the record duly reports.

“That’s when Christmas trees were just coming out into the general public,” Jollota said. The small tabletop trees were lit with actual candles, she added, and would usually be found in a grange hall or church.

“It would be one that the whole community would come to look at. It wouldn’t be in everyone’s home,” Jollota said.

The tree heist was the first in a series of recorded Christmas-related calamities over the coming century, according to the area’s official chronology.

“Dec. 24, 1915 — Charles Meyer, age 26, shot and killed John Kramer, age 68, at a Christmas Eve ‘party’ at Hazel Dell that featured whiskey, beer, and a general row. — On May 12, 1916, Meyer was convicted of second-degree murder,” the anthology states.

“Dec. 7, 1958 — The Ken Martin family of Portland, consisting of Martin, his wife, and three daughters, vanished when they went on a Christmas tree hunt up the Columbia, and no trace of them had been found at the close of 1958.”

Pettiness, too, is timeless. A lengthy legal battle commenced when the U.S. Army established the Vancouver Barracks around the Mission claim. The church was destroyed in an 1888 suspected arson, and when the army won rights to the land a few years later they replaced the site of the original wooden St. James Church with mule barns.

Today, the mules are gone but the barn remains. St. James found a new (and improved) home on West 12th Street downtown.