{"id":12508,"date":"2012-12-10T06:30:31","date_gmt":"2012-12-10T14:30:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/carlanthonyonline.com\/?p=12508"},"modified":"2012-12-10T06:30:31","modified_gmt":"2012-12-10T14:30:31","slug":"christmas-at-the-white-house-first-families-at-home-for-the-holiday-part-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/carlanthonyonline.com\/2012\/12\/10\/christmas-at-the-white-house-first-families-at-home-for-the-holiday-part-4\/","title":{"rendered":"Christmas at the White House: First Families at Home for the Holiday, Part 4"},"content":{"rendered":"Ronald Reagan dresses up as Santa Claus at a friend’s party. This is the fourth and final article in the series Christmas at the White House. You can find the previous three at the links at the end of this article. If contemporary observers expect a \u201ctheme\u201d each succeeding year of how Christmas and the holiday season is celebrated in the White House, the very first such theme might have been easily dubbed \u201cMisery.\u201d\u00a0 In 1800, John and Abigail Adams had moved into the newly constructed but unfinished presidential mansion only a month before the holiday season began and just as he lost his re-election bid. An illustration imagining the 1805 Christmas Day of President Jefferson, fiddling to his grandchildren s his daughter Martha Randolph prepares table. On top of this Mrs. Adams was deeply depressed for a personal reason: on her way to Washington she had stopped in New York to see her son Charles, a severe alcoholic. She recognized that he was terminally ill and that it was the last time she would see him alive. Even the presence of his four-year daughter old Suzanna, the presidential granddaughter failed to dispel the gloom. A friend broke dishes from her set of toy doll plates she was given as a gift and in retaliation the First Granddaughter bit off the head of her friend’s wax doll. At the first Christmas reception hosted in the new presidential mansion failed to make it memorable. It was freezing cold. Even with all the fireplaces going, as Mrs. Adams wrote in her famous first letter reporting on what living there was like, the plastered walls were still wet and not all the glass panes had been fitted into the windows. In 1802 was perhaps the happiest Christmas Thomas Jefferson had experienced as an older adult, having both of his daughters Martha and Maria visiting with him in the White House for a month, along with their husbands who were both Congressmen, some six grandchildren and his friend Secretary of State James Madison and his wife Dolley. The President himself walked to the market and chose the Christmas goose that would be served at dinner, while Mrs. Madison gave the four girls of First Daughter Martha Randolph for a carriage ride to see Georgetown for the first time. A later account claims that the President hosted a children\u2019s party for his grandchildren and several Continue reading →<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is the fourth and final article in the series Christmas at the White House. You can find the previous three at the links at the end of this article. If contemporary observers expect a \u201ctheme\u201d each succeeding year of… Read More ›<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[181,1444,1450,26,186,1478,76,78,165,1503,1516],"tags":[1874,1845,1877,661,714,756,1141,1859],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4a7VA-3fK","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/carlanthonyonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12508"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/carlanthonyonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/carlanthonyonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carlanthonyonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carlanthonyonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12508"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/carlanthonyonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12508\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/carlanthonyonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12508"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carlanthonyonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12508"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carlanthonyonline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12508"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}