Celebrating Small TOWN & country Life in New Jersey
Holiday Issue 2020
Look for the current print issue of The BRJ at your favorite location or read our flipbook edition here.
Help formerly homeless, and disabled veterans in need this holiday season during the “They Kept Us Safe, Let's Keep Them Warm” annual clothing drive. Find out more in our BRJ Community Journal.
Happening This Week
Winter Village & Dickens Days in Historic Clinton, NJ. November 27-29
This three-day German-style outdoor winter craft market in the heart of Clinton, New Jersey features over 40 local craft artisans, vintage peddlers, and food trucks each day. After visiting our German-style holiday market, step back into the Victorian era in Downtown Clinton, with carolers, Father Christmas, horse and carriage rides, and more... See our Calendar of Events page for more information.
Old News
From the High Bridge Gazette, October 10, 1918
Finds Santa Claus is Real
Clark Hackett of Easton, whose legs were crushed in an accident on the Lehigh Valley railroad, necessitating their amputation above the knees, several days ago received the following letter:
My Dear Friend:
I understand that you have both feet off and I am sorry for you. Enclosed find a check for $100 signed “Santa Claus.” Do not think this a joke. Have the Lehigh Valley Railroad Co. or any business concern send the check through for collection and give you the money when it is forwarded. Funds are on deposit at the North Philadelphia Trust Company to meet this check.
Sincerely yours,
SANTA CLAUS
Hackett was in doubt whether some one was trying to fool him, but he decided to try it. Tuesday he received the $100...
Original copy of the High Bridge Gazette, October 10, 1918 (Courtesy of James Cummins Bookseller)
Holiday Feature
The Man Who Drew Santa Claus
Although Clement Clarke Moore had given us a good description of Santa Claus in his 1822 poem, “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” also commonly known as “’Twas the Night Before Christmas,” the world still didn’t know what the jolly old elf really looked like.
Looking Back
The Belsnickel
If the thought of a lump of coal isn’t enough to induce good behavior in your kids at Christmas time, then maybe you need a fur-clad, masked man with a switch – who is not afraid it use it.
Best of the BRJ Holiday Highlights
A Dickens of a Punch
Metropolitan Seafood/Black River Journal Celebration Blue Crab Sauce
Santa Claus Flew a Piper Cub
Entire volumes have been dedicated to the drinks, cocktails and concoctions of the late Georgian and early Victorian eras, when Charles Dickens introduced us to the nearly bygone Christmases of old England.
Santa Claus Flew a Piper Cub
Metropolitan Seafood/Black River Journal Celebration Blue Crab Sauce
Santa Claus Flew a Piper Cub
On Christmas Eve 1944, the beleaguered American defenders holding the little Belgian town of Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge, were low on everything except courage.
Metropolitan Seafood/Black River Journal Celebration Blue Crab Sauce
Metropolitan Seafood/Black River Journal Celebration Blue Crab Sauce
Metropolitan Seafood/Black River Journal Celebration Blue Crab Sauce
The market at Metropolitan Seafood was closed, as it always is on Monday, when we slipped through the front door on a drizzly mid-morning, and locked it behind us.
Recipes: Louisa Macculloch's Soft gingerbread
Cooking Up History
We do tend to connect gingerbread with Christmas but people have been eating gingerbread since the time of Ancient Egypt and Ancient Greece. Louisa Macculloch (1785-1863) had several gingerbread and ginger cake recipes in her cookbook at historic Macculloch Hall in Morristown, NJ. Get the Recipe Here