God rest ye merry, traveler
There used to be in San Francisco a Christmas custom that your fathers and mothers (or your grandfathers and grandmothers) may not have mentioned to you; but it was one of great charm, and was brought to mind by the carol singers on the California cable cars and in Union Square last Friday evening.
On Christmas eves before the earthquake and fire of 1906, some 24 boy choristers in white surplices left the Episcopal Mission of the Good Samaritan and went from hotel lobby to hotel lobby in the downtown city, singing the old familiar carols for those who might be far from home.
The choir — shepherded by Miss Brown, the choir mistress, and the Rev. Mr. Kip — would generally sing first on the marble flags of the Palace Hotel’s great Palm Court. Then they would get into two horsedrawn omnibuses supplied by the Palace and ride in turn to the other hotels nearby — the Occidental, the California, the Pleasanton, the Colonial, the St. Nicholas, the Bella Vista.
At each one of them, homesick travelers would gather round the choir and listen to it with smiles on their faces, and would feel grateful for the fact that they had been remembered. “It’s just like home,” they would say to each other. And when one of the lads passed among them with cap held out for contributions to the mission, the travelers would shower silver into it generously and freely, eager to give what they could in return for the warmth and friendliness that the carols had brought to their hearts.
Impressive setting
The Palm Court in those days made an impressive setting for the little choir. It was an immense inner courtyard, into which patrons could drive in their cabs and hacks, entering through the carriage gates, which opened into New Montgomery Street. Around the court and above it rose the balconied promenades of the hotel’s six floors. Each year the choir sang there at the foot of a tall electrically lighted Christmas tree.
The Palace tree, which excited great admiration in those days, may well have been the first electrically lighted Christmas tree in the world. In the papers of the day, credit for the idea is given to the hotel’s chief electrician, Edgar Gribble, who in 1896, first hung the tree with strings of incandescent bulbs that took him and his helpers two days to wire. The bulbs were colored according to a design conceived by Gribble.
“The annual Christmas tree at the Palace is a gorgeous affair,” wrote a reporter on Christmas 1897. “It is set up for the pleasure of the guests in the courtyard, and is the biggest tree in the city. It is 40-feet high, and was brought specially from Marin County on two flatcars of the North Pacific Coast Company. In its branches the chief electrician of the Palace, Edgar Gribble, has strung 500 electric lights. The globes are of five different colors and the effect is very gorgeous. The lights look like brilliant fruit growing on the mammoth tree.”
The next year, the tree was only 33 feet high, but no less distinguished for its dazzling effect, for it also had 500 lights. To the delight of the feminine guests of the hotel, Gribble set up a smaller tree in the ladies’ grill and decorated it with 299 six candlepower bulbs, “most of which,” a reporter said, “were incased in fancy-colored bits of Chinese lanterns, not much bigger than a walnut.”
There must be many in San Francisco who remember those Christmas eves in the Palm Court, and the brilliantly lighted trees, so wonderful in that faraway day, and the high clear voices of the Good Samaritan choristers soaring up to the glass roof of the courtyard and filling all that space with Christmas music.
Fifty years ago
And there must be many people all over the world, who can look back to a Christmas Eve 50 years ago and recall how they were far from their own Christmas trees, and their lonely thoughts were driven from them and banished by the carols of little boys from a San Francisco mission.
This column originally appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle on Dec. 27, 1948.
On Christmas eves before the earthquake and fire of 1906, some 24 boy choristers in white surplices left the Episcopal Mission of the Good Samaritan and went from hotel lobby to hotel lobby in the downtown city, singing.