Early Carpinteria residents celebrated Christmas with verve and imagination. One year, Santa distributed gifts to children beneath a Christmas tree — as traditional as it gets. Another one featured temperance verse and gory scenes from “Bluebeard.” A different time, Santa clambered through a church window and stirred up mischief, until the real Santa burst through the door and exposed him as a fake.
On Christmas Eve 1873, Carpinteria families assembled in the Methodist Church, where a huge tree was laden with gifts. After songs and prayers, Santa handed out presents. While the children got gifts, bachelors in the crowd got cakes. The bachelors looked so delighted, according to a letter in the Santa Barbara Weekly Press, that they seemed ready to stay single for another year just to get more cakes. Another paper, the Santa Barbara Daily Morning Times, urged other communities to emulate Carpinteria’s Christmas celebration.
Five years later, the Weekly Press recounted a more cerebral event. On the evening of Christmas 1878, several Carpinteria schoolteachers mounted what the paper called “a literary entertainment and festival,” apparently with no children and no Santa. J. C. Oliver led off with a temperance lecture and discussion, followed by the reading of a temperance poem by Mattie Colby…