While Charles Dickens is generally credited with “saving” Christmas by capturing the best of English Christmas traditions in his novels A Christmas Carol and The Pickwick Papers, he undoubtedly drew his inspiration from Washington Irving. The American writer had earlier described traditional (but quickly dying) and, arguably, fictitious English Christmas customs in “Bracebridge Hall” and other stories published in The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, gent.
Dickens acknowledged that he was a fan of Irving’s when he stated while visiting the United States: “I say, gentlemen, I do not go to bed two nights out of seven without taking Washington Irving under my arm upstairs to bed with me.”
On both sides of the Atlantic, Christmas had become a day for decidedly un-Christian behavior due to high unemployment and marauding gangs. In fact, a Christmas Riot had led to the creation of New York’s first police force in 1828. Both Irving and Dickens sought to make Christmas more of a peaceful, family-oriented celebration.
Having already plundered Dickens to create the musical, The Last Christmas Carol, I am now forced to admit that I similarly violated Irving with the anti-musical, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow Condominium Association, Inc. However, after re-reading Sleepy Hollow for the first time in many years, I came to the realization that there wasn’t really that much to it, even for my less-than-honorable purposes. So I set about reading all of Irving’s American tales, treating them as one continuous story.
I also made a visit to Tarrytown, New York, in order to absorb the atmosphere and, more importantly, to find the house I envisioned as the setting for my play. Arriving by train with my wife and daughter in tow, I proceeded to walk all over the place, finally stopping at a sidewalk café for lunch. It was there that my wife made her first celebrity sighting: Carson from cable TV’s “Queer Eye” show. However, I was more interested in trying to imagine what the town had been like when Elsie Janis (from Columbus) had owned Philipsburg Mansion and used to race her sedan upon and down the streets.
We spent a lot of time strolling through the Old Dutch Burying Ground where some of the folks who served as inspiration for Irving’s characters are buried. We also visited the (new) bridge that the Headless Horseman would have chased Ichabod Crane across if the story were true. And we saw the condominium that now occupies the site of the former Elizabeth Van Tassel homestead, as well as the site where British spy John Andre was captured.
However, after I returned home from my trip, I did not feel a need to change one word of my play.
