The annual Christmas whirl was under way and Bangoreans were properly dizzy. “CHRISTMAS WILL BE GAY THIS YEAR: Great Confusion of Dances and Dinners and ‘Parties’ For Next Two Weeks,” announced a headline in the Bangor Daily News on Dec. 19, 1905, a century ago today.

The agenda included the annual visit by the Tufts College Glee Club and a YMCA sale. Two Bangor High School organizations, Alpha Phi Fraternity and the Yaker Club, were putting on dances and a sleigh ride. A subscription dance was scheduled at City Hall and private dances at Society Hall and Memorial Parlors. A half-dozen house parties at nearby lakes, a long string of dinners and card parties and “informal house dances” rounded out the schedule. Much of the festivity was fueled by the arrival of dozens of college students from Harvard, Vassar and a host of other exclusive schools where Bangor’s wealthy sent their children in the era before financial aid.

Then there was the matter of buying presents. It could drive one insane, as a newspaper reporter tried to show: “Tuesday morning the police received a call from the shopping district to arrest a crazy man. They proceeded with great haste to a retail store and found a poor unfortunate wanderer crazed with the desire to buy gifts and lamenting his lack of money.” After the paperwork was filled out by a physician, the man was taken to Eastern Maine Insane Hospital in the patrol pung singing all the way, the reader was informed.

The newspaper added its own incentive for holiday stress. An editorial writer told readers the only way to celebrate Christmas properly was to spend until you were broke: “That is what Christmas is for, to cause us to give until we are poor … It is then and not until then that we receive the true Christmas spirit.”

If the newspaper’s advertisements were an indicator, there was no shortage of things to buy. Durgin’s Bangor Bazar at 44 Main St. had “dolls by the thousands,” while the Chas. E. Black Shoe Co. at 22 Hammond St. was offering leggings of fine quality jersey cloth for women and overgaiters for either sex. Whiton’s Carriage Repository at 66 Harlow St. tried to interest shoppers in sleighs, pungs and fur carriage robes. J. Waterman Company at 161 to 171 Exchange St. was selling Turkish bathrobes, holiday suspenders and Alaska seal caps for men. Rice & Miller, a hardware store on Broad Street, advertised carriage and sleigh heaters and toy ice cream freezers. S.L. Crosby Co. at 186 Exchange St. had lots of Edison Phonographs and records as well as “skees” for “skeeing.”

The day before Christmas, the annual Christmas party at City Hall was held for 500 “worthy poor children.” It was organized by the city missionary, Mrs. H.A. Wentworth. Her husband played Santa Claus. His novel entry to the festivities in 1905 caused not a few satirical observations in the paper even though he was almost killed.

Tired of coming into the auditorium each Christmas through the door, Wentworth decided to descend from the attic opening high above the City Hall auditorium on the end of a rope held by two burly cops, Inspector Knaide and Capt. O’Halloran. Grabbing the wrong end of the rope, however, Wentworth shot through the opening head first, terminating his rapid journey hanging by his ankle, his head a few inches from the floor.

“The children, who failed to appreciate the gravity of the situation, were tickled about half to death,” a BDN reporter commented dryly.

Doubtlessly some of these same poor children were out Christmas morning on Cedar Street participating in the spontaneous “coasting” party that lasted all day and into the night. “The hill with its long slide from Fifth Street down into the hollow – and it is a ripping good bob – up over the bunch to Second Street has for generations been a favorite coast,” reported the newspaper. “Noisy gamins in moccasins … had no end of fun with home-made bobs, which frequently broke down or fearfully ticklish contraptions made of barrel staves which jumped and gyrated. … The skee-ing fever has hit the town hard, and skees, from the fancy ‘boughten’ patterns to ‘some father made’ vied with the sleds, bobs and toboggans.”

Some old-timers remembered when the hill was a glare of ice and there were no electric trolleys on Main Street. Back then, “some of the famous old flying bobs have started at Fifth Street, shot down Cedar Street with speed enough to take the rise from Sanford to Second, then another long swoop down across Main, around into Summer Street, finally ending a wild ride of nearly a mile in South Street – and that was going some.”

But perhaps the most talked-about Christmas gift that year was the one presented to Mr. and Mrs. Henry P. Gerrity of King’s Court in South Brewer. On Christmas Eve, a baby girl wrapped up in woolen blankets and lying in a basket appeared on their doorstep. The Gerritys, who were described as respectable, he having a good-paying job with the Eastern Manufacturing Co., had no children of their own after 16 years of marriage, according to the Bangor Daily Commercial.

As Mrs. Gerrity looked out the door that night after discovering the child, she noticed at the foot of the hill a closed carriage being rapidly driven away into the darkness. There was no way to tell who was in it or which way it went, she said. A few days later no clue had been offered as to the baby’s identity, and Mrs. Gerrity hoped the speculation would stop as she wanted to keep the foundling. And that is where this column will end until more can be revealed about the Christmas baby of 1905.

Wayne E. Reilly can be reached at wreilly@bangordailynews.net.