Prohibition was a joke. The idea that the government can ban people from drinking alcohol proved to be a huge waste of everyone’s time, since the bootleggers and smugglers often outwitted the police.
Case After Case of Liquor Smuggled in Christmas Trees Made the Trees Sell Cheaply
That’s Why New Yorkers Never Saw so Many or Such Cheap Christmas Firs
Immense Quantity of Hooch Brought Here
Never again let it be said that Santa Claus isn’t.
For the first time in many years Christmas trees were within the means of the poor. No family, no matter how large or how pinched by poverty in the year of prosperity need have been without the greens of Yuletide.
During the week before Christmas a thin dime would have bought a tree six feet or more in height. You could have had one for nothing.
From the woods of Maine and the forests of the Adirondacks the trees came in thousands. Christmas trees covered all the available flatcars of the New York, New Haven and Hartford and New York Central Railroads. It looked as if the forests themselves were moving to New York.
What ho! And the wherefore?
Underneath the forests there were snugly installed cases and cases of delectable Scotch whiskey, of Canadian Club, of rum and brandy and all sorts of Christmas seasoning.
Christmas trees don’t have to be consigned to anybody. The fellow that sends them comes after them and peddles them from the car and when the trees are all gone he turns the car back to the railroad and goes up after more trees.
It’s all very regular, but while Prohibition Director Yellowly and his cohorts were declaring Broadway without an oasis and the rest of New York burning up like the sands of Sahara, it was raining booze into the gay city from the North and the East. It was regular so far as the Christmas trees were concerned and what Prohibition Enforcement agent was going to peep under every Christmas tree for hooch?
Source: The Evening World (New York City, NY newspaper). December 26, 1922.
