Not Quite Christmas

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Holidays have always fascinated me.  Although we grew up poor, I always have cozy memories of childhood Christmases.  It was a combination of things—being out of school for a couple of weeks.  Presents.  Christmas trees.  Time outside ordinary time.  I’d read Penne L. Restad’s Christmas in America: A History years ago.  So many years, in fact, that I forgot that I wrote a blog post on it before.  That was back in 2012, in my early days of commuting to New York City, and early days of blogging.  Sometimes I have to come back to a book, however, and rereading this one reminded me of why.  There’s a lot of good stuff in here.  It mostly focuses on the nineteenth century, but it does go back before that and steps into the twentieth century (when it was written) toward the end.  I’d forgotten a lot of what I’d learned before.

This time through, having worked as an editor for a decade and a half now, I could tell that it was originally a dissertation.  It’s pretty hard to remove that completely from any book project.  Nevertheless, it’s engagingly written and full of facts.  I’d forgotten that Santa’s red clothes were not, in fact, Coca-Cola’s invention.  And that Washington Irving played quite a role in introducing Americans to the holiday.  And just how interconnected Christmas is with Thanksgiving, New Years, and yes, even Halloween.  Of course, no book can be adequately summarized in a brief blog post.  My previous one highlights some of what I found here, but this reading brought out other interesting features.  I spend quite a bit of my energy anticipating holidays.  Some years they’ve been minimized due to circumstances, but they are definitely the fixed points around which my life revolves.

One of the interesting things I noticed this time, introduced literally on the second-to-last page, was that the book mentions holiday horror.  Restad’s focus is on America so she doesn’t really delve into the British tradition of telling scary stories at Christmas.  (I do discuss this in The Wicker Man, I would note.  Although set on May Day, it was released in December, fifty years ago.)  These kinds of interconnections fascinate me.  Our culture reflects who we are and American culture includes Christmas for any who want to take part in it.  In fact, the book makes the point that becoming secular helped Christmas spread goodwill to people of all religious persuasions, or none at all.  It’s not really even a Christian invention.  It’s a blending of traditions that bring light to the darkest time of year.  And here I am like a kid, eagerly awaiting it again.

Christmas Incorporated

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ChristmasinAmericaA number of years ago I wrote a short book on holidays for children. Like most of my books, it was never published. I wrote it when I learned that good books explaining in simple language whence various American holidays came appeared not to exist. The literary agents I contacted quickly showed me why. In any case, I remain curious about holidays and so I read Penne L. Restad’s Christmas in America: A History. There’s a wealth of gifts in this brief book. I’d researched the subject a little bit myself, so I already knew some of the origin stories, but if you’d like to know why we have Yule logs, egg nog, or why Santa prefers red, this is the book for you. As I’ve noted in previous posts, Christmas is a fairly recent star in the constellation of American holidays. In fact, those of us who work for secular companies know just how few holidays Americans officially celebrate. Having lived three years in the Scotland, I know how seriously holidays are taken in at least one corner of Europe.

Christmas didn’t really catch on in America until the nineteenth century. Industrialization was beginning and more and more was expected of the worker who made the robber barons wealthy. It is no accident that the American Christmas had many of its origins in New York City where much of the industry ran non-stop. Restad, however, makes a very good point that Christmas has always been both pro- and anti-commercial. Owners of large retail chains saw the opportunities to sell goods to time-stressed individuals while the giving of presents often promoted a selflessness uncharacteristic of those who stand to profit from consumers. Restad notes the increase in goodwill that Christmas generates in society as a whole. Indeed, I have seen more people giving to the homeless during the past two weeks than I had seen so far this year.

One aspect of Christmas that I hadn’t expected to find in Restad’s treatment was the early emergence of the “prosperity gospel.” Of course, it wasn’t called that in the early twentieth century, but in the millennia since the Christmas story actually originated, some in the church began to take their own righteousness far too seriously. Seeing that clergy who knew how to tug the soul-strings just right could easily gain wealth, they started to suggest that God wants you to be rich. They seem to have overlooked who was born in a stable because there was no room in the inn. Search the Gospels and your search will be in vain if you attempt to find words to console the rich. The “prosperity gospel” is as much a lie today as it was when it began, back in the days when dubious clergy looked for a way to excuse their comfortable lifestyles while many of their flock suffered want. Christmas in America shows itself to have a little bit of the social gospel built in, for it is clear that even the Devil can site Scripture for his own purposes.