Excerpted from Christmas Unwrapped: Consumerism, Christ, and Culture Richard Horsley and James Tracy, eds. (c) 2001 by Trinity Press International. Reprinted with permission of Trinity Press International. All rights reserved. Buy the book from Amazon.com and help support GraceOnline.

From the Introduction

by James Tracy

For most Americans, the word "Christmas" conjures up a collection of pleasant images. Christmas in our associations is, as Scrooge's nephew says, "a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open up their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys."

 Christmas summons images of family gathered around a decorated tree, of music and light and the comforting smell of a special dinner cooking on a snowy winter day. Carolers at the door, sleigh rides, chestnuts roasting on an open fire, and sugar plums also come into play, although almost no one today experiences any of these. Memories shimmering with the sheen of childhood magic emerge of Santa Claus as the mysterious impish distributor of presents found on Christmas morn under the tree.

  These images are appealing--and powerful. They offer a Yuletide in which people greet their fellows warmly in a seasonal harbor from an otherwise cold society, a light-filled and entertaining respite from the gray of winter, a time when we are given gifts and when values are realigned into their proper chain of being--with family and friendship taking their proper place at the top of our lives' hierarchy. These are wholesome, deeply resonant symbols of the values we hold dear and of a world for which we yearn.

In the context of modern America it is not the case that the marketplace has co-opted a Christian celebration; it is far more accurate and illuminating to recognize Christmas today as the religious expression of consumer capitalism.

But is this the Christmas we actually experience? How many people standing in line at the malls would say that their Christmas season is replete with warmth, affection, and neighborliness? In fact, Christmas is experienced by most adults as a time of intensified stress. They feel obliged to go through the motions of preparation for what they have been socialized to believe are Yuletide necessities, spending large portions of their income on obligatory gifts and long hours of increasingly limited leisure time fighting for parking spaces--in the process, piling up debt that may take months to repay.

The Currier and Ives or Dickensian Christmas that is sought never actually existed. It is little wonder, then, that the frenzied activity supposed to culminate in such a Christmas instead delivers disappointment as its denouement. The result is often "holiday blues" and even severe depression. Americans are bombarded with a flurry of marketing imagery that leads them on an annual consumerist chase after a chimera.

It has become commonplace for religious and other pundits to decry what they consider the poisoning of the Christmas well with untoward commercialism. Such jeremiads usually call for a return to the "original meaning" of Christmas, either as a Christian celebration of Jesus' birth or as a spiritual celebration of "family values." However well-intentioned, these critiques fall wide of the mark, in no small measure because they at least implicitly posit a golden age of Christmas observance from which we have fallen. In short, they assume that Christmas was once a religious holiday into which the marketplace has insinuated itself.

This assumption is historically inaccurate and analytically anemic. The fact is that the Christmas festival has never--since its inception--been particularly spiritual. It has, of course, accrued different meanings in varied times and contexts, some of which will be touched upon. In the context of modern America, though, it is certainly not the case that the marketplace has co-opted a Christian celebration to increase sales; it is far more accurate and illuminating to recognize Christmas today as the religious expression of consumer capitalism. In other words, Christmas is not an autonomous subject that has been victimized by the rise of modern advertising. Rather, it is but one face (the religious facet) of that multiheaded hydra that has become America's cultural hegemon--namely, consumer capitalism.

Many hundreds of books have been written about Christmas. Surprisingly, though, it was not until the publication of Stephen Nissenbaum's The Battle for Christmas: A Cultural History of America's Most Cherished Holiday that a historian of the first water rigorously applied the tools of contemporary social science to a trenchant examination of the historical emergence of the many meanings and appropriations of Christmas in America. Nissenbaum's analysis has, in fact, been germinal for this book. Most of the contributors to this volume in one way or another use Nissenbaum's impressive work as the starting point for their own analyses. For this reason, it is sensible to provide here--for those who have not read The Battle for Christmas--a brief overview of Nissenbaum's insights that have most informed the essays in this volume

Christmas, Nissenbaum demonstrates, never had an immaculate conception. As the Roman Empire was being christianized, church leaders placed a thin Christian veneer over the traditional and ineradicable pagan celebration around the time of the winter solstice. While there was absolutely no scriptural basis for celebrating the birth of Jesus at all, let alone in December, this proved a convenient vehicle by which the church could appropriate so deeply entrenched a pagan holiday. Many pagan elements persisted, of course, in the now-Christian holiday. These included remnants of Roman paganism, as well as subsequent accretions of northern European paganism when Christendom spread.

By the Middle Ages and well into the early modern period in Europe, Christmas was a peasant celebration marked by excess, carnality, and, significantly, at least momentary "social inversion" (8). Christmas, according to Nissenbaum, "once occasioned a kind of behavior that would be shocking today: It was a time of heavy drinking when the rules that governed people's behavior were momentarily abandoned in favor of an unrestrained 'carnival,' a kind of December Mardi Gras" (x).

Christmas as practiced in England in the seventeenth century so offended the Puritans that in 1659 the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony outlawed its observance. "In New England," Nissenbaum notes, "for the first two centuries of white settlement most people did not celebrate Christmas. In fact, the holiday was systematically suppressed by Puritans during the colonial period and largely ignored by their descendants. It was actually illegal to celebrate Christmas in Massachusetts between 1659 and 1681 (the fine was five shillings)" (3, Nissenbaum's italics).

Anyone familiar with the Puritans' sensibilities will readily understand why they took offense to a celebration for which there was "no biblical or historical reason to place the birth of Jesus on December 25" (4), which was marked by excessive public drinking and gluttony, and which often included ribald, even lewd, activities such as "mumming" (cross-dressing that was associated with overt sexual frolics) (7).

Of equal concern for the Puritan establishment was the fact that English norms treated Christmas festivity as "an occasion when the social hierarchy itself was symbolically turned upside down, in a gesture that inverted designated roles of gender, age, and class" (8). Christmas occasioned "the mockery of established authority, aggressive begging (often involving the threat of doing harm), and even the invasion of wealthy homes" (5).

The quaint and harmless carolers that Scrooge sends to flight merely by angrily picking up his ruler were not so easily dismissed in the medieval and early modern eras. The peasants were wont to go "wassailing" in a seasonal mood of social inversion, entering unbidden into the homes of their socioeconomic superiors with demands for favors and treats ("give us some figgy pudding; we won't go until we get some"). The wealthier homeowner fully understood that failure to provide his unwelcome guests with sweets would quickly sour the visit.

As with so many Puritan experiments, the attempt to simply stamp out these Christmas traditions failed. As the late Roman-era church leaders understood, it is easier to appropriate than to eradicate such popular traditions. By the early national period, when American cities became more populous and impersonal, these behaviors, according to Nissenbaum, "had become even more threatening, combining carnival rowdiness with urban gang violence and Christmas-season riots" (x-xi). This led New York's elites to pursue the domestication of Christmas. Nissenbaum attributes this endeavor to a circle of literati that included Clement Moore and Washington Irving, "a small group of antiquarian-minded New York gentlemen--men who knew one another and were members of a distinct social set. Collectively, those men became known as the Knickerbockers. . . [They] felt that they belonged to a patrician class whose authority was under siege" (64-65).

As a means of social control and in concert with emergent middle-class sensibilities, the Knickerbockers sought to transfer Christmas merrymaking from the public realm to the domestic sphere, in the process transforming holiday treating from a class-based demand of gifts from elites ("wassailing") to a family-centered giving of gifts by parents to children. As Nissenbaum states, "age replaced class as the axis along which the Christmas gift exchange took place" (109). The great stroke of genius that effected this successful appropriation, Nissenbaum argues, was the creation of Santa Claus as though he were a venerable Dutch tradition. Santa Claus was, in fact, an "invented tradition" who, "far from being a creature of ancient Dutch folklore . . . was essentially devised by a group of non-Dutch New Yorkers in the early nineteenth century" (x). The major literary vehicle for disseminating this new notion of a domesticated Christmas symbolically focused on Santa Claus as the bringer of gifts to children in their homes was, of course, Clement Moore's poem, "A Visit from St. Nicholas" (which began, "'Twas the night before Christmas").

Nissenbaum provides an engaging analysis of the imagery in this poem, the poem's efficacy in achieving the goals of the Knickerbockers, and the subsequent transformations of Santa Claus iconography in the nineteenth century. He concludes that what changed as a result of this new paradigm "was not that the rowdier ways of celebrating Christmas had disappeared, or even that they had diminished, but that a new kind of holiday celebration was now being proclaimed as the 'real' Christmas. The rest of it--public drunkenness and threats or acts of violence, 'rough music'--had been redefined as crime" (99, Nissenbaum's italics).

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