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The Battle for Christmas
In 1659 the Massachusetts Bay General Court declared the celebration of Christmas to be a criminal offense. What the Puritans were trying to suppress was a holiday marked by boisterous invasions of the homes of wealthy. As recently as the early 19 century, Christmas reveling often resulted in violence and riots. In this book, Nissenbaum explores the not-always-proud history of Christmas in American culture. 46 illustrations.
381 pages, Hardcover
First published November 5, 1996
401 people are currently reading
1926 people want to read
About the author
Stephen Nissenbaum
18 books17 followersProfessor Emeritus Stephen Nissenbaum (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin, 1968) retired from the History Department, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, in 2004. In 1998-99 he was a Fulbright Distinguished Professor at the Humboldt University in Berlin. His major publications include The Battle for Christmas (1996), which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist; Sex, Diet, and Debility in Jacksonian America: Sylvester Graham and Health Reform (1980); and Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft (with Paul Boyer, 1974), which won the American Historical Association's John H. Dunning Prize. He has held major fellowships from the NEH, the ACLS, Harvard's Charles Warren Center, and the American Antiquarian Society. He has also been active in the public humanities, having served as member (and president) of the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities (the state agency of the NEH) and as historical advisor to a number of films.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 177 reviews
December 12, 2018
No, this is not about Fox News and their imaginary War on Christmas, but an insightful look at the birth of the holiday itself.
Attention, Bill O'Reilly followers: Christmas is not a celebration of Jesus's birthday, but a cleaned up, churchified version of the Roman Saturnalia, essentially a pagan festival covered with a Christian veneer.
It was only in the 4th century that the Church officially decided to observe Christmas on December 25. And this date was not chosen for religious reasons but simply because it happened to mark the approximate arrival of the winter solstice, an event that was celebrated long before the advent of Christianity.
Early Christmas was a celebration of "misrule," a holiday more like Hallowe'en, where costumed participants indulged in drinking, parties, and tricks. Naturally, the Puritans frowned upon this merriment, and promptly banned the observance in the colonies.
I could go on and on, and the author certainly does. His book is exhaustively researched, and more than a little exhausting to read, which is why it took me three Decembers to finish. Trust me, he doesn't miss a trick. If you want to learn ANYTHING about the origins of how this holiday is observed in America - this is the book to consult.
Two tidbits I found fascinating - the concept of the Gift Book developed in 1820 and the first gift of the dreaded fruitcake in 1840.
One I wholeheartedly applaud, the other makes me cringe.
Attention, Bill O'Reilly followers: Christmas is not a celebration of Jesus's birthday, but a cleaned up, churchified version of the Roman Saturnalia, essentially a pagan festival covered with a Christian veneer.
It was only in the 4th century that the Church officially decided to observe Christmas on December 25. And this date was not chosen for religious reasons but simply because it happened to mark the approximate arrival of the winter solstice, an event that was celebrated long before the advent of Christianity.
Early Christmas was a celebration of "misrule," a holiday more like Hallowe'en, where costumed participants indulged in drinking, parties, and tricks. Naturally, the Puritans frowned upon this merriment, and promptly banned the observance in the colonies.
I could go on and on, and the author certainly does. His book is exhaustively researched, and more than a little exhausting to read, which is why it took me three Decembers to finish. Trust me, he doesn't miss a trick. If you want to learn ANYTHING about the origins of how this holiday is observed in America - this is the book to consult.
Two tidbits I found fascinating - the concept of the Gift Book developed in 1820 and the first gift of the dreaded fruitcake in 1840.
One I wholeheartedly applaud, the other makes me cringe.
April 26, 2016
Thanks to newsfeeds on various social media platforms, I’ve been able to follow the mildly entertaining faux-controversy swirling around the public display area of Florida’s State Capitol. If you’ve been living your life in blissful ignorance of this local-interest story massively inflated by special interests (contributions welcome!), it comes down to this: A prayer group put a Nativity scene into the Statehouse; atheist groups responded with a pro-winter solstice message; some guy put up a Festivus pole made of beer cans; and the whole thing jumped the shark with the arrival of the Satanists.
The high point (or low point, depending on your tolerance for such things) of this story was news personality Gretchen Carlson’s on-air explosion in conversation with the Catholic League’s Bill Donohue. Carlson’s irritation was made plain in a plaintive rhetorical question: “Why do I have to drive around with my kids to look for a Nativity scene…?”
This question leads to many more questions. Such as: “Why don’t you just go look at the Nativity scene at church?” Or “Why don’t you look at the Nativity scene in your neighbor’s yard?” Or “Do you often drop by the State Capitol when driving your kids around?”
Of course, it’s a waste of time to seek logic in this debate. The debate itself is manufactured, making it impervious to reason. This isn’t about easy access to Nativity scenes. It’s about politics, cooption, and fundraising. I’m a Catholic and a Christmas lover, but I don’t think for a second this is about crèche. This is about shoving something in a person’s face; waiting for them to respond; and then going insane when you get the response you expected in the first place.
This is all part of the so-called “War on Christmas,” and it helps a lot of people to sell books, get on television, raise funds, and generally support themselves. The “war” has been dormant for awhile, since debuting in 2005 in the midst of two actual wars. The latest salvo came last week when Fox’s Megyn Kelly stated that Santa Clause is definitively white. In reality, Santa Clause is not real.
These heated nothing-fights are very un-Christmas-like. But as Stephen Nissenbaum relates in his fun-yet-scholarly book The Battle for Christmas, they are nothing new. Though Nissenbaum’s book does not cover modern times – it starts with the Puritans and resolutely ends in the antebellum South – its message still resonates. From its inception as a holiday, people have quarreled about the meaning of Christmas and the terms of its celebration.
It’s no secret that a December 25 Christmas is an invention of the Church, strategically placed during the Winter Solstice to subvert pagan celebrations. The parts of Jesus’ birth that we’ve incorporated into our modern Christmas come mostly from a sketchy portrait in the Gospel of Luke, which numbers around 400 words.
Nissenbaum starts his book with the Puritans of New England, and their attempts – legislatively and otherwise – to suppress Christmas celebrations. This was not simply because Puritans hated all things fun. It was because early Christmas celebrations involved a lot more than me drinking a bottle of Yellow Tail and watching It’s a Wonderful Life on the couch.
A lot of the merrymaking in early U.S. history sounds quite terrifying, like a drunk adult Halloween taken to an inebriated extreme. It was nothing like the child-centered commercial carnival we know today. Instead, it was a mechanism for the working class to blow off steam. Despite the fact that drunks were breaking into their houses, the wealthy often supported the tradition, because it oddly reinforced the social order of things. (That is, by giving the peasants one day of the year to “demand” things from their social betters, it reminded the peasants of their place in the hierarchy).
The use of Christmas as a safety valve for a particular class system dominates the early part of The Battle for Christmas. It also reappears at the end, when Nissenbaum discusses Christmas among slaves and slave owners in the pre-War South. Plantation Christmases could often be perversely joyous celebrations, for much the same reason that wealthy elites let poor strangers into their houses: it cemented the social order.
Between the felonious early revelry that starts the book, and the inverted reality of a Christmas in Chains that ends it, Nissenbaum traces the holiday’s evolution into something recognizable today. In one chapter, he tells the story of Clement Clark Moore, a wealthy New York landowner who became Christmas’s poet laureate when he wrote A Visit From St. Nicholas.
In another chapter – one of the better in the book – Nissenbaum delves into the commercialization of Christmas through the process of gift giving. He makes a study of Gift Books, which were mass-marketed products meant to be given in a very personal and intimate way.
I am big into seasonal reading. When a particular season – especially autumn and winter – comes along, I try to read something appropriate, to get me in the spirit. This was my choice this year. When I made it, I picked it up from variety of books purporting to tell the true history of Christmas. It should be noted that Nissenbaum’s volume is actually a relatively serious work. It is heavily researched, with over fifty pages of annotated notes. He makes heavy use of contemporary letters and diary entries and attempts to extrapolate from them some sort of sociological meaning. In other words, this isn’t one of those light reads filled with featherweight yuletide trivia (e.g. “Santa Clause, though bearded, does not appear in the Bible”).
By the end of The Battle for Christmas, the holiday has shed its reputation of criminal wassailing, and becomes recognizable to modern eyes, with decorated pine trees, conspicuous consumption, and children who are upset that they didn't get what they wanted.
Of course, Christmas did not stop evolving in the middle of the 19th century, when Nissenbaum leaves off. In his forward, Nissenbaum explains that he stopped here because he felt that subsequent changes were a matter of degree, rather than kind. In other words, the commercially bacchanalian spirit of the day was firmly in place before the Civil War, lacking only Hallmark Movies and Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas is You.
As the aforementioned crèche-controversy makes clear, the battle for Christmas (as separate and distinct from the wholly invented war on Christmas) is far from over. There is still a struggle for the soul of Christmas, waged between the fun-hating Puritans and the nog-swilling merry-makers, between theological purists and secular participants, between merchants with junk to sell, and kids who want that junk.
The high point (or low point, depending on your tolerance for such things) of this story was news personality Gretchen Carlson’s on-air explosion in conversation with the Catholic League’s Bill Donohue. Carlson’s irritation was made plain in a plaintive rhetorical question: “Why do I have to drive around with my kids to look for a Nativity scene…?”
This question leads to many more questions. Such as: “Why don’t you just go look at the Nativity scene at church?” Or “Why don’t you look at the Nativity scene in your neighbor’s yard?” Or “Do you often drop by the State Capitol when driving your kids around?”
Of course, it’s a waste of time to seek logic in this debate. The debate itself is manufactured, making it impervious to reason. This isn’t about easy access to Nativity scenes. It’s about politics, cooption, and fundraising. I’m a Catholic and a Christmas lover, but I don’t think for a second this is about crèche. This is about shoving something in a person’s face; waiting for them to respond; and then going insane when you get the response you expected in the first place.
This is all part of the so-called “War on Christmas,” and it helps a lot of people to sell books, get on television, raise funds, and generally support themselves. The “war” has been dormant for awhile, since debuting in 2005 in the midst of two actual wars. The latest salvo came last week when Fox’s Megyn Kelly stated that Santa Clause is definitively white. In reality, Santa Clause is not real.
These heated nothing-fights are very un-Christmas-like. But as Stephen Nissenbaum relates in his fun-yet-scholarly book The Battle for Christmas, they are nothing new. Though Nissenbaum’s book does not cover modern times – it starts with the Puritans and resolutely ends in the antebellum South – its message still resonates. From its inception as a holiday, people have quarreled about the meaning of Christmas and the terms of its celebration.
It’s no secret that a December 25 Christmas is an invention of the Church, strategically placed during the Winter Solstice to subvert pagan celebrations. The parts of Jesus’ birth that we’ve incorporated into our modern Christmas come mostly from a sketchy portrait in the Gospel of Luke, which numbers around 400 words.
Nissenbaum starts his book with the Puritans of New England, and their attempts – legislatively and otherwise – to suppress Christmas celebrations. This was not simply because Puritans hated all things fun. It was because early Christmas celebrations involved a lot more than me drinking a bottle of Yellow Tail and watching It’s a Wonderful Life on the couch.
The holiday [the Puritans] suppressed was not what we probably mean when we think of a traditional Christmas…it involved behavior that most of us would find offensive and even shocking today – rowdy public displays of excessive eating and drinking, the mockery of established authority, aggressive begging (often involving the threat of doing harm), and even the invasion of wealthy homes.
It may seem odd that Christmas was ever celebrated in such a fashion. But there was a good reason. In northern agricultural societies, December was the major “punctuation mark” in the rhythmic cycle of work, a time when there was a minimum of work to be performed. The deep freeze of midwinter had not yet set in; the work of gathering the harvest and preparing it for winter was done; and there was plenty of newly fermented beer or wine…that had to be consumed before it spoiled.
A lot of the merrymaking in early U.S. history sounds quite terrifying, like a drunk adult Halloween taken to an inebriated extreme. It was nothing like the child-centered commercial carnival we know today. Instead, it was a mechanism for the working class to blow off steam. Despite the fact that drunks were breaking into their houses, the wealthy often supported the tradition, because it oddly reinforced the social order of things. (That is, by giving the peasants one day of the year to “demand” things from their social betters, it reminded the peasants of their place in the hierarchy).
The use of Christmas as a safety valve for a particular class system dominates the early part of The Battle for Christmas. It also reappears at the end, when Nissenbaum discusses Christmas among slaves and slave owners in the pre-War South. Plantation Christmases could often be perversely joyous celebrations, for much the same reason that wealthy elites let poor strangers into their houses: it cemented the social order.
Between the felonious early revelry that starts the book, and the inverted reality of a Christmas in Chains that ends it, Nissenbaum traces the holiday’s evolution into something recognizable today. In one chapter, he tells the story of Clement Clark Moore, a wealthy New York landowner who became Christmas’s poet laureate when he wrote A Visit From St. Nicholas.
In another chapter – one of the better in the book – Nissenbaum delves into the commercialization of Christmas through the process of gift giving. He makes a study of Gift Books, which were mass-marketed products meant to be given in a very personal and intimate way.
The publishers of Gift Books took pains to give their products a personalized look. Of course, any book given as a present could be personalized by means of an inscription on the flyleaf, giving the name of the giver and the recipient (and their relationship), and adding the date on which the book was presented. But Gift Books went further than that. Ironically, the very techniques of mass production were employed to make Gift Books appear personal and unique, to convey the impression that they were customized, even handmade, products. At the frontispiece of each volume, there typically appeared a special introductory page known as a “presentation plate” – an engraving designed to be written on by the buyer of the book, to personalize it and make the presentation itself an intrinsic part of the book.
I am big into seasonal reading. When a particular season – especially autumn and winter – comes along, I try to read something appropriate, to get me in the spirit. This was my choice this year. When I made it, I picked it up from variety of books purporting to tell the true history of Christmas. It should be noted that Nissenbaum’s volume is actually a relatively serious work. It is heavily researched, with over fifty pages of annotated notes. He makes heavy use of contemporary letters and diary entries and attempts to extrapolate from them some sort of sociological meaning. In other words, this isn’t one of those light reads filled with featherweight yuletide trivia (e.g. “Santa Clause, though bearded, does not appear in the Bible”).
By the end of The Battle for Christmas, the holiday has shed its reputation of criminal wassailing, and becomes recognizable to modern eyes, with decorated pine trees, conspicuous consumption, and children who are upset that they didn't get what they wanted.
Of course, Christmas did not stop evolving in the middle of the 19th century, when Nissenbaum leaves off. In his forward, Nissenbaum explains that he stopped here because he felt that subsequent changes were a matter of degree, rather than kind. In other words, the commercially bacchanalian spirit of the day was firmly in place before the Civil War, lacking only Hallmark Movies and Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas is You.
As the aforementioned crèche-controversy makes clear, the battle for Christmas (as separate and distinct from the wholly invented war on Christmas) is far from over. There is still a struggle for the soul of Christmas, waged between the fun-hating Puritans and the nog-swilling merry-makers, between theological purists and secular participants, between merchants with junk to sell, and kids who want that junk.
December 24, 2025
The Battle for Christmas: A Cultural History of America's Most Cherished Holiday is a long but interesting read. The story begins in the Puritans in Massachusetts, who outlawed Christmas as a holiday in New England and then continues to the present time today when we celebrate Christmas every year. The book makes for a really interesting read at Christmas time.
January 6, 2021
Дослідження про те, як і коли Різдво в Америці набуло свого теперішнього вигляду (спойлер - в першій половині XIX століття) Головна мета автора - показати, що плачі про те, що колись Різдво було таке духовне, домашнє і автентичне, а потім комерціалізувалося - не мають підґрунтя. Різдво стало комерційним саме тоді, коли стало родинним святом. Ніссенбаум показує зміну ранньомодерного карнавального Різдва на модерне домашнє Різдво і вписує цей процес у класові відносини в ранньомодерному і модерному суспільствах.
Починається книжка з того, що пуритани в Америці Різдво на дух не переносили, це не був жоден вихідний день і взагалі, святкування намагалися заборонити. Чому? Тому що християнського у цьому святі було ой як мало. Святкування Різдва у землеробських суспільствах співпадало з закінченням збирання урожаю. Селяни різали свиней, варили пиво і проводили зимові місяці у радісних п’янках, а на саме Різдво йшли до місцевого феодала, співали пісень і вимагали в нього ще більше випивки і розваг, а феодал і його родина годували їх пирогами. Це все вписувалося в карнавальну радість перевернутого світу, де пригнічений і той хто пригнічує міняються місцями на короткий час, щоб лише підкреслити незмінність ієрархій.
В індустріальному міському суспільстві, де динаміка стосунків і календар були інакшими, пригноблені елементи (учні ремісників і так далі) продовжували цю традицію, в основному співаючи непристойних пісень під будинками представників еліт і громлячи все підряд. Але елітам це вже не подобалося, бо неприємно, коли тобі співають під вікнами.
Пуритани намагалися трансформувати Різдво і нагадати, що має йтися не про пиво, а про духовність, але безуспішно. Натомість змінити значення свята і зробити його допропорядним допоміг капіталізм. Саме нові еліти взяли Різдво під контроль, перетворивши його на своє власне домашнє свято. Тепер лінія поділу була не класовою, а віковою і діти, які добре надавалися на роль пригніченої меншини, отримували подарунки від батьків. Відповідно, це зразу стало комерційним святом, бо треба було купувати іграшки, книжки і прикраси на ялинку. Але буквально кожне покоління майже від самого початку цієї традиції скаржилося на те, що от за їх часів Різдво було не про гроші, а про цінності. Так само міста почали змінюватися, бо нові звичаї вимагали безпечних вулиць без карнавальної юрби. Культура стала новим способом отримати владу і контроль над публічним простором.
Також Різдво стало святом доброчинності. Благодійники також орієнтувалися на дітей, бо можна було розсадити їх за столами і спостерігати як ті чемно і вдячно їдять що їм дали та й тішитися з того, як все гарно. Часом ставалися проколи і хлопчики-газетярі кидалися їжею у філантропів, але якщо старанніше дібрати діток і відсадити їх подалі, то можна було отримати гарну різдвяну сценку. Загалом розділ про вуайєризм доброчинців спонукає до роздумів про тепер і як ми хочемо бачити фотозвіти з доброчинних різдвяних обідів.
Натомість динаміка старого Різдва з феодалами і вдячними селянами відтворилася на американському Півдні, де раби на плантаціях отримували на Різдво подарунки від плантатора і влаштовували танці з перевдяганнями в білого пана. Що з рухами за тверезість і за скасування рабства поступово занепало, але залишилося в колективній пам’яті що Різдво це романтичне свято і в блюзових піснях можна познаходити купу еротики про Санту і панчішки.
Книжка про досить вузький часовий період у США, але цікава і корисна всім, бо:
- пояснює, що традиції вигадані - усі з них, тому нема чого ламати мечі що з цього автентичніше
- показує, як традиції змінюються в залежності від ієрархії влади в суспільстві
- вчить, що благодійність може бути до біса егоїстичним заняттям
- розповідає як віднаходити рештки давніх традицій у сучасних справах
- якщо любите Луїзу Мей Олкотт і Гаррієт Бічер Стоу, тут є про них
Деякі приклади трохи попритягувані за вуха, зокрема я не дуже зрозуміла як карнавальні звичаї лютого (карнавал на Пурім і перед Великим постом) стосуються карнавальності на Різдво, але то не є центральною темою.
Мені також книжка прояснила в голові чому євреї на Різдво не виходили з дому - бо ж від карнавальних радощів до карнавального побоїща один крок.
“What had changed, then, 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, domestic and child-centered, had been fashioned and was now being claimed as the “real” Christmas. The rest of it—public drunkenness and threats or acts of violence, “rough music”—had been redefined as crime, “making night hideous.”
***
“During the 1890s some New Yorkers began to treat charity, almost literally, as a kind of spectator sport, performed on a large scale in arenalike spaces before a paying audience. On Christmas Day, 1890, a midday dinner was served to 1,800 poor boys (many of them newsboys) at Lyric Hall, a theater at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Forty-second Street. This meal was followed, that same evening, by the traditional dinners held at every Newsboys’ Lodging House in the city. It was as if the newsboys were being asked to put on performances at different holiday venues—as if there were something erotically charged about watching hungry children eat”
Починається книжка з того, що пуритани в Америці Різдво на дух не переносили, це не був жоден вихідний день і взагалі, святкування намагалися заборонити. Чому? Тому що християнського у цьому святі було ой як мало. Святкування Різдва у землеробських суспільствах співпадало з закінченням збирання урожаю. Селяни різали свиней, варили пиво і проводили зимові місяці у радісних п’янках, а на саме Різдво йшли до місцевого феодала, співали пісень і вимагали в нього ще більше випивки і розваг, а феодал і його родина годували їх пирогами. Це все вписувалося в карнавальну радість перевернутого світу, де пригнічений і той хто пригнічує міняються місцями на короткий час, щоб лише підкреслити незмінність ієрархій.
В індустріальному міському суспільстві, де динаміка стосунків і календар були інакшими, пригноблені елементи (учні ремісників і так далі) продовжували цю традицію, в основному співаючи непристойних пісень під будинками представників еліт і громлячи все підряд. Але елітам це вже не подобалося, бо неприємно, коли тобі співають під вікнами.
Пуритани намагалися трансформувати Різдво і нагадати, що має йтися не про пиво, а про духовність, але безуспішно. Натомість змінити значення свята і зробити його допропорядним допоміг капіталізм. Саме нові еліти взяли Різдво під контроль, перетворивши його на своє власне домашнє свято. Тепер лінія поділу була не класовою, а віковою і діти, які добре надавалися на роль пригніченої меншини, отримували подарунки від батьків. Відповідно, це зразу стало комерційним святом, бо треба було купувати іграшки, книжки і прикраси на ялинку. Але буквально кожне покоління майже від самого початку цієї традиції скаржилося на те, що от за їх часів Різдво було не про гроші, а про цінності. Так само міста почали змінюватися, бо нові звичаї вимагали безпечних вулиць без карнавальної юрби. Культура стала новим способом отримати владу і контроль над публічним простором.
Також Різдво стало святом доброчинності. Благодійники також орієнтувалися на дітей, бо можна було розсадити їх за столами і спостерігати як ті чемно і вдячно їдять що їм дали та й тішитися з того, як все гарно. Часом ставалися проколи і хлопчики-газетярі кидалися їжею у філантропів, але якщо старанніше дібрати діток і відсадити їх подалі, то можна було отримати гарну різдвяну сценку. Загалом розділ про вуайєризм доброчинців спонукає до роздумів про тепер і як ми хочемо бачити фотозвіти з доброчинних різдвяних обідів.
Натомість динаміка старого Різдва з феодалами і вдячними селянами відтворилася на американському Півдні, де раби на плантаціях отримували на Різдво подарунки від плантатора і влаштовували танці з перевдяганнями в білого пана. Що з рухами за тверезість і за скасування рабства поступово занепало, але залишилося в колективній пам’яті що Різдво це романтичне свято і в блюзових піснях можна познаходити купу еротики про Санту і панчішки.
Книжка про досить вузький часовий період у США, але цікава і корисна всім, бо:
- пояснює, що традиції вигадані - усі з них, тому нема чого ламати мечі що з цього автентичніше
- показує, як традиції змінюються в залежності від ієрархії влади в суспільстві
- вчить, що благодійність може бути до біса егоїстичним заняттям
- розповідає як віднаходити рештки давніх традицій у сучасних справах
- якщо любите Луїзу Мей Олкотт і Гаррієт Бічер Стоу, тут є про них
Деякі приклади трохи попритягувані за вуха, зокрема я не дуже зрозуміла як карнавальні звичаї лютого (карнавал на Пурім і перед Великим постом) стосуються карнавальності на Різдво, але то не є центральною темою.
Мені також книжка прояснила в голові чому євреї на Різдво не виходили з дому - бо ж від карнавальних радощів до карнавального побоїща один крок.
“What had changed, then, 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, domestic and child-centered, had been fashioned and was now being claimed as the “real” Christmas. The rest of it—public drunkenness and threats or acts of violence, “rough music”—had been redefined as crime, “making night hideous.”
***
“During the 1890s some New Yorkers began to treat charity, almost literally, as a kind of spectator sport, performed on a large scale in arenalike spaces before a paying audience. On Christmas Day, 1890, a midday dinner was served to 1,800 poor boys (many of them newsboys) at Lyric Hall, a theater at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Forty-second Street. This meal was followed, that same evening, by the traditional dinners held at every Newsboys’ Lodging House in the city. It was as if the newsboys were being asked to put on performances at different holiday venues—as if there were something erotically charged about watching hungry children eat”
September 14, 2008
Fascinating. Especially in light of the Fox News meme "liberals are fighting a cultural war on Christmas" propagated on TV every winter. It was social conservatives in New England (led by the theologically liberal Unitarians!) who banned Christmas 200 years ago. Huh?
Christmas celebrations were a social carnival with roots in A Day of Misrule rituals marking the shortest day of the year. Public drunkenness and fornication was celebrated, along with barely tempered home invasions in which lords and ladies were forced to provide food and drink to their lower class guests or suffer the consequences. Bring us some figgy pudding, we won't go until we get some... indeed.
Scheduling church services on this day to reinforce piety and temperate behavior didn't rein in the behavior that caused fear and dread among the moneyed classes. But a top down social "revolution" did: a reinterpretation of all of the myths and symbols of the holiday away from an upside down social "gift exchange" between classes and toward a family holiday focused on giving gifts to children. Now that's a tradition the moneyed classes could support -- retail!
Controversy over the religious birthday question is not addressed directly, but I've read elsewhere that the early church deliberately selected an existing holiday for the scheduling of their savior's birthday in order to pump up its importance by latching onto an already socially important day. Put it all together and.... well, at a Christmas party a few years back, I related all of this to another guest. The next year at a similar gathering I encountered her again, and she said "You're the one who ruined Christmas for me!" Naturally, I apologized.
I pick this book up every year. And while I'm annoyed by the social science style of writing and organization, I find it indispensable.
Christmas celebrations were a social carnival with roots in A Day of Misrule rituals marking the shortest day of the year. Public drunkenness and fornication was celebrated, along with barely tempered home invasions in which lords and ladies were forced to provide food and drink to their lower class guests or suffer the consequences. Bring us some figgy pudding, we won't go until we get some... indeed.
Scheduling church services on this day to reinforce piety and temperate behavior didn't rein in the behavior that caused fear and dread among the moneyed classes. But a top down social "revolution" did: a reinterpretation of all of the myths and symbols of the holiday away from an upside down social "gift exchange" between classes and toward a family holiday focused on giving gifts to children. Now that's a tradition the moneyed classes could support -- retail!
Controversy over the religious birthday question is not addressed directly, but I've read elsewhere that the early church deliberately selected an existing holiday for the scheduling of their savior's birthday in order to pump up its importance by latching onto an already socially important day. Put it all together and.... well, at a Christmas party a few years back, I related all of this to another guest. The next year at a similar gathering I encountered her again, and she said "You're the one who ruined Christmas for me!" Naturally, I apologized.
I pick this book up every year. And while I'm annoyed by the social science style of writing and organization, I find it indispensable.
December 28, 2014
I just re-read this book over the Christmas holiday after it has sat on my shelf for 14 years (Apropos of nothing, it was the first book I ever bought on Amazon). This should be required reading for everyone who complains about either "the War on Christmas" or "what a shame it is that Christmas has become more commercial." Little do these people know that what Christmas was in "the good old days" was really pretty much a drunken brawl (where it wasn't declared illegal) & that the wholesome, family-values Christmas traditions we think of today didn't enter the picture until around 1830.
Eminently readable and full of interesting insights into the way America celebrates Christmas, this book is highly recommended.
Eminently readable and full of interesting insights into the way America celebrates Christmas, this book is highly recommended.
December 22, 2020
'Tis the season when the conservative Christians launch their yearly propaganda campaign about how "the atheists are trying to suppress Christmas." And after all, the atheists did make celebrating Christmas illegal in Massachusetts from 1659 to 1681, right? Oh wait, that wasn't the atheists, it was the Puritans (a.k.a. conservative Christians.) The first chapter of Nissenbaum's The Battle for Christmas is called "New England's War on Christmas", and quotes many anti-Christmas sermons and writings by the Puritan clergy, particularly Increase and Cotton Mather. As early as the first year after the Mayflower, Governor Bradstreet of Plymouth ordered would-be Christmas-keepers to return to work. English almanacs, when reprinted in New England, always had the entry for December 25 removed up until 1720 (when Benjamin Franklin's older brother James broke the taboo), and there were no Christmas hymns or other songs printed in New England before that date, except during the brief dictatorship of Governor Andros, when the Puritans were out of power. Christmas celebration was legalized under Andros; after his ouster, it remained legal but the campaign against it resumed with laws forbidding churches to be open or shops and workplaces to be closed on December 25 unless it fell on a Sunday. Nevertheless, all the efforts of the Puritan oligarchy were unable to prevent the working classes, particularly the sailors and fisherman of Marblehead and Nantucket, from "keeping Christmas".
Why did the Puritans oppose Christmas so fervently? First, because it's not in the Bible; they asked, if God wanted people to celebrate the nativity, why didn't he tell them when it was? They clearly and explicitly recognized that in fact the date and the rituals associated with Christmas were pagan survivals of the Saturnalia and solstice celebrations (the "true meaning of the season"? -- mention the fact today and they'll mutter about "the atheists are trying to . . ." but it's emphasized in Increase Mather's writings.) Second, because Christmas was a time of feasting, drinking, dancing and "sexual license", and, worst of all, working people demanding to be treated as equal to their "betters." (All sounds good to me!) The main custom of Christmas was "wassailing", in which peasants and other working people came to the houses of the rich and expected to be given food, drink, and even gifts of money, in exchange for singing and other performances -- and there was a veiled or not-so-veiled threat of what might happen if they didn't get it. This was later put back to Halloween as "trick-or-treat" but as a game for children rather than a serious activity for adults. (Trivia: wassailing in early modern Scotland was called "Hogomany" -- the true origin of Hogswatch?)
As America approached the Revolution and Puritanism weakened, the rising class of small shopkeepers and merchants, true to their class nature, tried to compromise: Christmas should be celebrated with "moderate" feasting, "moderate" drinking, "respectable" dancing, and of course church services and no class antagonism. They weren't successful. But at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Christmas did change. It's worth quoting what Nissenbaum says about it:
"What happened was that in New England as elsewhere, religion failed to transform Christmas from a season of misrule into an occasion of quieter pleasure. That transformation would, however, shortly take place -- but not at the hands of Christianity. The "house of ale" would not be vanquished by the house of God but by a new faith that was just beginning to sweep over American society. It was the religion of domesticity, which would be represented at Christmas-time not by Jesus of Nazareth but by a newer and more worldly deity -- Santa Claus."
The second chapter details the invention of Santa Claus and the present holiday of Christmas by a group of New York aristocratic landowners calling themselves the "Knickerbockers". Prominent among the inventors of the modern Christmas were Washington Irving, John Pintard, and most importantly, Clement Clarke Moore. All were of English, not Dutch ancestry, High Church Episcopalians, who were equally contemptuous of the bourgeoisie and the working class, and opposed the economic development of New York City in terms of a largely invented Dutch heritage from New Amsterdam. (See Irving's writings.) Santa Claus (a.k.a. Saint NicK) was presented as a revival of the old Dutch customs of Christmas, supposedly forgotten in the social transformations of the City. In fact, there was a Dutch tradition of Santa Claus, not exactly the same as the new American one, but it had never been brought to the New World -- it was a Dutch Catholic tradition, and New Amsterdam was founded by Dutch Protestants who were as anti-Christmas as their English Puritan cousins.
Who remembers reading Michael Wigglesworth's poem "The Day of Doom" in high school? (Okay, so I went to high school in Massachusetts.) Nissenbaum prints excerpts of this poem side by side with Moore's "A Visit from Saint Nicholas", better known today as "The Night Before Christmas". Moore follows the structure exactly, just replacing Jesus and hellfire by Santa and presents. I never laughed so much reading a serious book. The new Christmas also echoes the structure of the old Christmas -- the inversion of hierarchy and giving of gifts to social dependents -- but in place of the poor peasants or workers, the dependents involved are the rich person's own children, and it takes place safely within the family rather than in a potentially threatening public way. The third chapter follows the evolution of Santa Claus and the gradual extension of the domestic, child-centered Christmas at the expense of the Saturnalian, carnavalesque Christmas among the middle classes and eventually the working classes. It was a gradual process; this is the "battle for Christmas" of the title. He shows that it was also connected with the Romantic "invention of childhood."
The fourth chapter focuses on presents, and shows that the new child-centered conception of Christmas was also commercialized from its very beginnings. (Interestingly, the commercialization of Christmas gifts began with books, not toys.) The fifth chapter deals with the Christmas tree -- no, that's not an ancient tradition either. It seems to have begun about 1600 as a local tradition in Strasbourg, and was spread to the rest of Germany in the late 1700's, largely by Goethe's popular novel The Sorrows of Young Werther. It arrived in the U.S. about the same time as the invention of Santa Claus, and was spread again by literature, especially the Christmas Gift Books. The sixth chapter is about the connection of Christmas with organized charity, from Dickens' Scrooge to the Salvation Army. The seventh chapter deals with Christmas under slavery in the South, which was similar to the original Christmas, with the rich (i.e. the slaveowners) giving license and presents to their dependents (slaves). The book ends with a short Epilogue tying it all together.
The bottom line: Christmas was transformed from a pagan, Saturnalian holiday to a secular, commercialized domestic holiday in the course of the nineteenth century. And the Christian, religious holiday some people want us to "go back to"? It never existed. Which is why atheists have no interest in abolishing Christmas.
Why did the Puritans oppose Christmas so fervently? First, because it's not in the Bible; they asked, if God wanted people to celebrate the nativity, why didn't he tell them when it was? They clearly and explicitly recognized that in fact the date and the rituals associated with Christmas were pagan survivals of the Saturnalia and solstice celebrations (the "true meaning of the season"? -- mention the fact today and they'll mutter about "the atheists are trying to . . ." but it's emphasized in Increase Mather's writings.) Second, because Christmas was a time of feasting, drinking, dancing and "sexual license", and, worst of all, working people demanding to be treated as equal to their "betters." (All sounds good to me!) The main custom of Christmas was "wassailing", in which peasants and other working people came to the houses of the rich and expected to be given food, drink, and even gifts of money, in exchange for singing and other performances -- and there was a veiled or not-so-veiled threat of what might happen if they didn't get it. This was later put back to Halloween as "trick-or-treat" but as a game for children rather than a serious activity for adults. (Trivia: wassailing in early modern Scotland was called "Hogomany" -- the true origin of Hogswatch?)
As America approached the Revolution and Puritanism weakened, the rising class of small shopkeepers and merchants, true to their class nature, tried to compromise: Christmas should be celebrated with "moderate" feasting, "moderate" drinking, "respectable" dancing, and of course church services and no class antagonism. They weren't successful. But at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Christmas did change. It's worth quoting what Nissenbaum says about it:
"What happened was that in New England as elsewhere, religion failed to transform Christmas from a season of misrule into an occasion of quieter pleasure. That transformation would, however, shortly take place -- but not at the hands of Christianity. The "house of ale" would not be vanquished by the house of God but by a new faith that was just beginning to sweep over American society. It was the religion of domesticity, which would be represented at Christmas-time not by Jesus of Nazareth but by a newer and more worldly deity -- Santa Claus."
The second chapter details the invention of Santa Claus and the present holiday of Christmas by a group of New York aristocratic landowners calling themselves the "Knickerbockers". Prominent among the inventors of the modern Christmas were Washington Irving, John Pintard, and most importantly, Clement Clarke Moore. All were of English, not Dutch ancestry, High Church Episcopalians, who were equally contemptuous of the bourgeoisie and the working class, and opposed the economic development of New York City in terms of a largely invented Dutch heritage from New Amsterdam. (See Irving's writings.) Santa Claus (a.k.a. Saint NicK) was presented as a revival of the old Dutch customs of Christmas, supposedly forgotten in the social transformations of the City. In fact, there was a Dutch tradition of Santa Claus, not exactly the same as the new American one, but it had never been brought to the New World -- it was a Dutch Catholic tradition, and New Amsterdam was founded by Dutch Protestants who were as anti-Christmas as their English Puritan cousins.
Who remembers reading Michael Wigglesworth's poem "The Day of Doom" in high school? (Okay, so I went to high school in Massachusetts.) Nissenbaum prints excerpts of this poem side by side with Moore's "A Visit from Saint Nicholas", better known today as "The Night Before Christmas". Moore follows the structure exactly, just replacing Jesus and hellfire by Santa and presents. I never laughed so much reading a serious book. The new Christmas also echoes the structure of the old Christmas -- the inversion of hierarchy and giving of gifts to social dependents -- but in place of the poor peasants or workers, the dependents involved are the rich person's own children, and it takes place safely within the family rather than in a potentially threatening public way. The third chapter follows the evolution of Santa Claus and the gradual extension of the domestic, child-centered Christmas at the expense of the Saturnalian, carnavalesque Christmas among the middle classes and eventually the working classes. It was a gradual process; this is the "battle for Christmas" of the title. He shows that it was also connected with the Romantic "invention of childhood."
The fourth chapter focuses on presents, and shows that the new child-centered conception of Christmas was also commercialized from its very beginnings. (Interestingly, the commercialization of Christmas gifts began with books, not toys.) The fifth chapter deals with the Christmas tree -- no, that's not an ancient tradition either. It seems to have begun about 1600 as a local tradition in Strasbourg, and was spread to the rest of Germany in the late 1700's, largely by Goethe's popular novel The Sorrows of Young Werther. It arrived in the U.S. about the same time as the invention of Santa Claus, and was spread again by literature, especially the Christmas Gift Books. The sixth chapter is about the connection of Christmas with organized charity, from Dickens' Scrooge to the Salvation Army. The seventh chapter deals with Christmas under slavery in the South, which was similar to the original Christmas, with the rich (i.e. the slaveowners) giving license and presents to their dependents (slaves). The book ends with a short Epilogue tying it all together.
The bottom line: Christmas was transformed from a pagan, Saturnalian holiday to a secular, commercialized domestic holiday in the course of the nineteenth century. And the Christian, religious holiday some people want us to "go back to"? It never existed. Which is why atheists have no interest in abolishing Christmas.
January 5, 2022
This was so interesting, an eyeopening read of Christmas and the traditions in mostly the USA.
December 28, 2018
I wish I could give this book 5 stars. It is so thoroughly researched and there is so much information inside, but that's why I can't. There is almost too much information and it is not tied together as well as I would have liked. Nissenbaum's voice is also a bit strange, but not necessarily a barrier. This book serves better as a collection of essays for quick information or additional research rather than a nice afternoon read.
December 27, 2022
The Battle for Christmas was a comprehensive Pulitzer with a lot of research and analysis about Christmas. It gives the history of it and how traditions we consider timeless and carried over to the US from Europe, “the Old Country” were crafted 100-150 years ago by wealthy businessmen in New York. They wanted to change Christmas from an occasion for drunkenness and riot, and carnival origins and become transformed during 19th Century to a festival of domesticity and consumerism.
Nissenbaum backs this work with a wealth of documents and illustrations where he charts the invention of our current traditions from Saint Nicholas to the Christmas tree, and the practice of giving gifts to children. It was a more peaceful time for focusing on family and children. Our Christmas tradition is based on “The Night Before Christmas”, a poem published in 1823 in a New York newspaper.
This is an essential read if you want to understand the origins of Christmas celebrations and especially to the people who have perceptions of people who don’t celebrate it the way they might want you to. This book helps you understand how it has become what it is today and that it is more a commercial holiday that hasn’t had much to do with religion. To really celebrate the religious nature of Christmas, people need to stop the spending sprees that evolved.
Nissenbaum did an excellent job expounding the history and describing the problems with Christmas over the centuries especially colonial America.
Nissenbaum backs this work with a wealth of documents and illustrations where he charts the invention of our current traditions from Saint Nicholas to the Christmas tree, and the practice of giving gifts to children. It was a more peaceful time for focusing on family and children. Our Christmas tradition is based on “The Night Before Christmas”, a poem published in 1823 in a New York newspaper.
This is an essential read if you want to understand the origins of Christmas celebrations and especially to the people who have perceptions of people who don’t celebrate it the way they might want you to. This book helps you understand how it has become what it is today and that it is more a commercial holiday that hasn’t had much to do with religion. To really celebrate the religious nature of Christmas, people need to stop the spending sprees that evolved.
Nissenbaum did an excellent job expounding the history and describing the problems with Christmas over the centuries especially colonial America.
December 7, 2021
Interesting book
I enjoyed reading this book. It covered the traditions of Christmas in America. Well thought out and organized. It is a keeper
I enjoyed reading this book. It covered the traditions of Christmas in America. Well thought out and organized. It is a keeper
January 5, 2026
Delightful, and finished just before Three King's Day! Nissenbaum demonstrates the ways that our modern vision of Christmas - domestic, commercial, focused on figures like Santa Claus and rituals like the giving of presents to children - developed as a response to an older version of Christmas characterized by heavy drinking, inversion of paternalist social hierarchy, and carnival. In the early 19th century, Nissenbaum shows, as the United States (especially the major northern metropolitan areas in NYC, Philadelphia, and Boston) was undergoing a transition to industrial capitalism, the older rhythms of life focused on agriculture, harvest, and feast were disrupted by the transformation of the economy. One tradition of this agricultural lifeway, that of Christmas "wassailing," took on dreadful significance as the bonds of intimacy and familiarity linking patrician grandees to their social inferiors (especially apprentices and young men) broke down and were replaced by the anonymity and disposability of wage labor. In that context, Christmas carnival began to inspire fear for leading patricians eager to curb the "unruly" appetites of the poor. Thus figures like the fabulously wealthy Clement-Clarke Moore, a Manhattanite who owned the land on which Chelsea now sits, attempted to put forward a vision of Christmas as a domestic affair instead of a public celebration (thus Moore's invention and refinement of Santa Claus in "A Visit from St. Nicholas"). Hand-in-hand with the coming of a domestic Christmas was its commercialization, as children within the family, rather than rowdy wassailers, became the objects of patrician and bourgeois largesse. The practice of giving gifts to children thus imitated the older rituals of giving good drink and food to other kinds of social inferiors. As these gifts became increasingly lavish and routinized year after year, many 19th century Americans became concerned that children were being spoiled. The anxiety that Christmas's true meaning was being lost in the sea of commercialism is as old as the modern domestic Christmas itself.
The book's final chapter shifts perspective, focusing our attentions on the antebellum south and on Christmas among enslaved people. In doing so, Nissenbaum reinforces his central argument that our modern celebration of Christmas is intimately bound up with industrial modes of production - much deeper into the 19th century, enslaved black Americans practiced a number of rituals around Christmas which bear a striking resemblance to wassailing, owing in large part to the similarities between the antebellum south and the agrarian-patrician social order of early modern Europe. The decline of the carnival Christmas in the South appears to have come after 1865, when the relationships between blacks and whites changed with the former's liberation and the coming of Jim Crow.
While I ultimately find Nissenbaum's argument that patrician reformers played a significant role in creating our modern, domestic, family-and-child-centered Christmas persuasive, I was surprised at the end to see him emphasize the role of non-elites in ushering in this change. To be sure, this seems somewhat correct to me, but it was so out of step with the rest of the text prior to the epilogue that it was somewhat jarring. The foremost voices in most chapters are those of elite, bourgeois or patrician reformers interested in using culture to reform the working classes, but we see very little for most of the book about why or how members of the working class would have embraced such changes. Indeed, when the working classes appear in most of the book, they appear as reactionaries intent on preserving older carnival traditions, as in the case of the newsboys who accepted charitable feasts while engaging in food fights. A more comprehensive examination of this subject might have carried the story forward and described the working class embrace of Christmas reform in greater detail, for example by providing more insight into working class support for temperance. There are interesting hints of this - in the discussion of the Know-Nothing Party's efforts to make Christmas a public holiday in Massachusetts, for example - but they are almost all reserved for the epilogue.
In short, while Nissenbaum does an excellent job explaining why patrician reformers sought to invent a new set of Christmas traditions, he glides over the process by which those traditions were appropriated and embraced by the subjects of reform. I learned a tremendous amount here and had a lot of fun reading it, but the story is incomplete.
The book's final chapter shifts perspective, focusing our attentions on the antebellum south and on Christmas among enslaved people. In doing so, Nissenbaum reinforces his central argument that our modern celebration of Christmas is intimately bound up with industrial modes of production - much deeper into the 19th century, enslaved black Americans practiced a number of rituals around Christmas which bear a striking resemblance to wassailing, owing in large part to the similarities between the antebellum south and the agrarian-patrician social order of early modern Europe. The decline of the carnival Christmas in the South appears to have come after 1865, when the relationships between blacks and whites changed with the former's liberation and the coming of Jim Crow.
While I ultimately find Nissenbaum's argument that patrician reformers played a significant role in creating our modern, domestic, family-and-child-centered Christmas persuasive, I was surprised at the end to see him emphasize the role of non-elites in ushering in this change. To be sure, this seems somewhat correct to me, but it was so out of step with the rest of the text prior to the epilogue that it was somewhat jarring. The foremost voices in most chapters are those of elite, bourgeois or patrician reformers interested in using culture to reform the working classes, but we see very little for most of the book about why or how members of the working class would have embraced such changes. Indeed, when the working classes appear in most of the book, they appear as reactionaries intent on preserving older carnival traditions, as in the case of the newsboys who accepted charitable feasts while engaging in food fights. A more comprehensive examination of this subject might have carried the story forward and described the working class embrace of Christmas reform in greater detail, for example by providing more insight into working class support for temperance. There are interesting hints of this - in the discussion of the Know-Nothing Party's efforts to make Christmas a public holiday in Massachusetts, for example - but they are almost all reserved for the epilogue.
In short, while Nissenbaum does an excellent job explaining why patrician reformers sought to invent a new set of Christmas traditions, he glides over the process by which those traditions were appropriated and embraced by the subjects of reform. I learned a tremendous amount here and had a lot of fun reading it, but the story is incomplete.
December 18, 2019
A great book about the evolution of "Christmas" as we know it.
May 27, 2022
DNF Very interesting book, but very dense and not the easiest to read.
January 9, 2020
This had so much potential and was by no means bad, but the style was a bit dry and repetitive and made it a bit of a slog at times.
On the one hand, the use of primary sources is great! But on the other, when a chapter is more than half direct quotes from those sources, it's incredibly tiring and disruptive. They'd also do the "tell 'em what you're gonna tell 'em, tell 'em, then tell 'em what you told 'em" pattern a lot when integrating these sources, as well as revisiting these items repeatedly later on. If I had to hear about that one New Years incident another time I would have put the book down.
Speaking of that incident, I identify way too hard with the classist villains here because to this day I cannot understand how the celebration of holidays translates into "make as much noise as humanly possible and disturb other people". I totally understand the context here and the social significance of that trend in connection to the evolution of this specific holiday, but I am very much a believer that you should consider how your actions affect others around you at all times.
Not really important, just something that stood out to me as I have that sort of battle here in Florida at almost every holiday where people are setting off explosives and shit until 3am. I don't understand that sort of "celebrating", it's not for me, and I wish it was possible to opt out but that is physically impossible by its nature.
This should be mandatory reading for everyone who shrieks about keeping Christ in Christmas every year or gets inevitably offended by how Starbucks designs its cups. The phrase "invented tradition" is one I coincidentally co-discovered this season when I was discussing Elf on a Shelf with my girlfriend in a store, and it absolutely nails the core issue of this War on Christmas today.
I love that the author begins by specifically discussing the fact that there is absolutely NOTHING in scripture about Christmas and at first many (if not most) sects even saw it as blasphemous. There was a parallel evolution of the religious side of the holiday, the social undertones of how gifting serves a larger purpose in class relationships, and the more raucous and social-more-breaking secular celebrations, and the eventual melding of aspects of all three of these into the holiday we know.
It's an entirely manufactured holiday that has been commercialized since the start. It's an interesting ritual to study, and to compare with how people have always celebrated this time of year in some way or other.
Just tweak the writing style a bit and this is fantastic; it reads a bit more like someone's dissertation than a book aimed at a wider audience, and that's really the only reason it loses stars. Also, I wish this continued into the 20th century, as the evolution of the holiday in the first half of that century, then the late-century nostalgia-driven "remember the good old days" period, are just as interesting to me....though that could comprise its own entire sequel to this.
On the one hand, the use of primary sources is great! But on the other, when a chapter is more than half direct quotes from those sources, it's incredibly tiring and disruptive. They'd also do the "tell 'em what you're gonna tell 'em, tell 'em, then tell 'em what you told 'em" pattern a lot when integrating these sources, as well as revisiting these items repeatedly later on. If I had to hear about that one New Years incident another time I would have put the book down.
Speaking of that incident, I identify way too hard with the classist villains here because to this day I cannot understand how the celebration of holidays translates into "make as much noise as humanly possible and disturb other people". I totally understand the context here and the social significance of that trend in connection to the evolution of this specific holiday, but I am very much a believer that you should consider how your actions affect others around you at all times.
Not really important, just something that stood out to me as I have that sort of battle here in Florida at almost every holiday where people are setting off explosives and shit until 3am. I don't understand that sort of "celebrating", it's not for me, and I wish it was possible to opt out but that is physically impossible by its nature.
This should be mandatory reading for everyone who shrieks about keeping Christ in Christmas every year or gets inevitably offended by how Starbucks designs its cups. The phrase "invented tradition" is one I coincidentally co-discovered this season when I was discussing Elf on a Shelf with my girlfriend in a store, and it absolutely nails the core issue of this War on Christmas today.
I love that the author begins by specifically discussing the fact that there is absolutely NOTHING in scripture about Christmas and at first many (if not most) sects even saw it as blasphemous. There was a parallel evolution of the religious side of the holiday, the social undertones of how gifting serves a larger purpose in class relationships, and the more raucous and social-more-breaking secular celebrations, and the eventual melding of aspects of all three of these into the holiday we know.
It's an entirely manufactured holiday that has been commercialized since the start. It's an interesting ritual to study, and to compare with how people have always celebrated this time of year in some way or other.
Just tweak the writing style a bit and this is fantastic; it reads a bit more like someone's dissertation than a book aimed at a wider audience, and that's really the only reason it loses stars. Also, I wish this continued into the 20th century, as the evolution of the holiday in the first half of that century, then the late-century nostalgia-driven "remember the good old days" period, are just as interesting to me....though that could comprise its own entire sequel to this.
January 18, 2020
The research done for this book is amazing. It went places I never imagined it would go--the antebellum South and North, the antislavery movement, celebrations of Thanksgiving, Chanukah and Kwanzaa, and so much more. According to Nissenbaum, "traditions are not static but dynamic forces that are constantly being negotiated and renegotiated." There has been through history a constant irruption of the Saturnalia-style winter celebration that hints at a need for an overturning of social "station." And then an attempt to domesticate the celebration. It is a fascinating story, well-researched and well-written. But then Nissenbaum goes a little too far in his conclusions, with the statement that "domesticity and capitalism themselves, 'family values' and accumulative, competitive ones, have been deeply interlinked from the very beginning, even when they have appeared to represent alternative modes of feeling (or seemed to be in conflict with each other)." Because while they definitely can be and are often linked, I feel domesticity does not have to be linked with Capitalism "per se" nor has he proven that they have to be. Also, this book is at its best in the story of Christmas in America. There are many references to Christmas elsewhere, for example, England, Ireland, the Netherlands, but there is no real reference to the origins of Santa as a St. Nicholas from Turkey. And while there is a brief reference in this book to "Belsnickle," a relative of Santa in blackface, there is no connection of Belsnickle with "Black Peter," a companion of Saint Nicholas in the Netherlands who is the subject of much current-day protest.
February 4, 2022
The Battle for Christmas by Stephen Nissenbaum was a Finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for History. It was a very interesting book, looking at the development of Christmas celebrations from early Europe to modern America. What intrigued me the most is that the Christmas we know did not form until the mid 1800s and was initially decried for its blatant commercialism. Also the idea that in Pilgrim America, Thanksgiving was promoted as a holiday to cancel out the Saturnalian celebration that served as Christmas. The Christmas then was little of what we consider Christmas celebration today.
Currently reading
January 6, 2021Had this on my TBR, then saw a friend read it, so here we are. Couldn't even wait until summer, so as to make this one of my semi-traditional "Christmas in July" reads.
In an auspicious start, a footnote name-checks one of John Roberts' and Tony Barrand's "Nowell" records to give an example of a "historically informed" performance of a rowdy wassail song :).
In an auspicious start, a footnote name-checks one of John Roberts' and Tony Barrand's "Nowell" records to give an example of a "historically informed" performance of a rowdy wassail song :).
January 20, 2020
This is an excellent book. Well researched and written. This is a top notch history book that I would highly recommend. Perhaps it is more than you would ever want to know about the history of Christmas. Nissenbaum focus is especially on the United States in the last few centuries. He does a good job of defending his thesis that Christmas as we know it is an"invented tradition" and that the commercialization of Christmas has been there from the beginning of the modern Christmas.
November 19, 2024
This book was quite interesting, and though I found it a bit repetitive in places, it really drove home the points that the author was trying to make about the connection that Christmas has to all aspects of modern society.
January 17, 2026
Interesting and engrossing, and well worth the read. The only down side is that it rambles a little long at points, and loses its narrative flow to start reading like a textbook. (I listened to the audiobook but the point stands.)
Worth a read, though. Some legitimately fascinating stuff and well-researched by all accounts.
Worth a read, though. Some legitimately fascinating stuff and well-researched by all accounts.
September 27, 2011
This is the best book ever written about Christmas, but it's also a towering example of careful historical research. Simply and elegantly put, Christmas is not what you think it is. Even if you know the basic history of it. Without any malice or intent to lecture Americans about their Christmas kookiness, Nissenbaum's book traces our cultural and historical relationship to the holiday. The only bummer about this book is that a lot of people probably wouldn't read it because (and on this I speak from experience) they aren't wild about reading nonfiction about Christmas. Either the subject of Christmas bores them or they are too blinded by the dazzle and ritual of the secular binge (or too unwilling to examine their tenuously religious devotion to the holiday).
I wrote a book about Christmas, too -- a contemporary, non-fiction narrative: Tinsel: A Search for America's Christmas Present In so doing, I read dozens of books about the holiday, from sentimental (and cheap) fiction to Dickens to religious/inspirational/philosophical literature to psychology to economics to theological exegesis of the Nativity/infancy narratives and to works of scholarly research. Nissenbaum is the most essential for anyone seeking to know the most about how we got to the Christmas we currently celebrate. There are two others that are extremely helpful: Karal Marling's "Merry Christmas!" and Penne Restad's "Christmas in America": Christmas in America: A History; Merry Christmas!: Celebrating Americas Greatest Holiday
I wrote a book about Christmas, too -- a contemporary, non-fiction narrative: Tinsel: A Search for America's Christmas Present In so doing, I read dozens of books about the holiday, from sentimental (and cheap) fiction to Dickens to religious/inspirational/philosophical literature to psychology to economics to theological exegesis of the Nativity/infancy narratives and to works of scholarly research. Nissenbaum is the most essential for anyone seeking to know the most about how we got to the Christmas we currently celebrate. There are two others that are extremely helpful: Karal Marling's "Merry Christmas!" and Penne Restad's "Christmas in America": Christmas in America: A History; Merry Christmas!: Celebrating Americas Greatest Holiday
December 17, 2014
"Our own culture has made us acutely aware of inauthenticities that pervade our own lives- in advertising, business, and politics. And the awareness presses us to seek out the practices of other, different societies, including those of our own past- distant places and times that carry the promise of being more 'in touch' than our own with 'what really matters.'... We read about times gone by and we do not wish to think those were just as complex, and as morally ambiguous, as our own times. But of course they were... If this book has argued, on the one hand, that traditions are constantly changing and that the domestic Christmas idyll is surprisingly new, it has also argued that most of the problems we face at Christmas today- the greedy materialism, the jaded consumerism, the deliberate manipulation not only of goods but also of private desires and personal relationships into purchasable commodities- are surprisingly old. They date, in fact, to the emergence of the domestic Christmas itself. And they were being publicly debated, and lamented, as early as the 1830s."
A well-researched and interesting history of the development of modern Western Christmas traditions.
A well-researched and interesting history of the development of modern Western Christmas traditions.
November 4, 2011
This book is about twice as long as it needs to be. Unless you're a scholarly scholar, it's almost too much documentation. It is quite interesting, though, in the historical evolution of the holiday as we know it today. It really re-enforces my own belief that celebrating Jesus is a daily joy, not a December one. As most of our holidays have pagan origins, so it is with Christmas - the Christians jumping on board in hopes of calming and taking over the extremely rowdy Saturnalia and harvest festival. Thus, the battle for Christmas as we try to "fight" it today is certainly not a new one, but has been going on for centuries. Interesting reading and it actually clarifies some of my thoughts on the holiday. NOT changing my belief in celebrating Christ, not changing my joy in the good things we hope to emphasize at Christmas - but solidifying my belief that that celebration and joy should be in the heart all year long.
February 28, 2009
Got to page 50 and ran out of gas, skimmed the rest of the book and threw it back.
The book itself probably would have been a good read for someone truly interested in the history of Christmas traditions, but what I had been looking for was something that explained the history of Christmas as the date of Dec. 25 -- who decided it should be on December 25, what went into that decision, and what sorts of warring factions there were, as there must have been some.
I hate to mark the book down as a two-star -- it currently has a global rating higher than four -- but it does say My rating up there, and that's my personal rating. Others with different expectations would undoubtedly get more out of this.
The book itself probably would have been a good read for someone truly interested in the history of Christmas traditions, but what I had been looking for was something that explained the history of Christmas as the date of Dec. 25 -- who decided it should be on December 25, what went into that decision, and what sorts of warring factions there were, as there must have been some.
I hate to mark the book down as a two-star -- it currently has a global rating higher than four -- but it does say My rating up there, and that's my personal rating. Others with different expectations would undoubtedly get more out of this.
January 15, 2021
Absolutely fascinating history of how the Winter holidays were pushed/pulled in various culture scrapes over the centuries.
Nissenbaum's writing is accessible and he sheds much light on the way holidays on/around and for the Winter Solstice have been celebrated, co-opted, and derided.
The "Battle" Nissenbaum is talking about has nothing to do with the fabricated "War on Christmas" b.s. that Fox News promotes; rather it's a study of how the Cultural Christmas we Americans know today would shock the pants off anyone from 1776. Heck, people would get in trouble for not working on Christmas Day back then. Gotta "love" that Protestant work ethic.
Recommended for anyone who likes history, folklore, and cultural mores/politics.
Nissenbaum's writing is accessible and he sheds much light on the way holidays on/around and for the Winter Solstice have been celebrated, co-opted, and derided.
The "Battle" Nissenbaum is talking about has nothing to do with the fabricated "War on Christmas" b.s. that Fox News promotes; rather it's a study of how the Cultural Christmas we Americans know today would shock the pants off anyone from 1776. Heck, people would get in trouble for not working on Christmas Day back then. Gotta "love" that Protestant work ethic.
Recommended for anyone who likes history, folklore, and cultural mores/politics.
November 14, 2011
Argh - I so badly wanted to finish this - I almost quit early but kept plowing ahead. Learned a lot - its really researched - but it was very academic. Maybe we are all spoiled with these non-fiction writers who can construct drama in everything. Either way, a very informative book but I'd prefer this kinda info in a Wikipedia page then a 400 page book. Not sure if that is a comment about the book... or about me.
August 13, 2012
This book was an illuminating description of how the way we celebrate Christmas in the US has evolved in just a few generations. It will take you out of the mindset that there are immutable "traditions", seemingly hundreds of years old. If you are interested in how our perceptions of the Christmas holidays have been shaped over time, this is a really good one. Full disclosure, I am not a Christian, so I read this because I have an interest in the history of the holiday.
March 2, 2016
Meh. There was a lot of interesting information, but I feel like the prose meandered and, often, continually reiterated the same information without advancing an argument about the nature of the holiday. In the end, I felt as though this 300+ page book could have been significantly shorter had it been streamlined by the book's editor.
November 4, 2024
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