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Christmas in America: A History
The manger or Macy's? Americans might well wonder which is the real shrine of Christmas, as they take part each year in a mix of churchgoing, shopping, and family togetherness. But the history of Christmas cannot be summed up so easily as the commercialization of a sacred day. As Penne Restad reveals in this marvelous new book, it has always been an ambiguous meld of sacred thoughts and worldly actions-- as well as a fascinating reflection of our changing society.
In Christmas in America , Restad brilliantly captures the rise and transformation of our most universal national holiday. In colonial times, it was celebrated either as an utterly solemn or a wildly social event--if it was celebrated at all. Virginians hunted, danced, and feasted. City dwellers flooded the streets in raucous demonstrations. Puritan New Englanders denounced the whole affair. Restad shows that as times changed, Christmas changed--and grew in popularity. In the early 1800s, New York served as an epicenter of the newly emerging holiday, drawing on its roots as a Dutch colony (St. Nicholas was particularly popular in the Netherlands, even after the Reformation), and aided by such men as Washington Irving. In 1822, another New Yorker named Clement Clarke Moore penned a poem now known as "'Twas the Night Before Christmas," virtually inventing the modern Santa Claus. Well-to-do townspeople displayed a German novelty, the decorated fir tree, in their parlors; an enterprising
printer discovered the money to be made from Christmas cards; and a hodgepodge of year-end celebrations began to coalesce around December 25 and the figure of Santa. The homecoming significance of the holiday increased with the Civil War, and by the end of the nineteenth century a full- fledged national holiday had materialized, forged out of borrowed and invented custom alike, and driven by a passion for gift-giving. In the twentieth century, Christmas seeped into every niche of our conscious and unconscious lives to become a festival of epic proportions. Indeed, Restad carries the story through to our own time, unwrapping the messages hidden inside countless movies, books, and television shows, revealing the inescapable presence--and ambiguous meaning--of Christmas in contemporary culture.
Filled with colorful detail and shining insight, Christmas in America reveals not only much about the emergence of the holiday, but also what our celebrations tell us about ourselves. From drunken revelry along colonial curbstones to family rituals around the tree, from Thomas Nast drawing the semiofficial portrait of St. Nick to the making of the film Home Alone , Restad's sparkling account offers much to amuse and ponder.
In Christmas in America , Restad brilliantly captures the rise and transformation of our most universal national holiday. In colonial times, it was celebrated either as an utterly solemn or a wildly social event--if it was celebrated at all. Virginians hunted, danced, and feasted. City dwellers flooded the streets in raucous demonstrations. Puritan New Englanders denounced the whole affair. Restad shows that as times changed, Christmas changed--and grew in popularity. In the early 1800s, New York served as an epicenter of the newly emerging holiday, drawing on its roots as a Dutch colony (St. Nicholas was particularly popular in the Netherlands, even after the Reformation), and aided by such men as Washington Irving. In 1822, another New Yorker named Clement Clarke Moore penned a poem now known as "'Twas the Night Before Christmas," virtually inventing the modern Santa Claus. Well-to-do townspeople displayed a German novelty, the decorated fir tree, in their parlors; an enterprising
printer discovered the money to be made from Christmas cards; and a hodgepodge of year-end celebrations began to coalesce around December 25 and the figure of Santa. The homecoming significance of the holiday increased with the Civil War, and by the end of the nineteenth century a full- fledged national holiday had materialized, forged out of borrowed and invented custom alike, and driven by a passion for gift-giving. In the twentieth century, Christmas seeped into every niche of our conscious and unconscious lives to become a festival of epic proportions. Indeed, Restad carries the story through to our own time, unwrapping the messages hidden inside countless movies, books, and television shows, revealing the inescapable presence--and ambiguous meaning--of Christmas in contemporary culture.
Filled with colorful detail and shining insight, Christmas in America reveals not only much about the emergence of the holiday, but also what our celebrations tell us about ourselves. From drunken revelry along colonial curbstones to family rituals around the tree, from Thomas Nast drawing the semiofficial portrait of St. Nick to the making of the film Home Alone , Restad's sparkling account offers much to amuse and ponder.
240 pages, Hardcover
First published October 24, 1995
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
November 21, 2023
A reader-friendly history of so many of America's holiday traditions, Restad's study is sure to please those who wonder whence such disparate customs came. Further comments may be found at: Sects and Violence in the Ancient World.
ADDITIONAL REVIEW:
I’ve read this book before and I posted a very brief review back in 2012. This time I’ll say a little bit more. As I point out in a more recent blog post (Sects and Violence in the Ancient World, this book began as a dissertation and hasn’t quite shed all the features of that genre. That doesn’t prevent this from being a wonderful resource full of great details about how Christmas became what it is in America. I still stick with my original four-star review.
Rested begins in the early colonial period, pointing out that Christmas wasn’t easily established, especially in Puritan New England. As America moved into the nineteenth century, several factors led to the local celebrations of the holiday that eventually gained momentum. One of those factors was Washington Irving’s writings about Christmas, and another was increasing immigration from countries where it was celebrated, principally Germany and England. Traditions blended and morphed and joined with commercial ventures, eventually offering one of the few holidays regularly recognized in the United States.
I written in other places about the fact that the US has a dearth of holidays. A typical employer will grudgingly give ten days off as paid holidays, and sometimes even fewer than that. This is out of sync with much of the rest of the developed world where increased prosperity and efficiency lead to more time off. Christmas is a great symbol of hope. This book is a nice, brief rundown of how things got to this state, up until the end of the last millennium.
ADDITIONAL REVIEW:
I’ve read this book before and I posted a very brief review back in 2012. This time I’ll say a little bit more. As I point out in a more recent blog post (Sects and Violence in the Ancient World, this book began as a dissertation and hasn’t quite shed all the features of that genre. That doesn’t prevent this from being a wonderful resource full of great details about how Christmas became what it is in America. I still stick with my original four-star review.
Rested begins in the early colonial period, pointing out that Christmas wasn’t easily established, especially in Puritan New England. As America moved into the nineteenth century, several factors led to the local celebrations of the holiday that eventually gained momentum. One of those factors was Washington Irving’s writings about Christmas, and another was increasing immigration from countries where it was celebrated, principally Germany and England. Traditions blended and morphed and joined with commercial ventures, eventually offering one of the few holidays regularly recognized in the United States.
I written in other places about the fact that the US has a dearth of holidays. A typical employer will grudgingly give ten days off as paid holidays, and sometimes even fewer than that. This is out of sync with much of the rest of the developed world where increased prosperity and efficiency lead to more time off. Christmas is a great symbol of hope. This book is a nice, brief rundown of how things got to this state, up until the end of the last millennium.
January 1, 2019
I really enjoyed this book, and although it was written in an almost academic style, it was surprisingly easy to read and I found myself up late at night not wanting to put it down. I skipped around the sections I was most interested in, and especially appreciated the chapter on slave celebrations in the American South as this is not a perspective on Christmas that I had come across before.
Overall, the text was well researched and read almost like a well-written PhD dissertation.
My biggest takeaway was that Christmas seems never to have been a very religious holiday anywhere in history. The Puritans banned its celebration, many traditions are based on Saturnalia and pagan rituals, and even when people did celebrate it throughout history it always seemed to be more about feasting, partying, and excess than about Jesus. Christmas is the peoples' holiday and history shows me that there's no one proper way to celebrate it.
Overall, the text was well researched and read almost like a well-written PhD dissertation.
My biggest takeaway was that Christmas seems never to have been a very religious holiday anywhere in history. The Puritans banned its celebration, many traditions are based on Saturnalia and pagan rituals, and even when people did celebrate it throughout history it always seemed to be more about feasting, partying, and excess than about Jesus. Christmas is the peoples' holiday and history shows me that there's no one proper way to celebrate it.
December 16, 2024
I enjoyed this interesting, thorough, and well-researched history of Christmas in the US. It’s written in an academic style, so some sections were tough. The book was full of great information and I’d recommend it to anyone with some downtime between Thanksgiving and the 25th!
November 24, 2023
A FINE HISTORY OF CHRISTMAS IN THE UNITED STATES
Historian Penne L. Restad wrote in the Foreword to this 1995 book, “There exists a commonplace history of America’s Christmas: Dour Puritan forefathers banned its observance and the effects of their prohibition lingered into the nineteenth century, when the stories of Washington Irving and Charles Dickens, the customs of new immigrants, and the expansion of commerce invigorated and widened our notion of the holiday. By the 1870s, Americans eagerly decorated trees, sang carols, shopped for gifts, and spent hot hours in kitchens preparing festive dishes. They … impatiently awaited the arrival of Santa Claus. By the end of the century, they had forged a new, splendid, and popular Christmas. Since then… materialism, aided by media, modern advertising, and mass marketing, has overtaken and profaned this most glorious of holidays. This account has guided much of the popular as well as academic writing on the holiday…
“[This book] places these understandings within a broad and often paradoxical chronicle, one that considers the holiday’s rich and changing spiritual, social, material, and personal meanings. It addresses those mythic qualities of Christmas that make it more than a simple winter festival, and shows it to be… a time of considerable private and social consequence… the celebration briefly unites a disparate people in rites and impulses that hold almost universal appeal… The chapters that follow provide an explanation for how much a Christmas came to be. In part, they comprise a narrative running from seventeenth century Jamestown, and before, to the present. They tell how Christmas has been celebrated or ignored at various times and in various places in America.” (Pg. vii-viii)
She recounts in the first chapter, “Sometime in the fourth century… the Roman Church began to celebrate a Feast of the Nativity and to do so on December 25… The Church has also grown concerned about the increasing popularity of pagan religious and mystery cults in Rome. Each year beginning on December 17, the first day of Saturnalia, and continuing through Kalends, the first day of January, most Romans feasted… and joined in other festivities as they paid homage to their deities. The Church’s alarm deepened when Emperor Aurelian… decreed in 274 C.E. that December 25, the winter solstice… be kept as a public festival in honor of the Invincible Sun. Rome’s Christians challenged paganism directly by specifying December 25, rather than some other date, as the day for their Nativity Feast.” (Pg. 4)
She reports, “By the seventeenth century… the Christmas season featured elaborate masques, mummeries, and pageants… It fell to Puritan reformers to put a stop to the unholy merriment and to bend arguments over the proper keeping of Christmas into an older and more basic one---whether there should even be an observance of the day… the Puritans struck Christmas… from their own lists of holy days. The Bible, they held, expressly commanded keeping only the Sabbath. That would be their practice as well… Even as the Puritan condemnation of Christmas intensified, the economic and social upheaval of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century had begun to alter English life. The standing social order… was crumbling. Christmas… could not escape unscathed.” (Pg. 7)
She recalls, “In 1659, in an atmosphere of tension over Anglicanism… the Massachusetts Bay General Court banned the keeping of Christmas… The law aimed to prevent the recurrence of further, unspecified ‘disorders’ which had apparently arisen… Pressure from England contributed to the troubled atmosphere. All of the once forbidden holiday rites had begun to be practiced once again during the Restoration in Britain, in forms more extreme than before… Finally in 1681, Massachusetts issued a repeal…” (Pg. 14)
She recounts, “Nineteenth-century Americans embraced and adapted many traditions from the many old Christmases around them to create the modern domestic holiday. Of these, the decorated evergreen tree and exchange of gifts among family and friends proved to be the most broadly significant and seductive. The tree… had a long history… Christians also invented a number of stories to explain the custom’s origin… At least some Christians had been bringing trees into their homes since the Reformation… the practice had begun to spread throughout Europe… Pennsylvania Dutch had brought the custom of Christmas trees to the United States in the early part of the nineteenth century… the German immigrants’ custom of a Christmas tree became a point of fascination for other Americans…. Often owing to the influence of German natives, evergreens began to appear in the homes of prominent Bostonians, Philadelphians, New Yorkers, and resident of other cities during the 1830s and 1840s.” (Pg. 57-59)
She notes, ‘[Charles] Dickens had written ‘A Christmas Carol’ in 1842 the winter after he had returned from his first visit to America… For part of this visit, he stayed in the home of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who allegedly imparted to Dickens a strong sense of the country’s spirit and customs. This included Christmas. Prior to then, Dickens had apparently shown no interest in the holiday… Only after his visit to America did Dickens begin to give large Christmas parties.” (Pg.136)
She explains, “So vital did Thanksgiving prove in inaugurating the Christmas season that commercial interest conspired in resetting its date. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, profits for Ohio’s Federated Department Stores declined. In 1939, earnings promised to be especially spare… [the] president of Federated, noted that by advancing the date of Thanksgiving one week, six additional days for Christmas shopping could be added to sales calendars. Persuaded by his logic, President Franklin Roosevelt moved the feast from the 30th to the 23rd of November, and in 1941, Congress set the annual date of Thanksgiving at the fourth (rather than the last) Thursday in November. As such, it… ensured a four-week shopping season each year.” (Pg. 162)
He concludes, “Christmas remains the most important holiday on our nation’s calendar… The holiday continues as always to cross the fluid boundaries between the realms of the sacred, secular, and profane. Sooner or later… its arrival brings individuals and culture into direct confrontation with ideals. It causes us to examine relationships with our families, our community, and our faith. At Christmastide, we must… set our priorities, establish our tolerances, and square our hopes with reality.” (Pg. 172)
This book will be of keen interest to those studying Christmas in this country.
Historian Penne L. Restad wrote in the Foreword to this 1995 book, “There exists a commonplace history of America’s Christmas: Dour Puritan forefathers banned its observance and the effects of their prohibition lingered into the nineteenth century, when the stories of Washington Irving and Charles Dickens, the customs of new immigrants, and the expansion of commerce invigorated and widened our notion of the holiday. By the 1870s, Americans eagerly decorated trees, sang carols, shopped for gifts, and spent hot hours in kitchens preparing festive dishes. They … impatiently awaited the arrival of Santa Claus. By the end of the century, they had forged a new, splendid, and popular Christmas. Since then… materialism, aided by media, modern advertising, and mass marketing, has overtaken and profaned this most glorious of holidays. This account has guided much of the popular as well as academic writing on the holiday…
“[This book] places these understandings within a broad and often paradoxical chronicle, one that considers the holiday’s rich and changing spiritual, social, material, and personal meanings. It addresses those mythic qualities of Christmas that make it more than a simple winter festival, and shows it to be… a time of considerable private and social consequence… the celebration briefly unites a disparate people in rites and impulses that hold almost universal appeal… The chapters that follow provide an explanation for how much a Christmas came to be. In part, they comprise a narrative running from seventeenth century Jamestown, and before, to the present. They tell how Christmas has been celebrated or ignored at various times and in various places in America.” (Pg. vii-viii)
She recounts in the first chapter, “Sometime in the fourth century… the Roman Church began to celebrate a Feast of the Nativity and to do so on December 25… The Church has also grown concerned about the increasing popularity of pagan religious and mystery cults in Rome. Each year beginning on December 17, the first day of Saturnalia, and continuing through Kalends, the first day of January, most Romans feasted… and joined in other festivities as they paid homage to their deities. The Church’s alarm deepened when Emperor Aurelian… decreed in 274 C.E. that December 25, the winter solstice… be kept as a public festival in honor of the Invincible Sun. Rome’s Christians challenged paganism directly by specifying December 25, rather than some other date, as the day for their Nativity Feast.” (Pg. 4)
She reports, “By the seventeenth century… the Christmas season featured elaborate masques, mummeries, and pageants… It fell to Puritan reformers to put a stop to the unholy merriment and to bend arguments over the proper keeping of Christmas into an older and more basic one---whether there should even be an observance of the day… the Puritans struck Christmas… from their own lists of holy days. The Bible, they held, expressly commanded keeping only the Sabbath. That would be their practice as well… Even as the Puritan condemnation of Christmas intensified, the economic and social upheaval of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century had begun to alter English life. The standing social order… was crumbling. Christmas… could not escape unscathed.” (Pg. 7)
She recalls, “In 1659, in an atmosphere of tension over Anglicanism… the Massachusetts Bay General Court banned the keeping of Christmas… The law aimed to prevent the recurrence of further, unspecified ‘disorders’ which had apparently arisen… Pressure from England contributed to the troubled atmosphere. All of the once forbidden holiday rites had begun to be practiced once again during the Restoration in Britain, in forms more extreme than before… Finally in 1681, Massachusetts issued a repeal…” (Pg. 14)
She recounts, “Nineteenth-century Americans embraced and adapted many traditions from the many old Christmases around them to create the modern domestic holiday. Of these, the decorated evergreen tree and exchange of gifts among family and friends proved to be the most broadly significant and seductive. The tree… had a long history… Christians also invented a number of stories to explain the custom’s origin… At least some Christians had been bringing trees into their homes since the Reformation… the practice had begun to spread throughout Europe… Pennsylvania Dutch had brought the custom of Christmas trees to the United States in the early part of the nineteenth century… the German immigrants’ custom of a Christmas tree became a point of fascination for other Americans…. Often owing to the influence of German natives, evergreens began to appear in the homes of prominent Bostonians, Philadelphians, New Yorkers, and resident of other cities during the 1830s and 1840s.” (Pg. 57-59)
She notes, ‘[Charles] Dickens had written ‘A Christmas Carol’ in 1842 the winter after he had returned from his first visit to America… For part of this visit, he stayed in the home of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who allegedly imparted to Dickens a strong sense of the country’s spirit and customs. This included Christmas. Prior to then, Dickens had apparently shown no interest in the holiday… Only after his visit to America did Dickens begin to give large Christmas parties.” (Pg.136)
She explains, “So vital did Thanksgiving prove in inaugurating the Christmas season that commercial interest conspired in resetting its date. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, profits for Ohio’s Federated Department Stores declined. In 1939, earnings promised to be especially spare… [the] president of Federated, noted that by advancing the date of Thanksgiving one week, six additional days for Christmas shopping could be added to sales calendars. Persuaded by his logic, President Franklin Roosevelt moved the feast from the 30th to the 23rd of November, and in 1941, Congress set the annual date of Thanksgiving at the fourth (rather than the last) Thursday in November. As such, it… ensured a four-week shopping season each year.” (Pg. 162)
He concludes, “Christmas remains the most important holiday on our nation’s calendar… The holiday continues as always to cross the fluid boundaries between the realms of the sacred, secular, and profane. Sooner or later… its arrival brings individuals and culture into direct confrontation with ideals. It causes us to examine relationships with our families, our community, and our faith. At Christmastide, we must… set our priorities, establish our tolerances, and square our hopes with reality.” (Pg. 172)
This book will be of keen interest to those studying Christmas in this country.
December 28, 2018
On the one hand, it was just what the title said: Christmas in America, not England or Europe, like so many books on Christmas do. After a short introduction of 1000 years of Christmas celebration, the only time she deals with European customs is when she's writing about Puritans and (mostly) German customs. This is a good thing.
The most interesting portion is on the 20th century. I suppose because 20th century Christmases are what I remember.
Unfortunately, although obviously very well researched, the book is not well organized. Essentially, the chronology of citations is haphazard. She jumps from 1862 to 1845 to 1867 in the same paragraph. It seems that, if she wanted to write about separate subjects, for example Santa Claus, Christmas trees, Gifts. etc. it would have been better to put the citations in chronological order or, at least, not skip around so much.
The most interesting portion is on the 20th century. I suppose because 20th century Christmases are what I remember.
Unfortunately, although obviously very well researched, the book is not well organized. Essentially, the chronology of citations is haphazard. She jumps from 1862 to 1845 to 1867 in the same paragraph. It seems that, if she wanted to write about separate subjects, for example Santa Claus, Christmas trees, Gifts. etc. it would have been better to put the citations in chronological order or, at least, not skip around so much.
January 3, 2022
Really a very fascinating history of Christmas in America! I really feel like more Americans should read it because it helps us to understand ourselves better.
November 25, 2024
god bless the Internet Archive
[used for writing inspiration/historical context]
[used for writing inspiration/historical context]
December 31, 2015
I started reading this book to hopefully learn what Christmas was like in the 1911 - 1913 time frame. For that purpose, the book was not well organized. For example, on one page the first year referenced was 1898. Then it jumped back to 1874, then forward again to 1893. That made it difficult to follow the development of the American Christmas tree or the development of the holiday in general.
Differences in how various ethnic groups celebrated are covered, but that also suffers from time jumps.
I did learn things, such as Christmas was ignored for many years in this country and people started complaining about the commercialization of Christmas in the early 1800s. Ever hear of Uncle Mistletoe? I never did until I read this book.
The book is interesting as a quick read to learn how Christmas has changed and why it was considered important from a national point of view.
Differences in how various ethnic groups celebrated are covered, but that also suffers from time jumps.
I did learn things, such as Christmas was ignored for many years in this country and people started complaining about the commercialization of Christmas in the early 1800s. Ever hear of Uncle Mistletoe? I never did until I read this book.
The book is interesting as a quick read to learn how Christmas has changed and why it was considered important from a national point of view.
December 26, 2011
This had a lot of information, but I found it almost oddly organized. There was a rough chronology, but it tended to jump around a bit. And for being about Christmas, it read rather dry. If you're interested in reading up on Christmas during the holiday season I would point you toward Merry Christmas!: Celebrating Americas Greatest Holiday.
January 26, 2015
This book was very readable, giving clear descriptions and analysis and plenty of historical quotes and examples to illustrate the author's points. The exploration of the early foundations of Christmas, Christmas among the colonists, and how it transformed over the 19th century are all thoroughly examined. I felt the 20th century was less well examined, and the last chapter felt rushed and incomplete. Overall it was an highly enjoyable and informative read.
November 30, 2015
Good background on the evolution of the holiday in America...chock full of detail.
The author develops a basic timeline in sharing her analysis. Unfortunately, she goes back and forth at times which can become annoying. In the chapter that deals with the Gilded Age, Restad cites examples from the 1830s and 1840s which she actually noted some chapters before when talking about Christmas in the slave-holding South.
For this reason I am docking a star and rating the book a four.
The author develops a basic timeline in sharing her analysis. Unfortunately, she goes back and forth at times which can become annoying. In the chapter that deals with the Gilded Age, Restad cites examples from the 1830s and 1840s which she actually noted some chapters before when talking about Christmas in the slave-holding South.
For this reason I am docking a star and rating the book a four.
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November 20, 2009This looks like a good book to read since Thanksgiving is coming.
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December 13, 2010I loved this book. It gave me so much information about how Americans have celebrated the Christmas season over the years.
December 14, 2012
A quick & enjoyable read. Various historical accounts of popular Christmas traditions and their evolution. It is sad how commercialized things have become....
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews