The title of this article that was printed in the Austin American Statesman. On December 25th of 1991,
The Making of a National Holiday by Michele Stanush
The idea was born right around Christmas.
Penne Restad, a doctoral candidate in American Studies at the University of Texas, was sitting in her West Austin home a few years ago, absentmindedly looking at her fireplace. On one side of the hearth was a menorah, her husband, who is Jewish, had brought it out for Hanukkah. On the other side was her aunt’s little ceramic Christmas tree, covered with tiny colored light bulbs. And slowly it struck Restad, maybe there was a dissertation topic sitting on her hearth.
“What I was looking at was something that had to do with a mix of cultures”, she remembers. They’re not related, and yet our culture has welded them together. And, from there, I got interested in the cultural history of Christmas.
The result, years of detailed research and a 500 page dissertation, (still in draft form in 1991), that looks at how and why Christmas evolved into the country’s biggest national holiday.
“We’re all implicated in it, regardless of religion or wealth”, says Restad. “What does it mean in a nation which separates church and state, that it’s really the main holiday”?
To trace Christmas’s Evolution in this country, Restad pored over old Diaries, travel accounts, reminiscences, newspapers and magazines such as Lady’s Godey’s book, The Atlantic and Harper’s Monthly.
“This is the age of multiculturalism. She says, But my thrust is opposite of that. I’m trying to find the strains of similarities. How is a culture we created a Christmas that is essential to our culture”.
Restad found early colonial reports to be scarce, in part because the Puritans frowned upon celebrating Christmas. Those colonists who did observe the holiday did so in widely varying ways, often based on traditions from their home country.
The United States was still a raw male oriented country, and Restad discovered many early Christmases, even through the 1800s,, to be raucous affairs, often celebrating with fireworks and gunshots. “You would drink with the boys and shoot guns and do rowdy things, she says. You’d pull over fences, knock down doorways and scare people”.
One of her favorite diary accounts, the fond childhood memories of a man who would inflate hog bladders, set them outside until cold and stiff, and then break them with a bang. Not surprisingly, most of Restad’s research focuses on the 19th century, when accounts of the holiday become easier to find and the so-called “New American Christmas” came into being.
“The themes of Christmas get more focused”, she says “it becomes primarily a domestic holiday, or at least its image imagery is focused around mother, child, hearthside, the Christmas tree. And peace on earth. Earth as the theme that becomes more pronounced, so does gift exchanging”.
As the century marches on, she finds, holiday traditions become more standardized, influenced by everything from urbanization to the media, which popularized concepts such as Santa Claus and the Christmas tree.
In 1850, for example, Godey’s Lady’s book published one of the earliest popular pictures of a decorated Christmas tree, which had been stolen from a British magazine, with all royal symbols airbrushed out of the picture. It wasn’t long, however, before Restad started finding reports of folks complaining Christmas had become too commercial
I think the first instant instance of real ambivalence I saw was in the mid 1860s, says Restad. By the 1920s, there were many, many essays and articles about. “Isn’t this a shame we’ve lost the true spirit of Christmas”.
“And when we talk about Christmas, we talk about what we’re concerned with in a broader sense. So when we say Christmas has become too commercial, we’re talking about our lives”. At the same time, Restad suggests that the commercial aspect of Christmas, in part, made the holidays so a pervasive time of year when now even Jewish rabbis find Christmas cards in their mail.
If we did not spend money at Christmas, If we did not somehow legitimize it with money, we as a culture would not celebrate the religious aspects of Christmas,
It’s money that brings it out into the broader community. But how does Christmas reflect our culture? Why, Indeed, has it become the event it has?
The question isn’t easy to answer.
I would like to I would like a tally of all the Movies Now that have Christmas in them, says Restad. “We have put Christmas into more things and more places with increasing frequency”. “And to me that says there is a need for something that Christmas suggests to us”.
But what is that? She says she isn’t yet sure, but she throws out one idea which might not be too far fetched. “Everyone wants to belong somehow. This is one way. When you’re walking down the street on Christmas Day, someone is bound to say, Merry Christmas. We suspend, for one day, our sense of competition, paranoia – all those things that have become part of the modern world. We act out our higher selves. We think about poverty and try to do something about it. We reach out. We reach our sense of what an ideal society is, in little bits, at Christmas”.
