Christmas is a necessity; if it didn’t exist, we’d have to invent it.

Various actors in the public sphere see Christmas as a battleground in the culture war (Nissenbaum, The Battle for Christmas, scholarly; Gibson, The War on Christmas, popular). Contesting Christmas—what the actors say Christmas means-- is itself a business, and business is good. People of faith skirmish with secularists, put-Christ-back-into-Christmas devotees battle merchants for hearts and wallets, and a few remnant Puritans give nearly inaudible voice to their centuries old complaint that Christmas, a date on the liturgical calendar, is not biblical.

 Except for the debate about secularism in the public sphere, the above paragraph could describe American society in 1905 and earlier. Leigh Schmidt, Professor of Religion at Princeton, tells the story of the construction of Christmas in America in Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays. Schmidt’s work is a superb piece of social history that is also a delight to read. In mustering diaries, handbills, sermons, newspaper articles and various advertisements, Schmidt shows that “the holiday was transformed through the intricately braided processes of domestication, Christianization, and commercialization.” (108) Today’s opposing camps jousted in similar fashion nearly two hundred years ago.

The rich heritage of varied Christmases in Europe deposited as many Christmases through arriving colonists. Shaping factors include class and geography, the latter being something of a proxy for denomination. Puritans and their heirs in New England sought to suppress Christmas. Those Protestants more influenced by Rome, who preserved the Roman liturgical calendar, tended to inhabit the middle and southern colonies. They celebrated a twelve day season of festivity that naturally included feasts with abundant food and drink.

However, according to Schmidt, Americans initially focused more of the season’s revelry on the New Year. “Plebians” caroused in drunken celebration, inviting both class-based and religious censure. For New Years, the gentility practiced stylized calling on friends and gift-giving, which soon spiraled in ever more materialistic display. Puritans denounced the pagan revelry, while less or non-Reformed evangelicals innovated the “watch-night” practice of watching in the New Year through repentance, prayer and “pious resolutions,” the forerunner to today’s non-religious New Year’s Resolutions.

During the early and mid-1800s, Protestants came to a cross-roads. “…the holidays, like the consumer culture, were terribly alluring, and in combination they were doubly so…..This growing alignment of evangelical Protestants behind the modern Christmas was integral to the holiday’s cultural ascent.” (121) The family-centeredness of feasting and the emergence of the concept of coddling children with gifts played on evangelical sentiments, and soon they accepted the blandishments of merchants and the spectacles of museums in relocating New Years giving to Christmas. Always the weaker partner in negotiating with culture, the Church (or much of it) accepted and then actively participated in both commercializing and “Christianizing” Christmas.

Lest this seem too impersonal (“commercialization”), we should remember that agents drove these developments. Saint Nicholas didn’t ‘just happen’ to evolve, he was intentionally developed by agents- writers, advertisers, merchants. Perhaps most of the ingredients already existed for development, but the myth of Santa the droll elf with an infinite bag of gifts was constructed and then standardized intentionally. (in rich detail, 130-148)

The balance of Schmidt’s tale, and highly worth reading, concerns the put-Christ-in-Christmas protests. Some of Schmidt’s sources seem genuine, but most, as he says, accommodated to such a degree that their protest-cum-acceptance essentially consecrated the consumer Christmas we have now.

Christmas, one might say, is imago humanae. As with other phenomena in culture, we make Christmas, and then Christmas graciously returns the favor. Christmas is a necessity, so we invented it.

© 2005, Glenn Lucke.