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Dark Victory: The Rise of the Christmas Shopping Season [1]
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Date: 2022-10-15
"I wish I was the Easter Bunny..."
As is my custom, this year’s Thanksgiving will include gratitude that as a Jew, I get to enjoy Christmas as a spectator sport.
I will not be sitting in my living room with a dead tree, eating candy from socks nailed to the fireplace. I will not wrap my house in enough lights to make my house visible to astronauts on the International Space Station. I will awaken on the morning after Thanksgiving with a smile born of the knowledge that I am safe and secure from all things Black Friday.
There will be no children or spouses waiting for a 3-foot-wide guy in an immaculate red velvet suit to push his way down a sooty 10-inch Chimney flue for the ten millionth time in one night, just to ‘bring’ countless gifts that I bought, wrapped, and will be paying for until May.
The same is true for broadcast television. Content is dominated by every Christmas movie and TV special ever made. And every television commercial is Xmas-speak. A new Subaru, Dell Computer, Samsung TV is the perfect Christmas gift, Preparation H makes a great stocking stuffer, and you-know-what is the official cola of Thomas Nast’s Santa.
And I will not be listening to Christmas music. Let me qualify that. I will not be seeking out additional Christmas music beyond the background din that turns Christmas music into a yuletide tinnitus. Except for the quiet of home, there is little escape.
I have two exceptions. The first is The Singers Unlimited: Christmas. This 1972 recording set a musical precedent that still has not been equaled. The combined (and recombined) voices of Don Shelton, Len Dressler, Bonnie Herman and Gene Puerling created a multilayered vocal sound so distinctive and impossible to duplicate. that they have yet to be improved. After you hear their interpretation of Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, all other versions will seem incomplete.
And it wouldn’t be Christmas for me without a comedy video from 2005. That year Saturday Night Live recorded Christmas Time for the Jews , sung by music legend Darlene Love. The video is a claymation by Robert Smigel, who also wrote the lyrics.
Otherwise, there is no escape from Christmas in America. Not for Christians. Not for non-Christians. Some retailers had Christmas merchandise on display since well before Halloween.
TV content is dominated by every Christmas movie or television special ever made on some channel somewhere until Christmas Day at 11:59 PM. And every television commercial is Christmas-speak. A new Subaru, Dell Computer, Samsung TV is the perfect Christmas gift, Preparation H makes a “great stocking stuffer,” and you-know-what is the official cola of the birth of Jesus. The only commercials without a Christmas theme are usually for some new anti-depressant.
No retailer can be open for business without full-on Christmas decor. Houses are decorated in varying degrees of excess and taste. And the Fox News on-air automatons locked and loaded for their war on Happy Holidays.
Christmas is ubiquitous. But how and why did this happen?
Many years ago, I was chatting with Father “Glenn,” a Catholic priest, longtime acquaintance, and one of the most intelligent and interesting people I’ve ever been lucky enough to know. We’ve never gotten together without me coming away smarter.
We were having lunch one day and started discussing the Season of Spending, and on the largely failed efforts to merchandise Easter in the same way that Christmas has been. Our chat went something like this:
FATHER GLENN: Have you noticed that while sales of flowers, finer clothing for Easter church attendance and candy spike at Easter time, the spending and gift-giving excesses of Christmas haven’t sullied Easter?
ME: Yes, I have! And considering the power and determination of American businesses, I’m a bit surprised it hasn’t happened.
FATHER GLENN: Well, consider what Easter is. It’s the core of Christianity’s story, the death and resurrection of Jesus.
And what’s Christmas? A birthday. Have you ever known ANYONE who didn’t have a birthday? It may be the symbol of Jesus’ birthday. But it’s still just a birthday. And what to people do on birthdays? They buy gifts.
That’s the problem. The theological substance of Christmas is, if I may be so bold as to borrow a word from your tribe, “bupkis” compared to that of Easter. Combine that with Christmas’ more recent pagan origins and underpinnings, and you have a recipe for this materialistic train wreck known as the Christmas shopping season.
ME: I never thought of that. I guess there’s just too much religious significance to Easter for this to have happened. Could I say that it’s because Easter is nothing but Christianity?
FATHER GLENN: Exactly! Evidence of this can also be seen in church attendance. Across the spectrum of Christian denominations in the United States, church attendance on Christmas is meager compared to church attendance on Easter. Millions of Americans who don’t attend any Christmas service wouldn’t dream of not going on Easter. The ratio might be smaller in some Christian denominations and larger in others. But Easter church attendance always dwarfs that of Christmas. And there you have it, my brother from another theological mother… Black Friday vs. Good Friday!
ME: Even from my Jewish ‘outsider’ perspective, that makes sense… Glenn, I guess that’s why they pay you the big bucks.
FATHER GLENN: The big bucks? Funny. Are you forgetting this collar I wear? We’ve known each other too many years for THAT to work! It’s still YOUR turn to buy lunch."
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Christmas excess is relatively recent in the history of Christianity. In fact, for centuries Christmas was not considered a proper Christian observance. Christians, ever uncomfortable with too much pagan influence, shunned Christmas.
The Pilgrims who came to America in 1620 were strict Puritans, with firm views on religious holidays such as Christmas and Easter. They argued (incorrectly) that scripture did not name any holiday except the Sabbath. They held to the position that “holy days” implied some days were not holy. "They for whom all days are holy can have no holiday," was a common Puritan maxim.
And they were particularly contemptuous of Christmas. They called it "Fools Tide" and banned any celebration of it throughout the 17th and 18th centuries.
On the first Dec. 25 the settlers spent in Plymouth Colony, they worked in the fields as they would on any other day.
The next year, a group of non-Puritan workmen caught celebrating Christmas with a game of stoole-ball, an early precursor of baseball, were punished by Gov. William Bradford. "My conscience cannot let you play while everybody else is out working," he told them.
They shunned it in part because Christmas did not originate as a Christian holiday. The upper classes in ancient Rome celebrated Dec. 25 as the birthday of the sun god Mithra. The date fell right in the middle of Saturnalia, a month long holiday dedicated to food, drink, and revelry, and Pope Julius I is said to have chosen that day to celebrate Christ's birth as a way of co-opting the pagan rituals.
The Puritans also considered it historically inaccurate to place the Messiah's arrival on Dec. 25. They believed Jesus had been born sometime in September.
They also didn't like Christmas because it was a raucously popular holiday in late medieval England. Each year, rich landowners would throw open their doors to the poor and give them food and drink as an act of charity.
The poorest man in the parish was named the "Lord of Misrule," and the rich would wait upon him at feasts that often descended into bawdy drunkenness.
Such decadence never impressed religious purists. "Men dishonor Christ more in the 12 days of Christmas," wrote the 16th-century clergyman Hugh Latimer, "than in all the 12 months besides." In 1645, amid widespread anti-Christmas sentiment, Puritans in the English Parliament eliminated Christmas as a national holiday.
Settlers in New England in 1659 took their ‘yulephobia’ even further, outlawing Christmas celebrations entirely. Anyone caught shirking their work duties or feasting was forced to pay a significant penalty of five shillings.
Christmas returned to England in 1660. But in New England it remained banned until the 1680s, when the Crown managed to exert greater control over its subjects in Massachusetts.
In 1686, the royal governor of the colony, Sir Edmund Andros, sponsored a Christmas Day service at the Boston Town House. Fearing a violent backlash from Puritan settlers, Andros was flanked by redcoats as he prayed and sang Christmas hymns. Still, the Puritans never caved in, maintaining their boycott of Christmas in Massachusetts for decades.
Cotton Mather, New England's most influential religious leader, told his flock in 1712 that "the feast of Christ's nativity is spent in reveling, dicing, carding, masking, and in all licentious liberty...by mad mirth, by long eating, by hard drinking, by lewd gaming, by rude reveling!"
However, settlers in other colonies continued to celebrate it as a pious holiday and a time for revelry. In his Poor Richard's Almanac of 1739, Benjamin Franklin wrote of Christmas: "O blessed Season! Lov'd by Saints and Sinners / For long Devotions, or for longer Dinners."
Anti-Christmas sentiment flared up again around the time of the American Revolution. Colonial New Englanders began to associate Christmas with royal officialdom and refused to mark it as a holiday. Even after the Constitution came into effect, the Senate assembled on Christmas Day in 1797, as did the House in 1802. It was only in the following decades that disdain for the holiday slowly ebbed away.
One of the sparks that ignited American enthusiasm for Christmas turned out to be a poem. Clement Clarke Moore's poem A Visit from St. Nicholas, aka ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas,’ was published in New York in 1823 to unprecedented success.
Thirteen years later, Alabama became the first state to make Christmas a public holiday. Other states jumped on the bandwagon, and the flood gates were opened.
But not in New England. As late as 1850, schools and markets remained open on Christmas Day. In 1856 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow noted a “…transition state about Christmas" in New England. "The old Puritan feeling prevents it from being a cheerful, hearty holiday; though every year makes it more so," he wrote. Christmas Day wasn’t formally declared a federal holiday until Pres. Grant did so in 1870.
The rest is economic history.
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