As another Christmas (or should we say holiday?) season unfolds, Americans are reviving their favorite customs for the festive season. Some may be religious, others secular, but there’s no doubt many Christmas traditions are the product of about 200 years of commercialization starting in the early 19th century.
Indeed, the commercial aspects of Christmas that many “traditionalists” lament have made the holiday so popular. The holiday itself evolved with other European feasts and celebrations starting in the first centuries after Christ. Like American society, Christmas is an amalgam of different cultural traditions mixed with pop culture and mass marketing to produce today’s hugely popular affair.
In this episode of History As It Happens, historian Ruth McClelland-Nugent dives into the origins of the modern Christmas, from ancient winter solstice feasts to family-centered gift-giving and Santa Claus myths, all the way to modern advertising campaigns and catchy tunes that have little to do with Christian theology.
“Tradition is a term we throw around a lot. We have a popular sense that things were all the same for a very long time and then recently everything changed. But, as a historian, when you dig into any kind of cultural custom, you tend to find there are lots and lots of changes that have taken place over time. That’s the way culture works,” said Ms. McClelland-Nugent, an expert on pop culture history at the Katherine Reese Pamplin College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Augusta University.
In recent years the “war on Christmas” has become a culture war fixation, but fights over the right way to celebrate are centuries old.
“In early modern England, it was very politicized. We know that with Christmas the Puritans were somehow hostile to it, but there were a lot of fights from the Reformation through the 19th century about the proper observance of holidays and the Christian calendar,” Ms. McClelland-Nugent said.
As for the “war on Christmas,” she said, “Christmas won.” Listen to this conversation about the “commercialization of Christmas” by subscribing to History As It Happens, which is available wherever you get your podcasts.
