Customer Reviews

The Battle for Christmas

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Stephen Nissenbaum shows us that there is no "real" Christmas to which we must return to be authentic. While some will find his demystification of our cherished traditions depressing, I found it liberating. Christmas has always been a malleable tradition, according to Nissenbaum. That means that while it may be an "invented tradition", it is one we are free to reinvent for ourselves. Many of us are concerned about the extreme materialism and consumerism that rules our societies and hijacks our family and community life. The Battle for Christmas provides a roadmap of where we have been, and suggests where we might go to recapture the magic of this seasonal festival.

This is an intriguing book which shows how deeply many of our Christmas traditions are rooted in social anxiety. In particular, Nissenbaum successfully argues that Christmas in America has always been infused with a pragmatic spirit of paternalism, and he explores several different guises this cultural tendency has taken. In making his point, Nissenbaum concomitantly shatters the pervasive myth that rampant consumerism at Christmas is a post-war phenomenon. The author is a wonderful scholar, and he is a master at gleaning telling details from the great mass of sources he has consulted. I am a student of literature, and Nissenbaum's study broadened my own perspective on how Christmas is portrayed in nineteenth century fiction. Many things I always found confusing in literary depictions of Christmas now make much more sense. I read this book while I was finishing my dissertation (in a completely unrelated area), and I found Nissenbaum's writing itself to be a real inspiration. This is what scholarly writing should be: lucid, to-the-point, substantial, and engaging. Nissenbaum's style is flexible and approachable, his scholarship impeccable. That's a rare combination! I definitely want to read other of Nissenbaum's works.

How many of us feel guilty each year as the holiday season approaches, feeling that we are not celebrating the holidays with the spiritual ferver and simplicity of our ancestors? Well, it turns out that our ancestors, at least until the 19th century, were probably getting drunk, partying, and possibly taking in a bit of "chambering" (an old euphamism for fornication) during the Xmas season. This is a fascinating book that shows through solid data that our preconceived ideas of what Xmas used to be are largely incorrect. Cotton and Increase Mather both preached against the celebration of Christmas from the pulpit because the celebrations at the Xmas season in their lifetimes were seen to be so immoral as to be unfit for Christians. I found this book to be so interesting and pertinent that I spent a hour in a church class explaining its contents to my fellow churchgoers. I highly recommend this book for any curious and thoughtful person and bet it will liberate you from guilt and stress based on incorrect perceptions of Xmases past.

Readable, researched, and endlessly interesting, The Battle For Christmas is the best history of our modern holiday available. Nissenbaum writes with a clear voice, and presents a mountain of research flitered through a keen eye for culture. He debunks many of the myths surrounding the holiday, and shows where our modern traditions truly came from (mostly Victorian invention, not medieval tradition or Christian dogma). It's an interesting mix of invention, suppression, and substitution that really aimed to create a holiday for everyone (not just Christians) ... and has, as the years have passed, actually begun to fulfil that promise.

This book quite literally changed the way I viewed Christmas. I appreciate the holiday and enjoy the season much more than I used to!

UMass professor Stephen Nissenbaum's Pulitzer-Prize nominated "The Battle For Christmas" is an engrossing, sober look at a holiday celebration reformed from reaction to drunken revelry. Its 317 pages do not debunk so much as dissect traditions which seemed to "stand outside history." He sees larger points within about 18th and 19th century societal, racial, and cultural divides and Christmas' role in spurring American consumerist society.

Nissenbaum bookends "Battle" with accounts of New England's "wassail" tradition and of Christmas celebrations in the slavery South. He finds similar tales of pauper (peasant class, slave) trading places with prince (gentry, slavemaster) with wild costumes (German Belsnickle, African John Canoe, Boston-Philadelphia "mumming"), endorsed begging, whiskey-soaked revelry and feasting, bawdy songs, wanton sex, vandalism and violence equal parts Halloween and Mardi Gras. Nissenbaum successfully argues that this role reversal behavior was tolerated, even encouraged to reinforce traditional class roles.

Nissenbaum builds his unsentimental holiday history between these pillars. He reinterprets beloved, seemingly eternal seasonal traditions (Dickens' "Christmas Carol," decorated trees, St. Nicholas) as creations to refocus the celebration on temperance, home, and family (especially children). He links their manufacture and deliberate spread to 19th century revisionist views: abolition and the role of freed blacks, new child rearing and education theories. Nissenbaum redefines "Twas The Night Before Christmas" nearly line-by-line, showing the social satire within Clement Moore's detailed descriptions and figurative redrawing of the "jolly old elf." These intentionally benign images mask and spur attempts to link a consumer-driven society in a still-new nation with folk traditions generations old.

Nissenbaum saves his empathy and some of his most descriptive, humorous writing to chart contradictions and hyprocricies within holiday giving. Much like orphaned New York newsboys' food fighting over not getting holiday dessert first, he pokes the motivations behind gifts charitable (Ebeneezer Scrooge's symbolic Christmas turkey, slavemasters' gifts to field hands, Louisa May Alcott's reaction to a children's Christmas dinner, New York's well-to-do buying tickets to attend large charity dinners) and personal (charting the Sedgwick family's gift giving history with problems close to our modern Christmas.) Nissenbaum's epilogue falters comparing antiquity's "carnival" Christmas with today's wild clothes and "boom boxes." His modern parallels come too little, too late, yet his meticulous research and detached writing style form a more factual, critical account than Karol Ann Marling's 2000 "Merry Christmas." (I still prefer that book for its sentimentality, broad scope and author's personal reflections. Marling cited "Battle" as influencing her work).

Nissenbaum acknowledged "my muse, and my darling" Dona Brown because "she made sure I used the writing of this book as a way to exploring my own sense of what it means to be Jewish." This is worth mentioning because Nissenbaum concludes that "today we wish for a past that has no past" and "there was never a time when Christmas existed ...immune to the taint of commercialism." His statement conflicts with the greatest hit of a Jewish songwriter, Irving Berlin, who made millions worldwide wistful for a Christmas "just like the ones I used to know." Both men understood how distant, near non-existant that idealized Christmas wish was, but the difference between successful composer and truthful, scholarly author lied in reaction and perpetuation. With due respect to the author's heritage and religious faith, anyone wanting "Christ back in Christmas" or the "reason for the season" returned should read this deeply researched, highly recommended history.

It was difficult to choose a title for this review - it could have been "Christmas celebrations as economic class struggles" or "Nothing to do with the so-called war on Christmas" both of which are important points to make. Another possible title for the review could be "How Washington Irving and Clement Clarke Moore invented Christmas."

First, this has nothing to do with the Religious Right's claims that there is a so-called "War on Christmas" going on in the 21st century. The book was written in 1996, and the period it covers ends at the beginning of the 20th century, pretty much. Second, it's a work of anthropology, in a way, and history, economic sociology, perhaps. It has nothing to do with the religious significance of the day, only how people celebrate it.

Perhaps a single sentence from a later chapter will illustrate the main theme:
"A key reason for the enduring popularity of this holiday may well be that it has provided a profoundly ritualized means of helping people come to terms with their own complicity in a larger system that they realize must breed injustice."

He's talking specifically about slavery in the US in the first part of the 19th century, in that chapter - but the sentence also applies to the whole system of industrial capitalism, especially as it's played out in the USA. Although Nissenbaum isn't calling capitalism bad, per se, he does use several occasions to point out that industrial capitalism has, over the past couple of centuries, greatly increased the inequality between the rich and the poor, commercialized MANY types of transactions that used to be non-commercial (not just Christmas), and enabled the rich to distance themselves more from the poor, replacing any personal knowledge of conditions with, instead, impersonal donations to organized charities.

Some of the very interesting things you'll find in here: newspaper delivery boys demanding tips at Christmas goes back further than you think. The origin of seasonal Gift Books. (During the week I was reading this, our local newspaper had an article about the 20th-anniversary edition of "Uncle John's Bathroom Reader" coming out in time for Christmas this year, which in conjunction with the idea of the 19th-century gift book just sent me into helpless laughter.) The Christmas tree was more usually a New Year's tree.

Another nice coincidence for me was that the week before I read this book, I had gone to the Winterthur Museum (just outside Wilmington, Delaware) to see their Yuletide Celebration; the Yuletide tour of the DuPont mansion included many things that I found later in this book, with more detailed explanations - but also, one of the illustrations in the book is one of the very prints that was on exhibit at Winterthur!

Although "The Battle for Christmas" does not go into the 21st century, after reading it, I could not help but frame the modern rituals of shopping in the mall vs. shopping online in terms of the same economic struggle and public-vs.-private pendulum that Nissenbaum has discussed. Indeed, shopping at the mall involves a mix of the classes, a lot of noise, pushing, even violence; incessant, annoying music (just like the wassailers!), and a lot of travelling from place to place - very much mimicking the peasants going from house to house to beg for gifts from the aristocracy. Meanwhile, shopping online - in the peace of one's own home, with no personal interaction with any craftspeople or tradespeople, let alone lower classes (and the unspoken truth that even nowadays it's still usually the upper half of the economic classes who have computers at home, credit cards, and the sort of education that allows them to find unusual things online) - reflects the upper classes' desire to distance themselves from the whole mess. Why, you can even donate money to charity online, without ever having to go past a Santa Claus ringing a bell in front of a store! Read the book, you'll see what I mean. And then, go out and do some non-spectator hands-on charity with delivering boxes of food or serving meals or wrapping Blue Santa toys. You'll need a dose of something like that to feel less guilty.

Being born into a family of historians, I've heard plenty of discussion about a certain paradox concerning books published in the field. Many historians, including some who are quite intelligent and qualified, lack the talent for writing readable prose, so their works frequently prove inaccessible to a wider audience. On the other hand, many of the most popular and widely read history books are not, by traditional standards, 'good' history books based on solid research. Stephen Nissenbaum's "The Battle for Christmas" manages to bridge the gap by presenting solid historical research in an easy to understand way.

Roughly, the book covers how the Christmas holiday was experienced by ordinary people in the United States, mostly focusing on the nineteenth century. After an introductory chapter covering the Puritans' somewhat surprising attitude towards the holiday, we get chapters that look individually at various different traditions, such as gift giving, and at various regions of the country. Nissenbaum's major thesis is that our concept of a traditional family Christmas was actually invented around the 1820's, an action that corresponds with the rise of the middle class. He backs this up with a fearsome array of evidence, including personal letters, newspaper articles, and advertisements. However, the text is not merely a recitation of facts and data. Nissenbaum organizes it into a type of narrative, letting us clearly see the progression through time as people's attitudes towards Christmas changed. In addition, he provides detailed portraits of some individuals who played key roles in defining a new type of Christmas, thus making it easier to understand how social trends actually affected people's lives. After reading "The Battle for Christmas", you'll feel like you know people such as Clement Clarke Moore, the author of "A Visit from St. Nicholas".

People often say that it is sad that Christmas is more about Santa Claus than Christianity. This book, however, shows that Christmas as we know it has always been about Santa and that before Santa Christmas was so horrible that Christians preferred not to celebrate it at all. Amazingly our Christmas tradition is based on the "Night Before Christmas" poem first published in a New York newspaper in 1823 and this tradition had taken its current form with all of its commercialism by 1830. Nissenbaum is to be commended for digging out this history and showing what the problems with Christmas were over a number of centuries and especially in the colonia American period and how the author of the poem altered and shaped other sources, particularly contributions by Washinton Irving, to alter social behavior around this holiday. The book also discusses the coming of the Christmas tree, the place of Dickens in our Christmas myths, and the role of the Christmas tradition in Black history. The book may need to be revised, however, since there seems to be some controversy about who the author of "The Night Before Christmas" really was. Other more recent books now seem to be available on this piece of history, but this book is the original research on the subject.

This is an intriguing book which shows how deeply many of our Christmas traditions are rooted in social anxiety. In particular, Nissenbaum successfully argues that Christmas in America has always been infused with a pragmatic spirit of paternalism, and he explores several different guises this cultural tendency has taken. In making his point, Nissenbaum concomitantly shatters the pervasive myth that rampant consumerism at Christmas is a post-war phenomenon. The author is a wonderful scholar, and he is a master at gleaning telling details from the great mass of sources he has consulted. I am a student of literature, and Nissenbaum's study broadened my own perspective on how Christmas is portrayed in nineteenth century fiction. Many things I always found confusing in literary depictions of Christmas now make much more sense. I read this book while I was finishing my dissertation (in a completely unrelated area), and I found Nissenbaum's writing itself to be a real inspiration. This is what scholarly writing should be: lucid, to-the-point, substantial, and engaging. Nissenbaum's style is flexible and approachable, his scholarship impeccable. That's a rare combination! I definitely want to read other of Nissenbaum's works.

All history books should be this easy to read!
This is a wonderful and insightful survey of what primary sources (personal letters, printed documents and such) have to say about the development of the Christmas holiday as we know it here in the US.
The writing is cogent and never bogs even the casual reader down with dates, times, names and places. All the information is there, but it's utterly upstaged by the actual history and social trends.
This is not a religious history, but a social history of our Christmas customs, such as Xmas trees, gift-giving, or Santa Claus, and Nissenbaum nails it-- it's marvelous.

If they taught History in high school using texts like this, everybody would LIKE reading history.