The Battle for Christmas: A Cultural History of America's Most Cherished Holiday Book

Thanks to newsfeeds on various social media platforms, I've been able to follow the mildly entertaining faux-controversy swirling around the public display area of Florida's State Capitol. If you've been living your life in blissful ignorance of this local-interest story massively inflated by special interests (contributions welcome!), it comes down to this: A prayer group put a Nativity scene into the Statehouse; atheist groups responded with a pro-winter solstice message; some guy put up a Festivus pole made of beer cans; and the whole thing jumped the shark with the arrival of the Satanists.

The high point (or low point, depending on your tolerance for such things) of this story was news personality Gretchen Carlson's on-air explosion in conversation with the Catholic League's Bill Donohue. Carlson's irritation was made plain in a plaintive rhetorical question: "Why do I have to drive around with my kids to look for a Nativity scene…?"

This question leads to many more questions. Such as: "Why don't you just go look at the Nativity scene at church?" Or "Why don't you look at the Nativity scene in your neighbor's yard?" Or "Do you often drop by the State Capitol when driving your kids around?"

Of course, it's a waste of time to seek logic in this debate. The debate itself is manufactured, making it impervious to reason. This isn't about easy access to Nativity scenes. It's about politics, cooption, and fundraising. I'm a Catholic and a Christmas lover, but I don't think for a second this is about crèche. This is about shoving something in a person's face; waiting for them to respond; and then going insane when you get the response you expected in the first place.

This is all part of the so-called "War on Christmas," and it helps a lot of people to sell books, get on television, raise funds, and generally support themselves. The "war" has been dormant for awhile, since debuting in 2005 in the midst of two actual wars. The latest salvo came last week when Fox's Megyn Kelly stated that Santa Clause is definitively white. In reality, Santa Clause is not real.

These heated nothing-fights are very un-Christmas-like. But as Stephen Nissenbaum relates in his fun-yet-scholarly book The Battle for Christmas, they are nothing new. Though Nissenbaum's book does not cover modern times - it starts with the Puritans and resolutely ends in the antebellum South - its message still resonates. From its inception as a holiday, people have quarreled about the meaning of Christmas and the terms of its celebration.

It's no secret that a December 25 Christmas is an invention of the Church, strategically placed during the Winter Solstice to subvert pagan celebrations. The parts of Jesus' birth that we've incorporated into our modern Christmas come mostly from a sketchy portrait in the Gospel of Luke, which numbers around 400 words.

Nissenbaum starts his book with the Puritans of New England, and their attempts - legislatively and otherwise - to suppress Christmas celebrations. This was not simply because Puritans hated all things fun. It was because early Christmas celebrations involved a lot more than me drinking a bottle of Yellow Tail and watching It's a Wonderful Life on the couch.

The holiday [the Puritans] suppressed was not what we probably mean when we think of a traditional Christmas…it involved behavior that most of us would find offensive and even shocking today - rowdy public displays of excessive eating and drinking, the mockery of established authority, aggressive begging (often involving the threat of doing harm), and even the invasion of wealthy homes.

It may seem odd that Christmas was ever celebrated in such a fashion. But there was a good reason. In northern agricultural societies, December was the major "punctuation mark" in the rhythmic cycle of work, a time when there was a minimum of work to be performed. The deep freeze of midwinter had not yet set in; the work of gathering the harvest and preparing it for winter was done; and there was plenty of newly fermented beer or wine…that had to be consumed before it spoiled.

A lot of the merrymaking in early U.S. history sounds quite terrifying, like a drunk adult Halloween taken to an inebriated extreme. It was nothing like the child-centered commercial carnival we know today. Instead, it was a mechanism for the working class to blow off steam. Despite the fact that drunks were breaking into their houses, the wealthy often supported the tradition, because it oddly reinforced the social order of things. (That is, by giving the peasants one day of the year to "demand" things from their social betters, it reminded the peasants of their place in the hierarchy).

The use of Christmas as a safety valve for a particular class system dominates the early part of The Battle for Christmas. It also reappears at the end, when Nissenbaum discusses Christmas among slaves and slave owners in the pre-War South. Plantation Christmases could often be perversely joyous celebrations, for much the same reason that wealthy elites let poor strangers into their houses: it cemented the social order.

Between the felonious early revelry that starts the book, and the inverted reality of a Christmas in Chains that ends it, Nissenbaum traces the holiday's evolution into something recognizable today. In one chapter, he tells the story of Clement Clark Moore, a wealthy New York landowner who became Christmas's poet laureate when he wrote A Visit From St. Nicholas.

In another chapter - one of the better in the book - Nissenbaum delves into the commercialization of Christmas through the process of gift giving. He makes a study of Gift Books, which were mass-marketed products meant to be given in a very personal and intimate way.

The publishers of Gift Books took pains to give their products a personalized look. Of course, any book given as a present could be personalized by means of an inscription on the flyleaf, giving the name of the giver and the recipient (and their relationship), and adding the date on which the book was presented. But Gift Books went further than that. Ironically, the very techniques of mass production were employed to make Gift Books appear personal and unique, to convey the impression that they were customized, even handmade, products. At the frontispiece of each volume, there typically appeared a special introductory page known as a "presentation plate" - an engraving designed to be written on by the buyer of the book, to personalize it and make the presentation itself an intrinsic part of the book.

I am big into seasonal reading. When a particular season - especially autumn and winter - comes along, I try to read something appropriate, to get me in the spirit. This was my choice this year. When I made it, I picked it up from variety of books purporting to tell the true history of Christmas. It should be noted that Nissenbaum's volume is actually a relatively serious work. It is heavily researched, with over fifty pages of annotated notes. He makes heavy use of contemporary letters and diary entries and attempts to extrapolate from them some sort of sociological meaning. In other words, this isn't one of those light reads filled with featherweight yuletide trivia (e.g. "Santa Clause, though bearded, does not appear in the Bible").

By the end of The Battle for Christmas, the holiday has shed its reputation of criminal wassailing, and becomes recognizable to modern eyes, with decorated pine trees, conspicuous consumption, and children who are upset that they didn't get what they wanted.

Of course, Christmas did not stop evolving in the middle of the 19th century, when Nissenbaum leaves off. In his forward, Nissenbaum explains that he stopped here because he felt that subsequent changes were a matter of degree, rather than kind. In other words, the commercially bacchanalian spirit of the day was firmly in place before the Civil War, lacking only Hallmark Movies and Mariah Carey's All I Want for Christmas is You.

As the aforementioned crèche-controversy makes clear, the battle for Christmas (as separate and distinct from the wholly invented war on Christmas) is far from over. There is still a struggle for the soul of Christmas, waged between the fun-hating Puritans and the nog-swilling merry-makers, between theological purists and secular participants, between merchants with junk to sell, and kids who want that junk.