Christmas in America had always reflected a mix of influences, from ancient Roman celebrations of the winter solstice to the Norse festival known as Yule.
Catholics in Europe had celebrated Christmas with public merriment since the Middle Ages, but Protestants often denounced the holiday as a vestige of paganism. These religious tensions spilled over to the American colonies and persisted after the Revolutionary War, when slavery divided the nation even further.
After the Civil War, many Americans pined for national traditions that could unify the country. Protestant opposition to Christmas celebrations had relaxed, so Congress finally declared Christmas a federal holiday in 1870. Millions of Americans soon adopted the German tradition of decorating trees. They also exchanged presents, sent cards and shared stories of Santa Claus, a figure whose image the cartoonist Thomas Nast perfected in the late 19th century.
The Christmases that Berlin and Crosby “used to know” were those of the 1910s and 1920s, when the season expanded to include the nation’s first public Christmas tree lighting ceremony and the appearance of Santa Claus at the end of Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
I hadn’t thought of secular Christmas this way… not as a mechanism to water down a religious observance, but as an adaptive response to create unity in a nation torn apart by a devastating war.
Perhaps, as a response to the Civil War and the desperate need to creed a national mythos to stop such a thing from happening again, we’ve forgotten how big and diverse and conflicted the various cultures have always been. And the Christmas tutt-tutting of my European friends has missed the point of what we were trying to accomplish here.
We’re pretty divided as a nation. A Multi-cultural critique of a dominant culture that is experienced as oppressive by those not naturally part of its narrative is helpful and necessary. But we do need something to resist the centrifugal impulses of the American experiment. If we view Christmas celebrations this way, can they still do that? Or shall we seek another?
Interesting thought! It seems like the battle lines are drawn pretty firmly around Christmas—“keep Christ in Christmas” bumper stickers, complaints about “ Happy Holidays!”—I wonder if Easter would work?