The Battle for Christmas

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Summary: The Battle for Christmas
Review: 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".

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Summary: A Rarity - Approachable, Readable Scholarship
Review: 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.

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Summary: Christmas Trees, Traditions Taken Down In "The Battle..."
Review: 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.