Dec 18th 2021
HAVING SPENT virtually 20 years ballyhooing a non-existent “War on Christmas”, Fox News acquired the very best current conceivable within the first week of Advent. A homeless man known as Craig Tamanaha, whereas stumbling round Manhattan late one evening, got here throughout the 50-foot-high “All American Christmas Tree” in Fox Square. Mr Tamanaha climbed it, allegedly flicked his lighter, and the tree-like set up went up with a whoosh.
Listen to this story
Your browser doesn’t assist the <audio> component.
Enjoy extra audio and podcasts on iOS or Android.
It appears the suspected arsonist was not in his good thoughts. Mr Tamanaha had earlier uncovered himself to journalists outdoors the courthouse the place Ghislaine Maxwell is on trial. Yet for Fox, his vandalism represented the conflict its anchors had spent so lengthy attempting to speak into existence. “Torching Christmas trees is an attack on Christianity!” wailed Tucker Carlson. For two days, the disaster and Fox’s Churchillian resolve to rebuild the tree sculpture dominated its protection. “We will not let this deliberate and brazen act of cowardice deter us,” thundered Fox’s CEO, Suzanne Scott.
Fox’s imagined War on Christmas is nonsense and conservative pay-dirt. Though Christian follow is collapsing (the share of Americans who attend church usually has fallen by virtually half since Bill O’Reilly first detected the conflict in 2005), Christmas is invulnerable. Nine in ten Americans have a good time it, together with a rising multitude of non-Christians. The downside, for Fox’s anxious white viewers, is exactly that variety, nonetheless. The conflict is a figment designed to exacerbate its fears of a altering nation.
As ritualised cultural statements, festivals, in addition to the debates round them, typically reveal quite a bit about their contributors, together with how they see themselves and what they concern. Christmas has carried out so to an astonishing diploma in America, and in methods its defenders on the appropriate would possibly discover stunning.
For a lot of the nation’s early historical past Christmas truly was beneath assault. The Puritans of the Plymouth Colony thought-about it wasteful, illicit and heathen; as certainly it was. A late addition to the Christian calendar, within the 4th century, Christmas was timed to match the winter solstice and Roman Saturnalia. And it retained the attributes, together with gorging, licentiousness and function reversal, of these pagan revels. Between 1659 and 1681 it was unlawful to have a good time Christmas in Massachusetts, because it was in England across the similar time. But whereas the Restoration quickly swept English Puritanism apart, its affect was way more enduring in America.
Christmas returned within the early 18th century in conventional type. Historians have recognized a surge of premarital pregnancies in New England round this time, and a “bulge” in births in September and October—9 months after the revels. Church and state authorities in the meantime continued to sentence and resist them. Christmas was an everyday working day in all places till Alabama, in 1836, made it a public vacation. Even now, New England’s Unitarian, Baptist and Methodist church buildings, inheritors of the Puritan custom, are sometimes closed on December twenty fifth.
The rich bourgeoisie that emerged in New York in the course of the early Nineteenth century feared Christmas for extra egocentric causes. Its members disliked the drunken revellers who, every wild Christmastide, claimed a subversive proper to their provisions and fireside. So they set about domesticating the pageant, out of which effort got here America’s largest contribution to it: Santa Claus. Mitteleuropean variations of the magical present-giver had lengthy been round; however the fashionable customary was set in 1822 by a wealthy slave proprietor known as Clement Clarke Moore, creator of “The Night before Christmas”. Where the historic St Nicholas was a lofty Greek bishop, his model was a jovial proletarian determine. Instead of demanding presents, because the wassailers at Moore’s gate did, nonetheless, he delivered them. Stephen Nissenbaum, a historian of the American Christmas, sees this as an inversion of propertied New Yorkers’ fears of the festive mob. It was an train in taming Christmas.
A pageant lengthy related to extra, now rededicated to spoiling shut relations in America’s richest metropolis, Christmas quickly turned commercialised. Coca-Cola is usually stated to have established the fur-clad picture of Santa Claus in a well-known sequence of adverts within the Nineteen Thirties. Yet related photographs appeared, promoting toys and family items, in New York a century earlier. The adoption of the Germanic Christmas tree within the 1830s was, for its promoters in New England, an effort to return the pageant to a extra harmless people custom. The try was later inspired by Queen Victoria’s Anglo-German festivities. Indeed, the traditional American Christmas, which has modified comparatively little because the 1850s, is an Anglo-American manufacturing. America contributed its most well-known poem and Santa Claus; Britain its most well-known novel—Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol”—and helped with the tree.
Visions of sugar plums
Of course, Christmas timber quickly supplied new alternatives for gross sales and advertising and marketing. After Thomas Edison’s enterprise companion strung electrical bulbs round a tree in New York in 1882, tree lights have been quickly being mass-produced. And the entrepreneurs—one other important ingredient of the American Christmas—have been solely getting began. The well-liked ritual of hiding a pickle ornament on the Christmas tree started as a late Nineteenth-century Woolworths’ gross sales gimmick. The Hall Brothers (now Hallmark) produced the primary folded Christmas card in 1915. Towns up and down the nation rebranded themselves as seasonal theme parks (“It’s Christmas all year round here in Bethlehem,” goes the slogan for that Pennsylvanian city). Since the publication in 2005 of “Elf on the Shelf: A Christmas Tradition”, over 13m households have been persuaded to “adopt” a toy elf (with the guide, it may be yours for $32.95).
Fox’s grandstanding is simply one other effort to show a buck from the pageant. Its War on Christmas isn’t any extra actual than the elf. Whether he knew it or not, against this, Mr Tamanaha’s Saturnalian rampage was a deeply conventional festive act. It was the type of factor the Pilgrim Fathers banned Christmas to forestall. ■
Read extra from Lexington, our columnist on American politics:
How the tradition wars can present what’s proper with America (Dec eleventh)
A racial-history lesson from the son of a slave (Dec 4th)
Pete Buttigieg’s unimaginable job (Nov 18th)
This article appeared within the United States part of the print version beneath the headline “Rowing about Christmas”