26 United States The Economist December 18th 2021
RowingaboutChristmas
H
aving spentalmost two decades ballyhooing a nonexistent
“War on Christmas”, Fox News received the best present imag
inable in the first week of Advent. A homeless man called Craig Ta
manaha, while stumbling around Manhattan late one night, came
across the 50foothigh “All American Christmas Tree” in Fox
Square. Mr Tamanaha climbed it, allegedly flicked his lighter, and
the treelike installation went up with a whoosh.
It seems the suspected arsonist was not in his perfect mind. Mr
Tamanaha had earlier exposed himself to journalists outside the
courthouse where Ghislaine Maxwell is on trial. Yet for Fox, his
vandalism represented the war its anchors had spent so long try
ing to talk into existence. “Torching Christmas trees is an attack on
Christianity!” wailed Tucker Carlson. For two days, the catastro
phe and Fox’s Churchillian resolve to rebuild the tree sculpture
dominated its coverage. “We will not let this deliberate and brazen
act of cowardice deter us,” thundered Fox’sceo, Suzanne Scott.
Fox’s imagined War on Christmas is nonsense and conserva
tive paydirt. Though Christian practice is collapsing (the share of
Americans who attend church regularly has fallen by almost half
since Bill O’Reilly first detected the war in 2005), Christmas is in
vulnerable. Nine in ten Americans celebrate it, including a grow
ing multitude of nonChristians. The problem, for Fox’s anxious
white audience, is precisely that diversity, however. The war is a
figment designed to exacerbate its fears of a changing country.
As ritualised cultural statements, festivals, as well as the de
bates around them, often reveal a lot about their participants, in
cluding how they see themselves and what they fear. Christmas
has done so to an astonishing degree in America, and in ways its
defenders on the right might find surprising.
For much of the country’s early history Christmas actually was
under attack. The Puritans of the Plymouth Colony considered it
wasteful, illicit and heathen; as indeed it was. A late addition to
the Christian calendar, in the 4th century, Christmas was timed to
match the winter solstice and Roman Saturnalia. And it retained
the attributes, including gorging, licentiousness and role reversal,
of those pagan revels. Between 1659 and 1681 it was illegal to cele
brate Christmas in Massachusetts, as it was in England around the
same time. But whereas the Restoration soon swept English Puritanismaside, its influence was far more enduring in America.
Christmas returned in the early 18th century in traditional
form. Historians have identified a surge of premarital pregnancies
in New England around this time, and a “bulge” in births in Sep
tember and October—nine months after the revels. Church and
state authorities meanwhile continued to condemn and resist
them. Christmas was a regular working day everywhere until Ala
bama, in 1836, made it a public holiday. Even now, New England’s
Unitarian, Baptist and Methodist churches, inheritors of the Puri
tan tradition, are often closed on December 25th.
The wealthy bourgeoisie that emerged in New York during the
early 19th century feared Christmas for more selfish reasons. Its
members disliked the drunken revellers who, each wild Christ
mastide, claimed a subversive right to their provisions and hearth.
So they set about domesticating the festival, out of which effort
came America’s biggest contribution to it: Santa Claus. Mittel
european versions of the magical presentgiver had long been
around; but the modern standard was set in 1822 by a rich slave
owner called Clement Clarke Moore, author of “The Night before
Christmas”. Where the historical St Nicholas was a lofty Greek
bishop, his version was a jovial proletarian figure. Instead of de
manding gifts, as the wassailers at Moore’s gate did, however, 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 exercise in taming Christmas.
A festival long associated with excess, now rededicated to
spoiling close relatives in America’s richest city, Christmas rapidly
became commercialised. CocaCola is often said to have estab
lished the furclad image of Santa Claus in a famous series of ad
verts in the 1930s. Yet similar images appeared, advertising toys
and household goods, in New York a century earlier. The adoption
of the Germanic Christmas tree in the 1830s was, for its promoters
in New England, an effort to return the festival to a more innocent
folk tradition. The attempt was later encouraged by Queen Victo
ria’s AngloGerman festivities. Indeed, the classic American
Christmas, which has changed relatively little since the 1850s, is
an AngloAmerican production. America contributed its most
famous poem and Santa Claus; Britain its most famous novel—
Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol”—and helped with the tree.Visions of sugar plums
Of course, Christmas trees soon provided new opportunities for
sales and marketing. After Thomas Edison’s business partner
strung electric bulbs around a tree in New York in 1882, tree lights
were soon being massproduced. And the marketers—another es
sential ingredient of the American Christmas—were only getting
started. The popular ritual of hiding a pickle decoration on the
Christmas tree began as a late 19thcentury Woolworths’ sales
gimmick. The Hall Brothers (now Hallmark) produced the first
folded Christmas card in 1915. Towns up and down the country re
branded themselves as seasonal theme parks (“It’s Christmas all
year round here in Bethlehem,” goes the slogan for that Pennsylva
nian town). 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 book, it can be yours for $32.95).
Fox’s grandstanding is just another effort to turn a buck from
the festival. Its War on Christmas is no more real than the elf.
Whether he knew it or not, by contrast, Mr Tamanaha’sSaturna
lian rampage was a deeply traditional festive act. It wasthesort of
thing the Pilgrim Fathers banned Christmas to prevent.nLexington
Knock yourself out, Fox: Americans have vied over Christmas for 400 years