America’s Two Christmases—and Why They’re Both Pretty Great
The double joy of a particularly Christian, and a distinctly American, holiday.
MY PRIEST THE OTHER SUNDAY preached about Advent—no surprises there—and the tension between Advent’s waiting-period approach to Christmas, and America’s no-holds-barred commercialized celebration. Christmas does not start in October, he noted, and it does not grind to a halt on the evening of the 25th of December.
Christians are called to prepare for Christmas, he emphasized. Not by buying things and listening to the same twenty midcentury Christmas songs on repeat. By preparing spiritually for what we profess to believe Christmas to be: a moment in real time, in human history, when the great big abstract God of the universe entered our little world as a baby.
That American, secular Christmas, he suggested, is a distraction from the genuine article. Advent is quiet, expectant. Penitential, even.
Then at the end of Mass, he invited us to the parish hall for an evening of fun and arts and crafts and festive music.
TO BE SURE, a Christmas party is a far cry from a celebration of consumerism. And corralling people for a Christmas party after the big day is a feat. But what struck me is that my priest, only accidentally perhaps, made a point that I’ve long thought about with regard to Christmas: there are really two of them. There is the Christian Christmas, and there is an American, civic, and yes, commercial Christmas.
And I am an unapologetic celebrant of both of them.
On some level, this has always been the case. The early church, not knowing when Christ was really born, chose late December as a kind of Christianizing of an old pagan solstice celebration (or, in the estimation of the dour Puritans, as a sort of paganization of pure Christianity). Some sort of celebration in the cold, bare winter is a universal cultural phenomenon. In so many ways, for example, the Chinese New Year serves as “Christmas” in a completely distinct civilization. If Christmas as a winter festival did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it.
What is somewhat newer, though perhaps not quite as new as we sometimes imagine, is the utter commercialization of Christmas, and the escalation of gift-giving into a massive, multi-month industry that floats many businesses. This conflation of Christmas with buying and spending became an outsized cultural concern in the middle of the twentieth century. Think about the three most famous children’s animated Christmas TV specials, which all came out in the mid-1960s: the message of the song “Silver and Gold” in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964); all the griping about Christmas having “gone commercial” in A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965); and in How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (1966), the green guy’s discovery that Christmas “doesn’t come from a store; maybe Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more.” (All these were broadcast on sponsor-dependent commercial TV, mind you.)
One interesting way you can see the divide between the two Christmases is to ask people when exactly are the “twelve days of Christmas” celebrated in the counting carol. I haven’t conducted a scientific survey, but my sense is that lots of Americans believe the song is about the twelve days leading up to Christmas, and the season screeches to a halt on December 25 because there is no more gift-selling or gift-giving to be done. But on the Christian calendar, the twelve days start on Christmas and end on Epiphany. (In some traditions, the Christmas season lasts forty days, going all the way through Candlemas; imagine how intolerably long that version of the song would be.)
Aside from the complaints about the confusion and the commercialism of America’s secular version of Christmas, you’ve probably heard some of the other gripes. Some critics say America’s secular Christmas resembles a pagan celebration of wintertime; that is, Christmas as atmosphere, drained of having anything much to do with God or Christ. And there is an even nastier version of this critique, one still mostly confined to the seedier corners of the internet, although it perhaps informs some of this: that America’s secular Christmas is a Jewish invention, one part crass commercialism and one part an actual attack on Jesus Christ.
But this is not just antisemitic; it is a rejection of pluralism, and a rejection of something distinctly American.
AS A CATHOLIC, I observe Advent. I try to remember that quiet, expectant, even spooky idea, that unsettling thought that God walked on this earth.
But also, I must confess, I love the American secular Christmas. I love the Christmas songs on the radio for a month or more, the giant, tacky displays of artificial trees in every height and color in the stores, the inflatables ranging from Snoopy to Star Wars contraptions in the front yards, the dorky commercials rewriting carols and seasonal tunes with lyrics about going crazy while shopping. I love Frosty and Rudolph, the observation that “it’s a marshmallow world” when it snows, the general brightening up and enlivening of the winter.
And for anybody with even an ounce of sentimentality or nostalgia—which is most of us—even some of the quasi-commercial traditions can end up meaning something. The discount artificial tree from fifteen years ago that my father restrung after the cats gnawed the original lights; the Christmas village houses my wife and I buy, one after Christmas every year to look forward to displaying the next; archaeological layers of decorations and ornaments my parents accumulated over the decades, that function as receptacles for memories, a sort of mental map of my childhood condensed to a few boxes.
None of this takes away from the “reason for the season.” Why should it? Why can a human heart, and our nation, not be big enough for all of it?
What kind of cheerless bigot—if you look a little bit, you will find them—can hear the iconic sounds of the Phil Spector Christmas album and think “a Jewish producer using black artists to sing secular songs to attack Christmas” instead of enjoying the music? (In fact, that album does end with “Silent Night,” which is mostly instrumental but with the final words sung, making them the final words on the album itself: “Holy infant so tender and mild / sleep in heavenly peace.”)
In this vein, there is something beautiful about the Jewish contributions to America’s Christmas celebrations. Unable, of course, to celebrate the birth of Christ as a religious event, and therefore in some sense excluded from America’s primary cultural event, Jewish Americans wrote a whole canon of secular Christmas songs: “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” “White Christmas,” “The Christmas Song.” They helped to make Christmas something bigger and broader, helping to cement it as something not only religious, but truly American. It was not a redefinition of the holiday, but in some ways the invention of a parallel one. America’s secular, commercial Christmas is a triumph of the melting pot.
There is a Christmas for everyone, and every 25th of December, as I remember the birth of my Lord, I celebrate that, too.
Thank you for this. Wishing you and everyone in The Bulwark community the happiest of holiday seasons and the very best for the new year.
I love a pluralist holiday time. Less about a set of traditions or values being right or wrong, but a time to get recentered and reflect on being a part of a society of many, for many. For me it’s not an overwhelming cultural presence- it’s simply a time to appreciate. Now, the cheap gifts and tons of garbage- I feel like that is a different conversation that could be one of economic pluralism- where is the sturdiness of craftsmanship? Why not better gifts vs. more? Are we in a monoculture of amazonification?
A society that values craftsmanship may be one that is practicing attention. If we can learn to value the unique voice of a quality toy or a hand-knit sweater, or even an independently owned craft beer … are we practicing the same muscles needed to value the unique voice of a neighbor from a different religious background? Both require us to slow down, look past the surface, and honor the effort of others.