Ah, Christmastide is nigh; the traditional 12 days of Christmas that are about to bow. It’s such a wonderful time of the year on so many levels, religious, of course, and secular.
And while the birth of the Christ child is a story thousands of years old and thousands more times told, how we in America celebrate Christmas is, at least on that secular side, a relatively young affair.
As The History of Christmas website reminds us, it wasn’t until the second half of the 19th century that Americans began to embrace Christmas, changing it from “a raucous carnival holiday into a family centered day of peace and nostalgia.”
“By the last quarter of the 19th century, America eagerly decorated trees, caroled, baked and shopped for the Christmas season,” the website notes.
“Since that time, materialism, media, advertising and mass marketing have made Christmas what it is today.” For good and/or for ill.
The website reminds that the traditions we enjoy at Christmas today “were invented by blending together customs from many different countries into what is considered by many to be our national holiday.”
Heavily truncated herewith is a brief timeline on the evolution of “modern” secular Christmas in America:
1863: Illustrator Thomas Nast created images of Santa Claus for the Christmas editions of Harper’s Magazine, continuing through the 1890s.
1897: Francis P. Church, an editorial writer for the New York Sun, wrote an editorial in response to a letter from Virginia O’Hanlon, 8. She had written to the paper asking whether there really was a Santa. That editorial, “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus,” became a Christmas mainstay in newspapers across the land.
1920s: The image of Santa was standardized to portray a bearded, overweight and jolly man dressed in a red suit with white trim.
1931: Further reinforcing the image of Santa was advertising for Coca-Cola.
1939: Robert L. May created a poem about “Rudolph,” a red-nosed reindeer who saved Christmas one foggy Christmas Eve for a Montgomery Ward Company advertisement.
1949: Johnny Marks penned the song “Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer.” And May and Marks – and Rudolph — went down, as Gene Autry would sing, in Christmas “his-tore-ee.”
So, you see, complaints about the “commercialization of Christmas” are nearly as old as is the “modern” celebration of Christmas in America.
Nonetheless, a very gratifying thing happens each year at this time for many, if not most, of us.
As the hustle and bustle subsides, the globe seems to turn more slowly on its axis. It’s as if the world is exhaling. The dusk of Christmas Eve brings families, friends and even strangers together.
One cannot help but to pause, to reflect, to take stock and to rejoice. And we affirm anew that it is in giving that we receive and that the long-ago promise of peace and goodwill are the eternal message of Christmas.
It is well to recall what this very special season truly is all about. Listen, intently, to the silence of the holy night, then, later, to the joyful tolling of the bells heralding the arrival of yet another Christmastide.
And no matter how “modern” society attempts to define Christmas, the truth is that the only real and abiding Christmas is the one we hold in our hearts and define ourselves.
Colin McNickle is a senior fellow and media specialist at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
