Not surprisingly, the strongest impetus for such a holiday came from those areas most profoundly affected by the various social, economic and technological revolutions of the antebellum era. It became a moment of idealized national self-definition. Its relative lack of theological or Biblical authority – what had made it anathema to the Puritans – ironically allowed Christmas to emerge as a highly ecumenical event in a land of pluralism. The 'American' holiday enveloped the often contradictory strains of commercialism and artisanship, as well as nostalgia and faith in progress, that defined late nineteenth-century culture. Americans varied old themes and wove new symbols into the received fabric to create something definitively their own. This new 'revived Christmas of our time' afforded a retreat from the dizzying realities of contemporary life, but cast in contemporary terms. The many Christmases celebrated across the land began to resolve into a more singular and widely celebrated home holiday. At this cross-roads of progress and nostalgia, Americans found in Christmas a holiday that ministered to their needs. It also made them reconsider the notion of 'community' in larger terms, on a national scale, but modelled on the ideal of a family gathered at the hearth. The swirl of change caused many to long for an earlier time, one in which they imagined that old and good values held sway in cohesive and peaceful communities. New wealth and larger markets superseded old. Moral, political and economic tensions mounted among east, west and south, raising new questions about the nature of the Union itself. Immigration vastly widened the ethnic and religious pluralism that had been a part of American settlement from its beginning. Communication and transportation revolutions made once isolated parts of the country acutely aware of each other. Even as late as the early nineteenth century, many Americans, churched or unchurched, northerners or southerners, hardly took notice of the holiday at all.īy mid-century, however, new conditions had begun to undercut local customs and create needs for common and visible celebrations. Virginia planters took the occasion to feast, dance, gamble, hunt and visit, perpetuating what they believed to be the old Christmas customs in English manors. In colonial times, Americans of different sects and different national origins kept the holiday (or did not) in ways they carried over from the Old World, Puritans, for instance, attempted to ignore Christmas because the Bible was silent on the topic. The holiday's new customs and meanings helped the nation to make sense of the confusions of the era and to secure, if only for a short while each year, a soothing feeling of unity. Like many other such 'inventions of tradition', the creation of an American Christmas was a response to social and personal needs that arose at a particular point in history, in this case a time of sectional conflict and civil war, as well as the unsettling processes of urbanization and industrialization. Yet the familiar mix of carols, cards, presents, trees, multiplicities of Santas and holiday neuroses that have come to define December 25th in the United States is little more than a hundred years old.Īmericans did not even begin to conceive of Christmas as a national holiday until the middle of the last century. The Christmas that Americans celebrate today seems like a timeless weaving of custom and feeling beyond the reach of history.
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