Holidays have always fascinated me. Although we grew up poor, I always have cozy memories of childhood Christmases. It was a combination of things—being out of school for a couple of weeks. Presents. Christmas trees. Time outside ordinary time. I’d read Penne L. Restad’s Christmas in America: A History years ago. So many years, in fact, that I forgot that I wrote a blog post on it before. That was back in 2012, in my early days of commuting to New York City, and early days of blogging. Sometimes I have to come back to a book, however, and rereading this one reminded me of why. There’s a lot of good stuff in here. It mostly focuses on the nineteenth century, but it does go back before that and steps into the twentieth century (when it was written) toward the end. I’d forgotten a lot of what I’d learned before.
This time through, having worked as an editor for a decade and a half now, I could tell that it was originally a dissertation. It’s pretty hard to remove that completely from any book project. Nevertheless, it’s engagingly written and full of facts. I’d forgotten that Santa’s red clothes were not, in fact, Coca-Cola’s invention. And that Washington Irving played quite a role in introducing Americans to the holiday. And just how interconnected Christmas is with Thanksgiving, New Years, and yes, even Halloween. Of course, no book can be adequately summarized in a brief blog post. My previous one highlights some of what I found here, but this reading brought out other interesting features. I spend quite a bit of my energy anticipating holidays. Some years they’ve been minimized due to circumstances, but they are definitely the fixed points around which my life revolves.
One of the interesting things I noticed this time, introduced literally on the second-to-last page, was that the book mentions holiday horror. Restad’s focus is on America so she doesn’t really delve into the British tradition of telling scary stories at Christmas. (I do discuss this in The Wicker Man, I would note. Although set on May Day, it was released in December, fifty years ago.) These kinds of interconnections fascinate me. Our culture reflects who we are and American culture includes Christmas for any who want to take part in it. In fact, the book makes the point that becoming secular helped Christmas spread goodwill to people of all religious persuasions, or none at all. It’s not really even a Christian invention. It’s a blending of traditions that bring light to the darkest time of year. And here I am like a kid, eagerly awaiting it again.