America’s Christmas wars

HAVING SPENT almost two decades ballyhooing a non-existent “War on Christmas”, Fox News received the best present imaginable in the first week of Advent. A homeless man called Craig Tamanaha, while stumbling around Manhattan late one night, came across the 50-foot-high “All American Christmas Tree” in Fox Square. Mr Tamanaha climbed it, allegedly flicked his lighter, and the tree-like 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 trying to talk into existence. “Torching Christmas trees is an attack on Christianity!” wailed Tucker Carlson. For two days, the catastrophe 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’s CEO, Suzanne Scott.

Fox’s imagined War on Christmas is nonsense and conservative pay-dirt. 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 invulnerable. Nine in ten Americans celebrate it, including a growing multitude of non-Christians. 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 debates around them, often reveal a lot about their participants, including 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 celebrate Christmas in Massachusetts, as it was in England around the same time. But whereas the Restoration soon swept English Puritanism aside, 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 September 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 Alabama, in 1836, made it a public holiday. Even now, New England’s Unitarian, Baptist and Methodist churches, inheritors of the Puritan 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 Christmastide, 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. Mitteleuropean versions of the magical present-giver 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 demanding 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. Coca-Cola is often said to have established the fur-clad image of Santa Claus in a famous series of adverts 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 Victoria’s Anglo-German festivities. Indeed, the classic American Christmas, which has changed relatively little since the 1850s, is an Anglo-American 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 mass-produced. And the marketers—another essential 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 19th-century Woolworths’ sales gimmick. The Hall Brothers (now Hallmark) produced the first folded Christmas card in 1915. Towns up and down the country rebranded themselves as seasonal theme parks (“It’s Christmas all year round here in Bethlehem,” goes the slogan for that Pennsylvanian 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’s Saturnalian rampage was a deeply traditional festive act. It was the sort of thing the Pilgrim Fathers banned Christmas to prevent. ■

Read more from Lexington, our columnist on American politics:

How the culture wars can show what’s right with America (Dec 11th)
A racial-history lesson from the son of a slave (Dec 4th)
Pete Buttigieg’s impossible job (Nov 18th)