Merry Christmas! Celebrating America's Greatest Holiday

Abstract

Merry Christmas! is an exuberant romp through the stuff of Christmas—wrapping paper, Christmas trees, candy and cookies, greeting cards, charity, Santa Claus, and television specials. Karal Ann Marling, a professor of art history at the University of Minnesota, examines the material culture of Christmas and much more. As she unpacks (and unwraps) the various rituals that mark the holiday season, she speculates about why Americans love Christmas. The book's intended audience is nonaca-demic, and so there is some latitude for asides and digressions; for example, the chapter on Christmas charity begins with an analysis of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol (1843). Other parts of the book assess almost every prop associated with celebrating Christmas. Marling opens with the claim that “Christmas is the universal memory, one of the few rituals on the calendar of life that virtually everybody has played a part in.” The book, however, is not about the wide range of Christ-mases Americans may have celebrated; instead it is about the Christmas of white middle-class America in the middle decades of the twentieth century. The title of the chapter that addresses depictions of African American Christ-mases is tellingly titled “Somebody Else's Christmas.” The book's America, then, is Betty Crocker's and the young Elvis Presley's, both subjects of earlier and better books by Marling. To be sure, each chapter looks backward to the nineteenth-century origins of a variety of practices. The chapter about wrapping paper is especially thorough; it addresses the origins of gift boxes, tissue paper, ribbons, holly boxes, and Christmas seals.