New Old-Fashioned Ways: Holidays and Popular Culture

Abstract

Neru Old-Fashioned Ways: Holidays and Po Culture. By Jack Santino. (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1996. Pp. x + 175, introduction, 49 illustrations, references, index. $14.95 paper) This recent work by Jack Santino explores new ground in its analysis of the commercialization of traditional American holidays and the semiotics of holiday products. The book is an accessible guide to the holiday motifs that are used to market goods, and in some ways it is a companion volume to Santino's previous book on holidays and calendrical traditions, All Around the Year: Hol idays anti Celebrations in American Life ( 1994). New Old-Fashioned Ways contributes to a growing body of scholarship on the dynamics of holiday commercialism and consumerism, such as Leigh Eric Schmidt's Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays, 1995; Daniel Miller, ed. Unwrapping Christmas, 1993; William Waits, The Modern Christmas in America: A Cultural History of Gift Giving, 1993). Unlike these other studies, however, which limit their discussion to selected holidays, New Old-Fashioned Ways offers the most complete survey of the commercialization of a wide range of American holiday themes, while examining the connections between folklore, American popular culture, and consumerism. As Santino states, the book is an introduction to holiday-themed products and an analysis of cultural logic and symbolic connotations underlying these products (xviii). Through a myriad of examples, entertaining case studies, and numerous illustrations of actual products, Santino reveals, with subtle wit, the ways that companies exploit holiday imagery as a marketing tool in order to give the same old products a festive, seasonal appearance. Many of the holiday goods discussed are familiar ones, such as breakfast cereals, candy, beverages, and snack foods (e.g., Christmas Coca-Cola; Halloween Oreo cookies, Holiday Lucky Charms). But Santino's study also examines holiday themes in cartoons, comic books, romance novels, popular films, rock music, and the genre of holiday-based dasher films (Halloween, April Fool's Day, New Year's Evil, et al.). Each chapter of the book is organized around a particular medium, genre, season, or holiday. Chapter 1 (Holidays and Popular Culture) orients the reader to basic ideas associated with the study of holidays, traditions, and popular culture, and examines representations of calendrical traditions in popular media, such as how they are used as elements of plot in narrative genres for dramatic and metaphorical reasons, or as a means of providing settings or enhancing themes. Santino notes the ways that holiday are an important part of the national economy providing an invisible structure to the American year which allows businesses to highlight the seasonal item. Although commercial industry has capitalized on the various aspects of holidays, Santino repeatedly points out how mass produced cultural artifacts are used by people to create meaningful personal and familial ways of celebrating (23-24). This emphasis on how popular culture becomes folklore in the postindustrial era is an important point of the book, and a topic that folklorists have tended to neglect or devalue. In chapter 2 (The Year in Candy), Santino continues his discussion of how popular culture objects are used as tools for realizing celebrations (30), and argues against the notion that holidays have become completely commercialized consumer gouging. Drawing upon numerous examples, he examines seasonal candy, beer, comics, and popular music, and shows how and why specific genres and products are more likely to be linked to different holidays. For instance, he discusses how traditions that involve inversion, like Halloween, are embraced by expressive styles that are rebellious or subversive of mainstream ideas (such as heavy metal, punk rock, or horror comics). Ultimately, he concludes that popular culture has not been a monolithic leveler of calendrical diversity, but that mass culture products reflect different calendars and express a degree of cultural pluralism. …