Celebration Of Christmas Research Articles

Religion, politics and jingle bells: examining contextual factors influencing the impact of workplace holiday practices

PurposeWhile Christmas and the holidays are widely celebrated in society at large in the US, the question arises whether doing so has value in today’s organizations. In this light, the present study examined the relationship of workplace holiday practices with positive affect and emotional engagement, along with some boundary conditions of these relationships. Specifically, this research examined the moderating influences of religious orientation, political orientation and political environment.Design/methodology/approachData were collected at two points in time via an online survey. At time 1, the participant survey included measures of workplace holiday practices, political orientation and demographic characteristics. At time 2 (approximately two weeks afterward), the participant survey included measures of positive affect and emotional engagement.FindingsWorkplace holiday practices were related to both positive affect and emotional engagement. There were slightly stronger effects for the impact of workplace holiday practices among individuals who reside in more conservative (“red”) states in the US on emotional engagement, but not positive affect. Individual political orientation did not moderate the relationships between workplace holiday practices and the outcomes. Counter to expectations, the absence of workplace holiday practices had a stronger negative effect on non-Christians’ emotional engagement than Christians. The interaction between workplace holiday practices and religious orientation with positive affect was nonsignificant.Research limitations/implicationsThe data from this research were obtained via a survey methodology. Although data on the independent and dependent variables were obtained at two different points in time, future research could experimentally manipulate features of the work environment related to the celebration of the holidays to more definitively establish cause-and-effect relationships.Practical implicationsThis research highlights the value of celebrating Christmas and the holidays. In this light, organizations should not underestimate the potential value of such celebratory activity in promoting employee goodwill. At the same time, organizations must be cognizant that some individuals may value the celebration of Christmas and the holidays more so than others.Originality/valueThis research provides a framework for further research on workplace holiday practices and identifies theories that can be used in future research to explore the mechanisms that influence how and under what conditions workplace holiday practices impact employees’ experiences at work.

Recognition at the corporate celebration of Christmas: Freezing the postsocialist gender regime

This article critically examines the perpetuation of gender regimes within postsocialist Europe by analyzing how organizational recognition is performed as part of the corporate celebration of Christmas. A critical ethnography was conducted at a male-dominated company in postsocialist Hungary. The article’s findings align with three corporate Christmas scenes: the company owner’s speech, an award ceremony for families, and an award ceremony for the best employee. This study contributes to critical organization studies by advancing an understanding of the postsocialist gender regime and those ideological forms of recognition that invisibly reproduce it through the seemingly innocent practices of Christmas celebrations. Furthermore, by providing a critical reconceptualization of workplace familism as an ideology, it is argued that it is a central and distinctive element of the gendered subtext of this particular postsocialist gender regime. Ultimately, three different and ritualized forms of pathological recognition (misrecognition, overidentification and reification) are identified, claiming to be constitutive of individual gender identity regulation and extending socioideological control beyond the boundaries of the organization.

크리스마스이브 밤의 연대기

Polish Director Krzysztof Kieślowski made his mark on the world cinema scene with his 10-part TV series The Ten Commandments, produced by Polish national television. In this study, we will focus on the third installment of the series, “The Ten Commandments,”(The Decalogue) which takes place overnight on Christmas Eve. “The Third Commandment”(Decalogue 3) is a collaboration between co-screenwriter Krzysztof Piesiewicz and Piotr Sobociński, the cinematographer of Kieślowski’s last film, Red. This study explores the significance of Kieślowski’s use of Christmas Eve, Poland’s largest holiday, and his embodiment of the universal human experiences of loneliness and melancholy into the celebration of Christmas. In particular, the chapter on scene analysis focuses on the opening and the temporal and spatial arrangement of dramatic events.

‘The Santy Claus myth’: The Politicisation of Santa Claus During the Great Depression

ABSTRACT This article argues that the commercial celebration of Christmas and children’s reverence to Santa Claus became politically contentious during the Great Depression when well-established Christmas traditions were threatened by economic strife. Growing numbers of parents simply could not afford to fill their children's stockings. Santa Claus was easily recognisable as a religious and cultural figure but during the Depression era the potential political connotations and messages of the legend became clear, especially when under threat. The nation’s ability or otherwise to indulge youths in Christmas fantasies and fun became a barometer for the health of capitalism and the nation. Santa Claus embodied important American values including the emerging right to a childhood, Christianity, and the capitalist system. Some radical youths participated in so-called anti-Christmas parties and pledged to expose what they called ‘the Santy Claus myth’ to their peers whilst journalists, literary figures, philanthropists, and the federal government mobilized together to protect Christmas traditions including the cult of Santa Claus. In doing so they worked to protect a form of celebration which had wider implications. Any percieved attack on the notion of Santa Claus was not only an attack on fun but was interpretted as an attack on the United States and its ideals.

Religious activity and expression of national identity of Ukrainians during the introduction of the new Soviet ritual: 1960’s–1970’s

The party ideologues of the Soviet totalitarian state artificially developed and actively introduced into the life of the titular nation of the Ukrainian SSR a new Soviet ritualism, the main goal of which was to raise from every Ukrainian a Russified citizen of the Soviet type without national identity and religious beliefs, with a Russian consciousness, mentality and language. The article proves that the ancient church and religious traditions and customs of the Ukrainian people continued to be a part of the everyday culture of Ukrainians. The religious activity of representatives of the Ukrainian ethnic group was especially observed during the celebration of Christmas, Epiphany, Easter and other church holidays. And although the number of adherents of religious rites in the republic was different – from less in the East to more in the West, Christian values, despite atheism, continued to be the basis of the spiritual life of the absolute majority of Ukrainians.

The Spy Girls and the Quest for “Forbidden” Literacy: Rural Chinese Girls’ Negotiation of “No Christmas” School Policy Through Subversive Literacy Practices

ABSTRACT This article is a critical ethnographic study that examines rural Chinese girls’ literacy practices in sanctioned and unsanctioned spaces, and their negotiations with the articulated and delivered literacy program. In particular, this study focuses on a group of 1st-grade girls, who I call the “Spy Girls,” engaged in the celebration of Christmas, and their interactions with unauthorized literacy practices or “forbidden literacy” that challenge the institutional and structural discourse in relation to gender and school policies. Using a feminist lens, I argue that although local governments have deemed celebrating Christmas to be a compromise of tradition and unpatriotic, the girls’ practices exemplified the ways they negotiate gender roles and construct literate identities through appropriating acceptable forms of literacy expression to communicate under the radar.

ХРАНА У БОЖИЋНИМ ПРАЗНИЦИМА КОД СРБА У РУМУНСКОМ БАНАТУ И У ВОЈВОДИНИ

Christmas is a central holiday in year cycle of folk celebrations. One of its characteristics is the three days celebrations, but if we take into account the fact that the celebration of Christmas, in addition to the period of fasting, is preceded by several holidays that have been celebrated in the past or are still being celebrated as well as several holidays after it, then, the Christmas celebration implies a significantly longer period of time – on Saint Barbara, Saint Ignatius, Christmas Eve, Little Christmas, Cross day, Twelfth day. Apart from certain customs, the aforementioned holidays are also characterized by a certain type of food as their recognizable feature. The subject of consideration in the paper will be the food that is prepared for the holidays of the Christmas cycle among the Serbs in the Romanian Banat and among the Serbs in Vojvodina.

Strategic Skepticism: The Politics of Grassroots Participation in an Afro-Andean Nomination to the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage Representative List

Abstract This article analyzes the grassroots participation politics in the nomination of a set of Afro-Andean musical and dance practices—atajo de negritos and pallitas—to the UNESCO Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage. These are performed during the Catholic celebration of Christmas in the Ica region in Peru. I suggest that the participation of grassroots practitioners in this case study featured a behavior pattern I label “strategic skepticism.” This behavior is a critical but passive form of grassroots engagement, alternative to both compliance and resistance, which allows a form of local agency that clashes with the neoliberal logics of the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage process. The article, based on fieldwork conducted in the region of Ica in Peru between 2017 and 2018, includes perspectives from grassroots practitioners and state Intangible Cultural Heritage officials.

Приемы нарушения литературно-культурного кода Рождества викторианской Англии в малой прозе Дж. К. Джерома (на материале произведения «Пирушка с привидениями»)

The study aims to identify the techniques of violating the literary and cultural code of Christmas in Victorian England in J. K. Jerome’s short prose. The work ‘Told After Supper’ was chosen as the research material. The study is novel in that it is the first to consider the chosen work through the lens of parodying traditional Christmas genres, as well as the cultural tradition associated with the celebration of Christmas. The paper identifies the key features of the genres of the Christmas story and ghost stories and analyses in detail how Jerome modifies them in his work. Considerable attention is paid to the kind of peculiarities of everyday life and personality traits of representatives of Victorian England that are parodied, as well as the way the comic effect is achieved in the text under consideration. As a result, it has been found that the main parodying techniques in ‘Told After Supper’ are the rationalisation of the miraculous, which destroys the atmosphere characteristic of Christmas genres, the absurdity arising from the multiple repetitions of plot devices, the hyperbolisation of the “narrator’s unreliability”, the projection of the conduct of the living on the world of ghosts and the explication of the social underside of British respectability.

AN OUTSIDER’S GLANCE ON TODAY’s ESTONIAN CHRISTMAS

For the Estonian, Christmas is a most beloved holiday, not only by children, but by the whole population. Christmas, which coincides with the winter solstice, has been so important, that the Estonian have been able to preserve it throughout the Soviet era, despite the hostility of the authorities, which tried to uproot this tradition and to replace it with the laic acknowledgement of the New Year. Today, the celebration of Christmas is a mixture of old traditions, of Soviet times adaptations and of international influences. This article aims at presenting the modern way of celebrating Christmas and insists on the centrality of family and kin, with eating of traditional dishes, a fair amount of material symbols, the exchange of presents, the performance of ritual songs and the visiting of the kin’s graves. The attendance at church remains from the past. The author discovered Estonia and started living in this country as an adult and has been observing the Estonian’s customs for circa 30 years. This article relies mostly on these observations and in addition, on literature written about old customs.

Nittel Nacht: A Jewish Christmas?

The history of Ashkenazi Judaism in Christian Europe, particularly in the earlymodern period, is the story of a religious minority subsisting within a threatening majority: its ability to resist cultural dominion and preserve its own cultural-religious traditions. One such setting in which this interaction materialized was through the religious calendar of the Christians. Specifically, the popular celebration of Christmas was a point of concern for the Jewish communities, and, in turn, became a vehicle for assault. While the tradition’s inception was formed as a means to counter the holiday, its actualization served to inculcate Christianity, its doctrines and its ethos, within the Jewish tradition. Thus, Nittel Nacht was an anti-anti holiday — its observance blurring the line between repudiation and celebration — which produced an everlasting bond between the two religions.

A secular Advent. waiting for Christmas in Swedish preschools

ABSTRACT Swedish preschool education is, by law, non-confessional. Yet, it is also an educational context within which most children aged 1–5 encounter traditions that carry Christian connotations. This paper explores how two Swedish preschools maintain a balance between keeping education non-confessional and paying attention to the traditions that are associated with the preparation for and celebration of Christmas – Advent. The data consist of ten videotaped observations from two preschools. The data was thematised with the help of Ninian Smart’s dimensions of religious and secular worldviews. This way, we could show that the different traditions the two preschools were engaged in during the four weeks before Christmas contributed to a banal reproduction of a holiday season with roots in Lutheran Christianity. At the same time, the preschools contributed to a (re)production of traditions that evoke a national imaginery. Our results show that Advent in Swedish preschools is characterised as a non-confessional task for the institution. Thus, the principle of non-confessionality lives side by side with a banal national religion. Thereby, the Swedish preschool plays an integral part in the banal reproduction of a Swedishness that includes Lutheran Christianity.

Religious Moderation in The City Of Pancasilais: Study on the Tradition of Halal Bihalal and Christmas Together as a Cultural Basis for Religious Tolerance In Salatiga City

The Setara Institute (in 2018) designated Salatiga City as the number two Tolerant City in Indonesia. The culture of togetherness, as reflected in the celebration of Halal Bihalal and Christmas Together, in the midst of the multi-cultural society of the City of Salatiga is a fundamental factor in the formation of a tolerant and mutually supportive life order. This type of naturalistic qualitative research, using a critical analytical descriptive approach, makes the Pengilon hamlet community its material object. The results of this study found that religious moderation which was manifested in the celebration of halal bihalal and Christmas together, became a medium for preserving the value of tolerance that was so effective for every level of society in Salatiga City. Such a cultural base can guarantee the strength of the four indicators set by the Setara Institute, namely city government regulations; government action; social regulation; and religious demographics, in the ranking of tolerant cities in Indonesia.

Winter Solstice Celebrations in Denmark: A Growing Non-Religious Ritualisation

During the last decade, local celebrations of winter solstice on the 21st of December have increased all over Denmark. These events refer to the Old Norse ritual of celebrating the return of the light, and their appeal is very broad on a local community level. By presenting two cases of Danish winter solstice celebrations, I aim to unfold how we can understand these new ritualisations as non-religious rituals simultaneously contesting and supplementing the overarching seasonal celebration of Christmas. My material for this study is local newspaper sources that convey the public sphere on a municipality level. I analyse the development in solstice ritualisations over time from 1990 to 2020. Although different in location and content, similarities unite the new solstice celebrations: they emphasise the local community and the natural surroundings. My argument is that the winter solstice celebrations have grown out of a religiously diversified public sphere and should be understood as non-religious rituals in a secular context.

Emotional Bodies: The Historical Performativity of Emotion. Edited by Dolores Martín-Moruno and Beatriz Pichel (Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 2019) 285 pp. $110.00 cloth $32.00 paper

Performative approaches to the body are increasingly influential within history, but especially in the history of emotions where it provides a model for emotions as embodied cultural phenomena. This collection grapples with this methodological approach, arguing for its uses especially in interpreting emotion on the surface of bodies—that is in gestures, facial expressions, as displayed in photographs or film, or otherwise communicated by the body to observers. As is explicitly addressed in a chapter by Rob Boddice, the collection attends to a debate in the field about whether nonlinguistic, responsive behaviors, like blushing, are biological or cultural, firmly and unsurprisingly locating them in the latter category. With an introduction, eleven chapters and an afterword, the contributors provide an array of perspectives from medieval to modern. They strongly emphasize histories of emotion that intersect with the history of medicine and the ways by which observations of the body have contributed to science in the modern era, probably because physicians believe such observation to be more “truthful” than patients’ descriptions of their own feelings.The collection has four sections, each with two to three chapters and a brief introduction, although the larger themes are generally consistent across the volume. The first three chapters explore medically oriented discussions of abnormal emotions—hysteria, “crimes of passion,” and psychosomatic processes in the production of diseases like cancer—to highlight how bodies become emotional through performance. Section 2 attends primarily to the photographed body, in the context of children’s pain in medical settings, theater, and the psychological sciences, as well as in relation to the AIDS crisis that arose from heroin use in the 1980s. These chapters explore technology’s ability to read emotions on the body and to disseminate their images. We have long known that photographs can lie, but the manner in which this technology assumes truth functions in the health domain are suggestive of how emotions come to be displayed.Section 3 develops themes from Section 2, attending specifically to how representations of emotional bodies produce emotional communities. One chapter looks at a twelfth-century Franciscan celebration of Christmas, and another examines representations of the pétroleuses (female revolutionaries) during the Paris Commune. Both show how ephemeral and abject bodies can become sites of political meaning and historical change. Section 4 explores humanitarianism and the suffering body as a specific example of this building of emotional collectives. Three chapters illuminate the different forms that bodies in pain took historically to enable compassionate action, as well as moments when emotional bodies failed to produce such action. Thus, the volume moves from attending to the body’s ability to communicate emotion (not without considerable debate about what it tells us) to its ability to produce collective feelings and community responses. As this book makes clear, the body is never neutral in this process; it is a site of emotion subject to interpretation according to cultural rules.This well-constructed and consistently high-quality collection makes a compelling case for the usefulness of performativity as a mode of biocultural and emotional analysis. The individual chapters involve some remarkable, even moving, case studies, in its analysis of physical representations of emotion in a field where analysis of language continues to remain the dominant mode. The book will interest historians of emotion, medicine, photography, and visual culture, and scholars who engage with ideas about spectacle and modes of observation.

Representations of Christmastide in Latin American Christmas Folk Songs: A Transitivity Analysis

Considered as the universal language, music has been historically a means of communication and personal expression about the inner and outer world of its creator, it is present in almost every social activity of human beings as in the habitual religious celebration of Christmas across the largely Catholic countries. Therefore, the present paper will provide a descriptive text analysis of ten traditional Latin American Christmas folk songs on the base of the transitivity system informed by the Hallidayan Systemic Functional Linguistics theory. To reach this goal, both a quantitative and qualitative research method approach was applied. Findings indicated that among the six analyzed transitivity process types, the material processes (32%) dominate the construal of the musical pieces, followed by the mental (23%), behavioral (18%), and relational realizations (13%) whereas the verbal and existential processes are relatively low all together representing an overall frequency of 14%. This reveals the singers’ attempt to represent the Christmas season as a nostalgic time leap, an immediate enjoyment, and a rewarding exchange.

«Наддніпрянська правда» як засіб висвітлення атеїстичної пропаганди у Херсонській області УРСР (друга половина 1940-х – перша половина 1960-х рр.)

У статті аналізуються публікації на атеїстичну тематику у друкованому органі Херсонського обласного та міського комітетів КП(б)У, обласної та міської рад депутатів трудящих «Наддніпрянській правді». У повоєнний період переважали праці в яких висвітлювалася діяльність комуністичних партійних структур і радянських культурно-просвітницьких закладів спрямована на поширення матеріалістичного світогляду. Після приходу до влади М.С. Хрущова з’явилися публікації, в яких лунали заклики активізувати атеїстичну пропаганду, критикувалася релігія як явище, для пропаганди використовувалася творчість письменників. З кінця 1950-х років виходить низка статей, які засвідчили перехід до посилення адміністративного тиску на духовенство та мирян.

SANCTITY OF CHRISTMAS AND OPTIMISM OF NEW YEAR REFLECTED IN AN ELECTRONIC TEXTBOOK ON MUSIC

The celebration of Christmas over the centuries has involved many folk and even regional traditions that are passed away, rejected and gradually forgotten by the modern man. Now more and more the main meaning of the feast the intimate reverence for the newborn God, sacrificing himself for all of us and for his mother, the Virgin Mary has been shifted from buying and receiving interesting, impressive, spectacular Christmas gifts, from arranging a lavish dining table, from a rich Christmas revel. On the other hand sending the old and welcoming the new year is traditionally associated with the anticipation of something new and good, positive change, happiness, prosperity, fulfillment of dreams. Increasingly, these personal, intimate expectations are shifting from care, where will we welcome the New Year, what will we wear to make a stronger impression, what will we eat in the festive evening. Christmas is a religious holiday specific to the Christian faith, while New Year is celebrated in the cultures where there is a chronology. Christmas has a certain date, and the New Year for Different Cultures begins in a different season. More by this glimpse is clear, first, that the two holidays differ essentially, and second, that the commercialization of our lifestyle and thinking largely unified and increasingly unifies those, essentially many different holidays. In order to limit the manifestations of negative trends that shift the main emphasis of the holidays, making them occasions to demonstrate our own success in society, it is important to to further influence the on educating adolescents. When looking for an impact to overcome already rooted in the minds of youth attitudes, it is necessary to select tools that are modenn, that evoke confidence, that are likable, attractive to young people. Spending more and more time in front of the computer screen communicating through their phones, teenagers are increasingly accustomed to trusting the electronic way of communicating as well as searching and finding the necessary information electronically. In sync with these attitudes is the new educational tool electronic textbook. True to the notion that luxuriance, spectacularity, self assertion and egotism are unrelated and should not disturb one of the two brightest Christian feasts Christmas, I set as the aim of this study highlighting by placed in the electronic textbook tasks of the different nature of the two large following in rapid succession holidays, i.e. of the gracious intimacy, modesty and kindness of Christmas, and the glamorous splendor and catcing optimism of the New Year. In this study I review the electronic music textbook for the fourth grade of the general education school in Bulgaria of Publishing House "Prosveta". The two holidays are reflected with: 2 presentations organized as team tasks. Since teamwork contributes to creating relations of mutual assistance, to neglecting of individualistic attitudes for the sake of the success of the common cause, this kind of organization is in line with the objectives of the study. 2 photo galleries designed to support the impressionsaccumulated by the presentations with additional brightly sighted visual information. As one gets the main part of the information with which he operates, visually, the acquaintance with the exhibited photographs further enhances the impact of student presentations.

THE FIRST EARLY CHRISTIAN TESTIMONIES OF CHRISTMAS

The article presents the earliest reference to the celebration of Christmas as a holiday or feast, namely: the Roman calendar of Philocalus (so-called Chronography of 354), the first sermons preached for this occasion (pope Liberius, Optate from Milewe, Zenon from Verona) and the first hymns (Ambrose from Milan and Prudentius, Ephrem the Syrian). The analysis of sources shows that there is no record of this feast before the First Council at Nicaea (325 A.D.). It appeared in Rome around 335 A.D. and from there it has spread to other regions. As soon as it appeared, it quickly gained popularity and characteristic theological significance.

Soteriological Motifs in Leontii Karpovych’s Preaching on the Sunday before Christmas

In the paper, the depiction of soteriological motifs in Leontii Karpovych’s Preaching on the Sunday before Christmas are considered. The image of Jesus as the true Messiah that developed in the Preaching is analyzed. The phrase itself – the true Messiah – was possibly adopted from some Polish sources, perhaps, from the Jakub Wujek Bible. One of the main ideas of the Preaching is to show connections between righteous man from the Old Testament and Jesus Christ who is their direct descendant. In the text of the Preaching, patriarchs, kings and prophets are compared to the messengers of the rich and powerful king; they are sent to inform his people of the king’s arrival. Their good news is about the forgiveness of sins and God’s plan for the salvation of humankind. In this way, the preacher describes an approach to the Christmas holiday and motivates his congregation to prepare their hearts for greeting the King of kings. Thus, believers ought to be ready for hosting the important Guest who will be present in the stable of their souls, which must be properly cleansed. The celebration of Christmas enables Christians to participate in the events of sacred history. According to Karpovych, using their imagination helps believers to meet with the newborn divine Baby and to share the joyfulness with those who celebrated the Messiah’s coming in ancient Israel. This propensity for compassion is an efficient mechanism for listeners/readers of the sermon to open their hearts and become closer to Jesus the Savior.Karpovych constantly emphasizes that the Lord descends from the Kingdom of Heaven to raise sinners to the heights of paradise. This vertical up-and-down movement represents the preacher’s view on the soteriological “strategy” of God. However, redemption is possible only in the womb of the true Church, which is compared to a sky illuminated by the spiritual light of Christ. Moreover, God needs people’s attempts to rid themselves of their moral impurity; this is why Karpovych prompts believers to repent their sins, to confess and to do good works, practicing prayer, fasting, and almsgiving.