Merry Christmas!; Celebrating America's Greatest Holiday

Karla Ann Marling

ISBN 10: 0674003187 / ISBN 13: 9780674003187

Published by Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2000

About this Item

Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. 2000. Hardcover. First Edition. Book is tight, square, and unmarked. Book Condition: Fine. DJ: Fine. Red boards with green cloth overlay on spine with gold lettering on the spine boxed in red and gold. 442 pp 8vo. This book is a thoroughly engaging and eye-opening tale of how a religious celebration came to be secularized and nationalized in the US. This book will give the reader an analysis of Christmas unfailingly put into the broad context of social mores that have defined American popular life, most notably the roles of women and children. Christmas is America's biggest holiday and therefore to understand it meaning is to understand significant aspects of America's character at home as well as in the marketplace. A clean pristine edition.

Seller Inventory # 003843

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Merry Christmas!; Celebrating America's Greatest Holiday
• Publisher: Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA
• Publication Date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674003187
• ISBN 13: 9780674003187
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Fine
• Seller catalogs:
  • Religion

About this title

Synopsis

It wouldn't be Christmas without the "things." How they came to mean so much, and to play such a prominent role in America's central holiday, is the tale told in this delightful and edifying book. In a style characteristically engaging and erudite, Karal Ann Marling, one of our most trenchant observers of American culture, describes the outsize spectacle that Christmas has become, showing us the provenance and significance of each of its essential parts: the decorated trees and holiday lights, the cards and gifts and wrapping papers, the toy villages and store displays and Macy's holiday parade, Bing Crosby and Santa Claus.

Viewing Christmas through the media of mass culture--engravings and lithographs, magazine fiction, pictorial ads, news photos, cards, and movies--Marling tells us how the beloved Christmas tree grew out of a much-reprinted image of Queen Victoria and her family gathered around a decorated fir; how Santa Claus lost his provincial Dutch character and turned into the jolly old soul we know; how Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol borrowed from Washington Irving's imaginings of what Christmas must have been like in Merrie Olde England; and how the holiday, balancing between the private and public realms, conferred a central and defining role on women.

A celebration of the visual culture of the season, Merry Christmas! offers captivating evidence that Christmas in America is primarily a secular celebration of abundance, goodwill, and familial identity, expressed in a multitude of material ways.

About the Author

Karal Ann Marling is Professor of Art History at the University of Minnesota.