Review by New York Times Review
MODERN CHRISTMAS is a secular sham, and all the glorious, meaningful and ancient, often religious, traditions are being drowned in a vile pile of cheap paper, expensive pink trees and SpongeBob Santas. Judith Flanders isn't having it. She likes Christmas (I think), but she loves reality and its awkward, amusing facts. (A previous book of hers, "Inside the Victorian Home," is deep, bright and encompassing.) What she's not a fan of: the lazy, drippy, delusional Christmas mythmaking nonsense of Northern Europe, the United Kingdom and, most notably, the United States. Heartbroken that someone's trying to take the Christ out of Christmas? Not Flanders. Not hardly. She observes that it's been barely noticeable as a major Christian birth-of-Christ celebration in most of the world... ever. Alcohol, on the other hand: practically timeless in its appeal on Christmas Day, from medieval times on. Flanders has unearthed all sorts of interesting facts, none of them dull, the tower of them a bit overwhelming. She spends a detailed 245 pages showing us that Christmas Future is whatever people will need it to be; Christmas Present is what people need now and usually includes a tree-type thing and Santa-type being. It's Christmas Past that's the mother lode. That's where every tradition comes from, whether it's very, very old (lots of food, heavy on the joints of meat, cakes and cookies and even heavier on the wassail) or faux vieux (like caroling in the mid-1800s, for instance, introduced by people who pretended that the songs had been handed down from "the imaginary pastoral of Merrie England" and that gambling, a traditional Christmas pastime in England, never happened). Because there are so many bibelots, knickknacks and trinkets of information, Flanders has marked their appearance in "Christmas" with small Wingdings in the margins ("Carnival and riot," "Drinking - and drunkenness," "Food and feasting," "Gifts and gift-giving," "Gift-bringers," "Greenery," "Music and dancing" and "Religion"), so that if you have a particular hankering for one of these subjects, you can flip right to it. For example: On Page 192, you can find Wingdings for gifts, decoration and plum puddings. It's as if all illfitting sweaters came in specially striped wrapping paper, to give you a heads up. On the subject of wrapping paper and gifts, Flanders pays special attention to the older custom of gifts asa form of tax paid to the rulers and landlords of the 15 th and 16 th centuries (as standing ovations are in the White House this season), which is transformed by the 19th century, especially under the influence of Dickens, into a new, child-centric tradition of parents giving gifts (manufactured gifts, not homemade ones) to their children. From shotguns, fireworks and whiskey, the holiday becomes - in the words of President Grover Cleveland - a day of "reunion of families" and "the social intercourse of friends." What Flanders shows most clearly is that holiday traditions are constantly being invented to give people what they long for, and that the heart of our most modern tradition is the belief that "whatever was happening in the world that was wrong... Christmas would bring it to a halt for a period of peace and companionship." Christmas, Flanders tells us (and persuades me), offers a wonderful "illusion of stability, of long-established communities, a way to believe in an imagined past... while unconsciously omitting the less desirable parts of those times." She demonstrates that the greatest transformations in the celebration of Christmas came after revolutions "in family, religion, personal and social relationships" - which brought in irreversible and sometimes frightening change. We love and miss the past that never was and that - along with the fat guy in the red suit (who, in the Austrian context, used to be "half-goat, half-demon" and ate bad children for dinner) and the domestic decoration (which used to involve people wearing goat skeletons on their heads) and the celebration of family (which used to be the time for the ruling class to receive "costly items" from those further down the hierarchy) - is what it's all about. Christmas, as Flanders says, "is what we hope for." AMY BLOOM'S latest book, "White Houses," a novel of Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok, will be published in February.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 3, 2017]
Review by Booklist Review
Christmas evokes both memories of the past and expectations for future celebrations, but Flanders (The Making of Home, 2015) posits that the holiday never was the quiet, thoughtful, religious observance we think it was. Separating fact from myth and traditional practice, Flanders provides a well-researched biography of how Christmas came to be observed through the ages and in various cultures. Elements of celebration included feasting, attending plays (both sacred and profane), and participating in revelry like the disguise-wearing mummers' parades. Her rambling study includes historical and popular culture references, so readers can expect to learn more about Saint Nicholas of Myra, understood to be the precursor to Santa Claus, along with movies like Holiday Inn and It's a Wonderful Life. Gift-giving traditions and the origins of gift wrapping are just two of many highlights in the book. Extensive and highly readable footnotes and end notes make this a pleasurable read. A calendar of important holidays is included, and readers are directed to more resources online.--Curbow, Joan Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Flanders (The Making of Home) dispenses with cherished trappings and traditions in this investigation of Christmas, drawing a short line from Christmas's religious origins to its secular celebration. She begins by reporting on the ecclesiastical warning against excessive frivolity, which was issued by the Archbishop of Constantinople only 30 years after Christmas became a church festival in the late fourth century. Then she makes the case that Christianity slowly made itself a consumer product. Mythologizing Christmas by selling it, she argues, didn't start with the miniature ceramic Christmas villages of the 1970s or Coca-Cola ads in the '30s or even department store parades of the '20s, but has been a slowly building process that began almost as soon as Christmas became a widely practiced tradition. Although Flanders's voice sometimes disappears amid the cascade of facts, her well-structured argument lays to rest the idea that the celebration of Christmas is solely religious. Agent: George Lucas, Inkwell Management. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
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