Why are Americans so unhinged about Christmas?:
The most obnoxious advert on American television this Christmas season
features a thirtyish man telling his wife he ‘got us a little
something’ at a holiday sale. ...
[W]e are
talking about $135,000 worth of truck and — even if you get it on sale —
about a man giving a Christmas gift to himself that is worth more than
the annual income of the median American family. ...
Today there are articles in women’s
magazines and on gossipy websites with titles like ‘How Not to Go
Bankrupt This Christmas’. ...
Nothing is ever enough. Radio stations, in the age before the
internet, used to play Christmas carols now and then. Some would play
carols nonstop after 6 p.m. on Christmas Eve. Today, the streaming
wireless network Sirius XM Radio has 16 whole channels dedicated to
different sub-genres of holiday-season music, and they run all month
long. ...
The country gets more Christmassy even as it gets less Christian.
That is probably not an accident. Most of America’s Christmas traditions
— with trees, stockings, fires, carols — were imported with the German
immigration of the 19th century. Germans remain the largest ethnic group
in the United States. After the German language and most of its
folkways were driven out of American life during the first world war,
Christmas became the main avenue through which German-American culture
lived on. Its pleasures, as Americans understand them, are hard to
distinguish from those of today’s faddish Teutonic concept, hygge:
cosiness, family and making the best of bad weather. Christmas now seems
like the opposite of the American way of life, as hygge seems a
dangerous kind of anti-Americanism. For as long as the season lasts,
Christmas supplies what Americans don’t have enough of in their lives.
It is a counterculture.
The great American Christmas songs — ‘I’ll Be Home for Christmas’,
‘White Christmas’, ‘Winter Wonderland’ — are about the warmth of family,
the solidity of small-town life, the building of human relations on a
bedrock of decency, and above all the love of tradition. If Americans
are devoted to Christmas more zealously, fanatically, excessively than
ever, it may be because the destruction of familiar traditions has
ceased to be an unfortunate side-effect of American culture and started
being its raison d’être.
