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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Date: December 14, 1995
Contact: Mary Caffrey (609) 258-5748
The History of Holiday Shopping: Professor finds American Consumer Culture is a Tie that Binds
Princeton, N.J.--Has the checkout counter become America's holiday altar? The questions seems as much a part of the Christmas season nowadays as decorating the Christmas tree.
According to Associate Professor of Religion Leigh Schmidt, commercialization of the holidays has been a topic of debate in the United States for more than a century. Yet, in a recently published book, he finds that holiday merchandising cannot be dismissed as the seamy side of religious celebration.
Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays explores the melding of ``the church's time'' and ``the merchant's time'' into what Schmidt calls ``the hybrid relationship between Christianity and the consumer culture--a relationship that was, by turns, symbiotic and conflictual, complementary and contested.''
Schmidt's book traces the commercial history of major American holidays, including Valentine's Day, Christmas, Easter and Mother's Day, and discusses failed attempts by merchants to invent more. Throughout, Schmidt explains not only how florists, confectioners and shopkeepers have capitalized on holy days but also how churches have used decorations and holiday cards to ``market'' themselves to potential parishioners.
In Consumer Rites Schmidt uses 19th-century diaries and letters to show how gifts and advertising symbols gave holidays a ``national'' flavor. Fond recollections of traveling to see store displays turn up in records from East Coast cities, he says, and also in more personal items, such as letters left by his ancestors, who lived in South Dakota. ``One thing the marketplace does is disseminate a common set of rituals,'' he observes.
Schmidt pays special attention to the role of women as ``superintendents'' of the celebrations. Shopping, cooking, decorating and dressing up gave Victorian women a measure of attention and power they did not otherwise enjoy, he notes in the book. The consumer activities pursued by women are the ones criticized--mostly by men.
``In short,'' he writes, ``the twin feminization of consumption and festivity in American culture requires careful consideration, not wry dismissal.''
Nostalgia for lost holidays
The slogan ``Keep Christ in Christmas'' dates to 1949, but historians have traced conflicts over commercial activity to medieval hucksters who peddled their wares on the church steps.
However, holiday debates in Colonial America took a different form, according to Schmidt. Protestant reformers sought to clear the calendar of saints' days and festivals for the Virgin Mary, which were seen as a waste of labor. The Protestants were successful, but Schmidt found that by the mid- 1800s commentators were lamenting the loss. ``This nostalgic yearning for renewed holiday celebration proved a crucial underpinning for commercial refashioning of celebrations in the nineteenth century,'' Schmidt writes.
Merchants, influenced by Charles Dickens' tale of Ebenezer Scrooge, were already reinventing the Christmas celebration. In its revived form the occasion was seen as a commercial opportunity. ``When merchants rediscovered the holidays, the former transformed the latter, not vice versa, as merchants systematically extended the apparatus of the market into the realm of celebration,'' Schmidt writes.
Before capitalizing on Christmas, the greeting card industry went through a ``dress rehearsal'' by reviving Valentine's Day, Schmidt shows. Geoffrey Chaucer's poetry had transformed St. Valentine from a Christian martyr to a patron saint of love in the late 14th century, but by 1840 the holiday had been largely forgotten in the United States. Merchants imported the London tradition of sending valentines, along with the lace paper to make them. The practice of sending cards was firmly entrenched by 1850, giving women especially ``the new freedom to make their affections known via the ritual exchange.''
Modern Christmas celebrations developed over a longer period, starting in 1820. Schmidt describes how the tradition of exchanging gifts on New Year's Day was gradually transferred to Christmas, as Protestants aimed to condense the holiday period and take the focus off the ``pagan'' event. German traditions, such as the Christmas tree, overtook the French-inspired New Year celebrations. Protestants ultimately meshed Christian symbols of the Holy Family and the Magi with a celebration of home, church and gifts. Images of Santa Claus, particularly those by Thomas Nast, became national after the Civil War, and Santa was the star in the explosion of Christmas cards that took place after 1870.
Sunday School Santas
The post-Civil War era marked the rise of what Schmidt calls the ``Christmas cathedral,'' the elaborate, eclectic department store display that mixed the sacred and the secular. John Wanamaker of Philadelphia pioneered the form at his Philadelphia store, which featured what was then the largest pipe organ in the world. ``During the holidays, people did not just shop at Wanamaker's, they received devotional reminders and religious encouragement,'' Schmidt writes. Store owners clearly aimed to lure shoppers inside. But in the Victorian era they were careful to emphasize themes of church and family. Schmidt says that changed in the 20th century, particularly after courts ended school prayer and increasingly removed religious symbols from public areas.
Victorian-era churches, meanwhile, were filled with new holiday hymns, bells, decorations and Sunday school Santas. Schmidt provides ample evidence that churches simultaneously chastised and embraced the emerging consumer culture. He reports this advice from the Religious Press Association in 1891: ``Christmas advertisers can not reach so many Christmas buyers in any other way so cheaply and easily as by advertising in these papers.''
Easter displays
According to Schmidt, New York City's Easter Parade grew out of religious celebration in the 1870s. Church decoration had become increasingly important, as ``issues of competition and emulation crept into Easter displays.'' The parade itself began when well-dressed couples walked from church to church to see the holiday displays, which featured lilies and floral crosses.
Merchants lagged behind churches in creating Easter displays, and they did not use the holiday as a vehicle to promote spring store openings or new fashions until the 1870s. But by the mid-20th century the parade was seen as a celebration of American wealth, or, as Schmidt writes, ``a parable about the bounties of American enterprise that contrasted sharply with the failures of Soviet Communism.''
Mother's Day was founded by a woman, Anna Jarvis, in celebration of traditional roles. Schmidt writes that churches embraced the day as a counter-point to the suffrage movement, and florists immediately sensed opportunity. At the first celebration in 1908, Jarvis urged people to wear white carnations (her mother's favorite flower), and a market was born.
Florists let Jarvis take the lead in promoting the day. ``Keenly aware that they could `kill the day' with ill-conceived or tactless marketing, [florists] carefully appropriated and emphasized in their advertising the revered values of motherhood, home, family and faith.'' By 1920 Jarvis became the foremost critic of Mother's Day commercialism, even though merchants had played a vital role in building public acceptance of her holiday.
Kwanzaa comes of age
Schmidt points out that the ``holiday'' industries have tried to foist many other celebrations on the public without success. Candy Day was renamed Sweetest Day, but it still failed. Father's Day received a cool reception as well.
Rather, modern marketing successes around Halloween, Martin Luther King Day or the African-American festival of Kwanzaa start with sentiment. Kwanzaa, ironically, began as a rejection of the ``white'' consumer culture that sur-rounds Christmas. Now, merchants host a Kwanzaa trade expo, which Schmidt sees as a symbol of its acceptance. In America, Schmidt says, ``The consumer culture is one of the areas that provides some common ground.''