Christmas in the Crosshairs: Two Thousand Years of Denouncing and Defending the World’s Most Celebrated Holiday

This accessible survey offers a chronological and thematic overview of the contested cultural, political, and religious meanings of Christmas since its first appearance in the historical record in the fourth century to the present day. In seven chapters, historian Bowler offers a tour of the origins and suppression of Christmas festivities during the early centuries of Christianity, their 19th-century revival as a commercialized family holiday, the use of Christmas by special-interest groups, the opinions of modern-day Christmas haters, and current disputes over the place of Christmas in a multicultural, global society. Ambitious in scope, the book is strongest in its documentation of Anglo-American traditions in the early modern period through the 19th century. Christmas outside of Europe and North America remains underexplored. The chapters on late 20th-century Christmas culture are rushed and thin on historical analysis, tending instead toward the polemic. The author’s conclusion that Christmas occupies an unjustly embattled place within modern society is undercut by his own historical narrative. Since the fifth century, Christmas has been critiqued by Christians and non-Christians as a holiday both too sacred and too profane, too bawdy and too domesticated—a tradition at once crushingly normative and radically threatening to established power. Despite the somewhat sketchy conclusions, this rich cultural history will be a perfect scholarly stocking stuffer for any history buffs on holiday shoppers’ lists. (Oct.)