Christmas in the Crosshairs
Two Thousand Years of Denouncing and Defending the World's Most Celebrated Holiday
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- USD 14.99
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- USD 14.99
Descripción editorial
An Anglican priest hands out brass knuckles to his congregation, preparing to battle anti-Christmas fanatics. Fascists insist that the Winter Solstice is the real Christmas, while Communists stage atheist musicals outside of churches on Christmas Eve. Activists vandalize shops that start touting the holiday in October and anti-consumerists sing parody carols in shopping malls. Is there a war on Christmas? As Gerry Bowler demonstrates in Christmas in the Crosshairs, there is and always has been a war, or several wars, on Christmas.
A cherished global phenomenon, Christmas is the biggest single event on the planet. For Christians it is the second-most sacred date on the calendar, but it also engages billions of people who are caught up in its commercialism, music, sentiment, travel, and frenetic busyness. Since its controversial invention in the Roman Empire, Christmas has struggled with paganism, popular culture, and fierce Christian opposition; faced abolition in Scotland and New England; and braved neglect and near-death in the 1700s, only to be miraculously reinvented in the 1800s. The twentieth century saw it banned by Bolsheviks and twisted by Nazis. Since then, special interest groups of every stripe have used the holiday's massive popularity to draw attention to their causes.
Christmas in the Crosshairs tells the story of the tug-of-war over Christmas, replete with cross-dressing priests, ranting Puritans, and atheist witches. In this eye-opening history of Christmas and its opponents from the beginning up to the present day, Bowler gives us a shocking, and richly entertaining, new look at the tradition we thought we knew so well.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
