Overview

Slogans such as ""Let's put Christ back into Christmas"" or ""Jesus Is the Reason for the Season"" hold an appeal to Christians who oppose the commercializing of events they hold sacred. However, through a close look at the rise of holidays in the United States, this book argues that commercial appropriations of these occasions were as religious in form as they were secular. The rituals of America's holiday bazaar that emerged in the 19th century offered a luxuriant merger of the holy and the profane - a heady blend of fashion and faith, merchandizing and gift-giving, profits and sentiments, all celebrations of a devout consumption. This book offers a reassessment of the ""consumer rites"" that various social critics have long decried for their spiritual emptiness and banal sentimentality. It tells the story of how holiday celebrations were almost banished by Puritans and other religious reformers in the colonies but went on to be romanticized and reinvented in the 19th and 20th centuries. Merchants and advertisers were crucial for the reimagining of the holidays, promoting them in a grand, carnivalesque manner, which could include gargantuan fruit cakes, towering rabbits, masked Santa Clauses, and exploding valentines. Along the way Schmidt uses everything from diaries to manuals on church decoration and window display to show the ways people have prepared for and celebrated specific holidays - such as going Christmas shopping, making love tokens, choosing Easter bonnets, sending flowers to Mom, buying ties for Dad. He demonstrates in particular how women took the lead as holiday consumers, shaping warm-hearted celebrations of home and family through their intricate engagement with the marketplace.

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Consumer Rites is good history and good reading. . . . a terrific story terrifically told. . . . richly documented, smoothly narrated, and lavishly illustrated by a cultural historian who knows his stuff and tells it with panache. . . . Give it as a gift next Christmas, Mother's Day or Father's Day! It's the American thing to do.--Cross Currents Its that time of year again: holiday shopping, and lots of it. Ever wonder how this American tradition got started? In this enlightening book, Leigh Eric Schmidt looks at holidays in our country and how they've evolved over the past 150 years into highly commercialized events. . . . Consumer Rites is without question a true holiday gift, and it makes for fascinating reading.--Washington Post Book World The real merit of this book lies in its complex sympathies: it is at once a major contribution to American religious history and to cultural history. --David D. Hall, Harvard University [A] richly documented, smoothly narrated, and lavishly illustrated [study] by a cultural historian who knows his stuff and tells it with panache. Consumer Rites is good history and good reading. . . . A brilliant chronicle of the American tale where domesticated remnants of Protestant religion, not nationalist identity alone, drove developments, and where capitalist expansion was in the driver's seat.---Lawrence A. Hoffman, Cross Currents Filled with interesting facts and nascent ideas.---Fred Miller Robinson, The New York Times Book Review Conceptually sophisticated, wide ranging; [Schmidt] treats Valentine's Day, Easter, and Mother's Day as well as Christmas all within a delicately balanced framework of tensions between market rationality and romantic sentiment. . . . [A] fresh and timely alternative to contemporary academic fashion.---Jackson Lears, The New Republic Honorable Mention for the 1996 Ray and Pat Browne Award for Best Book in Popular Culture

Consumer Rites is good history and good reading. . . . a terrific story terrifically told. . . . richly documented, smoothly narrated, and lavishly illustrated by a cultural historian who knows his stuff and tells it with panache. . . . Give it as a gift next Christmas, Mother's Day or Father's Day! It's the American thing to do. --Cross Currents [A] richly documented, smoothly narrated, and lavishly illustrated [study] by a cultural historian who knows his stuff and tells it with panache. Consumer Rites is good history and good reading. . . . A brilliant chronicle of the American tale where domesticated remnants of Protestant religion, not nationalist identity alone, drove developments, and where capitalist expansion was in the driver's seat. ---Lawrence A. Hoffman, Cross Currents Filled with interesting facts and nascent ideas. ---Fred Miller Robinson, The New York Times Book Review Honorable Mention for the 1996 Ray and Pat Browne Award for Best Book in Popular Culture Its that time of year again: holiday shopping, and lots of it. Ever wonder how this American tradition got started? In this enlightening book, Leigh Eric Schmidt looks at holidays in our country and how they've evolved over the past 150 years into highly commercialized events. . . . Consumer Rites is without question a true holiday gift, and it makes for fascinating reading. --Washington Post Book World Conceptually sophisticated, wide ranging; [Schmidt] treats Valentine's Day, Easter, and Mother's Day as well as Christmas all within a delicately balanced framework of tensions between market rationality and romantic sentiment. . . . [A] fresh and timely alternative to contemporary academic fashion. ---Jackson Lears, The New Republic The real merit of this book lies in its complex sympathies: it is at once a major contribution to American religious history and to cultural history. --David D. Hall, Harvard University

Schmidt (Religion/Drew Univ.; Holy Fairs, not reviewed) traces the cultural and commercial history of American holidays with some surprising results. Christmas gift-giving pumps some $37 billion into the American economy every year, a figure greater than the gross national product of Ireland. About 150 million Mother's Day cards are sent annually. In short, holidays are big business in America, and many people are not too pleased about it. Schmidt focuses his attention primarily on showing how the commercial grinch crept into the picture in American celebrations of St. Valentine's Day, Christmas, Easter, and Mother's Day. However, he argues that the apparent taint of commerce is, in reality, as much in keeping with the festal excess at the heart of the notion of festivity as any religious recognition of these days, and can be traced in many cases back to the medieval period, when fairs and markets were common on feast days. He shows convincingly that the battle over the holidays in America is rooted not in recent commercialism, but in the fundamental difference between the somber Puritan and more indulgent Anglican/Catholic visions of religion. His argument founders, however, when he asserts that the excesses of American capitalism are in some way tied into the carnivalesque - the term used by Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin to connote bawdy, insurrectionary humor - mistaking mercantile vulgarity for Rabelaisian subversion. In general, his defense of holiday commercialism is not entirely convincing, but he offers a fascinating picture of key changes in American celebration, from a bewildering variety of antebellum Santas to quick biographies of Joyce Hall, father of Hallmark Greeting Cards, and Anna Jarvis, the creator of Mother's Day. Although the central argument of the book remains unproven, this is an enlightening and entertaining look at a relatively undiscussed aspect of American culture, particularly interesting for its insights into 19th-century mores. (Kirkus Reviews)

Consumer Rites is good history and good reading. . . . a terrific story terrifically told. . . . richly documented, smoothly narrated, and lavishly illustrated by a cultural historian who knows his stuff and tells it with panache. . . . Give it as a gift next Christmas, Mother's Day or Father's Day! It's the American thing to do.

Author Information

Leigh Eric Schmidt is an Associate Professor of History at Princeton University. He is the author of Holy Fairs: Scottish Communions and American Revivals in the Early Modern Period (Princeton).

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