Christmas

From the point of view of consumer culture, Christmas has become the key ritual celebrating consumption. This ritual takes place not only within the Christian world, but is increasingly enacted in Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, and Buddhist cultures as well. This seemingly improbable embrace of a Christian holy day by non-Christians seems due to the festivity and modernity associated with contemporary public Christmas celebration as well as the holiday's traditional seasonal role in helping to brighten the darkest time of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. Celebrating Christmas lends a sense of participating in global consumer culture. For some Jewish immigrants to the United States, adopting aspects of Christmas celebrations was also seen as a way of fitting into the culture. The same is true of other non-Christian immigrant groups. But besides this pull from consumers helping to spread Christmas geographically, there has been a big push from merchants, who see the opportunity to profit by increasing mall traffic, store sales, and Internet buying through providing a festive atmosphere that encourages buying extravagantly for family, friends, and loved ones. Providing hope for religious salvation is now overshadowed by providing hope for the economic salvation of merchants as the general public anxiously watches to see how retail sales in December compare to the previous year.

The fact that Christmas is now being celebrated in non-Christian locations, such as Japan, China, Turkey, Thailand, India, and Egypt, does not mean that it is celebrated in the same way in each locale.

For example, in Japan and China, rather than the family coming home for the holiday, couples go out to restaurants, bars, and hotels to celebrate. Even within the largely Christian countries of North and South America, Europe, and the Pacific, Christmas traditions differ, although they each invoke the same iconography of Santa Claus, reindeer, Christmas trees, holly wreaths, snowmen, Christmas carols, and Christmas cards. Besides the shared Christmas iconography, the key shared element of the ritual enactment of Christmas is extravagant spending. This spending includes special Christmas meals, drinks, entertainment, home decorations, and gifts. These expenditures differ culturally as well, but in some cases include not only gifts to others, but “self-gifts” as well. Besides demonstrating the personal sense of materialism as the belief that consumer goods are the chief source of happiness in life, such expenditures also provide a public affirmation of materialism in what has been called the “giant potlatch” of “wasteful” Christmas spending and giving. A disproportionate amount of the feast preparation and gift buying at Christmas is produced by women, reinforcing the stereotype of women as consumers.

Although it is easy to imagine that the materialism we now associate with Christmas as a recent development that has resulted from the secular celebration taking over much of the religious celebration, this is not entirely the case. Drawing on Clement Miles who was quoting the Roman Libanius, Daniel Miller shows that there was strong criticism of the lavish feasting, gift giving, decorations, spending, and gambling associated with the predecessor Roman festivals of calends and Saturnalia that were also held in the latter half of December. The invention of Christmas at this time of year by the Christian church was no coincidence. It was intended to co-opt both the Roman Saturnalia and the celebration of the Persian sun god, Mithras, which was also popular at this time of year during the second and third centuries AD. So before the commercial co-optation of our winter celebrations, there was the Christian cooptation of predecessor holidays. This does not justify either appropriation of the seasonal enthusiasm, but it may temper criticisms that commercialism and popular culture have taken Christ out of Christmas.

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