On American Christmas and the Christmas Film

Rewind to America's roots—the Plymouth Colony, December 25, 1620. The First Thanksgiving in New England is over. A light snow is falling. The First Christmas on American soil is about to begin…without a turkey, without mistletoe, without a brightly lit tree. The Puritans who settled in New England had banned Christmas and the behavior that accompanied it in their part of the New World—in Europe, there had been “rowdy public displays of excessive eating and drinking, the mockery of established authority, aggressive begging (often involving the threat of doing harm), and even the invasion of wealthy homes” (Nissenbaum 1997: 4, 5). Stephen Nissenbaum points out, Cotton Mather complained in Grace Defended: A Censure on the Ungodliness, By Which the Glorious Grace of God, Is Too Commonly Abused that “the Feast of Christ's nativity [had been] spent in Reveling, Dicing, Carding, Masking, and in Licentious Liberty…by Mad Mirth by long Eating, by hard Drinking, by lewd Gaming, by rude Reveling” (1712, 20; 1997, 7).1 Across the Pond, Anglicans agreed with America's Puritans. The behavior of Christmas celebrants needed to be curbed. The Reverend Henry Bourne of Newcastle, England, found the season a “Scandal to Religion, and an encouraging of Wickedness,” and “a pretense for Drunkenness, and Rioting, and Wantonness”—the 40 days of disorder and drinking customary during the mumming and the carol singing, he deemed a “disgrace…generally done, in the midst of Rioting and Chambering” (1725, 141; qted in Nissenbaum 1997, 7).2 As Nissenbaum remarks, Christmas was a profoundly ritualized carnival, at base, a transgressive, post-harvest Saturnalia in which social hierarchy was turned upside down. Yuletide meant men could and did dress like women; women could and did dress like men; the young imitated and mocked their elders (1997, 8). Puritans in America declared Christmas illegal throughout the seventeenth century, but the season did not disappear. It went underground as young people continued to drink and “chamber.” In his diary entry dated December 30, 1711, Cotton Mather noted, “I hear of a Number of young People of both Sexes, belonging, many of them to my Flock, who have had on the Christmas-night, this last Week, a Frolick, a reveling Feast, and Ball, which discovers their Corruption, and has the Tendency to corrupt them yett more” (1912, 146; qted in Nissenbaum 1997, 20). Despite Mather's determination to “prevent such Follies for the Time to come” (1912, 147) by the end of the eighteenth century the Yuletide was once again a public festival. However, it had morphed into a celebration that incorporated piety and moderation into its celebration. Hymnals in New England churches housed Christmas hymns; Masonic lodges held Christmas banquets; polite wassailing happened in Boston as newspaper boys asked their customers for tips because of the season; Anticks and mumming returned to New England's streets. In the nineteenth century, Christmas was better-behaved throughout America, sanctioned by the services for the season held in churches. In 1822, Clement Clarke Moore's Santa Claus arrived in A Visit from St. Nicholas, and upper-class New Yorkers, who visited and comforted those less fortunate on Christmas Day, invented the charitable face of the holiday we know today, and the runaway popularity of Charles Dickens' best-seller, A Christmas Carol (1843) further aligned the American temperament to acts of personal charity. Fast forward to today. Without question, Mather would be appalled by what Christmas has become. Christmas now is a ritual filled with peculiar postmodern rites. Our Christmas trees are draped with Victorian mementos and retro ornaments. Hanging from their branches, Woody Wagons carry more trees to be trimmed, bunches of grapes glow, fat sheep sport Santa hats, John Deere tractors, candy canes and carousels glisten, skates twirl, disco balls blink, and Nutcracker soldiers bear tin drums, shoulder to shoulder, with ceramic shepherds, cherubic angels, glassy stars, and wise men with gifts. Juxtaposed, the middle-class materialism of the season and the Bible's story of Christ's birth partner in our parlors. On screen, our Yuletide movies mediate our mixing of the secular and sacred aspects of the holiday, fashioning for many what Daniel Miller would recognize as a proper Christmas in modern America. Lucy (voiced by Tracy Stratford), for example, in A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965) thinks the little evergreen that the children fashion out of the lights and Christmas ornaments they find on Snoopy's doghouse is “not a bad tree after all.” All Christmas films transmit and maintain important cultural patterns, influencing societal norms and shaping individual values. Their dominant motifs and tendencies (and those of the Christmas television shows) guide our consumption of commercial forms, intimate social relations, and our spiritual well-being. In this special issue of the Journal of American Culture, eight articles go to the movies and chart how the character of Christmas (and American culture) has changed from the Second World War to today. Gaylyn Studlar's ‘Yet in Thy Dark Streets Shineth’: Hollywood and the Emergence of the American “Christmas Movie” begins the conversation by unpacking nineteenth century norms and forms of the American Christmas to argue presentations of Christmas in wartime and postwar Hollywood films of the 1940s can be understood as a compromise formula in which Christmas is most often the framing device for examining the relationship of an individual to the institution of the American family in keeping with the attitude of Charles Dickens. For Studlar, the Hollywood film industry's representational investment in Christmas underscores the majority of Christmas-centered American feature films of the 1940s, whether they offer comedic relief, musical nostalgia, or puzzling plots and criminal behaviors. Following, Kathy Merlock Jackson's “Nearsighted, Shortsighted, and Farsighted: Mister Magoo's Christmas Carol (1962)” finds Mister Magoo's Christmas Carol, the first animated Christmas special made for television, introduced new creative possibilities for that medium, especially regarding its child audience. Mister Magoo's Christmas Carol, which first aired on NBC at 7:30 EST, brought to the small screen a physically impaired character who lets nothing stand in his way, drawing attention to the capability inherent in disability. Merlock Jackson concludes Mister Magoo's Christmas Carol furthered the tradition of Christmas linked with personal transformation, especially for those interested in social change by spreading its theme of optimism and goodwill for those disabled or less fortunate. Then, Valerie Pennanen's “Holiday Magic, Animated Misfits and the ‘True Meaning’ of Christmas” explores what the creative teams behind Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, A Charlie Brown Christmas, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and Frosty the Snowman did right in the 1960s, aesthetically and thematically, to win the hearts of American audiences. Pennanen argues each film's winning formula includes visually appealing artwork; skillfully rendered music; kid-friendly humor; sensitive treatments of the “misfit” theme; and allusions to the sacred and/or magical aspects of Christmas, through which the holiday's “true meaning” can be grasped. In the 1980s, the broad cultural shifts that occurred in American culture during the aftermath of the Vietnam War were marked by the rise of conservatism, free market economics, and sweeping socioeconomic change. In response to America's “new normal,” a Christmas film that earlier been unthinkable was released. A tale of terrorism, John McTiernan's blockbuster action film Die Hard (1988) became a Christmas staple. Drawing on the ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin, Sue Matheson's “If this is their idea of Christmas, I've gotta be here for New Year's: carnival in John McTiernan's Diehard (1988)” argues Die Hard heralds the return of Christmas carnival that is found in the transgressive “crownings and uncrownings” of its characters. For Matheson, Die Hard argues Christmas is at once a departure from and a return to Victorian standards that renegotiates America's values, its Christmas Eve being a time of transformation, redefinition, and reconciliation. Fran Pheasant-Kelly's “Tim Burton's Christmas Chaos: Abject Transgression in Batman Returns, The Nightmare Before Christmas, and Edward Scissorhands” follows, exploring the darker side of Christmas in these Yuletide films that are especially susceptible to Kristevan analysis through their qualities of abject space, parental influence, and incoherent identity, as well as their elements of bodily disgust and boundary transgression. Pheasant-Kelly finds Burton promotes Christmas as a highly traumatic and disruptive if memorable event, acknowledging dystopian elements of Christmas that are also evident in movies such as Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984), Gremlins (1984), The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), and Deck The Halls (2008). As Pheasant-Kelly points out, Christmas films offer their audiences stories filled with transgression, but Christmas also proved itself to be more than trauma and unhappy endings. Self-healing, Hollywood turned back to Dickens' idea of the holiday as the shock of America's paradigm shift subsided. Ben Hufbauer points this out in “Ron Howard's How the Grinch Stole Christmas: A Critique and Celebration of Yuletide.” Examining the non-religious spirit of Christmas, Hufbauer finds the Yuletide in the year 2000 marked by kindness and community and positioned against discrimination—toward any Who. According to Hufbauer, Howard's look at the excessive consumerism of Christmas, which causes Yuletide doubts in not just the Grinch but also in Cindy Lou, is an equally relevant lesson for the viewer. The modern American Christmas, as James Carrier points out, beit carnival or Christian, has been (and continues to be) a ceremony of affection and stability, its celebration most pronounced in the realm of the nuclear family. Home, as Carrier says, “is the world of durable and affectionate relationships, where things are done for love” (1993, 56). In “Reindeer Fantasies and Reunited Families in the three Prancer films” Stella Hockenhull identifies a current in American Christmas films that counteracts carnival's violence and transgressive sensibilities. Hockenhull examines how real Reindeer, otherworldly and mysterious when viewed through the lens of childhood, can have the ability to repair family misfortune and societal defects at Christmas time. As Hockenhull points out, Prancer (1989), Prancer Returns (2001), and Prancer: A Christmas Tale (2022) follow the trend for Christmas films released immediately after the Second World War in which Christmas was idealized at home, the family unit was of great importance, and in which broken and damaged relationships are repaired. Finally, in “One Good Turn Deserves Another: Reciprocity and Renewal in Marcel Pagnol's Merlusse and Alexander Payne's The Holdovers,” Tom Ue considers the importance of gift-giving in The Holdovers (2023). Examining Payne's influences, especially French writer-director Marcel Pagnol's Merlusse (1935), Ue recovers the Pagnol-Payne connection to argue these directors commercialize the act of gift-giving only to decommercialize it. He finds Payne goes much further than Pagnol in revealing how reciprocity can lead to renewal. I believe as Christmas movies change, the importance of sentiment throughout their activities remains a constant, encoded in gift giving presented as an exchange that is at once generous and foundational, and at its base, quintessentially American. For Ralph Waldo Emerson, the gift given at Christmas would be “a portion of thyself…the poet brings his poem, the shepherd his lamb, the farmer, corn; the miner, a gem; the sailor, coral and shells; the painter, his picture; the girl, a handkerchief of her own sewing” (1841 [1876], 133; in Carrier 1993, 56). Made after the spirit of Emerson's observation, this issue of the Journal of American Culture is our gift to you. The articles collected here do not claim to be comprehensive or exhaustive works about American Christmas and the ideas and concepts contained in these chapters are not conclusions on which the reader is meant to rest. Each article is a point of departure for further study and discovery. I look forward to the conversations that this issue of the Journal of American Culture will generate and the opportunities for further study in this field that will develop as long as Christmas films are made. Carl Sederholm, our senior editor, especially deserves a huge shout-out for his unflagging support of this project. Thank you, Carl, for your hard work and patience. And now that it is time to turn the issue over to our readers, I and the writers (whose work awaits) would like to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas. The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author. The data are not publicly available due to privacy or ethical restrictions.

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