What kind of Christmas did we used to know? To hear some critics and historians tell it, the holiday used to be a lot more religious than it is now. According to one recent commentary, the turning point came during World War II when Americans coalesced around a universal, humanistic understanding of the holiday that was only nominally Christian.
There’s a particular version of the secularization story that revolves around Jews. In his 1993 novel Operation Shylock, Philip Roth argues that Irving Berlin’s songs “Easter Parade” and “White Christmas” are about “the two holidays that celebrate the divinity of Christ—the divinity that’s the very heart of Jewish rejection of Christianity.” He then goes on to remark that Berlin “de-Christs them both.” By making Easter into a fashion show and Christmas into a celebration of snow, Berlin “turns their religion into schlock.”
A few paragraphs later, Roth dismisses his screed about Berlin and Christmas insufferable “blah-blah.” The passage is memorable, though, because it expresses something many people believe to be true, even if they are less articulate about it than Philip Roth. That’s the idea that the acid of American culture has degraded a solemn religious observance into consumer kitsch. In 1954, less than a decade after “White Christmas” hit number one, the gospel singer George Beverly Shea implored Americans to “Put Christ Back in Christmas.” Berlin sang about mail and weather but, according to Shea, the “angels sing the glory of Our Lord.”
Did Jews have something to do with secularization of Christmas? Not as much as Roth suggests. That’s because the story starts much earlier than we think. Modern Christmas music is a product of the post-World War II culture industry. But the extravagant lighting, lavish displays, and extended hours we now associate with the so-called holiday season date back to the late 19th century, when massive department stores increasingly replaced local specialist shops. Some store owners, such as the Philadelphia retail titan John Wannamaker, set up religious statues and used organs to play hymns as customers hunted for gifts. But the most successful retailer of the period was R.H. Macy in New York, which pioneered the use of Santa imagery, wintry decorations, and illuminated windows to attract businesses years before its acquisition by the Jewish Straus family.
These tactics were successful partly because Christmas had rarely been a particular solemn occasion in America, even in the colonial period. Puritans, Quakers, and other Protestant dissenters spurned the holiday, which they saw as a descendant of pagan rites. Anglicans and Huguenots did recognize Christmas—but observed it with precisely the kind of feasting, fancy dress, and often drunken revelry that Puritans saw as the problem.
Clergy urged their congregants to take the holiday more seriously, but there’s little evidence that anyone was listening—and men of the cloth often engaged in frolics themselves. As late as 1832, the English actress Fanny Kemble observed of America that “Christmas day is no religious day and hardly a holiday with them.” Christmas was widely observed in the South, where Anglican influences were stronger, but in New England, Independence Day and Thanksgiving were the only generally recognized festivals.
German customs such as Christmas trees and the legend of Santa Claus arrived in the United States in the 19th century, partly as a result of the large influx of German immigrants in that period. Americans were also influenced by British fashion, which had also gravitated toward German Christmas traditions under the influence of the German-born Prince Consort Albert. This new version of Christmas was seasonal, familial, and domestic—a reassuring contrast to the disorderly merriment of previous centuries. But it was also relatively secular, or at least ecumenical in ways that appealed across denominations and even beyond Christianity.
In fact, one reason that American Jews of the period were comfortable with this sort of Christmas is that they already knew it from German-speaking regions from which they emigrated. Many of them considered it, in the words of one Reform rabbi, a “universal Volkfest” rather than an exclusive celebration of the Messiah’s birth. The campaign for Hanukkah observance that accelerated around the turn of the 20th century was a response to the popularity of Christmas. There was no need to wait for Shea or his evangelical associate Billy Graham to insist on the religious meaning of the day. Rather than joining in a watered-down festival, Jewish Hanukkah advocates insisted on putting the Christ back in Christmas so as to discourage Jews from participating.
This history is interesting in itself, but also helps clarify an issue in the recent culture wars. For at least the last decade, conservatives have promised to resist the “war on Christmas” represented by “season’s greetings,” “holiday” sales, and other neutralized rhetoric. In October, Donald Trump insisted that if elected, “we will proudly say Merry Christmas again.”
To some of Trump’s opponents, this kind of promise reflects a dangerous brand of Christian nationalism. But it’s crazy to believe that Trump or any relevant number of his supporters imagine the kind of Christmas pogroms that Jews feared in Eastern Europe, or even a harmless but more religiously significant practice such as midnight mass. Instead, they mean the sort of warm, kitschy, vaguely humanitarian occasion that most Americans had known for around a century before Irving Berlin got involved.
The reality of American Christmas doesn’t satisfy anyone. For Christians, Jews, or others who care about communal stability, theological consistency, and public dignity, it’s a bit of an embarrassment. Surely there is more to Christmas than presents, cards, and dinners. It’s tempting to romanticize a more pious past. Yet the same complaints about commercialization and vulgarization have been familiar since the Civil War.
On the other hand, America’s affection for Christmas is a problem for secularists and multiculturalists. The name of the holiday, some of its traditional iconography, and its dominance of the vacation calendar, remind us of the historical centrality of Christianity to American life. Public figures and institutions pretend that this week is the pinnacle of a generic “holiday season” or pile up lists of rival celebrations on pretense that they have equal significance. But it doesn’t fool anyone. Even without the help of Bob Geldof, we all know that it’s Christmas.
That ambiguity is what Berlin and other American artists have wrestled with for decades. Rather than secularizing a deeply religious event (whether because they were Jews or because they just wanted a hit), they were trying to capture in words, sounds, and images the kitschy, incoherent, yet joyous occasion that Americans created from a characteristic blend of religious, ethnic, and political influences. American culture thrives from this slightly goofy but irresistible syncretism. To celebrate that, let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.