The Battle for Christmas

A Cultural History of America's Most Cherished Holiday

PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST

Drawing on a wealth of research, this "fascinating" book (The New York Times Book Review) charts the invention of our current Yuletide traditions, from St. Nicholas to the Christmas tree and, perhaps most radically, the practice of giving gifts to children.

Anyone who laments the excesses of Christmas might consider the Puritans of colonial Massachusetts: they simply outlawed the holiday. The Puritans had their reasons, since Christmas was once an occasion for drunkenness and riot, when poor "wassailers" extorted food and drink from the well-to-do. In this intriguing and innovative work of social history, Stephen Nissenbaum rediscovers Christmas's carnival origins and shows how it was transformed, during the nineteenth century, into a festival of domesticity and consumerism.

Bursting with detail, filled with subversive readings of such seasonal classics as "A Visit from St. Nicholas" and A Christmas Carol, The Battle for Christmas captures the glorious strangeness of the past even as it helps us better understand our present.

©1996 Stephen Nissenbaum (P)2024 Tantor Media

Informative

It’s informative- narrated like reading a brochure and as informative as a run off sentence about the true history of Christmas. It was a sludge to get through…

Interesting, but the narration was distracting

The information was very interesting. I thought I knew the history of Christmas, but learned a lot. The narration, however, was distracting. The author has strange inflection, irritating.

perfectly jolly read

I have been studying the holidays for years. this book takes an angle that is refreshing. I learned how surprisingly new the traditions are in America. I will probably listen again.

An excellent history of Christmas

This book is a thoroughly researched and fleshed out study of Christmases past and present. The author has gone to great lengths to include contemporaneous accounts through the centuries of Christmas traditions, rituals and observations, even before said holiday existed. It also benefits from excellent narration.

outstanding history of American christmas

wonderfully researched history of what we celebrate in American Christmas. Blew my mind to learn how things have changed since the 1800s.