Best Books on the History of Christmas (U.S)

Penne L. Restad, 1996

Restad’s was the most comprehensive work on my list. It starts with a meticulous explanation of the origins of the Christmas holiday in the early Christian Era, wends its way through how the holiday was observed in Colonial America and how it evolved in the new American Republic. It provides reliable introductions to Christmas tree and Santa Claus traditions in the country, covers Christmas in the Old South, and explains how the holiday changed from Saturnalia to more of a religious holiday as evangelical Christianity swept most of the country It also describes the increasing commercialization of the holiday in the Gilded Age, and winds up in the twentieth century. Notably, Restad uses the story of the poem “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” to clarify the holiday’s commercialization.

Stephen Nissenbaum, 2010

Pay attention to the tension implied in Nissenbaum’s title because it is the key to his fine book. Nissenbaum covers much the same ground as Restad’s book, but with a quite different perspective. He highlights the holiday’s conflicted history in this country. It was certainly contested in the colonial period when Puritans in New England tried to prohibit its observance. But it was also contested at other times and in other parts of America. Later, the persistent carnival aspects of the holiday perturbed genteel folk in America’s growing eastern urban enclaves, leading to efforts to tame the holiday. On plantations in the South, slaves contested masters’ control of the holiday with both subtle and blatant forms of physical and cultural resistance. This is a brilliant work of social and cultural history that astutely probes literary treatments of the holiday and primary sources to uncover differences that Americans had over class relations, charity, slavery, and a host of other matters. Given accusations in recent years about presumed “woke” intentions to ban Christmas, it is helpful to recognize that Christmas has been contested since the colonial period. Unfortunately, Nissenbaum’s coverage stops with the twentieth century.

Thomas Ruys Smith, 2021

This book deserves your reading on two levels. On the one hand, it provides a marvelous anthology of historically significant excerpts from pre-1900 American-authored books and magazine pieces on Christmas, many of them by significant figures from the American past. Authors include not only acclaimed literary icons like Washington Irving, Henry James, and William Dean Howells but also writers who are remembered less for their literary skills per se than the ways their advocacies and polemics affected the course of their nation’s political and social history—persons like Frederick Douglass, Jacob A. Riis, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. All the works are helpfully contextualized by the editor. Thus, for example, Smith introduces Charles Eastman’s piece “The Ghost Dance War” by noting Eastman’s presence in South Dakota after the massacre of Native Americans at Wounded Knee and the relationship of those events to the succeeding reservation Christmas holiday. The most valuable aspect of this volume to me is its remarkably thorough and documented (173 endnotes!) 57-page introduction relating American literary treatments of Christmas both before and after the Civil War to the distinctive developments of those time periods. I especially liked Smith’s emphasis on transatlantic influences on American Christmas writings and, vice versa, American influences on European Christmas writings. Naturally, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol comes under the spotlight for its popularity in the U.S., but, in contrast, native New Yorker Washington Irving’s Christmas materials in his Knickerbocker’s History of New-York impacted Sir Walter Scott. This is a wonderful collection.