| Popis: |
The peoples of Scandinavia and Germany created an impressive array of Christmas observances. This chapter explores their history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when today’s holiday took shape. Even as nineteenth-century ethnographers were conducting studies of the holiday’s roots in pre-Christian pagan traditions, celebrants were drawing on existing religious, aristocratic, and peasant traditions to reinvent a holiday that celebrated middle-class family values; new observances centred on the Christmas tree, the jultomten (Christmas gnome), and Father Christmas. After 1900, Christmas was deeply influenced by the consolidation of consumer culture, exemplified in the history of the Christmas market and the department store, and the evolving mass media, including family Christmas literature. Along the way, Christmas was also politicized and nationalized, especially in Germany, where Marxist Social Democrats, National Socialists, and Cold War Communists and liberals all tried to shape a Christmas that advanced their political agendas. This history suggests that Christmas observances in northern Europe crossed boundaries normally kept separate: between the sacred and the secular, the public and the private, the personal and the political, the commercial and the authentic. While critics repeatedly complained that waning piety, excessive commercialization, or drunken frivolity threatened the ‘true meaning’ of Christmas, this chapter argues that such changes were both inventive and productive. Christmas in Germany and Scandinavia (and elsewhere) was never static, but instead opened space for the contestation and reproduction of changing ideals of faith, family, and community belonging. |
