Extract from this year's 2025 Christmas Wishbook:
"You are invited to Connecticut, to the Whitmore family mansion, December 25, 1985. Doug, Libby, Max and Buster are gathered around their perfect tree, swapping jokes, tearing open presents, and basking in the soft chime of glass ornaments.
This year, we celebrate An American 80s Christmas: the debt the world owes America for eight-foot trees, eggnog, Santa à la Coca-Cola and inflatable lawn decorations; to the decade that forever froze the look and feeling of Christmas into a technicolour dream of family chaos, tinsel and television reruns.
Indeed, last year, in A Rococo Christmas, through the eyes of Marie Antoinette, we had to face the hard truth that eighteenth-century traditions had little to do with our present-day understanding of Christmas. Norman firs, Santa’s wish lists and pigs in blankets were not really part of the baroque courtiers’ zeitgeist.
In pre-Georgian times, December feasts referred more strictly to the notion of the winter solstice – a time for enjoying excess food after the harvest, a respite from toiling the land (though not for Marie Antoinette, ever the farmer of Le Hameau de la Reine!). The New Year was a far more important turning point, when the hope of a new season, a way out of darkness, could be contemplated; hence Christmas, in time, became the holiday of light.
Many nights reading Christmas Academia – a truly fascinating intersection of sociology, history, literature, anthropology and psychology – lay bare that Christmas, as we celebrate it today, is not ancient nor definitive nor essentially Christian. Beyond its pre-Christian roots – the Roman celebrations of Saturn and Sol Invictus, and the Germanic and Norse winter-solstice feasts – it has been shaped less by spirituality and religion and far more by industrialisation, politics, commerce and popular culture in the twentieth century, and nowhere more so than in America. Its storytellers, retailers, and advertisers built the modern Christmas.
Take Santa Claus: his present-day form was drawn by Thomas Nast in the 1860s and perfected by Haddon Sundblom for Coca-Cola. From the 1930s to the 1960s, Coca-Cola’s winter campaigns burned the red suit and jolly face into the global imagination. Christmas ornaments, supposedly German heirlooms, were in fact popularised by F. W. Woolworth, who discovered Lauscha glass baubles in the 1880s and sold them to mass success in New York on a punt. When war later cut off imports, Corning Glass Works adapted its light-bulb machines to blow ornaments for the Shiny Brite company, turning craft into industry. Even gift-wrapping, first improvised by Hallmark in Kansas City in 1917, was a commercial invention: a retail device to define what could be bought as a gift. Stick a Santa on it, and subliminally suggest that the present was made, or at least approved, by the man himself. Before then, gift wrapping only existed as a way to conceal the gift itself out of modesty, not ceremony.
While this thesis feels controversial, possibly disenchanted, linking Christmas to the machinery of modernity allows for a humanist view of Christmas as a secular community festival, where traditions from different places and times merge into a common language of belonging and desire, for social harmony and transcendence. It stands as a mirror of our shared aspirations, anxieties and hopes (often in contrast with our imperfect reality) and perhaps explains our annual compulsion to restage the same rituals year after year: a choreography of memory, our Groundhog Day of longing and repair.
This civic dimension found its most vivid expression in America, where public rituals such as the Macy’s Christmas Parade (its original name), first held in 1924, transformed private faith into public spectacle. What began as a department-store procession of floats and zoo animals soon became a televised national ritual and collective performance. Politics and commerce became indistinguishable bedfellows in shaping the holiday. In 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt famously moved Thanksgiving one week earlier, not for reasons of piety or harvest but to extend the Christmas shopping season and aid Depression-era retailers, a controversy the press humorously nicknamed “Franksgiving.”
Moments like these underline just how profoundly America has shaped not only the story of Christmas but also its very tempo – stretching the season, industrialising its symbols, and broadcasting its cheer across the world. What started as a set of European folk traditions were shaped into a national pageant ready for cultural export: one part faith, one part showmanship, and wholly American in its optimism. "
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