The Battle for Christmas

The Battle for Christmas (1996) is a broad survey of the history behind the evolution of the Christmas holiday by American author and professor Stephen Nissenbaum. Nissenbaum’s book gives an ambivalent take on the Americanization of Christmas, casting the widely celebrated event as problematic, bound up in consumerism and legacies of racial and religious oppression. Nissenbaum scrupulously deconstructs a holiday that is, in his opinion, often taken for granted, and illuminates the different cultural assumptions and ideologies that it has propagated over the past 300 years.

Nissenbaum begins his work by tracing Christmas all the way back to Puritan society in the seventeenth century. Some of the very first English colonies in America were Puritan, following strict codes of religious and moral conduct which led to the religion’s name becoming, rightly, synonymous with “rigid” and “strict.” The original “Battle for Christmas” became a conflict in the New England colonies between the Puritans and people who followed other Christian denominations, like Catholicism. The Puritans, who held the most political power, reasoned that no evidence exists to support the notion that Jesus was born in late December. They also believed that Christmas was based on a pagan ritual for the winter solstice. However, Nissenbaum contends that their main reason for rejecting the holiday was its close association with promiscuity, drunkenness, and other excesses. Evidence shows that Christmas in the seventeenth century was more absurd and belligerent than it is today. Men and women cross-dressed, and musical vagrants demanded hospitality in exchange for their (often unwanted) talents while wandering the country. If a solicited household refused to comply with their demands, they would often see their house vandalized.

While forming the idealistic “city upon the hill” that was to be the Massachusetts Bay colony, the state’s first governor, John Winthrop, vowed to create a devoutly Christian society based on a Puritan way of life. He and other government leaders worked to suppress religious activities that were not directly supported by scripture. In 1659, the colony outlawed Christmas and imposed a hefty fine for those who ignored the ruling. The holiday remained illegal for more than two decades until the law was lifted due to overseas political pressure from the government of England.



In the eighteenth century, Christmas began to reclaim some of its power. The English Restoration government that rose to power disliked that the Puritans ruled over the colonies, and knocked many of its administrators out of their positions. This contributed to a long-term separation between church and state that would later be formalized in the United States Constitution. Massachusetts became more spiritually diverse, though, of course, it still rallied around the Christian faith.

Nissenbaum situates the Battle for Christmas in New England within a 1700-year timeline, during which the holiday has been more or less continuously threatened. He acknowledges that some of the challenges to Christmas are morally defensible, as they are reactions to an obvious trend of materialism, greed, alcoholism, and other antisocial behaviors. He also analyzes the figure of Santa Claus, showing how the creation transformed from a story about a saint to the ubiquitous jolly old man in a red coat with white trim. This change went hand-in-hand with the Christmas holiday’s shift from a public holiday (or, sometimes, a banned public holiday) to a family oriented holiday celebrated mainly indoors and in private. Nissenbaum touches on the contemporary “Battle for Christmas,” most of which relies on xenophobic impulses against non-Christian forms of spirituality, empowered by America’s long legacy of white nationalism. He notes this trend’s odd, regressive appeal to the reunion of church and state. The Battle for Christmas provides a comprehensive overview of the contentious holiday, showing that its existence is at least as much about power as it is about spiritual belief.