[LINK] "What if they changed Christmas and we didn't notice?"

[rfmcdonald]

jsburbidge writes about the ways in which celebrations of Christmas have been changing over time, and ways in which they might continue to change in the future.

The Victorian period is marked by a firm attempt to suppress the surviving rowdy observances of Christmas while reviving in a domestic setting antiquarian customs. Christmas carols come back in (stripped of the drunken revels of a wassailing party), reaching their height in the early 20th Century with Dearmer's Oxford Book of Carols. The plum pudding, which had a general association with festival in its origin, becomes firmly tied to Christmas observance, as does its cousin the fruitcake. The Victorians were the inventors of Christmas cards. Christmas trees came over with Prince Albert. Off in New York, many of the critical factors merged to create the Christmas figure of Santa Claus, as a blend of the English Father Christmas and the Dutch variant of St. Nicholas (who was a December 6th figure). Christmas presents also seem to have emerged from the oranges, nuts (or coal) associated with St. Nicholas.

In many ways, when I was growing up, we still lived (or so it seems to me) in an aftermath of the Victorian stage. The principal innovations had been electric Christmas lights, which meant that a Christmas tree could be lit up for more than a few hours on Christmas Eve / Christmas Day (when it was green and reasonably safe to use lighted candles).

[. . .]

I wonder, however, how much the Victorian pattern is attenuating and being replaced by a newer one. It can be hard to tell: one's own experience of domestic Christmas is likely to be fairly stable, but what may have been "normal" for your family forty years ago might be rather rarer now; so what one perceives as a relatively little changing pattern could be in rather greater flux. (It's like one's own idiolect. One starts out with a baseline set domestically, modified by one's own early peers, but as one gets older, it will diverge from what younger users of the language have as their idiolects.) I've had basically the same pattern of observing Christmas since the early 1980s, and I go to a family Christmas Day gathering which has been ongoing since before I was born.

Certainly, in central Canada, it seems to me that there is a very much reduced importance of Christmas cards (which bulk large in Lewis' description, and in my own memory), compared to when I was young, and that this antedated the emergence of e-mail. (Part of the local reason for this may have been the postal strike of 1975, ending December 2, which disrupted many people's habits of organizing and sending Christmas cards early.)

Certainly, too, the increased secularism of the Canadian context has led to the replacement of carol singing assemblies in schools (using sheets produced by the local papers) by winter pageants with generic winter themes. (The decoupling of what one might call broadly a "festival of lights" decoration period (running from early November to early January) from any specific religious associations has probably assisted, not discouraged, the extension of generic festive decorations in public spaces.)