Tag: John Wanamaker

Who Created Christmas?

Published on by D. G. Hart22 Comments

One answer looks either to fourth-century emperors who devised December 25 to compete with pagan holidays or to popes who established Christmas as a festival for the western church. Another might point toward the tradition of Lessons and Carols which have become a Protestant (Anglican) way to observe the festivities.

But the point of the question is to wonder why people like Barry Manilow, a Jewish-American, feel so comfortable with Christmas that they can’t wait to record another holiday album. After all, many of the Christmas “standards” came from the pens and pianos of Jewish Americans who found the way that Christian Americans carried on during December so inviting that they could compose a song like “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year”:

It’s The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year
With the kids jingle belling
And everyone telling you “Be of good cheer”
It’s The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year
It’s the hap -happiest season of all
With those holiday greetings and gay happy meetings
When friends come to call
It’s the hap – happiest season of all

There’ll be parties for hosting
Marshmallows for toasting
And caroling out in the snow
There’ll be scary ghost stories
And tales of the glories of
Christmases long, long ago

It’s The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year
There’ll be much mistltoeing
And hearts will be glowing
When love ones are near
It’s The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year

There’ll be parties for hosting
Marshmallows for toasting
And caroling out in the snow
There’ll be scary ghost stories
And tales of the glories of
Christmases long, long ago

It’s The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year
There’ll be much mistltoeing
And hearts will be glowing
When love ones are near
It’s The Most Wonderful Time
It’s The Most Wonderful Time
It’s The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year

That song, by the way, came from Edward Pola (nee Sidney Edward Pollacsek) and George Wyle (nee Bernard Weissman). Wyle also gave us the theme music for Gilligan’s Island, a tune to which Amazing Grace, I hear, can also be sung. Talk about inter-religious synergy.

This is a wonderful song and captures much of the experience of many North Americans during the last half of December each year which finds citizens of the United States observing Christmas as a national holiday.

But can you imagine, as I attempted last night, non-Muslims writing songs to communicate a sense of Ramadan festivities. We watched two holiday movies to take advantage of the respite from a work schedule. The first was The Bells of St. Mary’s (and boy, Bing Crosby was pretty engaging; Ingrid Bergman was fetching even in a habit), a Christmas movie that was remarkably successful with all Americans at a time (1945) only four years before the most successful anti-Catholic polemic ever written, Paul Blanshard’s American Freedom and Catholic Power, a book that was a best seller and offered through the Book of the Month Club. Here was a story of a priest and a nun who disagreed over the running of a parochial school. It was, in some ways, insider Roman Catholic baseball stuff. And yet it is a very charming movie that once again underscores how congenial Christmas can be.

But imagine if the movie makers had created a film about a Muslim school which featured a conflict between a female teacher and an Imam during the observance of Ramadan. How endearing or inviting would that be? If you were part of a Protestant minority living in Quebec City during the 1940s, the parallels between the Roman Catholic observance of Advent and Christmas might be akin to the experiences that Christians (Protestant or Roman Catholic) might have in Baghdad during Ramadan. But again, Christmas invites non-Christians to join the festivities and create holiday expressions that although lacking in explicitly Christian content warm the perhaps sentimental hearts of Christians.

The other holiday movie we watched was Fordson: Faith, Fasting, Football, a documentary about Dearborn, Michigan’s high school that is staffed and populated primarily by Muslim (Arab) Americans. The movie follows the coach, players, and family members as they prepare during the fasting and feasting of Ramadan for THE game against Fordson’s arch-rival, Dearborn High. It is the closest I could come to a movie made in the U.S. that featured a holiday foreign to either Christians or Jews. Well worth seeing (and only 55 minutes).

But the aspect of Christmas that most Americans find so inviting has next to nothing to do with the birth of Christ — if it did have much to do with the incarnation, I can’t imagine Barry Manilow lining up to sing those songs. It is a time for families to gather, for cooks to cook and trenchermen to eat, for givers to give and receivers to decide how to negotiate wrapping paper. In other words, it is a time to consume. Even more, it is an important cycle in the business year of many merchants. Lots of religious folk may not care for the commercialization of Christmas but that doesn’t keep the Puritanically minded from spending and eating (no drinking, of course) even if in a less than crass way.

As much as the commercialization of Christmas may seem foreign to Christianity, Protestants should be careful in getting huffy, not in the ways that Rev. Kev. suggests, but for the reason that Presbyterians like John Wanamaker, the owner of one of Philadelphia’s largest department stores, played a huge role in cultivating a holiday atmosphere that appealed to lots of people who didn’t care a wit about the baby Jesus or his reason for taking human form. (The best book on the commercialization of Christian holidays remains Leigh Eric Schmidt’s Consumer Rites.)

So once again, as I enjoy a break from responsibilities and look forward to a festive meal and time with friends, I enter yet another holiday with great ambivalence. With classes behind and grades in, Christmas is indeed one of the most wonderful times of the year. As someone who leans heavily against the liturgical calendar (other than fifty-two holy days a year), I am not all that upset by a secular Christmas. But it does give me pause that the First Advent can be so easily domesticated. It was not so with Herod who tried to snuff out the babe in the manger and all infants doomed to be born near that day. I don’t know exactly how it will happen, but the Second Advent will likely not invite such merriment (at least for those in the First Adam). So I wonder if Christians, if they are going to invest some religious energy in Christmas observance, should spend a little more time considering that the First Advent leads ultimately to That Great Day.

Catechetical Preaching Solves the Church Calendar Problem

Published on by D. G. Hart22 Comments

I continue to scratch my head that low-church Protestants are as attached as they are to the calendar of the Roman Catholic church. They don’t think of Christmas or Easter as part of Roman Catholic liturgical practices. But assigning Christ’s birth to December 25th and Christ’s resurrection to the fortunes of the lunar calender and the ides of March is not a project that leaps immediately from the pages of the New Testament as a must. That is why Christmas and Easter greatly expanded their appeal when businessmen like the Presbyterian, John Wanamaker, recognized the big holiday’s of Christ’s life as good for big business. Wanamaker’s department store in center city Philadelphia featured a main hall complete with a grand pipe organ and various forms of musical and holiday festivities (the store’s current owner, Macy’s, continues some of the rituals holiday commerce). The best book on the commercialization of Christian holidays and the high-churchification of low-church Protestants (implicitly) is Leigh Schmidt’s, Consumer Rights: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays.

Some Reformed Protestants will be quick to point out that various churches, such as the Netherlands State Church, included in their church order instructions to observe five days from the Roman calendar – Christmas, Epiphany, Good Friday, Easter, and Pentecost. Reformed church historians will shoot back that the Dutch authorities were not the most reliable magistrates ever to oversee a Reformed church – they let Descartes live among the Dutch observers of Christmas and Epiphany, after all. These historians will also argue that the retention of these five holy days was a concession to keep the former Roman Catholic – now Protestant – population happy.

Historical and commercial reflections aside, the one argument for retaining Christmas and Easter that makes the most sense is the difficulty in answering simply the question, “what’s wrong with once a year calling attention to the birth and resurrection of Christ?” That question invites other questions: what’s wrong with observing once a year the announcement to the virgin Mary of her conception? And by what criteria do we decide which once-a-year observances are wrong?

To these questions the good Heidelberg Catechism has the answer. Divided into 52 Lord’s Days, most print versions break down the 129 questions and answers into units that Reformed pastors were expected to preach in the second Sunday service. Those were the same expectations that brought Christmas, Epiphany, Good Friday, Easter, and Pentecost into the Reformed church. For a second service with a catechetical sermon every Sunday in every Reformed church that observed Christmas and Easter, I might be prepared to swallow the Roman Catholic origins of the Christian “holidays.”

But I’m still holding out hope that catechetical preaching will make Christmas and Easter unnecessary. The reason is that every fourteenth Lord’s Day of the year the Heidelberg Catechism explains the significance of Christ’s birth. And every seventeenth Lord’s Day Heidelberg teaches the meaning of Christ’s resurrection. That means that Christians would have the opportunity to see that nothing is wrong with reflecting once a year on Christ’s birth and resurrection.

The question for those who want to retain the annual festivities is whether they would be comfortable celebrating Christ’s birth in mid-April (14th Sunday), and Christ’s resurrection in early May (17th). (They don’t seem to realize that they already celebrate Christ’s resurrection fifty-two days a year.) That would make for a rushed holiday season among low-church Protestants. But if Jews can squeeze Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur into two weeks of Indian Summer, surely Reformed Protestants can gear up for three weeks of celebrations. And just imagine how merchants will benefit from a Spring-time boost in sales.

When Did Reformed Christians Become Adventists?

Published on by D. G. Hart98 Comments

Frosted FlakesI remember a time when Advent was foreign to most Protestants except for Episcopalians and a few Lutherans. Now one hears regularly of the Advent season in conservative Reformed and Presbyterian churches. Some even bring out the wreaths, the candles, and orchestrate Hallmark moments where an entire family will be involved in a reading and lighting that Sunday’s candle. The observance of Advent among the low-church Christians are usually ham fisted, of course, because technically Christmas carols should not be sung until December 25th – and that’s because Jesus isn’t born until then. Before Christmas, expectations of Christ’s advent are supposed to be properly advental, which makes “Come Thou Long Expected Jesus” an Advent hymn, and “Joy To the World” a Christmas hymn. How the liturgical calendar comes back to bite.

The objections to Advent – not to mention Christmas – are legion in the Reformed tradition. The regulative principle is one of those reasons.

But beyond the obvious confessional concerns are some more trivial and some more substantial. Among the trivial is the idea that Advent has become the commercial bridge between the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday and Christmas, thus baptizing a time of much consuming, both by the mouth and the wallet, with the religious patina of “Come, Lord Jesus, Come Quickly” (but not so fast that merchants fail to generate the seasonal profits on which their enterprises depend). Leigh Eric Schmidt’s book, Consumer Rites, is among the best on the commodification of holidays in American history and he notes the following:

In a market philosophy organized on the guiding priniciple of growth, every year Christmas advertizing was said to get “bigger and better,” and seemingly the only question that remained was how early in November to begin the blitz. The Dry Good Economist candidly noted in 1902 that many retailers consider 15 November or even 1 November “none too early” to open the “Holiday Campaign.”

One of the merchants that Schmidt includes was the New School Presbyterian and financial sponsor of Dwight L. Moody, John Wanamaker, of the famous Philadelphia department store that bore his name. According to Schmidt, “As one of the most influential and powerful merchants of his day, Wanamaker was rarely outdone, and at Christmas he kept up a formidable flow of store souvenirs, gift catalogues, newspaper advertisements, trade cards, window decorations, musical concerts, Santa Claus stunts, and other holiday entertainments.” Wanamaker even had Christmas hymnals printed for use in the store, and also wrote messages appropriate to the season such as the following: “To get right with Christmas would make men right with one another, nation with nation, and . . . put right this old world, almost falling to pieces.” Didn’t the baby Jesus as a grown man turn out merchants from the Temple for making profits off religion?

A more substantive concern about creeping Adventism among Presbyterians is that because Christmas follows Advent, hard pressed are many believers not to think that the coming of the Lord upon which they are meditating in December is the Advent that took place two millennia ago — thus causing eschatological rubber-necking. Of course, we can sing Advent hymns (if we are going to sing hymns) with Christ’s return in view, and believers should be encouraged to live expectantly, hoping for their Lord’s second coming. Mind you, this is a remarkable disincentive for commerce since living in the light of Christ’s imminent return leads to prayers like Calvin’s – “let us not become too deeply attached to earthly and perishable things.” But if we were going to sing Advent hymns it would make more sense to sing them as far away from Christmas as possible, so that folks don’t lose track of where they are in redemptive history.

We live in the inter-advental period – period. Christ has come. He is coming again. We are not awaiting his birth. Been there, done that. In which case, why don’t we sing all those Advent hymns at General Assembly and Synod, a time when Christmas is a distant memory and when commissioners would do well to consider their work in the light of “the fullness of time”?