Anyone who laments the excesses of Christmas might consider the Puritans of colonial Massachusetts: they simply
outlawed the holiday. The Puritans had their reasons, since Christmas was once an occasion for drunkenness and
riot, when poor "wassailers extorted food and drink from the well-to-do. In this intriguing and innovative
work of social history, Stephen Nissenbaum rediscovers Christmas's carnival origins and shows how it was transformed,
during the nineteenth century, into a festival of domesticity and consumerism.
Drawing on a wealth of period documents and illustrations, Nissenbaum charts the invention of our current Yuletide
traditions, from St. Nicholas to the Christmas tree and, perhaps most radically, the practice of giving gifts to
children. Bursting with detail, filled with subversive readings of such seasonal classics as "A Visit from
St. Nicholas and A Christmas Carol, The Battle for Christmas captures the glorious strangeness of the past even
as it helps us better understand our present.
"Christmas . . . too often fails to wholly satisfy the spirit or the senses. How and why the yuletide came
to this is the subject of historian Stephen Nissenbaum's fascinating new study. "
