The Battle for Christmas -Stephen Nissenbaum

epub/mobi
Product Details
Paperback: 400 pages
Publisher: Vintage (October 28, 1997)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0679740384
ISBN-13: 978-0679740384

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.