Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Christmas in the Crosshairs
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S): Bowler, G. Q.
BIRTHDATE: 1948
WEBSITE:
CITY: Winnipeg
STATE: MB
COUNTRY: Canada
NATIONALITY:
http://www.semesteratsea.org/faculty-and-staff/gerry-bowler/ * http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/2917/gerry-bowler * http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2016/12/christmas_in_the_crosshairs_by_gerry_bowler_reviewed.html * http://www.macleans.ca/general/macleans-interview-gerry-bowler/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1948; married; wife’s name Karen; children: three.
EDUCATION:University of Saskatchewan, B.A., M.A.; King’s College, London, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB, Canada, faculty member. Founding director, Centre for the Study of Christianity and Contemporary Culture, Nazarene University College, Calgary, AB, Canada.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals; editor of Music from Within: A Biogrpahy of Sophie Eckhardt-Gramatte and The World’s Greatest Christmas Stories.
SIDELIGHTS
Historian Gerry Bowler teaches at the University of Manitoba and served as founding director of the Centre for the Study of Christianity and Contemporary Culture at Nazarene University College in Winnipeg, Alberta. He specializes in the intersection of religion and culture, and has written on topics including Santa Claus, Christmas, The Simpsons, and Aristotle and wrestling.
The World Encyclopedia of Christmas
Bowler’s The World Encyclopedia of Christmas offers a comprehensive collection of history, traditions, foods, rituals, and beliefs surrounding the Christmas holiday. Originally published in 2000 and updated in 2004, the revised edition contains more than one thousand entries, organized alphabetically, in which the author covers material from religion, literature, history, art, song, and film. Most entries are primarily descriptive, but the author also includes critical discussion, especially on films such as the iconic A Christmas Carol and It’s a Wonderful Life.
Though the scope of the book ranges from ancient to modern times and includes western and nonwestern cultures, Booklist reviewer Mary Ellen Quinn pointed out that it omits several countries, among them India, Turkey, Korea, and many African nations. Quinn also found the book’s lack of a detailed index to be a “serious shortcoming.” Even so, Quinn credited the encyclopedia as an “enticing” work that is concise and well-written. Gary P. Gillum, writing in Library Journal, especially enjoyed the book’s special lists, such as how to say “Merry Christmas” in various languages; special events that took place on Christmas day; and favorite Christmas toys from Victorian times to the modern era. In Publishers Weekly, the book received high praise being “downright funny” as well as engagingly written and carefully researched.
Santa Claus
Bowler brings a humorous perspective to Santa Claus: A Biography, which looks at the changing meaning of Santa over the centuries. The author examines how the figure of Santa was created from bits of folklore and morphed into different images. Several hundred years ago, Santa was a stern taskmaster who scolded and beat those who misbehaved; by the early 1800s, he had become a jolly old man in a red suit, promoting fun and good cheer.
As Bowles explains, Santa has done much more than simply running his North Pole gift-making operation and spending his Christmas Eves flying across the world delivering presents to deserving children. During the Civil War, Santa enlisted in the Union army. He has also starred in several popular movies and has appeared in numerous advertisements, including ones promoting the sale of guns. Bowles looks at the role of advertising, movie makers, and other groups in manipulating Santa’s image and meaning, and argues that the belief in Santa may be a psychologically valuable experience for young children.
Christmas in the Crosshairs
In Christmas in the Crosshairs: Two Thousand Years of Denouncing and Defending the World’s Most Celebrated Holiday Bowler traces the history of the Christmas holiday from its origins in the Roman Empire to the twenty-first century, focusing on historic conflicts about its meaning and proper celebration. The author explains that Christmas, which commemorates the birth of Jesus and is the second most holy day of the year for Christians, began as a simple religious holiday but has become a global phenomenon in which billions of people participate regardless of religious belief. From early times, the holiday has been contested. In the fifth century, St. Augustine criticized the habit of buying Christmas gifts, arguing that people should mark the day by giving money to the poor. Puritans in Scotland and the New England colonies banned its celebration, as did Bolsheviks in the twentieth century. Christmas enjoyed a revival during the 1800s, when it was reinvented as a day of family togetherness, feasting, and gift-giving.
This commercialization has continued through the 1900s and into the twenty-first century, sparking controversy from both religious purists and anti-consumerists. The ubiquity of Christmas has also angered many who have objected to religious content in a public holiday. In 1905 Jewish parents in Brooklyn demanded that a school principal be fired for telling students at a December assembly that they should aspire to act like Christ. Many families refused to let their children attend holiday fest ivies the following year, and school leaders were forced to agree to stop holding celebrations connected to a specific religion. Since then, similar battles have been fought about public displays of crèches, Christmas trees, or other holiday symbols with religious content, and even about the propriety of wishing a “merry Christmas” to others.
Slate Web site contributor Ruth Graham commented that Bowler is a “lively guide” to the social history of Christmas, but noted that the author has an obvious bias against the holiday’s critics. Graham said that though the author’s scorn is sometimes appropriate, Bowler sometimes “wastes time shooting at small targets” and “misses an opportunity to look critically at contemporary conservative paranoia about the war on Christmas.” Questioning the author’s point that the Christmas holiday has been subjected to unfair controversy, and finding the book sometimes more polemical than analytical, a Publishers Weekly reviewer concluded that this “rich cultural history” would delight many readers.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Biography, winter, 2006, Katherine Ashenburg, review of Santa Claus: A Biography, p. 247.
Booklist, May 1, 2001, Mary Ellen Quinn, review of The World Encyclopedia of Christmas, p. 1702.
Globe & Mail (Toronto, ON, Canada), December 23, 2016, John Semley, review of Christmas in the Crosshairs: Two Thousand Years of Denouncing and Defending the World’s Most Celebrated Holiday.
Library Journal, December 1, 2004, Gary P. Gillum, review of The World Encyclopedia of Christmas, p. 161.
Maclean’s, December 22, 2008, Kenneth Whyte, interview with Bowler.
Publishers Weekly, September 25, 2000, review of The World Encyclopedia of Christmas, p. 61.
Publishers Weekly, August 8, 2016, review of Christmas in the Crosshairs, p. 60.
ONLINE
Canadian Christianity, https://canadianchristianity.com/ (May 23, 2017), interview with Bowler.
Gerry Bowler Home Page, http://gerrybowler.com (May 23, 2017).
Semester at Sea Web Site, http://www.semesteratsea.org/ (May 23, 2017), Bowler faculty profile.
Slate, http://www.slate.com/ (May 23, 2017), Ruth Graham, review of Christmas in the Crosshairs.*
Maclean’s Interview: Santa
Santa, courtesy of Gerry Bowler, talks about shopping, recessions and personal attacks
Kenneth Whyte
December 22, 2008
Gerry Bowler
Gerry Bowler teaches at the University of Manitoba and is working on his third book about Christmas. His previous books include Santa Claus: A Biography and The World Encyclopedia of Christmas. He arranged for Maclean’s to speak with Santa.
Q: All we’re hearing is bad news about people losing jobs and offices cancelling Christmas parties. Should we just write off Christmas this year?
A: Oh, not at all, no. It’s actually in the times of economic depression and social turmoil that we need magic.
Q: But how can we afford the magic?
A: Santa Claus always operates in conjunction with parental resources, and the prime directive of Santa is that he never outstrips the ability of parents to provide. The important part of my job is to deliver things magically, and it’s the magic that’s more important than the particular gift.
Q: So is the magic in figuring out ways to still give kids what they want, or is it finding other ways to satisfy them?
A: There are all kinds of ways of expressing love at Christmas that don’t involve material things, and children are remarkably flexible in accepting and expecting and, if they’re talked to in advance, I think they’re seldom disappointed with what they get.
Q: Does Santa himself have to cut back during these downturns?
A: It has happened. If we look at my experience during various wars there have been places that, because of conflict and blockades, I haven’t been able to get into. During the American Civil War, for example, southern children were deprived of much that I would usually have brought them, but parents were able to encourage kids to defer their expectations to the time when the war was over. They were told that General Lee had asked me to take the toys and convert them into supplies for the injured troops.
Q: But we’re not in that bad of a situation at the moment.
A: Oh, certainly not, but you can look at similar things in the Great Depression in the 1930s where things were scaled back. But the belief in Santa was even more important then—and this was one of the golden ages of Santa Claus, with appearances in department stores, for example, that would eventually lead to depictions such as Miracle on 34th Street.
Q: Is it of any consequence to Santa that office parties are being cancelled? Does Santa have a place in the office?
A: No, he doesn’t. Cheap imitators show up there, and I’m often sorry to read about what these counterfeits have gotten up to under the influence of too much eggnog.
Q: Is there any concrete evidence that Santa’s going to be less of a presence this year? Are sales down?
A: I’m hearing mixed news. I know that personally—travelling incognito in malls and their parking lots—there doesn’t seem to be any kind of reluctance of parents to hit the shopping precincts, at least not yet.
Q: Is Santa himself any less visible in the places we see him before Christmas, on TV pitching products, or in movie theatres?
A: Not that I can tell. Remember that this is not me, these are merely the ghosts, as it were, that are conjured up by Madison Avenue. There’s no sign my image is any less important to the economy than it has been in previous years. Where it’s in retreat is thanks to the umbrage industry, those people whose job it is to be offended on behalf of others who see in me a threatening religious figure and thus a sign of exclusivity and bigotry.
Q: Are those the people who lynched you in Florida a few years ago?
A: That’s one branch of it, certainly. There’s always been a tendency inside the Calvinist wing of Christianity to cast a jaundiced eye on Christmas and on me, but the stuff that I’m seeing tends to come out of government offices, school systems. England is particularly under siege by these characters.
Q: And who are these characters?
A: Well, the other day in England a woman was told by an employee of the local city council that she had to take down her Christmas lights because Christmas lights were by definition an act of exclusivity that might offend her neighbours, and when she complained she discovered that the local council had no such policy in place at all, but we see here the tendency to self-censor, to have minor officials feel they’re empowered to ask for Christmas trees to be removed or for kids dressed in Santa Claus outfits not to be allowed at costume parties.
Q: It’s one thing to object to a nativity scene or some Christian symbol, but Christmas lights?
A: It’s getting worse and worse every year.
Q: There’s another group of anti-Santa types out there who simply see Christmas as a capitalist plot, who take an anti-consumerism view of you and the season. Are they still out there in force?
A: Oh, they’re certainly in Winnipeg, where this is the world headquarters of the Buy Nothing Christmas, and in Victoria.
Q: That’s right in your backyard, right?
A: It is, I’m afraid. I think they were planning on assaulting a mall this past weekend with anti-consumerist carols. “I’m Walking in a Consumer Wonderland” was one of them. Yeah, for these people I’m the mall’s puppet, I’m a heterosexual white overeater who should not be emulated in any way, but these people absolutely miss the point of a midwinter festival. Christmas is a midwinter festival; it shares religious meaning—deep religious meaning—with the whole tradition of wanting, at the very darkest time of the year, to be surrounded by light and heat and greenery and plenty. To ask that capitalism essentially collapse itself in December for the sake of some misplaced notion of thrift is unreasonable. These attacks are really Marxist in origin. If you go into the website of some of these groups the question is posed: if we don’t buy at Christmas won’t a lot of retailers suffer, and the answer given is yes, and that’s what they want, they want to destroy the retail industry and rebuild a fairer, juster, greener world out of the rubble.
Q: The kids’ll be really happy with that.
A: Yeah, I’m a little ticked off about it too.
Q: I’ve been reading recently about church attendance being up because of the economic times, and a lot of churches are expecting strong attendance this Christmas. Is a movement back to church at Christmastime one that takes attention away from Santa?
ANot at all. Santa Claus is a quasi-religious figure. I have godparents like St. Nicholas, I’m a descendant of the movement in the Middle Ages that saw gifts brought by saints for the Christ child. Many churches will have Christmas trees in them, which are not an overtly Christian element, and the kids in these services will have two kinds of magics to contemplate on Christmas Eve. They’ll have the nativity play and all the miracles associated with that, and they’ll have the expectation of a magical gift-bringer.
Q: Is there any reason to expect, given the times we’re in, that people would be more likely to follow Santa’s example and give of themselves? Would we expect more people to put money in the Salvation Army boxes, or volunteer at charity dinners for the homeless?
A: I think it depends on how long the recession lasts. The impulse to charity is embedded in Christmas. Christmas has always been the great time of finding ways to distribute charity, and that will never disappear. I do worry, however, about the tendency by certain retail outlets and by malls to make it harder for organizations like the Salvation Army to operate on their premises.
Q: You mean the anti-bell-ringing campaigns that we’ve seen in recent years?
A: Yeah, or those who feel that it’s a religious thing and they ought not to be exclusive or that there are certain kinds of liabilities that might legally fall on their heads. Whatever it is, it’s certainly been harder for these groups to find places that will take them.
Q: Santa’s always been a little bit judgmental. There’s a who’s-naughty-and-who’s-nice dimension to his presence, and if kids do wind up receiving less this year, are they going to just think they’re not as worthy?
A: The judgmentalism attributed to me has slackened off in the last hundred years. I don’t even carry coal or horse manure or long black birchen rods that I used to have to carry in the 19th century. The only thing that I might do is delay the visit to a house where a child is intentionally wakeful, but I certainly wouldn’t put anything less under the tree.
Q: The whole world’s going green and one would expect that Santa, living in the North Pole, is aware of the effects of global warming. Has it changed your style of operations?
A: I’ve been green since day one. I travel by reindeer, for crying out loud! Do you know how much dung a reindeer produces in the course of a year?
Q: That’s a lot of methane isn’t it? You’re contributing to the problem.
A: No, that fuels the mighty furnaces at the North Pole. Actually, I tap into geothermal heat for most of the year.
Q: There have been a lot of bad Santa movies out in recent years. Do you take this as a backhanded compliment?
A: Well, it is a backhanded compliment, and the fact that they are so cheesy and reach ever farther and farther beyond the bounds of what people know to be the authentic Santa story shows just how deeply embedded the belief in me is in the culture. If you take a look at, say, the last 10 years of Santa movies, they’ve abandoned certainly the Miracle on 34th Street kind of approach about faith or not faith. We now have all kinds of children attributed to me whom I don’t have, daughters, one’s an evil twin and one’s a good one, or they’re fascinated by the notion of how Santas might pass on the magic from one generation to another. Wake up, folks, it’s just me! I don’t have children, I don’t have successors, and insinuating that you put on the suit and you’re forced into some kind of involuntary bondage as Santa—or that when I retire, according to the CBC, I go to the Santa Senate—this is all just pure nonsense.
Q: Were there any great songs or movies of you during the Great Depression?
A: There were no good movies, but the greatest addition of the 20th century to the canon of belief in me was the addition of a ninth reindeer on the part of a Chicago department store that handed out flyers toward the end of the 1930s and alerted the world to the presence of Rudolph, my backup guide.
Q: Just to sum up, you’re in good shape, you’re not going to be in that lineup for a bailout with the car companies and everyone else?
A: Not at all. I’ve been working out, I’ve been running the reindeer through their paces, and it’s going to be a great Christmas.
Q: Anything special you’d like as a snack?
A: Ooh, shortbread. I’m partial to shortbread.
Gerry Bowler received his Ph.D. in History from King’s College, London, and presently teaches at the University of Manitoba. He is the author of Santa Claus: A Biography and The World Encyclopedia of Christmas, and the co-author of Europe in the Sixteenth Century. He has published works on topics ranging from Renaissance monarchy and Bloody Mary to the Simpsons, the Spice Girls, and the history of professional hockey. Dr. Bowler was the founding director of the Centre for the Study of Christianity and Contemporary Culture at Calgary’s Nazarene University College. He lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba, with his wife, Karen, and three daughters.
Gerry Bowler teaches medieval and early-modern history at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. He received his Ph.D. in History from King’s College, University of London where he studied political theory of the Tudor period. He is particularly interested in the intersection of religion and culture and has published on subjects such as Renaissance monarchy, theological justifications of violence, the religious content of The Simpsons and the relationship between Aristotle and professional wrestling. In addition to co-authoring Europe in the Sixteenth Century, Dr. Bowler is a leading authority on the history of Christmas and its cultural significance. His books The World Encyclopedia of Christmas andSanta Claus: A Biography have been translated into Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese and Russian. He has sailed before with Semester at Sea, in Fall 2001, Summer 2008 and Summer 2010.
Gerry Bowler is a Canadian historian and writer with a special interest in popular culture and its connections to religion. He has won several awards for teaching, trivia, amateur theatrics and 5-pin bowling. He has travelled around the world and never succeeded in paying less than full retail price when haggling with merchants on five continents.
Gerry has written on Bloody Mary, Wayne Gretzky, Christmas, tyrannicide, Renaissance monarchy, pirates, Puritans, The Simpsons, and the relationship between Aristotle and professional wrestling.
He likes the writings of Samuel Johnson, Avram Davidson, Alan Furst, Michel de Montaigne, Ben Pastor, Maurizio di Giovanni and Richard Blake.
1. What are the main challenges and issues the Canadian church is facing?
The number one issue facing the church in Canada in the 21st century is the absence of any notion of The Church. This is nothing that we have really lost; ever since the banning of Protestants from the colony of New France in the 1600s we have chosen to value sectarianism over The Kingdom, or perhaps to state it more fairly: to view sectarianism as an essential strategy in building the Kingdom. There is no meaningful expression of the concept of Christendom and as a result Christians cannot confront the challenges they face in the expectation of the support or even tolerant understanding of their core ligionists. We do not have Christian colleges; we have small, struggling Catholic or Protestant colleges.
We do not have Christian television; we have a myriad of low-budget entrepreneurs competing for niches in the religious-media marketplace. Do we have any journals that speak for, or to, Canadian Christianity as opposed to a splinter of it? Whom can one identify as the intellectual voices of Canadian Christianity? What institutions or para-church bodies can we say speak for a majority Canadian Christians? To ask these questions is, alas, to answer them. Should we ever meet this challenge, all the other issues - modernity, orthodox/liberal schism, worship wars, church/state tensions, etc. -- will seem quite solvable.
The second issue of importance in the coming years is going to be the access of faith groups to the public square. Two trends mitigate against Christianity being allowed a respected hearing or even any standing outside of the home. The first is the rise of the human rights industry as a tool of the secular left; it has been enormously successful in ensuring the triumph of one set of rights chiefly gender and sexual over the imagined constitutional guarantees of freedom of religion and religious speech. The traditional place that Christianity as had in Canadian society had inoculated it from a full-scale assault but the second trend - the demand by Canadian Islam for tolerance for its religious distinctives - now mandates that all religions be marginalized in the public sphere. We may look for increasing state interference in child-rearing practices, tax-exempt status, church and religious-educational hiring policies, freedom of preaching or publishing on controversial issues, etc. Religion will soon be seen as having no right to public utterance if it dares to contradict accepted social mores.
2. What are the bright spots, encouraging trends, new movements in Canadian Christianity?
Two encouraging trends: 1) immigration of foreign Christians and of those, particularly East Asian newcomers, open to Christianity. This will increase our numbers and strengthen the voices of orthodoxy. 2) the coming Anglican schism. Despite my lament for Christian unity see above an official sundering of the Canadian Anglican church will believers in both or all resulting fragments to worship and speak more boldly. Compromise in matters of adiaphora is all very well but compromise is a strategy and should not be elevated to a governing virtue. Over decades it can turn a church into a body of frustrated and impotent Laodiceans, allowed to be neither hot nor cold. The great potential now lying in many Anglican parishes will be released once the smoke has cleared and everyone will be the better for it.
3. What is the character of the Canadian church?
There is no 'Canadian church.' see question one.
4. How is the church doing qualitatively?
The answer to that is the same answer one can give to questions about the state of almost anything Canadian: so-so. Except in hockey, Canadians do not value excellence or fevered enthusiasm in public enterprises. Our motto is "Go for the bronze!" We are taught to define ourselves as a nation by our particular approach to the delivery of medical care. Toleration and a pleasant mediocrity are our watch-words. Canadians regard suicide bombers and Jehovah Witness tract distributors with the same degree of disdain.
Some of our churches are doing fine, many are withering on the vine, the shrinkage in attendance nationally is slow but inexorable. We are not experiencing a vigorous efflorescence of faith as in for example Brazil or Korea or much of the USA but neither are we a museum piece like Western European Christianity.
We are not noticeable at a provincial or national level but on a micro scale Canadian Christians continue to do wonderful work with the destitute, lonely and lost. If such workers were raptured away tomorrow the inner city would notice the absence long before the media or politicians.
5. What is the state of the church in Canada numerically, both in terms of the number of church members and the number of Christians?
I haven't checked the figures since the 2001 census results were published but I don't believe our diminishing presence nor the trend to secularism have been slowed. What we all hope for is the situation expressed by Greta Garbo in "Ninotchka" 1939 where she plays a grim Soviet commissar visiting Paris. When asked how things are back in the USSR she replies that the latest purges have been a great success and that there are now going to be "fewer but better Russians".
6. What is the attitude of the larger Canadian society to Christianity?
See question one and four.
7. What is the ethnic makeup of the church in Canada and what impact is immigration having on Canada? Are we converting immigrants to Christ?
Anecdotally, based on the evidence I see at the University of Manitoba, foreign students are continually seeking out and being reached by Canadian Christian groups.
8. Are other religions gaining adherents?
Certainly, but in the same proportion as Christianity? Probably not.
9. Are we winning our children or losing them?
It depends who "we" are. Evangelicals seem to be putting up a good fight; Catholics too but they seem to have lost that battle in Quebec. Older Protestant denominations seem to be aging at a rapid rate.
10. How multicultural is the church, how representative of the Canadian population?
Canadian Christianity seems to be very multicultural though it may wish to have a conversation in a little while about the wisdom of ethnic-oriented churches. Are they a short-term solution or a long-term vision?
11. What are the most important moral issues that the church will be wrestling with in the next few years?
Abortion is due for a come-back as an issue. The same-sex issue is over for at least the next generation . With the appearance of the first wave of geriatric Baby Boomers, end-of-life issues will be the next great moral struggle. Within 20 years suicide will be seen as the socially correct thing to do for the elderly and do-not-resuscitate policies will be mandatory.
Gerry Bowler grew up in Saskatoon and earned his first two academic degrees from the University of Saskatchewan. He received his Ph.D. in History from King’s College, London with a dissertation on Protestant political theory of the Tudor period. While continuing to teach Medieval and Early-Modern European history at the university level, he switched his area of research to the intersection of religion and popular culture, publishing works on The Simpsons, the relationship between Aristotle and professional wrestling, Wayne Gretzky and Bloody Mary, but eventually focussing his main efforts on the history of Christmas.
He is the editor of Music from Within: A Biography of Sophie Eckhardt-Gramatté and The World’s Greatest Christmas Stories; and the author of Europe in the Sixteenth Century, The World Encyclopedia of Christmas, Santa Claus: A Biography, Christmas in the Crosshairs: Two Thousand Years of Denouncing and Defending the World’s Most Celebrated Holiday, and The Kindly Curmudgeon.
Christmas in the Crosshairs: Two Thousand Years of Denouncing and Defending the World's Most Celebrated Holiday
263.32 (Aug. 8, 2016): p60.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Christmas in the Crosshairs: Two Thousand Years of Denouncing and Defending the World's Most Celebrated Holiday
Gerry Bowler. Oxford Univ., $29.95 (336p) ISBN 978-0-190-49900-6
This accessible survey offers a chronological and thematic overview of the contested cultural, political, and religious meanings of Christmas since its first appearance in the historical record in the fourth century to the present day. In seven chapters, historian Bowler offers a tour of the origins and suppression of Christmas festivities during the early centuries of Christianity, their 19th-century revival as a commercialized family holiday, the use of Christmas by special-interest groups, the opinions of modern-day Christmas haters, and current disputes over the place of Christmas in a multicultural, global society. Ambitious in scope, the book is strongest in its documentation of Anglo-American traditions in the early modern period through the 19th century. Christmas outside of Europe and North America remains underexplored. The chapters on late 20th-century Christmas culture are rushed and thin on historical analysis, tending instead toward the polemic. The author's conclusion that Christmas occupies an unjustly embattled place within modern society is undercut by his own historical narrative. Since the fifth century, Christmas has been critiqued by Christians and non-Christians as a holiday both too sacred and too profane, too bawdy and too domesticated--a tradition at once crushingly normative and radically threatening to established power. Despite the somewhat sketchy conclusions, this rich cultural history will be a perfect scholarly stocking stuffer for any history buffs on holiday shoppers' lists. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Christmas in the Crosshairs: Two Thousand Years of Denouncing and Defending the World's Most Celebrated Holiday." Publishers Weekly, 8 Aug. 2016, p. 60. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA460900425&it=r&asid=27b03a10e0d129fda5dc55598888e577. Accessed 4 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A460900425
Bowler, Gerry. The World Encyclopedia of Christmas
Gary P. Gillum
129.20 (Dec. 1, 2004): p161.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2004 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
BOWLER, GERRY. The World Encyclopedia of Christmas. McClelland & Stewart. 2004. 257p. illus. ISBN 0-7710-1535-6. pap. $12.95. REF
Singing Christmas carols while reading a book? Wistfully embarking on a nostalgic trip to Christmases past? This well-written and comprehensive book will answer nearly any reference question relating to Christmas, including "What is callithumpian music?" Originally published in 2000, this improved edition includes over 1000 entries and 200 black-and-white and color illustrations for nearly half the price. Bowler's (Europe in the Sixteenth Century) special lists are particularly intriguing: How to say "Merry Christmas" in 85 languages, famous events that took place on December 25 in the last two millennia, U.S. presidents and Christmas, and favorite Christmas toys dating back to 1867. The book includes illustrations of many world Christmas stamps and the complete lyrics for 115 Christmas carols from all over the world--some in their original languages with English translations. Bottom Line This is a better choice for most libraries than Tanya Gulevich's Encyclopedia of Christmas, which contains 240 long articles and goes for $68. The meager price of Bowler's book makes it a wonderful seasonal compendium.--Gary P. Gillum, Brigham Young Univ., Provo, UT
Gillum, Gary P.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Gillum, Gary P. "Bowler, Gerry. The World Encyclopedia of Christmas." Library Journal, 1 Dec. 2004, p. 161. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA126558076&it=r&asid=48198bce12223efee9ae6c4031b9d80a. Accessed 4 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A126558076
The World Encyclopedia of Christmas
Mary Ellen Quinn
97.17 (May 1, 2001): p1702.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2001 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
The World Encyclopedia of Christmas. By Gerry Bowler. 2000. 257p. illus. McClelland & Stewart, $39.95 (0-7710-1531-3). 394.2663.
This encyclopedia is described as a "truly comprehensive look at Christmas and all its customs" on its book jacket. It provides more than 1,000 entries on worldwide secular and religious Christmas practices expressed in song, literature, events, film, arts, and trivia and is aimed at young adult and adult readers as well as researchers. Entries are primarily descriptive, but a number of them, especially those on films, contain critical commentary.
The entries proceed from A to Z with a liberal number of black-and-white illustrations and 16 pages of color plates. An entry heading is in boldface if it is historical or factual; in italics if it is a book, film title, or foreign phrase; and in quotation marks if it is a song or short story title. Cross-references are in capital letters or given as a see item. Notable among the entries are Quotes about Christmas, which lists quotations related to the season; a chronology of December 25 events; discussions of films such as A Christmas Carol and It's a Wonderful Life; entries giving the histories as well as the words of individual songs and carols; and descriptions of practices like mumming.
A serious shortcoming is the lack of a detailed index. which would bring together the various songs, carols, films, etc., that are referred to within the various entries. Lack of a bibliography or list of sources is another weakness, as is the fact that the scope is not explained in the introduction. Some countries have been omitted, including much of Africa, India, Korea, and Turkey. Finally, the illustrations, though they are captioned, lack dates or sources. It is tedious to scroll through the Copyright Holder's page for this information.
On the positive side, the book is enticing reading with its many descriptions of exotic customs and its blend of the ancient and the modern. It is written well and concisely. Many of the older books on Christmas customs, now out of print or difficult to find, are admirably updated in this new volume, which can enrich highschool, college, and public library collections.
Reference Books Bulletin, a program of the American Library Association's Publishing Committee, is published twice monthly, except for July and August, when it is issued monthly. It is a separate publication within Booklist and operates under its own procedures. It reviews reference books and electronic titles likely to be of general interest (defining reference book as a publication designed by its arrangement and treatment to be consulted for definite items of information rather than to be read consecutively). Reviews in Reference Books Bulletin are prepared by members of the Editorial Board and by contributing reviewers. Drafts are submitted to Board members for criticism and revision; published reviews therefore represent the Board's collective judgment.
Reference Books Bulletin Editorial Board, 2000-2001: Deborah Rollins, Reference Librarian, University of Maine, Orono, Maine, Chair; Jill Althage; Charlotte Decker; John Doherty; Nora Harris; Merle Jacob; Christopher McConnell; Jack O'Gorman; J. Sara Paulk; and Cheryl Karp Ward. For affiliations of Board members, see September 1 RBB.
Contributing reviewers for this issue: Jerry Carbone; Sharon E. Cohen; Marie Ellis; Lesley Farmer; Marlene M Kuhl; Abbie Vestal Landry; Margaret Power; and Christine Whittington.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Quinn, Mary Ellen. "The World Encyclopedia of Christmas." Booklist, 1 May 2001, p. 1702. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA75249149&it=r&asid=c7d7bdc8f0f06cf3235bd8639575cc5e. Accessed 4 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A75249149
THE WORLD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF CHRISTMAS
Jana Riess
247.39 (Sept. 25, 2000): p61.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2000 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
CERRY BOWLER. McClelland & Stewart, $39.95 (336p) ISBN 0-7710-1531-3
* Every Christmas trivia question that was ever asked is probably definitively answered in this comprehensive book of holiday lore, traditions, history, foods, carols and fables. Bowler includes bread-and-butter entries on standard fare such as wassail and reindeer, but she also explains the 1983 "Reindeer Rule" (the Supreme Court decision that public display of the secular elements of Christmas do not violate the First Amendment) and the tradition of door-to-door "wassail wenches" in 17th-century England. She is comfortable discussing the posada observances of El Salvador in one entry and offering a minireview of Elmo Saves Christmas in the next. Meticulously researched, well-written and often downright funny, this encyclopedia does justice to its fascinating subject. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Riess, Jana. "THE WORLD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF CHRISTMAS." Publishers Weekly, 25 Sept. 2000, p. 61. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA66218181&it=r&asid=ed7c6dd41615be30d13213b6eddbf963. Accessed 4 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A66218181
Santa Claus: Santa Claus: A Biography
Katherine Ashenburg
29.1 (Winter 2006): p247.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2006 University of Hawaii Press
http://www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/t-biography.aspx
Santa Claus Santa Claus: A Biography. Gerry Bowler. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2005. 287 pp. $34.99.
"Bowler, a Winnipeg historian and the author of The World Encyclopedia of Christmas, tells his meandering tale well, with a shrewd eye for the bizarre or clarifying detail.... [H]e devotes serious consideration to the question, 'What good is Santa?' He has several eloquent answers, including the unreciprocated, unselfish nature of parental love; the profound value of stories and myths; the superiority of a 'noble lie,' in Plato's term, over a life without magic or wonder. Santa has found a thoughtful champion in Bowler and well deserved, too."
Katherine Ashenburg. Globe and Mail, Dec. 17, 2005: D6.
Ashenburg, Katherine
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Ashenburg, Katherine. "Santa Claus: Santa Claus: A Biography." Biography, vol. 29, no. 1, 2006, p. 247. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA146347074&it=r&asid=4fc5464fe310c57db6c24b206874f73e. Accessed 4 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A146347074
Two-Thousand Years of Grinches
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118
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Hand-wringing over Christmas has been going on since the Christ child left the manger.
By Ruth Graham
CHRISTMAS IN THE CROSSHAIRS.
Lars Martinson
I don’t know if you’ve heard, but the real meaning of Christmas has been sadly overtaken by wanton capitalism in recent years. “This festival teaches even the little children, artless and simple, to be greedy,” as one critic put it. “The tender minds of the young begin to be impressed with that which is commercial and sordid.”
Ruth Graham Ruth Graham
Ruth Graham is a regular Slate contributor. She lives in New Hampshire.
The year was 400, and the anxious writer was the Cappadocian Bishop Asterius of Amasea. Asterius’ pious fretting is quoted in Canadian historian Gerry Bowler’s Christmas in the Crosshairs: Two Thousand Years of Denouncing and Defending the World’s Most Celebrated Holiday, which makes clear that hand-wringing over the correct way to celebrate the Christ child started practically before the kid left the manger.
The refreshing takeaway of Christmas in the Crosshairs is that most contemporary agita about Christmas’ supposed decline is misplaced. The commercialization of Christmas isn’t a recent development; St. Augustine was pleading with people to give alms instead of holiday gifts in the early fifth century. The supposed erasure of Christ from Christmas isn’t new, either; devout killjoys have forever lamented the season’s secular revelry. And the “war on Christmas” has been enlisting troops for centuries; in Communist Russia, Christmas trees were banned, and children were told their gifts came from Stalin, not Santa. Despite all these obstacles, Christmas is now, Bowler announces, “the biggest single event on the planet.”
The one moment in history that Christmas seemed truly imperiled was the early 19th century, when celebrations in the United States and parts of Europe had become rowdy, violent affairs. Yuletide wildness distasteful to the upper classes was an old phenomenon. But now gangs of men and boys would roam the streets drinking, vandalizing property, throwing firecrackers, and even invading homes. In New York in 1828, soon after Andrew Jackson’s election had prompted fears of “mobocracy,” lower-class revelers wassailed their way down the Bowery with drums and whistles, shouted outside a fancy-dress ball, and ended the evening by smashing up a black church and chasing worshipers through the streets. It took mythologizers such as Charles Dickens, whose A Christmas Carol was published in 1843, to drag Christmas from the streets into the parlor. In the late 19th century, the holiday began to take on its contemporary shape as an idealized season of family warmth rather than one of drunken partying.
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Today, Christmas’ status as both a religious holiday and a time for private gift-giving and merriment is more than secure. Once again the question is what the holiday should look like in the public square. Bowler traces the modern American “war” on Christmas to 1905, when a group of Jewish Brooklynites became exasperated with yuletide evangelizing in a public school. When the principal told students at a December assembly to be “more Christlike,” the fed-up parents called for his ouster. The Board of Education refused, and dissenters spent the next year agitating for their cause, including the removal of the Christmas tree. The next year, many removed their children from participating in holiday ceremonies, and school authorities agreed to forgo explicitly religious celebrations. The parents won the battle, but the war had just begun. By midcentury, disputes about how schools and local governments should mark the holiday increasingly took place in the courtroom and from there became fodder for the culture wars.
Just as hostilities seemed to be dying down, Donald Trump revived them.
Social histories of Christmas are a well-worn genre, but Bowler, previously the author of Santa Claus: A Biography, is a lively guide. His focus on combat gives his account narrative zip, and it doesn’t hurt that he covers two millennia in fewer than 250 pages. But as Christmas in the Crosshairs marches forward to the modern era, it becomes clear that Bowler is not just a war correspondent but a combatant. He puts “progressive” in scare quotes and sneers at the “delicacy towards the feelings of others” that has led to minor local disputes over, say, distributing “Merry Christmas” goodie bags at a veterans hospital. Occasionally his scorn is well-placed—he correctly pegs many New Atheist diatribes as humorless—but elsewhere he wastes time shooting at small targets. “Snowmen have long been deemed to be part of the holiday season, but have you considered their contribution to the sum total of racism and sexism in the world?” he jeers. “Professor Patricia Cusack, an art historian of Birmingham University, has.” (It’s Tricia Cusack, it’s the University of Birmingham, and the paper Bowler goes on to mock seems admittedly silly but hardly worth the firepower.)
It’s worth slogging through Bowler’s sarcasm and disdain, however, to get to anecdotes like the one about Nazi schoolchildren singing a version of “Silent Night” that included these lyrics:
Silent night, Holy night,
All is calm, all is bright.
Adolf Hitler is Germany’s star
Showing us greatness and glory afar
Bringing us Germans the might.
But a more serious problem is that Bowler misses an opportunity to look critically at contemporary conservative paranoia about the war on Christmas. By the time the reader gets to the present day, she is trudging through pages upon pages in which almost the only sources cited are Fox News, National Review, and other noble muckrakers. But it would be nice to see deeper analysis of why reporting on local officials who dare to call a tinsel-decked fir in the town square a “holiday tree” resonates with news consumers.
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Fox’s Bill O’Reilly declared victory in the war on Christmas in 2014, noting that for the first time in recent memory, no stores had instructed their employees not to say “Merry Christmas” to customers. Phew! But just as hostilities seemed to be dying down, Donald Trump revived them. “If I become president, we’re gonna be saying Merry Christmas at every store,” he told Iowans last year. “You can leave ‘happy holidays’ at the corner.” The promise became a staple of his stump speech. It all seemed so harmless for a while, didn’t it? But Bowler’s book is a timely reminder that progressives should be paying more attention to the fear many conservatives feel that their culture is slipping away from them. As frivolous as the war on Christmas may seem, once in a while it has casualties.
Review: Gerry Bowler’s Christmas in the Crosshairs looks at the long, contested history of the world’s biggest holiday
JOHN SEMLEY
Special to The Globe and Mail
Published Friday, Dec. 23, 2016 10:07AM EST
Last updated Friday, Dec. 23, 2016 10:11AM EST
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Title Christmas in the Crosshairs: Two Thousand Years of Denouncing and Defending the World’s Most Celebrated Holiday
Author Gerry Bowler
Genre history
Publisher Oxford University Press
Pages 336
Price $32.95
On Dec. 14 of this year, Fox News conservative pundit and professional troll Bill O’Reilly issued a rare triumphant statement: War is over. “And,” O’Reilly added, “we won.”
For the better part of a decade, O’Reilly and other conservatives with literally nothing better to do had been reporting from the front lines of the so-called “War on Christmas”: the assault on Christendom by companies that prefer generic, non-denominational seasonal greetings such as “happy holidays” over “Merry Christmas.” Now, the war has achieved a détente. Let’s hope none of the soldiers and pundits missed the last chopper out of the North Pole, St. Peter’s Basilica or an overcrowded Costco parking lot.
Recently, I heard a historian respond to a question with a great, all-purpose answer: ’Twas ever thus. It’s a way of niftily explaining (or explaining away) the specifics and particulars of a given moment by suggesting that, well, it’s always been like this. Why do people rally around strongman politicians? ’Twas ever thus. Why do people vote against their own interests? ’Twas ever thus. Why is Christmas such a seemingly fraught holiday, assailed on various sides by competing factions of religion, globalization, nationalism and atheism? As historian Gerry Bowler’s new book Christmas in the Crosshairs proves, ’twas ever thus.
As Bowler writes, “there is a history of almost two thousand years of opposing, controlling, reforming, criticizing, suppressing, resurrecting, reshaping, appropriating, debating, replacing and abolishing the world’s most popular festival.” So the history of warring against Christmas runs back just about as far as the reported nativity of Christ itself. While contemporary American Christians are not – as the glowering, Grinchy Bill O’Reillys may claim – being religiously persecuted, Christmas itself has been contested on numerous different fronts.
First, there was the idea of even celebrating the birth of Christ – birthday celebrations being regarded in older times as the gaudy province of pagan rulers. In the Middle Ages, Christian higher-ups balked at the ways in which Christmas celebrations adopted certain rowdy pre-Christian traditions, such as singing, dancing, tree-decorating and the excessive consumption of spirits. Fourteenth-century English-Catholic reformer John Wycliff decried the holiday practice of “syngynge songs of lecherie.” By the 19th century, the season was being reclaimed. Clement Clark Moore’s 1822 poem Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas, better known as ’Twas the Night Before Christmas, popularized the image of Santa Claus, the jolly, secular giver of gifts. Moore, Bowler claims, “redefined Christmas by moving its focus from the tavern and street to the kitchen and family fireplace, from adult conviviality to the expectant child.”
The arrival/invention of Santa Claus led to more squabbling. And not only from Christians who worried that the (already shaky) religious basis of the holiday was eroding, but from various nationalist and political groups who resented the globalized American-Christian icon of holiday good cheer.
Hitler’s government replaced Santa with Knecht Ruprecht, an annual gift-giver riding a white stallion, styled after the Germanic god Wotan (a version of the Norse god Odin). Before banning Christmas altogether in 1969, Castro’s Cuba revamped the Biblical “Three Wise Men” as Che Guevara, army chief Juan Almeida and Castro himself. In 1930s Brazil, St. Nick was deemed a corrupting foreign influence and was supplanted by the government-sponsored Vovo Indio (“Grandfather Indian”), devised as a half-black, half-aboriginal embodiment of national patriotism. Even the KKK had “Santa Klaws,” who handed out presents in black communities as a show of “goodwill” that was really a show of white, Eurocentric power. And there is, of course, Zwarte Piet, Dutch Santa’s blackface sidekick who remains controversial to this day.
With the ostensible exception of atheists and anti-capitalists calling for the abolition of the holiday altogether (while still enjoying some statutory time-and-a-half), there seems to be, even among these squabbling camps, an essential need that Christmas satisfies. As Bowler concludes, Christmas remains “important in countless ways: in the intimate lives of families, in the industrial economy, in its spiritual challenge, in art, music and cinema.” It is, in other words, worth fighting for – and fighting over.
So forget the horrid consumerism, and even the birth of Mary’s boy child. It’s just essentially, pretheoretically nice to huddle up with friends and family to mull some wine, sip some upmarket rye, share some stories and jokes, synge songs of lecherie, watch Badder Santa and just feel – well, sort of – warm. The pragmatic cynicism our world demands can cool its heels, if only for a night or two, surely.
Which is why I wish anyone reading this column, with what unbecoming earnestness I can muster, a merry Christmas, a happy Hanukkah, a joyous Kwanza, a hale and hearty Boxing Day protest and just a nice, warm time sipping and laughing with the people you love, and who, believe it or not, might even love you back.