Christmas In Americ The First Industrial Revolution

Christmas in America has had different meanings to many people through history. Farmers, workers, and religious adherents practiced their traditions in the public sphere in respective periods of time. However, the modern understanding of Christmas celebration stems from the experience of a growing middle class as it set out to define its identity. Christmas as a domestic, commercial holiday originates from the middle class engagement with the vehicles of the first industrial revolution and the subsequent adoption of a culture of consumerism.
Rural farmers traditionally celebrated the end of the harvest and the beginning of the long winter with feasting and celebration at Christmas during the eighteenth century. Ingrained in Americans and Europeans …show more content…
This was the origin of mass consumer culture in America. A series of changes during the opening decades of the nineteenth century provided the opportunity for this integral component of modern American ethos to manifest. Primarily, the first industrial revolution provided the materials which fuelled the transformation of the American consumer. Urban dwellers experienced the greatest impact to the social and economic landscape with establishment of department stores with affordably priced goods. With industrialization, America increasingly urbanized allowing manufacturing centers to easily employ wage laborers who produced en masse the consumer goods which would fuel the new economy. One Christmas in 1858, George Templeton Strong, a prominent New York lawyer and firm member of the upper middle class, bought for his two sons a “cavalry regiment, and the cow with the movable head, and the steamboat that runs about on the floor, and that stupendous village” while for his wife he acquired “a silver soup-tureen, and a pair of gilt and glass brackets to be hung against the wall and hold flowers.” As a gendered understanding of the holiday permeates the consciousness of middle class identity, the appearance of gendered gift exchange is noteworthy. Most interestingly, Strong’s gifts to his wife are extensions of the …show more content…
In the text of Harper’s Weekly, the editors sought to remind audiences to be aware of people who do not celebrate Christmas indoors, and to pity those “poor shivering creatures cowering under the storm, many of them, perhaps, with ‘nowhere to go.’” Not only do Harper’s editors normalize the domestic celebration of Christmas, they label outdoor celebrations of Christmas as abnormal. Furthermore, the editors implicitly suggest that anyone who does prefers to celebrate outdoors without family and refuses to partake in the commercialized giving of gifts are homeless and not members of the urban middle class. Considering that celebrating the season with outdoors was the normative behavior only a few decades ago, defining outdoors celebrations abnormal demonstrates the middle class behavioral shift towards a bourgeois domestic materialism. While the editors may have been attempting to channel a enlightened middle class benevolence, they impress societal norms upon members of the middle class with implicit warnings to conform to the domestic, commercial celebration of Christmas, or otherwise be socially ostracized as a helpless vagrant. As a New York Times article in 1864 suggested, the purpose of it was to be with family at this time of rest. The author writes: “We are beginning to pay more attention to Christmas in this country [...]. It is a sign of progress in the right