Merry Christmas! : Celebrating America's Greatest Holiday - Hardcover

Karal Ann Marling is Professor of Art History at the University of Minnesota.

Like an agreeably stuffed literary Christmas stocking, Marling's entertaining history of how Christmas became America's top holiday is generously filled with interesting facts, anecdotes, and period illustrations...Lively and informative...[Marling] describes how Santa became a national icon; the changing attitudes toward giving to the poor; the origin and growth of Christmas cards; and the impact of popular Christmas songs, movies, and television broadcasts...A special holiday treat to be savored while nibbling Christmas cookies and admiring the well-dressed tree. (Kirkus Reviews)

Imaginatively researched and strewn with surprising details, this engaging cultural history traces the rise of the consumerism that has become as integral to the celebration of Christmas in the United States as tinsel is to tree trimming...With a keen eye for cultural diversity...and a ready sense of irony, she pierces the sentimental myths surrounding this cultural institution. (Publishers Weekly 2000-10-23)

Marling...[is] a keen-eyed critic of American popular culture...Merry Christmas is an inspired idea of the sort that academics seldom have: consider the obvious, because no one else has, and treat it with respect. Marling's chapter topics read like a classic 'What to Do for Christmas' list--the tree, Santa, wrapping paper, shopping, cards and gifts, cookies and decorations. She also throws in movies, music and advertising. Showing the zeal of an archaeologist, Marling has dug through magazines and newspapers, photograph files, shoeboxes full of old cards, records of department-store windows and parades, and every possible kind of ephemera. The result is a collection of unrecorded histories, the visual and material culture of the American Christmas holiday...Combining imagination with solid historical grounding, Marling's analysis is both erudite and delightful...For all her scholarship and research, Marling is still tuned directly into [our] primary needs to right the wrongs of Christmas Past. She understands our national effort to keep trying to get it right next time...Reading her intelligent and entertaining book just might be a way to get through that familiar mixture of joy and dread that hits...when the Santas and the holly berries first appear in our land. (Jeanine Basinger New York Times Book Review 2000-12-03)

Marling sets out to define the ways in which we have turned to things to define Christmas. It is not, thank God, an anti-materialist rant...Marling's book is a celebration of plenty, which needn't mean self-satisfied or vulgar. She's an authentic American author--one who loves stuff and puts it lovingly in its place. (Charles Taylor Newsday 2000-12-17)

Like a parent faced with a holiday toy in 100 pieces and a sheet of instructions in faulty English, Karal Ann Marling, in Merry Christmas! Celebrating America's Greatest Holiday, has deconstructed the holiday and reassembled it in interesting and unexpected ways...[It] is a book full of surprises...By cleverly taking apart and analyzing our modern holiday customs, Marling tells us a lot about who we are. (Jarrett Smith Minneapolis Star Tribune 2000-12-17)

This book may be the definitive study of secular Christmas traditions in the United States. Though she acknowledges the genuine glow of family and religion in Christian observances, Marling...makes it clear that her story centers on the materialism of Christmas. (Norman Anderson Christian Science Monitor 2000-12-21)

Cultural historian Karal Ann Marling traces the history of our modern Christmas in the zestful, often endearingly gabby Merry Christmas! It is, like the holiday itself, a story of American families and business, stuffed like a red stocking with glittery details, vivid episodes, and eccentric side-trips. (Scott Alarik Boston Globe 2000-12-24)

Marling deserves credit, and perhaps even a measure of gratitude, for bringing together in one book a vast amount of information about American Christmases past and how they evolved into Christmas as we know it today...Give Marling credit, too, for being unsentimental about the true nature of the American Christmas. By contrast with innumerable others who have complained, over the years, that a pure religious holiday has been 'corrupted' and 'commercialized' by the American marketplace...Marling notes at the outset that 'the American Christmas has always been more secular than sacred.' (Jonathan Yardley Washington Post Book World 2000-12-24)

According to Karal Ann Marling, 'Christmas is the universal memory' for contemporary Americans (whether they're Christian or not), an event in which 'virtually everybody has played a part.' By telling the story of Americans' celebration of Christmas, she promises to uncover a surprisingly neglected piece of not only our national past, but our collective wishes and psyche...Marling has a keen eye for offbeat topics, arresting detail and original interpretation...Her goal is to unwrap the hidden meaning of quotidian, but telling, objects and practices to reveal the holiday's deeper significance. (Chris Rasmussen In These Times 2000-12-25)

Could there be just a tiny clove of Grinchly garlic in our author's soul? Yes, as there is in yours and mine. Every virtue needs its vice, every Christmas its moody kitchen moments, embarrassment of riches, and stack of disingenuous greeting cards...While Marling is carefully unwrapping the facts of this 'more secular than sacred' holiday in America, she looks up to remind us that there is jaw-dropping delight to be plucked from the package. (Holly Finn Financial Times 2000-12-09)